Free The Great Expectations School by Dan Brown

guards, positions assigned to kids with discipline problems in their background, tabulated disruptions to be submitted for later punishments. They policed their own!
    Bonn took his kids to the rug to read
The Blind Men and the Elephant,
a second-grade-level book about a gang of sightless geezers who decipher that there's an elephant standing in front of them by using teamwork. The reading was brief, and at the last word the kids immediately returned to their groups, hustling to get out their notebooks. Bonn gave group points on the chalkboard to the first group with all members who had written their name and the date. When Tiquan spoke out of turn, he had to copy a page of the dictionary. The class ran seamlessly. I was wowed.
    What could I cull from this observation to bring to 4-217? Bonn had several advantages that I didn't have. Fifth grade was graduation year, so Paul had the NGL (No Graduation List), the most feared P.S. 85 punishment, at his disposal. Also, dictionary-copying fell into the broad reach of
corporal punishment,
a territory where I was reluctant to tread.
    Corporal punishment, as I understood it, encompassed touching a child, forcing one to stand, making a student face the corner, and dishing out punitive assignments of no academic value. I slowly learned that P.S. 85 turned a blind eye to all of these practices in the name of avoiding “incidents.” However, Barbara Chatton strongly discouraged me from engaging in them, especially in my first few weeks. I agreed. I did not want to become a teacher who dealt out these kinds of penalties, although my current methods were not exactly clicking.
    I thought Paul Bonn's group points were perfect. Since I already had my stars and strikes that applied to all of 4-217, bringing in Bonn's group points would encourage teamwork and discourage academic laggards. (“Deloris is not writing her name and that's costinggroup three points right now!”) I planned to keep track of the points in a box on the blackboard and give out candy bars or wildly popular Yu-Gi-Oh fantasy game cards to the winning group on Friday afternoons.
    I also borrowed
The Blind Men and the Elephant.
    At 10 a.m. on Friday, September 19, our principal, Mrs. Boyd, made a cryptic announcement on the PA. “Fellow eighty-fivers. There has been a… disharmony on Webster Avenue. Please stay in the building until you are further advised. Luckily, we are very safe right now. However, you should all know once again that there is a disharmony currently going on at the Webster Avenue intersection behind the school. Thank you and once again, we are safe.”
    A disharmony?
    â€œSomebody been shot,” Cwasey muttered.
    A police chase had just ended at 187th Street and Webster Avenue with a massive shootout in the street. The suspect, who had a fake gun, was shot fourteen times by police and died in the crosswalk that I used every day to get to the One Way Deli to buy my lunchtime turkey sandwich. The intersection was sealed off with the coroner's wagon, and a massive bloodstain was visible from four stories above. Several bullets had tagged the doors and windows of the nearby apartment buildings.
    The popping-gunshot scene was audible and visible to the classes on the opposite side of the hall from 4-217. The bullets went off adjacent to the minischool, the grades K–1 annex where I had first met Mr. Rose during his pronoun lesson in June. In Allie Bowers's kindergarten class, the kids instinctively knew to duck when the shots rang. Allie made them crawl into the hall, pretending to play a “waiting game” while they sat for thirty minutes.
    Despite the bullet-ridden cadaver on the pavement outside the building, I had my best day yet. I ignored the disharmony and within two minutes the kids forgot about it too. We finished reading
The Hundred Dresses,
a beautiful book about a poor immigrant girl, WandaPetronski, who tells her cruel peers that she has a hundred dresses of