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Y'all remember Mrs. Brown? Yea, the teacher who was quiet but could always settle down the fights? Yep, that's the teacher I'm talkin' about. She wasn't much when she first started teachin'. Heh, I was one of her first classes. She had no idea what to do with us. The school gave her all the bad kids for her "English Class". It was more like a special ed class the way the kids acted in there the first part of the year. In my class, we had twelve people from three different gangs. It was almost like a livin' hell. They would always get into arguments and fights. The school hated them and wanted to kick them out as soon as possible, but the government don't allow schools to do that. Instead, the school just puts them in these classes to keep them away from all the other kids.
Ms. Brown was the only teacher with all her classes filled with bad kids. I remember we mostly just slept in her class. There was no teachin and the school knew that she was probably not going to get anything done in her classes. But, after a couple of months, everything started changin'. Ms. Brown got to know her students. She started trying to do things that would get the whole class to do something. Her first success came in the middle of November.
I remember entering the class room on a Monday, which was supposed to be full of desks and nothin' else, and the whole thing had changed over the weekend. There was this giant blanket that covered most of the floor. Drape-like-things hung down from the ceiling. These drapes were made from a fabric of see-through black. She had taken strings of lights and sewed them into the fabric. More little lights crisscrossed over the rest of the ceiling. On the giant floor blanket, there was a whole bunch of pillows and blankets. Ms. Brown had gotten rid of all the desks, including hers. She was straightening the pillows when I walked in.
She looked up and smiled at me. "Come, sit down. Oh, but please, take off your shoes first. I don't want to get my blankets dirty," she had told me in her quiet voice. Now, she was quiet for a reason and most of the class had already heard why. She had something like a hole in either her lung or her windpipe that was not healing properly. She couldn't really talk that well, but she tried her best to speak to us.
As the rest of the class filed in, takin' their shoes off at the door and pilin' them up near the wall, she asked the class to be quiet as she tried to explain what was goin' on. "I thought that it would be nice to be comfortable in your classroom. I want to try to make it feel like a safe place that you all can come to at least one time a day. I don't care if you want to sleep in here, or do something else. If you all would like, I can turn off the lights. This is a trial period to see if this works. I hope you all like it." She smiled sweetly and we all stared at her. I think this was the first time a teacher had not put any rules on something like this, if a teacher had ever tried this in a public school.
We all agreed to have the lights off and she turned them off and turned the other little lights on. You could lay back and stare up at what seemed to be the stars. It was comforting. I think most people fell asleep the first day. Things among the students of her class started to change after that. We all took care of the room more. We also showed up to school more. It was the best part of the school day for most of us. We considered it our nap time that the school never before gave to us. We got into less fights and most people started doing well in some of their classes. It was an amazing turn around. You agree?
Ah, those were the days, weren't they? Being able to sleep in class and do whatever you want. Do you remember the times when Ms. Brown had her spasms? They were sure scary times, but she always got over them. She would start coughing like there would be no end to them. Most of the time she would be cougin' up blood. How 'bout that time when she fell down cause she was coughin' so bad? Tasha had to call the nurse down and they rushed Ms. Brown to the hospital. She came back a few days after that. She told us that she would probably die in one spasm, but she would never die as long as she had us around to take care of her. We all laughed. She put in a movie a few days later and brought in popcorn. That was one of the fun days.
Oh, what about the last month of that year? The time when all the teachers are preparing for finals? Ha! Ms. Brown had the best final. She got up in front of the class and told us that she had to have at least one grade in the grade book and it had to be a final. So her final was something that we made. It could be anything that we wanted from a drawing to something written to something we made with our own hands. All she wanted was something that we did. It was the easiest final of the whole year. She got a lot of drawing. I believe that she hung them up on her wall. Kevin stole one of her pillows and sewed a smile face into it. It was funny when she got it back. She was happy that he returned the pillow, but even more happy that he had done somethin' special to it. I gave her a drawing of her name written in graffiti. She liked it.
Yeah, she was the coolest teacher of the whole school. What? Oh, yeah, she… she's not around anymore. Her sickness killed her just a year back. Today's the anniversary of her death, now that I think about it. Sad thing too. She was in class and had one of her fits. The class didn't know what to do and waited a little while before they called the nurse. By that time, it was too late. She had choked on her own blood. Her close relatives had to fly in from far away to come to her funeral. I remember that one of the students from my class got us together a couple days before her funeral. We started workin' right then and, on the day before her funeral, we raided the funeral home. We had made some drapes like the ones that used to be in her room. We had also gone out and bought as many pillows and blankets as we could. Some of the girls had taken a bunch of blankets and sewn the edges together to form a big floor blanket. We all arrived on time for the funeral. We acted like nothing had ever happened.
Heh. You should have seen all the faces. All of her students walked in, smiled and did what they normally would do. They took off their shoes and got comfortable with a pillow. The other people, her relatives and some friends, had stood around, not sure what was going on. It took them some time, but they also joined the students, taking their shoes off and staring at the little lights we’d strung from the ceiling. Some people cried. It was hard to see something like this for the last time. No other teacher would do this in our school. But the whole thing was worth it. Her students filled up most of the room. She had a small family, but that was ok. One of our classmates got up to give a speech. She didn't stand at the podium like the pastor or Ms. Brown's father had done. She sat down on the floor like Ms. Brown always did with us when she wanted to talk to us. A lot of students left crying and I wasn't one to be left out. I think we all cried like babies when we left that day. She meant a lot to us. I'm sure glad that I had her. Aren't you?