Macroscope

He stood before thirty-five senior engineering students. They were, in that quiet before the storm, reasonably orderly, watching him intently. What should his first words be? How should he break the ice?

No problem: he called the roll. The principal had made that tediously clear. They could put up with a few firecrackers and water balloons in the halls, but they could not omit that roll. It seemed that the state paid so much per head per day in class, and the school mustn’t miss a head. Still, it did help control the situation. A kid ru

Easier said than done. He did not know those boys by sight, and had to take their word when they answered to the names he laboriously pronounced. There was increasing merriment that he thought stemmed from his errors in pronunciation — until two answered at once on “Brown” and he realized that they were covering for an absent student.

He remembered, with relief, the seating chart. He could check them that way… as soon as each boy was seated where he belonged. “All right, engineers — you know where you sit. Move. From now on, I want every one of you in the proper place.”

“My place is home!” one quipped, and the rest joined in with a too-boisterous laughter.

His next task was to discover where they stood in engineering, so that he could start teaching meaningfully. It was a general course, mostly electronics, and the textbook was good except that it was sadly out of date. He would have to extrapolate from it, filling in the advances of the past decade, or the training would be almost useless.

One of the boys casually took out a cigarette and lit it.

Ivo snapped to classroom awareness. “Hey! You—” he looked at the seating chart — “Boonton. What are you doing?”

“Smoking,” the boy replied, as though surprised at the challenge.

“Isn’t there a school rule against student smoking?”

“It’s permitted for seniors in the technical wing, sir.”

Ivo looked about, suspecting that the boy was lying. Others in the class were covering smirks. They were trying the substitute out, as he had been warned they would.

This was the time for toughness. The principal had put it plainly to the group of volunteers: “Either the instructor rules the students or the students rule the instructor. If you’re weak, they will know it. Put your foot down. The whole authority of the public school system stands behind you. Most of our kids are good kids, but they need to be governed firmly. Don’t let the few bad apples take over.”

Platitudes galore, he had thought at the time — was it only an hour ago? — but probably good advice. Now was the time to apply it. He affected a boldness he did not feel and laid down the local law.

“I don’t care what the technical-wing rules are for what grades. I will not permit the fire hazard of smoking in my classroom. Put that weed away immediately.”

Then they all were on him. “What do you mean?”

“Mister Hoover lets us smoke!”

“How do you expect us to concentrate?”

“Cheeze!”

Ivo hesitated, suddenly unsure. He did not want to be a martinet. “All right, Boonton. You may smoke in class—” there was a spontaneous cheer — “if you can show me a note from the principal approving it.”

Silence.

Then the boy jumped up. “I’ll go see him right now! He’ll tell you it’s okay!”

Ivo let him go. He spent the rest of the period trying to pin down how much the boys knew about engineering of any type and how far into the text they had progressed. It was hard, taking over a functioning class from another teacher, and he could see that much effort would inevitably be wasted in the changeover, simply because of the differing styles of the two men.

Boonton never came back. Ivo didn’t have time to be concerned with that. Probably the principal had been busy.

The bell rang for the end of the period, and he realized that he had really accomplished nothing. All he had done was call the roll and argue about smoking and try to find some place to start. As they cleared out and the next bunch came in, he remembered that he hadn’t even given them a homework assignment. What a begi

The room was a mess. Balls of paper littered the floor, chairs were scattered, assorted slop was on the desks and strands of colored wire lay in odd places. And here he had to do it all over again with a new class!

Somehow he made it. But that afternoon he received a note from the principal, suggesting that he try to settle his problem in class instead of aggravating the students and involving the front office. That was how he learned that Boonton had simply gone home for the day with a story about being prejudicially kicked out of class by a temporary teacher. His mother had called the principal in a fury, and the reprimand was being duly relayed to the concerned teacher.

Ivo reread the note, appalled. No one had bothered to check his version of it. It appeared that any student could make any charge against any teacher — and be believed without question.

There were limits. He went to the principal’s office at the begi

“Ha!” Afra said.

Ivo was jolted back to reality: this was Harold Groton’s experience, not his own.

“I was dead tired the end of that first day,” Groton continued. “As nearly as I could tell, I had cleaned up enough debris and mispronounced enough names to last me for a normal year — but I hadn’t taught anybody any engineering. And to top it all off, I received three calls at my home from irate parents complaining about my mistreatment of their hard-working angels. The last one was at one a.m. I think that was when I really began to understand what it meant to be a teacher.

“The next day was worse. The word was out that I could be taken. Everyone seemed to know that I’d had trouble with the office, and the students were determined to run me down. They talked out of turn, they slept in class, they looked at comic books; I couldn’t make all of them pay attention all the time. I saw that few of them cared about the subject or had any real thought for the future, and the ones who needed instruction most were the ones who refused even to listen when it was offered. They drew pictures of girls and hotrods in their notebooks, and there was always some obscene word on one of the blackboards. I’d erase it, not making an issue of it — as I’d been advised — but another would be there again next period. There’d be an anonymous noise while I was talking — a clicking or a harmonica note or something similar — and it would stop the moment I did. I couldn’t ignore it because every time it happened the whole class got out of control and became noisy, and I couldn’t pin it down either. And the thing was, they knew as well as I did what would happen if I cracked down on anyone and sent him to the principal’s office for discipline. I’d get spoken to, not the student, for letting things get out of control. It was my responsibility.

“Hell,” Groton said, “is a roomful of rebellious juveniles — and a pusillanimous administration. I was committed, and I refused to quit — but I became obsessed with the progress of the negotiations between the state authority and the FEA.”

“FEA?” Ivo asked.

“Florida Education Association. That was the teachers’ group, and they still may be, for all I know. I really came to appreciate their stand. I never worked so hard in my life, in the face of such abuse. Oh. the newspapers were full of editorials! ‘Wonderful Volunteers Filling In For Errant Teachers,’ ‘Nobody Cares About Our I