By Michele Herman
The school year is over, which means that my 9-year-old son is moving on after second and third grade in Charly’s class at P.S. 3, and so am I. For the past two years, while Albany malingered, I did my bit for class-size reduction in the New York City public schools. Every Friday at 10 I reported to Charly’s to knit. Charly would look around the room, do a quick calculation based on some wise-teacher formula of who was most desperate to learn knitting balanced against who needed TLC and who, as she so kindly put it, was growing too wiggly. She would then point to a kid or two, I would set them up with class needles and class yarn, and we’d go sit in the hall, making the class total a slightly more humane 26 than its usual 28. This is still a lot of second and third graders to pack into a small classroom already brimming with the raw materials and the fruits of creation: the electricity corner, the cardboard longhouses, the crafts that hung from the ceiling awaiting the day of the big class crafts sale, and the curtained corner where two remarkably poised third-grade girls, for their independent study, conducted interviews about their classmates’ dreams. Luckily this year the class no longer hosted the fat foster rabbit of 2002-’03.
I will miss sitting in the hall with one of Charly’s knitters on either side of me. Sometimes I was there to teach, and sometimes, with a kid who’d already learned to knit but still was susceptible to the classic mistakes of the beginner, I was just there to spot. I talked them down when all the stitches slipped off the needle and had to be retrieved. I made sure the original 20 stitches didn’t mysteriously grow to 47, and that the scarf didn’t turn inward on itself and begin to resemble a large strawberry, as one of my knitting buddies put it.
Charly was determined, when she came to P.S. 3 two years ago, to teach all her kids to knit, because knitting provides confidence, focus and lots of math practice. I love knitting, too, in part because it’s such a good facilitator for other, harder activities like making conversation with people you don’t know well, and the one that’s sometimes hardest of all: being alone and at peace with your own thoughts. Knitting with Charly’s class, I learned a lot about pets and pesky siblings and the plots of “Simpsons” episodes. I got to know almost all 28 kids, and to love them individually and collectively. I learned that eight- and nine-year-olds are both smart and a little famischt, as my father used to say, about the workings of the world. I once had to explain that George Bush is not the owner of the United States but runs its government (as much as I may think their view is the more accurate).
We knitted to the rhythm of Bruce the music teacher and his very spirited drummers who practiced in a classroom down the hall. Come spring the bulletin board across the hall sprouted my favorite perennial creative-writing assignment: the poems called “Where Poetry Hides.” The occasional fifth-grade drama queen trudged past on her way to the girls’ room to recover from a passing tragedy, usually trailed by a best friend acting the role of lady-in-waiting. The smiling occupational therapist Gail came and went on her way to teach touch-typing or cursive. Ever since 1996, when I came on my P.S. 3 tour, I have loved these hallways that serve as classroom annexes — informal but never chaotic, the province of the students rather than the shushing hall monitors of other, lesser institutions.
Kids at P.S. 3 stay with the same teacher for two years in a system called bridge classes. Like any system, it has its advantages and disadvantages. Charly’s class wasn’t the most orderly or peaceful on earth, but thanks to her skill and devotion it was a wondrous second home for my son and the cadre of friends he made there. When I think of the turmoil that’s usually going on inside our tiny, perfectly functional four-person household at any given time — the miscommunications, the hurt feelings, the sheer amount of droning annoyance — I want to get down on my knees and thank teachers like Charly, who are willing to absorb buckets of other people’s need. Somehow Charly walks into the classroom cheerful each morning, and talks to the kids in a voice that carries affection and authority and understanding (all in a soft London accent). Even at her most depleted, I never heard a note of condescension or cruelty or indifference. I wish I could shake our governor and tell him: give this woman and her colleagues the support they deserve. Enough with the testing, already. Ask them what would make their jobs easier. Shower them with accolades. Take a fraction of the pork in Albany and convert it to salaries for lunchroom and recess aides, so that the only thing bouncing off the walls is playground balls, not kids.
For all its glaring inequities and idiocies, our public-education system still strikes me as one of the great achievements of humans governing themselves. I’m always holding an internal argument with the libertarians on this subject. And just the other day I was glad to hear my old favorite radio personality, Mario Cuomo, quote Lincoln on the proper role of government: to create collectively what people can’t provide for themselves individually. How remarkable it is that, whatever other crud takes up space across this continent, every couple of miles a different group of humans has organized another one of these small societies of 5-to-12-year-olds, complete with dodgeball and spelling lists and hot lunch and hot-lunch jokes and book reports and yearbooks. Of course government is also always a big mess, with new reform heaped upon old reform before the old reform has been given a chance, with managers who lack the time or inclination to listen to educators, with blunt solutions to complicated problems.
Thanks to P.S. 3’s determination to keep the forces of bureaucracy at bay, and thanks to Charly’s sensitivity and patience, her grads are all wide open to learning. They all know how to knit. They are a little naive about civics, but wiser than many adults I know about how to be kind to one another. And though they can certainly bicker and taunt and pout with the best of them, they know it’s possible to work through their conflicts and come out the other side. At the moment, that strikes me as an investment worth throwing every possible resource at.
