Free The Great Expectations School by Dan Brown Page A

all colors and materials, even though she wears the same ragged frock to school every day. Wanda has to move away suddenly, but through a poignant letter her regretful tormentors discover her elaborate and gorgeous drawings of a hundred dresses. I loved the book, and I think the kids did too. I did not respond when Lakiya said, “This story GAY!” It definitely went over better than
James and the Giant Peach,
which I had abandoned a few days earlier after sensing rampant confusion.
    On the way down the steps for dismissal, Sonandia reached out and clasped my hand. When Athena saw this, she looped around to hold my other hand. Jennifer gave me a hug in the parking lot. She did it every day.
    I collapsed on my bed at 6 p.m. on Friday, out cold for the next fifteen hours. I spent the weekend in my apartment catching up on back episodes of
Six Feet Under
and eating frozen pizza. I filled my plan book and brooded over the fatal shooting.
    Cat Samuels actually saw the victim riddled with the cops’ fourteen shots and fall dead to the rainy asphalt. She reacted with blank-faced horror. “If that's not enough to get me out of this hell, I don't know what is,” she told me by the fifth-grade detention table where she served earsplitting lunch duty.
    I got headaches in 4-217, but the cafeteria during upper-grade lunch was a migraine pressure chamber. Screams and squeals reverberated as children bounded over tables, wrestled on the refuse-strewn floor, and mashed up their fish patties for projectile fodder. It was a mammoth, virtually unchecked melee.
    Cat and I had similar problems in silencing the whole class. As a prep teacher, though, she was at a disadvantage because she taught only one lesson per class per week. If it sputtered or got interrupted, she would leave feeling like a failure. When I had a lesson that tanked or a ridiculous student outburst, I could rebound or change gears immediately with a new activity with the same kids. I might lose thebattle, but I had a shot at winning the war. Fighting isolated and out-manned battles, Cat felt overmatched. When she finished only one out of her first eighteen lessons in those initial two weeks, I couldn't blame her for considering leaving.
    On Sunday night, I climbed into bed at 10:30 but never fell completely asleep. Sunday nights are dark times for teachers. Ugly moments from school rushed at me like a cinematic montage. I thought about the barrage of questions about pencil sharpening and the bathroom, the crying, the wild line on the steps, the clockwatching, and the yelling. So much yelling.
    I tried to intellectualize my place in the universe, reaching only bleak conclusions. The dearly held idea that one person can change lives now felt like cheap, baseless dogma. It was an easy aphorism, like “love conquers all”; one that worked in movies and instantly disintegrated in the giant, indifferent city. I thought, My kids are so needy, and I can never compensate for what they're missing in their lives. I can barely teach them math. I should do more, but I am failing at the basics.
    No! Snap out of this void of negativity! I willed myself into a cold shower and slapped myself in the face. “It is always darkest before the dawn,” I said aloud, creeping myself out. Was this job making me a self-talker?
    My morning route to school took me into the subway at Allen and Houston streets to board the uptown F or V trains. At Herald Square, I transferred across the platform where the D train, my uptown express ride to the Bronx, originated. On lucky days, I would pull into the station on the F to find the open-door D waiting to leave. When the platform was empty, the wait was longer and the omen was ill.
    On Monday, September 22, my F pulled into Herald Square but kept its doors shut long enough for the awaiting D train to close up and get moving while I haplessly watched. “The D train is an ass-hole,” a woman in a business suit