I’m Doing Fine
Notes from a Worn Out Whistler Blower
“When is lunch?”
(I don’t know.)
“That’s not how Mrs. Lawrence does it.”
(I don’t care.)
“The teacher always lets me sit under my desk.”
(Not on my shift.)
“Oh Miss Brown Dress! Come here, please!” he summoned.
The voice itself grabbed my attention. Theatrical, authoritative, a budding high-pitched Julia Child.
I traced the command to a balding fellow with a paunch and baggy trousers sitting at his desk, absorbed in some calculations. With a spare pencil tucked in the crook of an ear, he stopped intermittently to push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Beside his desk was a hard shell briefcase next to an Evel Knievel lunch box. His name was John and he was nine years old.
I had taken over for a teacher who left suddenly to seek help at a Famous Treatment Center. In this Special Education class, some of the students had problems that were probably not going to be solved with remediation or rehab. Most of them needed to be accepted ‘as is.’
I noticed the handmade sign taped to his desk above his official name tag:
Johns Office Quite Please
He was straining to grasp the idea of adding double digits.
“Hey, John. How are you doing with these?” I whispered.
“I’m doing fine. My teacher is not here today. I’m doing fine,” he affirmed with his startling falsetto, sounding pretty worried.
As he spoke, his head made a circuit that would repeat itself many times that morning. It rolled back all the way, then forward till his chin touched his chest, then to the left, away from me.
It is impossible for an outsider to duplicate the routines and rituals set up by a regular teacher. A substitute’s job calls for improvisation. We open up the umbrella and walk the tightrope, bounce off the audience and try to have some fun.
I knelt on the floor to get our heads together. Then I tapped out “Shave and a haircut” on his desk with my pencil. Like an alert and hungry bird, he made a slight head adjustment and looked at the first math problem out of the corner of his eye. He tapped back “Two bits.”
Mentally adding six and six, I wrote down two and carried my one.
“Did your teacher show you how to rename tens when you add big numbers?”
John looked at the ceiling and blinked several times before he answered, “I am already good at renaming things!”
He cocked his head to the side and worked the second problem.
I nodded.
His eyes scanned the ceiling, the floor, and the left again. Then he changed pencils and tackled the third problem. I hovered for another couple of head spins and two more pencil changes. Then I moved on to work the crowd.
“I’m doing fine!” he reported as I left.
During the pre-lunch bustle, I noticed him gather up his paperclips, erasers, and pencils, arranging them methodically in his briefcase. He tucked in his shirt, smoothed back his hair, and announced once more:
“I’m doing fine.”
After lunch I took the class out to watch a baseball game. We settled as a herd in a comfortable shady spot, and I smiled at John’s delight in chasing a butterfly. Relaxing in the soft grass, I was nine again myself, playing softball under blue skies and balmy breezes. Until I heard,
“MISS BROWN DRESS!”
This time his voice was shrill, alarmed. John was running toward me, hands on both cheeks, sobbing.
“That big boy! He hit me! He hit me and he hurt me! That boy! The big one!”
“Let me see,” I insisted, and placed my hand on his reddened cheek.
The crying stopped abruptly. John looked deep into my eyes and asked,
“Does it still hurt?”
We were both stunned by the question.
“No, John, it’s not so bad now. It hurt at first, but now it’s feeling a little better.”
No one had ever made it so clear to me what pain is, and what can make it stop.
When I took my hand away, he felt his face again. He nodded, and as he hurried away he chirped, “I’m doing fine. I’m doing fine.”
You may have already guessed what I was silently chanting on my drive home.
I am an auditory learner. Something is always going through my head. And thirty-six years later, “I’m doing fine!” and “The Mexican Hat Dance” are still tied for second, both lined up behind the compulsion to count every step I take.
