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showed up varied. Fifteen, or down to half a dozen. Mornings only, from nine o’clocktill noon, including rest times. Children were kept away if their temperature had risen or if they were undergoing tests. When they were present they were quiet and tractable but not particularly interested. They had caught on right away that this was a pretend school where they were free of all requirements to learn anything, just as they were free of times-tables and memory work. This freedom didn’t make them uppity, it didn’t make them bored in any troublesome way, just docile and dreamy. They sang rounds softly. They played X’s and O’s. There was a shadow of defeat over the improvised classroom.
    I decided to take the doctor at his word. Or some of his words, such as the ones about boredom being the enemy.
    In the janitor’s cubbyhole I had seen a world globe. I asked to have it brought out. I started on simple geography. The oceans, the continents, the climates. Why not the winds and the currents? The countries and the cities? The Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn? Why not, after all, the rivers of South America?
    Some children had learned such things before, but they had nearly forgotten. The world beyond the lake and the forest had dropped away. I thought they cheered up, as if making friends again, with whatever they used to know. I didn’t dump everything on them at once, of course. And I had to go easy with the ones who had never learned such things in their lives because of getting sick too soon.
    But that was all right. It could be a game. I separated them into teams, got them calling out answers while I darted here and there with the pointer. I was careful not to let the excitement go on too long. But one day the doctor walked in, fresh from morning surgery, and I was caught. I could not stop things cold, but I tried to dampen the competition. He satdown, looking somewhat tired and withdrawn. He made no objection. After a few moments he began to join in the game, calling out quite ridiculous answers, names not just mistaken but imaginary. Then gradually he let his voice die down. Down, down, first to a mumble, then to a whisper, then till nothing could be heard at all. Nothing. In this way, with this absurdity, he took control of the room. The whole class took to mouthing, in order to imitate him. Their eyes were fixed on his lips.
    Suddenly he let out a low growl that had them all laughing.
    “Why the deuce is everybody looking at me? Is that what your teacher teaches you? To stare at people who aren’t bothering anybody?”
    Most laughed, but some couldn’t stop watching him even for that. They were hungry for further antics.
    “Go on. Go off and misbehave yourselves somewhere else.”
    He apologized to me for breaking up the class. I began to explain to him my reasons for making this more like real school.
    “Though I do agree with you about stress—” I said earnestly. “I agree with what you said in your instructions. I just thought—”
    “What instructions? Oh, that was just some bits and pieces that went through my head. I never meant them to be set in stone.”
    “I mean as long as they are not too sick—”
    “I’m sure you’re right, I don’t suppose it matters.”
    “Otherwise they seemed sort of listless.”
    “There’s not any need to make a song and dance about it,” he said, and walked away.
    Then turned to make a barely halfhearted apology.
    “We can have a talk about it some other time.”
    That time, I thought, would never come. He evidently thought me a bother and a fool.
    I discovered at lunch, from the aides, that somebody had not survived an operation that morning. So my anger did not turn out to be justified, and for that reason I had to feel more of a fool.
    Every afternoon was free. My pupils went down for long naps and I sometimes felt like doing the same. My room was cold—every part of the building seemed cold, far colder than the apartment on Avenue Road,