Cestoda

            Ms Henning tried to calm him down. “Nigel, please—forget for a moment what just happened; tell me what you felt coming to school today.”

            Nigel held his scowl and wouldn’t take such bait.

            The room was a tawny glow of afternoon sun, slanting to the reaches of most desks, if not the one that Nigel chose for this detention. Distant playground noise came through the open windows, and perhaps both he and his teacher were relieved not to be out there on this destined-to-be-dumb kind of day. The principal had made it a policy—not because of Nigel, but probably with him in mind—that when typical time-outs and such weren’t working on a teacher’s recess duty, instead of going to the principal’s office, the trouble-maker would go back to the classroom with the teacher, and the principal would watch the rest of recess. This way, he argued, the context of the problem would already be known and the principal could see a recess devoid of this contextualized factor. If necessary, a debrief could be deep, with everyone better ‘in the know’.

            Some teachers saw this as a cop-out, the principal ‘too soft on crime’, but Ms Henning had been through countless recess policies and figured that today, for instance, she could get more marking done while letting the ten-year-old delinquent stew. Her initial efforts were earnest, as perhaps were Nigel’s clamming up. She came to his math assignment and marked it as ‘messy in spots, but correctly done’, then lost herself in the stack that required more reminders, beyond the need for being neat.

            “They treat me like I was Mr Bean,” he finally said.

            “Hmm. Do they know who Mr Bean is?” she asked, doing a quick calculation that the 2012 Olympics opened that mime up to the wider world; these kids an ocean away would only have been in kindergarten then.

            “Everyone knows him. And no one want to be like him.”

            “Well, I’ve seen a couple episodes… I’m not sure many students here at Roosevelt Elementary would—”

            “They do. I’ve shown them on my phone.”

            “And… they enjoy?”

            “They say they’re stupid.”

            Ms Henning almost channeled Forest Gump’s ‘stupid is what stupid does,’ yet wasn’t sure that would be germane. She decided that attending to the next math paper would be the better answer.

            Nigel saw what she was doing and turned more toward the shadows. He’d murmur something, eventually, but wouldn’t let her understand.

            “Occasionally,” he heard her say, “Mr Bean adds his trusty teddy bear to a scene—you know Rowan Atkinson writes his own stuff—and the audience will go from laughter to a heartfelt ‘aaww’…. I think they call that a foil character, when the hero has somebody with him, and the audience feels better for it.”

            “Then that’s also stupid. It’s a grown man clinging to a teddy bear.”

            She’d continue, ‘and untold millions cheering him on,’ but recognized the growing banter in the hallway that indicated recess was over and the final hour of math (as the schedule would have it) was coming back into the room.

***

            The next day was nondescript. Maybe everyone forgot the reason Nigel had to sit out the second recess, or, like Ms Henning, thought the prank had run its course. It must have taken days of preparation to gather all those worms and put them into zip-lock bags with the precise ratio of air holes to keep them squirming. Then to threaten mostly girls throughout the morning that they wouldn’t guess what might hit them—and some teased ‘lima beans?’ and others ‘what your mum put in your lunch’, which might have been the same—and to sulk behind the cell phone he’d been told many times to put away or else to bring it here, the morgue that Henning had within her desk, for things that shouldn’t interfere with school.

            “What’s with these worms, Nigel?” Ms Henning asked, when he lingered after school voluntarily, almost as if he wanted to be in detention again. “I mean, it’s fine to have interest in a particular creature, and your report last month on tapeworms was very thorough.”

            “Cestodes,” he clarified. “Weren’t you listening?”

            “Oh, we all were. You said that tapeworms were ‘eucestoda’, if I remember right. And that there were some myths concerning them.”

            Nigel took some paper out from his desk tray and started to sketch. Ms Henning watched him for a minute before facing more worksheets to mark. Progress was very slow, however, as she kept thinking about the first weeks of the school year, Nigel being new to the school and even the country, having come from Glasgow with his American father and Scottish mum, and a poem he placed in the desk tray of Alison, another new student from San Francisco. Now Ms Henning tried to conjure the poem from memory, but resorted to the original she had to confiscate, filed at the back of her bottom drawer. Silently, not to be suspected, she slid it out and read it again:

Guess who I am?

I’m under the very

skin of things

(the earth has a skin

and so does the sea,

somewhat the same

as you and me)

so that means

I’m under myself—

Guess who I am!

He had written it out carefully on the front of a sealed envelop, the kind with bubble wrap inside to pillow the contents. When Alison opened it—during the lull of work time dedicated to math—she pulled out a flattened and desiccated earthworm that happened to be in the shape of a question mark, without the bottom dot. She screamed, naturally, and it took a whole week to get a confession out of Nigel, the only one of the boys who didn’t roar with laughter. Since Alison wasn’t really devastated, and in fact became more popular as a result, Ms Henning didn’t pursue the matter beyond some stern words about respecting one another and accounting for bad judgment. When Nigel finally told her, privately, that he had done it, he said his bad judgment was trying to be a poet.

            “I disagree, Nigel,” Ms Henning reacted at the time. “The poem is actually thoughtful, maybe even lovely when you consider no one was really hurt.”

            “Maybe I wanted to hurt,” Nigel responded, and ran away.

***

            The week was coming to a slow exit for the weekend. Friday recess was observed by the principal even though no one was having a time-out, and Ms Henning took it as a chance to get back up to the room and churn out the final papers she would otherwise have to distribute on Monday. ‘Nice of the principal to do that,’ she thought.

            She was surprised to see Nigel’s mother in the classroom, sitting at her son’s desk. She clutched a single sheet of paper as if it were a go-cart steering wheel and remained seated when she queried, without a greeting, “what is this that Nigel left on our dining room table yesterday?”

            Ms Henning said, “hello” and, walking over to look, “I don’t know.” It was a kind of flowchart—they had been working on these in math to determine absolute values for equations—and an odd kind of life cycle for—she could instantly see—tapeworms. She used “cestodes” to explain that Nigel preferred that term in his research for this project a month ago.

            “But this was yesterday, and he became awfully upset in the evening when I asked him about it. Look more closely—” the mother pointed to the labels of the figures:

            The central figure was shaped like an outline for a women’s lavatory, and on the left skirt side was minutely written ‘Ms Henning’; within that figure was a something that looked very similar to Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm, if more stoic; the worm was labeled ‘me’; arrows exited the woman downwards and to the right—through grass to a cow labeled ‘Mum’—and to the left—through waves to a fish labeled ‘Alison’; inside each were larvae, all with Lowly Worm’s trademark Tyrolean hat; arrows coming out of the cow and fish led straight into a grocery bag and sushi bar respectively, then into the lavatory figure’s mouth (also stoic, if one could say so).

            “I don’t know what to say,” Ms Henning admitted, contextualizing further that Nigel had chosen this animal and in no way would such labels be sanctioned, even if a creative approach to the assignment was encouraged. “We want to make sure the kids don’t just do a Wikipedia report,” Ms Henning explained, “but of course this chart isn’t an appropriate example of creativity.”

            “Are you saying Nigel isn’t creative?”

            “Oh, heavens,” Ms Henning laughed a little, wondering if that ‘Guess who I am’ poem had been drafted on their dining room table, “Nigel is precocious and full of curiosity—I’m not worried about his creative potential.”

            “Well then, you’re worried about something else.”

            “Why would you assume so? I would email you any concern I’d have, and we spoke last time at parent-teacher conferences that he—”

            “—could be neater in his work, could integrate better with his peers, could channel his energy more constructively at recess…”

            “Yes. And should continue to be the best math student we have, and the sensitive soul that has talked with me when something is on his mind.”

            “Well, that’s where I want things to stop.” Nigel’s mother asserted. “We—Nigel’s father and me—have issued a formal complaint about your pseudo-counseling of our son—”

            “Excuse me?”

            “—and the way you demean him with teddy bear examples and questions like ‘what’s with these worms, Nigel?’—exact quote, do you disagree?”

            Ms Henning reviewed in an instant the forty years she had been teaching at this school. She had taught Nigel’s dad in this very room, almost from this very desk. She hadn’t met Alison’s parents yet—odd, that—but calculated that probably a hundred new families had come through her classroom as a means to acclimate to not just Roosevelt Elementary, but the suburban world around it. The bulletin boards changed several times a year, but rarely the cork below. Windows had become terrorist-proof. Blackboards turned green, then white, then smart. Desks, oddly, went through very few changes—seems like those trays below would never go out of style. Recess probably experienced most alteration. Some kids today wore bike helmets on or around the swing sets. Long gone were the days of ‘smear the queer’, which resulted in the termination of a principal—not for the semantics or the playful way to hate, but because a boy had broken his arm, and most likely not the ‘queer’ that was the designated one to ‘smear’. All the math assignments, stories that ranged from Flat Stanley to Judy Blume, science projects that were prescribed and dialed up by choice, birthday parties that still wanted a wallchart to designate, filmstrips and transparencies and videos and school-issued iPads, portfolios that pushed away tests, tests that demanded ‘no child left behind’, tests that extolled some kind of ‘core’, meetings on everything, principals towing some sort of line…

            “Do you disagree?” the question banged rhetorically.

***

            Nigel’s birthday was not to be denied, charted on the wall like everyone else in the class—even Ms Henning, who happened to be lumped in with the five other ‘summer birthdays’ they’d celebrate on the final day of the school year. What anyone wanted to do with their birthday was up to them, to some degree. Most brought in cupcakes, sometimes with a theme of Stars Wars or Despicable Me. Someone suggested that Nigel should do Harry Potter, to which he curtly reminded, “I’m Scottish, not English.”

            “I thought you were American.”

            “That, too. I have dual citizenship.”

            “What’s that mean?”
            Someone wanted to be funny: “it means you can choose who to spy on!”

            Ms Henning clarified what Nigel thought he could do for himself, but he remained silent. Awkwardly, he took out a grocery bag full of gummy worm packets and distributed them desk-by-desk as if they were Halloween overstock. He returned to his desk and declared to no one in particular, “don’t worry, they’re not real.” When some appreciative laughs coincided with the packages opening, Nigel decided to add, “but you should see how gelatin is made.”

           

***

            It was a curious way to end another school week, especially so close to the summer break. The principal emailed Ms Henning to come to his office to discuss Nigel, as if that was enough to go by. She brought her gradebook and his portfolio, guessing that something regarding performance indicators would be relevant. As for time-outs, he hadn’t had any since that worm-throwing incident.

            The boy wasn’t there, but his parents were. Mum looked exactly as she had the time she surprised Ms Henning in the classroom; the father looked amazingly familiar, considering she had not seen him since the early eighties, when he was in 4^th grade—his receding hairline didn’t make him look less boyish. The principal stood to invite Ms Henning to a central chair, poised to face more the parents than the spot he’d occupy behind his desk.

            She shook everyone’s hand instinctively, and smiled at the chance to advise Nigel’s progress.

            “We’re really concerned about your influence on our son,” began the mum, barely after Ms Henning sat down.

            The principal a-hemmed, yet allowed more space for her—or as it happened—her husband to continue.

            “Yes, it’s remarkable to see you again, Ms Henning, after all these years. I’d say you haven’t changed a bit, but… the world does change.”

            “I don’t know what we’re exactly talking about,” Ms Henning replied.

            “You see,” the mum turned to the principal, “there’s a peculiar naïveté that doesn’t befit this meeting, let alone a sustained presence at this school.”

            “I’ve brought Nigel’s portfolio, if that befits the meeting. I was only informed this morning on an email that didn’t say more than ‘we need to discuss Nigel’—”

            The principal again coughed into his fist and took a semblance of charge: “we always put children first in our considerations; Nigel is our starting point… and only outcome.”

            Ms Henning nodded at that and added, “there are twenty-nine other children also on my mind, each and every school day.”

            “I can’t believe you just said that,” the mum rejoined, “as if you’re sweeping every one of them into a pile.”

            “I’m doing nothing of the sort.”

            “A pile that’s destined for a dustbin.”

            “I refuse to be so accused. Again, I’ll assert, in an even-keel voice, I don’t know what what we’re exactly talking about. That’s not my naïveté—rather your own lack of clarity.”

            The principal inserted some rambling ideas about the history of conflict management at the school, how complaints are filed and addressed, other mumbles that didn’t set the women at ease.

            And so the father thought it best to enter in. “I’ll tell you all a little story. Ms Henning, you’ll probably know some of this.”

            She did not want to nod anymore a presumed sense of acknowledgement. Instead, his wife encouraged him to “go on, whether she knows it or not.”

            “Ok. I enjoyed being a student here, for the most part. Your lessons, Ms Henning, probably helped make me a better manager of my time—certainly made me correct spelling errors, as if that mattered—but probably flat-lined things like math, not that that matters for an aspiring businessman.”

            “As I recall, you didn’t do much math homework—”

            “We won’t bring ‘homework’ into this meeting,” interjected the principal. “You know we use the term ‘enhancement exercises’ now and have done so for at least six years.”

            “And we have exercised that often,” the mum let known, “not that we have to say so.”

            “Appreciating that,” Ms Henning acknowledged, “though at the time of this story, a homework policy was in place and I attended fully toward its success. How you ‘flat-lined’ is, well, regrettable, but not a reflection of our negligence as a school.”

            “I can’t believe you just said that,” the mum restated.

            “Anyway,” her husband continued, “I’ve done pretty well in life. I don’t want to say ‘despite’ this or that, and—credit to you, Ms Henning—nothing about you demonstrably held me back.”

            “Gosh, I guess I’ll say thanks,” she said, devoid of any certain tone.

            “There was a teacher then, a Mr Christopherson—you must remember him…”

            Ms Henning searched her memory, “you mean for P.E.?”

            “Yes, an older guy—well, apologies, about your age.”

            “He was here just one year, I suppose the year before he retired.”

            “He was fired, Ms Henning—you must know that.” He turned to the principal for a verification the latter wasn’t prepared for, but still provided with a nod. “He sat every P.E. lesson and smoked Marlboros as we played dodgeball—every single time it was dodgeball, without exception. And at the end of the semester, when grades came out and every single one of us got a ‘C’, we marched up to him and said, basically, ‘what’s up with this?’ And he said, still smoking, ‘what does it mean to get a grade of C? average, right?’ and we, dumb 4^th graders, had to agree. Then he said, ‘you all did average.’ ‘But,’ one of us said, ‘all we did all semester was play dodgeball.’ And he salted the wound by concluding, ‘yep—your dodgeball was positively average.’”

            Ms Henning let that story sink in, exhibiting what pedagogy calls ‘wait time’. She nodded in a modicum of understanding, then decided, “he obviously taught you something, despite appearances.”

            “And what would that be?” jumped in his wife.

            “You tell me.”

***

            The summer birthday boys and girls didn’t bring in cupcakes, but instead received well-wishes written from everybody in the class. Ms Henning wrote out something for every student, regardless of when their birthday occurred, and received something from everyone in kind. Alison’s included the logo for the Golden State Warriors, saying, ‘keep playing great!’ Nigel’s was wordless, if a rather neatly drawn ouroboros, looking like a Möbius strip.

            The same afternoon had another kind of card in Ms Hennings’ staffroom box, if not the insulting ‘pink’ everybody associates with it. She marched into the principal’s office and threw it on his desk. “Rejected,” she said, aware of the double entendre in so saying. To clarify, she followed with, “I reject this.”

            “You can’t,” the principal held. “It isn’t up to you to reject or even me to defend. And if you read more closely, there are provisions for your most positive severance package—”

            “I’ve taught here for forty years, entitled to a couple more—”

            “Ms Henning, I couldn’t agree more to a sense of entitlement, and that’s why you should really read those provisions—”

            “I was here when Mrs Berg burst her veins during a 2^nd grade lesson, and no one could make sense of it, let alone step in to help those students decompress!”

            “I don’t doubt for a moment—”

            “And when Mr Parker was rumored to be on drugs and fell down the flight of stairs, or Mr Norton collected all the 6^th graders after school to chide them for not laughing at his jokes—I was the one who negotiated their release, so to speak.”

            “Negotiation is precisely what we’re talking about—”

            “And I won’t exploit the thousands of private examples where adults and kids needed something of a listening ear—”

            “But that has become your Achilles heel, Ms Henning, in this case—”

            “What?”

            “Nigel didn’t want you to be a listening ear. He didn’t want your advice on teddy bears or worms.”

            Ms Henning took that in, more for the principal’s benefit than her own. “He didn’t want…. Or he didn’t need….”

            “The former, for sure.”

            “And the latter?”

            “The latter doesn’t matter. We’re fighting the voucher system nowadays, if you haven’t followed politics.”

            “I most certainly have, yet—at apparent risk—I’ll listen to your point.”

            “My point is that we’ll lose parents like Nigel’s and, consequently, the voucher allocation that comes with it.”

            “And so, instance by instance, you’ll weigh the risk of losing these vouchers.”

            “That’s too simplistic—”

            “Too much an ouroboros?”

            “What? what do you mean?”

            “Ask Nigel. He’s obviously in a position to teach you a thing or two.”

            “Now, Ms Henning—”

            “I do have a first name—”

            “Of course, I don’t—”

            “—mean to be crass? Goodbye, Mr Principal of nothing I ever stood for.”

            “The school year is not over yet—”

            Ms Henning thought about that. “You’ve got the general gist through recess,” she said, and left with a thorough sense of coda.

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)