What Was She Thinking? Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked this and muttered something that Sheba couldn’t make out.
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    “Special needs, Miss,” he repeated in a croak.
    Contrary to some of the reports that have since emerged, Connolly was not “backward” or “retarded.” Along with a good 25 percent of St. George’s students, he had been identified as having “literacy issues”—difficulties with reading and writing—and was therefore eligible for daily special needs sessions in the remedial department. On questioning the boy further, Sheba discovered that special needs also prevented him from participating in art classes. She told him that she was surprised about this and suggested that something might be done to rectify the situation. Connolly was shrugging noncommittally when Sheba was suddenly called away. One of her second-year
charges was attempting to burn a first-year with a disposable lighter.
    That night, she says, she remembered her brief interaction with Connolly and put a little note in her diary reminding herself to enquire about the possibility of rejigging his timetable. It was wrong, she felt, that the boy should be prevented from pursuing a subject—perhaps the only subject—for which he had some aptitude. She wanted to help.
    Such do-gooding fantasies are not uncommon in comprehensive schools these days. Many of the younger teachers harbour secret hopes of “making a difference.” They have all seen the American films in which lovely young women tame innercity thugs with recitations of Dylan Thomas. They, too, want to conquer their little charges’ hearts with poetry and compassion. When I was at teacher training college, there was none of this sort of thing. My fellow students and I never thought of raising self-esteem or making dreams come true. Our expectations did not go beyond guiding our prospective pupils through the three Rs and providing them with some pointers on personal hygiene. Perhaps we were lacking in idealism. But, then, it strikes me as not coincidental that, in the same period that pedagogical ambitions have become so inflated and grandiose, the standards of basic literacy and numeracy have radically declined. We might not have fretted much about our children’s souls in the old days, but we did send them out into the world knowing how to do long division.
    Sheba never did succeed in having Connolly’s remedial schedule altered, of course. She went as far as going to see Ted Mawson, who is responsible for devising the school timetable. But Mawson brusquely dismissed her request, explaining that designing simultaneous timetables for thirteen hundred children was
“like playing three-dimensional chess” and that if he started dithering over this one’s lost art class or that one’s missed woodwork, he would never get the job done. Anxious not to be difficult, Sheba apologised profusely. “This is a comprehensive school,” Mawson told her in a jokily reproachful tone as she backed out of his office, “not the bloody lycée.” Sheba seems to have been rather outraged by this last comment, detecting in it a dig at her privileged naïveté. At the time, she promised herself to pursue the matter further—with the head if necessary. But she never did. Other things came up, she says. She got too busy. Or perhaps, one conjectures, like so many would-be reformers before her, she simply lost interest.
    A few days after meeting Connolly for the first time, Sheba found a picture in her pigeonhole. It was a rudimentary pencil sketch of a woman, executed on lined foolscap, in the romantic style often favoured by pavement artists. The woman had vast, woozy eyes and long, long arms that resolved themselves in odd, fingerless trowels. She was gazing into the distance with an expression of slightly cross-eyed eroticism. Ballooning out from her low-cut blouse was a good amount of heavily crosshatched cleavage. In the bottom right-hand corner of the page the anonymous author of the sketch had written