I’ll Become the Sea Read Free

chart.
    “Britney.” Jane handed her a sheet of stickers. “Please go around the room and give a star to the students who are doing what I’ve asked them to do.” She nodded toward a group of students sitting quietly at their desks. “I see a lot of students earning stickers for silence during the transition. Good work, Kayla. Very nice, Shaquan.”
    She stopped for a moment in front of a child hanging out of his chair, body half-lying on the floor. “Raymond.”
    He flinched and shot up in his seat, pushing his chair in and folding his hands on the desk. He gave her an ingratiating grin.
    “Nice, Ray.”
    She lined the students up, group by group, forming two straight lines in the hall outside their door.
    Beside them, Ms. Gibson’s class crowded in a bunch, jostling and pushing each other. With their teacher in the classroom rounding up stragglers, a few students wandered over to Jane’s class.
    “Ooh, look at the good children all lined up.”
    “Kyle.” Jane stepped out to the center of the hallway. “Back up.”
    “No, no,” another kid chimed in. “It’s the slow class, they got to walk down the hall real slow.”
    She watched her students react. Some kept still, staring straight ahead, ignoring them. Others began moving from one foot to the next, scowling.
    “Shateek, Kyle, I said back up.” Jane put her body between Ms. Gibson’s students and her own, forcing the agitators to take two steps back toward their classroom.
    Ms. Gibson stepped out to the hallway. “What is this?”
    At the sound of her voice, her students whipped themselves into their lines and faced forward, avoiding her gaze.
    Ms. Gibson turned her head to look at Jane. “You can’t leave them. Not for a minute. These children! They don’t know how to behave.” She faced her students, hands on her hips. “Shateek! Fix your face, man!” She turned again to Jane. “No home training. What are we supposed to do?” She stalked off with her class.
    Jane watched them go, then turned to her students. “Nice work. They provoked you, and you held your peace.”
    Her class looked at her.
    “They want to rile you up, but you’re not going to let them do that to you. Right?”
    Her students nodded.
    “Now how many of you actually buy what I just said?”
    Half the class raised their hands. The others looked away, shrugging.
    “Well.” Jane smiled. “It’s a start. Let’s see if the half of you who raised your hands can keep the other half from beating the crap out of Shateek and Kyle on the playground.”
    A ripple of laughter ran up the line.
    “Right. Let’s go to lunch.”
    *  *  *
    She was eating a sandwich in the teachers’ lounge when her cell phone rang.
    “Hello?”
    “Ms. Elliott. This is David Casey, the education director at Shore Programs. Raymond Johnson’s grandmother gave us your name. You’re his teacher?”
    She set her sandwich down. “Yes. Hi! Raymond was accepted?”
    “Possibly. We’re calling on you for a reference.”
    “Oh. Great. I recommended you to his grandmother. I read about your organization online. I thought he could use some guidance outside of school. He’s a very bright kid.”
    “Well, I think so too. We had him in for an interview yesterday. He’s a good candidate for our program. It would help me to know a bit about what he’s like in the classroom, though. What made you send him our way?”
    Raymond. He interrupted her lessons every three minutes. He could barely sit still long enough to sharpen a pencil. He was her favorite student.
    “He’s a thinker.” She smiled. “Very funny and intuitive. When he started fourth grade in September, he couldn’t read at all. He’d been left back twice already, reading below kindergarten level. I don’t know how he slipped through the cracks for so long.”
    She paused. “Actually, I do. He’s very charming, and a good faker. And so capable in other ways. Strong in math. Great listening comprehension, loves science. He just