We Love You, Fluffy the Hamster
By Jason Rizos
Copyright 2011 Jason Rizos
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www.jasonrizos.com
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We Love You, Fluffy the Hamster
It was a simple case of motivation, Ms. Atchison contended when it was all over. Only six months out from her Ph.D. in Elementary Education, Ms. Atchison considered herself an expert on early childhood discipline. Almost immediately upon meeting her 3rd grade class of seventeen youngsters did she observe that self-interest did not act as motivation for good behavior, efficient study time, and completed assignments. She concluded that eight-year-olds were far too impulsive and savage to improve their behavior based on a system of rewards and lost privilege. Corporal punishment would no doubt have amounted to a wholesale disciplinary improvement, as a sense of self-preservation is ultimately instinctual. But the Jasper County school district had long abandoned such short cuts to success.
She perused her copious textual resources; several esoteric journals published by leading colleges and universities, but these concerned only theory. One article that seemed especially hopeful was titled “Extraordinary Disciplinary Revisionism in the Elementary School Classroom,” but the article concerned itself only with brain chemistry, social hierarchy, and other such symptoms of bad behavior that Ms. Atchison was all too familiar with. “Tell me something I don’t know,” she whispered, chucking the journal to the stack of others equally useless and pedantic.
Fortunately, Ms. Atchison had a second resource—her undergraduate degree in 20th Century History. Thus, Ms. Atchison consulted the strategies of several World War II despots. Specifically, the techniques of maintaining social order conceived by Joseph Stalin. Although history had construed him as a vile, bloodthirsty killer, she figured, without all the massacring and enslavement, his ideas were well founded and considerably successful at obtaining general law and order.
Inspired by Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, she began her new regimen on a bitter-cold January afternoon. The sky was a craven dome of deepest gray, the wind-chill well below freezing. For the children, recess was a matter of endurance. The students stared meekly at the great gothic clock tower across the playground and counted the minutes ticking by. They clustered around the main entrance to the playground and persuaded their chaperone to call it off, but this required the temperature to drop below 15 degrees Fahrenheit. The only thermometer, the stark totem of Sammy the Salamander suckered to the window and mocking them with sunglasses and Hawaiian shirt, registered only 18. Mr. Dobson, the Art Teacher, pointed to Sammy from inside the school’s foyer and pushed his lower lip out.
Across the playground, Ms. Atchison watched the children through the foggy window of her classroom, steam rising from the coffee mug she held in both hands. She thought to herself how obnoxious the little cretins were this morning and found this their just deserts. One student remained, hence the lack of menthol cigarette in her left hand as she sipped. Serving his twelfth consecutive detention since his unpleasant uprising in November, David looked out the window as well, catching glances at his teacher while cleaning the inside of a pencil holder with a brown paper towel. Alone together in the quiet classroom, the boy spotted Ms. Atchison eyes narrowing and paused with a shiver.
“You know, David, I’ve changed my mind.” Ms. Atchison smirked, glancing down at him. “You can go out for recess after all.”
“That’s o.k., Ms. A. I’m fine here anyway.” He said, blowing graphite dust from the pencil holder and increasing his pace. “Good as new.” He handed it to her and began clashing his fists together nervously. Ms. Atchison lifted the pencil holder and inspected it carefully.
“Festina Lente,” she said. “Do you understand Latin, David?” He shook his head. “It means to make haste slowly. You would do well to learn Latin.” David glanced at the chalkboard now realizing his fatal error, having too quickly completed two-hundred repetitions of I will not throw pencils at the ceiling. Ms. Atchison smiled broadly and twirled the pencil holder in her hand.
“Go on now,” she said, condescending. “I insist.” David sulked his way to the cloakroom and retrieved his parka. Without looking at her, he marched his way outside. Yet still, Ms. Atchison observed, lighting a menthol cigarette, his stalwart insolence remained. She lit a menthol cigarette and watched as he pushed his way past the mob and climbed the jungle-gym. Reaching the highest platform, he buried his face into the neck of his parka and jumped off. The typically pliable mulch crunched under his feet. He repeated this obligatory play until at last the clock tower turned the final minute. Mr. Dobson blew the whistle and the children poured back indoors. “Enjoy it,” she whispered, exhaling smoke through her nose, “you’ll learn to respect me yet.”
Upon returning, the students discovered a large box on her desk, covered with a black satin cloth. They returned their cold weather gear to the cloakroom, and no sooner than the replacement of the final mitten, Ms. Atchison began.
“You kids don’t seem to care what happens to you, so we are going to try something to teach you the value of proper conduct.” Her tone was unsettlingly calm. She explained, “Starting this instant, the consequences for carelessness will no longer amount to a shortened recess, time out sessions, or the repetitious copying of behavioral declarations on the chalkboard.” Every student felt they were the victims of another’s bad behavior. They could not recall any deed that could possibly lead to such an ultimatum as this. Though they were too young to understand what Ms. Atchison was now for the first time holding in her right hand, it was in fact a riding crop.
The students looked on with the guilty apprehension of bayed beasts recognizing their time may be at an end. In the give-and-take game of rewards and punishments, their camaraderie was impenetrable. Their strategy was to act as though they had no concept of the word ‘misbehavior.’ She looked into seventeen of the most unabashedly sheepish faces she had encountered since her high school prom. They would curb their misbehavior only as long as it took for her indignation to pass.
She stared into the mass of them, transfixed, as a familiar but uncertain silence crept into her declaration. She wondered was this intimidation? She had suffered previous spells as this; herself single and childless, and a creeping thought asked which, if any, of the children before her would be worthwhile as one of her own. Such moments of partiality made her ashamed of herself, having pursued a career in elementary education for her unconditional love of all children. But such noble, if naïve, motivations were quickly lost among the impulsivity that dictated their every action. The simplest instruction of, say, calling them into a line for an excursion to Mr. Dobson’s art classroom, could very well result in shoving, bickering, pasted ears (paste in ears), magic-markered clothing and the all-too commonplace head contusion. And should she arrive at Mr. Dobson’s art classroom, Mr. Dobson himself wearing his white Stetson cowboy hat, meditating on a portrait of water lilies, or perhaps some gummy mass of papier-mâché, nothing was more embarrassing than admitting to a casualty list at Nurse’s Friendly’s office.
That previous summer, the Jasper County school district hired Ms. Atchison from among nearly one-hundred qualified applicants, an impressive designation, herself being the only recent graduate in the applicant pool. She believed their reasoning was based on her pedagological research (at a notable institution no less), but more than this, her sobering consideration for discipline. When the topic of classroom order was broached during her interview, she struck an expression of calculated seriousness and explained that she planned to maintain complete order, repeating complete order for emphasis, even if she had to “call upon unorthodox methodology.” Principal McKinley pulled back in his chair, much to his own surprise, and not so much moved by the content of her answer, did he note her uncanny conviction.