weeks of summer. Glad for the rhythm of the school year to pull me along. Glad for the library full of readers.
I loved the energy of their little bodies, and sounds of their voices, even when they got too loud. I was not a librarian who went around shushing kids—but I did try to help them remember that the library was supposed to be a calming space, a special space, one that left room for the imagination.
Duncan made changes, yes—but incrementally enough that, one by one, they didn’t provoke rebellion.
He instituted assigned seating for the kids at lunch, for example. Which actually turned out to have some advantages.
The kids hated it, but that was okay. Kids hated lots of things.
Duncan also started requiring the teachers to take attendance in every class—not just first thing in the morning. His reasoning was that we needed to monitor where the kids were throughout the school day. What if one of them went missing? How would we know?
This change had fewer advantages. The teachers hated this one.
Um. How would we know? We would just—you know—notice that someone was missing. The implication that taking attendance was the only way to keep our kids from going AWOL was, frankly, pretty insulting. But Duncan wanted a record—an accounting of where every single kid was during the school day. And it wasn’t the biggest imposition in the world. Seriously, once we’d seen him hold up that gun, something like taking attendance in class seemed like small potatoes.
In theory, at least.
In practice? Taking attendance is just about the most boring possible way to start a class.
Other little changes that Duncan worked into the schedule bit by bit without ever causing a riot: Shortening lunch by ten minutes. Shortening recess, too. Decreeing that faculty could not cover each other’s classes. Decreeing that faculty could not leave campus during the school day.
Not to mention, adding locks and keypads to every gate that let you in or out of school grounds—except for the front entrance, which was guarded by security at all times.
The keypads themselves weren’t all that onerous, but what did turn into a serious drag was that they changed the security codes every two weeks.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, if you had nothing else to think about.
But teachers always have everything else to think about.
It was the worst for people who drove—which was everybody except me—because the parking lot was on the far side of the school’s entrance. If you forgot the code, you had to walk all the way around to the front. It made me glad, in a way, that I didn’t drive anymore—not since the seizures came back. Partly because I didn’t want to be on medication, which was required for a license. But also, if I’m honest, after that first, spectacular reintroduction to my adult epilepsy, I wasn’t too eager to get back behind the wheel.
It was fine. There were upsides.
It was a slower pace of life.
Most mornings I just rode my yellow bike—with my supplies tucked into the handlebar basket that Babette and I had hot-glued fake flowers all over—and Chuck Norris would come bounding out of the gates and lick my ankles while I locked it up out front.
Remember how Duncan told us not to pet him?
Yeah … I would pet the hell out of that dog.
It was good for both of us.
In fact, I did my best to ignore most of Duncan’s changes.
But the one that hit me the hardest was car-pool duty.
He completely overhauled car pool the third week of school—deciding that it wasn’t safe for kids to sit outside the building while they waited to go home.
“They’re literally sitting ducks,” he’d said to Alice.
“Well,” she had famously said, “not literally.”
By royal decree, the kids now had to sit inside in the courtyard for car pool. It took twice as long and required a relay system.
It required twice as many teachers, too.
I got conscripted into it—against my will. Everybody did. So once a week, at the end of a long, draining workday, I got to stand out in the hundred degree heat for more than an hour, breathing carbon monoxide and fielding angry parents who’d roll down their car windows and shout, “I’ve been in this line for over an hour!”
“At least you have AC,” I’d say, taking a swig from my water bottle.
It got so bad, Alice suggested we stick ice cubes in our bras—which I did not go for, though it was tempting. Instead, I found a giant pink