"The Whiz" -- a story (v)

Chief Blackhawk

That which triggered my fictional attempt to tell this story is not something I witnessed. What I witnessed is what the narrator describes: 6th period, junior English, American Lit were stunningly quiet when they walked into the room that day because they'd just come from a class where they'd experienced something they'd never seen, something which became for all of us a very real "teaching moment." 

What you're reading is fiction, but were you to ask anyone who was there--as I did some of them almost fifty years later--they would tell you they hadn't forgotten. 

The next day in class, Mel stood in front with the chalk in her hand, trying to wrench the right answer from some stubborn puzzle on the board, and she wasn't getting it. But no kid in that room understood why not. There was more in her figuring than what she was scribbling, but when she didn't get it right, Wilson Friedli's best student, the one he'd opened up to the night before—when she didn't get the answer, he took it personally. It drove him crazy, and he blew his mind all over that classroom.

"I try and I try, and I try," he screamed. "I give my life for my students, and what do I get for it? Does anyone every appreciate me?" He screamed directly at Melinda.

The kids stared, petrified, at the assault.

"You can't believe how hard I work around here--how much I care."

He turned to the rest of them. "I want you kids to learn this. I want you to leave my classroom knowing this stuff. I give my life for this, and what do I get back? Does anyone ever say anything?" he yelled. "Does anybody ever say thanks? Do I ever get a yearbook dedicated to me? What do I have to do?"

He turned back to her, in silence. He caught himself for a moment, I guess, then looked back at the class, his eyes unfocused, as if he recognized none of them. He stepped back, felt behind him for the corner of his desk, and brought himself slowly around to his chair, still glancing back and forth between Melinda and the rest of the kids. Blindly, he sat down, stunned, they said, as if suddenly embarrassed. Then he dropped his head into his hands and started to cry very much out loud.

Melinda stood stiff at the board.

Then came up once more and looked at them again, eyes full of tears. "And you," he said to Mel, "you know what I mean. You—of all of them—know. And you don't even care."

Melinda ran out of the room.

The others stared blankly at each other as Wilson Crotty put his head down once again when he saw her leave. "I try and I try and I try," he said again, banging his fists on the desk. "I try and I try and nobody cares—no one," he said.

He pulled both arms up around his face and lay there on the desk bawling. The kids waited, looking at each other, wondering what to do. When the sobbing stopped, two of them, football players, took it upon themselves to walk to his desk--at least that's the way the story went.

They took hold of Wilson Crotty's elbows, got him to sit straight, then helped him to his feet. "You need to get out of here for awhile," one of them said, almost in a whisper. "Come on," he said. "Let's go."

Mr. Templeton met them at the door because Melinda, this time, hadn't simply run out of school.

*

Most of those math kids came downstairs to my room for sixth period English. I didn't know what had happened, but I could tell the moment they came in that something had occurred which left them speechless.

One of the guys who'd helped him told my class very respectfully how Mr. Crotty's arms were shaking when he held them. He explained how what the man had said earlier, yelled really, didn't make any sense to anybody, and how he'd aimed it all at Mel, and how horrible it must have been to be the kid who caught all that screaming. It was about the worst experience he'd ever had, he said, to see someone blow a fuse that way, just lose it right in public. "And Crotty too," he told the others. "Geez, I mean, who'd have ever thought it would be Crotty, you know?—I mean, I thought he was already crazy."

They giggled, respectfully really.

Melinda went home. Crotty did too, the principal driving him. He stayed out of school for almost five weeks, until the school board thought it would be okay to let him finish the year, psychologists indicating that it may have even been therapeutic for him to return to the classroom.

When he came back, everyone asked him how it was going—maybe it was the first time in all those years he'd been at Arrowhead that anyone had paid much attention to him, in or out of the teachers' lounge.

Mel never told anyone what he'd said or done the night before.

I was the only one who knew what was going on, and I didn't say anything either. Melinda never spilled a word to Templeton either. It was something only the two of us knew—the three of us, Crotty too.

____________________ 

Tomorrow--conclusion of the story.