Charlotte Charny

In sixth grade I was part of an experiment. It was called the “Open Classroom”. Just when I had learned the rules of survival in my primary school, they changed the rules. The classroom was divided into modules and you had to figure out the point to each one of them before you were allowed to move on to the next one. The idea was to allow children to advance at their own pace, to use their powers of inquiry and to help each other learn. None of this happened. We ended up bottlenecked in small, desperate groups, unable to move, waiting like prisoners before interrogation.

 

Our sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Sunners, was a math teacher with a passionate love for the subject; every module was another form of math. Unfortunately for me, math was a subject surrounded by a barbed wire fence. I had managed to make it through math for three years by hiding under my desk for multiplication drills. Now the game was up. Mrs. Sunners was rooting out all the poor math achievers in her Open Classroom.

 

I stayed at some of the modules for days, where my peers would try explaining things and then give up on me. I would take the same tests over and over again and fail miserably every time. To this day, I have an irrational fear of number lines that dates from the two days I spent with my back against the blackboard trying to figure out how numbers could occupy space while I occupied time. Whenever I attempted to mark a number on the number line, my hands left sweat marks on the blackboard and I felt the damp heat of failure.

 

I began to have nightmares with numbers in them. There were endless strings of them, rolled up like balls of wool. It was my job to unwind them but they kept getting tangled up. Then the numbers would take on life and wrap around me, trying to suffocate me. I would wake up in a panic.

 

After a couple of months, a Stalinesque purge had taken place in our Open Classroom. Former teacher’s pets like me, who had excelled in English and History, had been denounced. We stood in permanent exile and asked each other how long we had been at each module, speaking quietly. The math whizzes formed committees where they decided what we would all “learn” next. 

 

Meanwhile, Mrs. Sunners would sit at her desk during lunch time, eating the same lunch of low fat cottage cheese and Diet Fresca. She was skinny and dry with jet black hair, teased up, shellacked and shoulder length, with a hard, upward curl on the bottom. It was hair that had finally been bent into submission and it would not move when she walked around the classroom. I was so afraid of her that I couldn’t even let her into my nightmares.

 

When it was time to work on our science projects for the upcoming Science Fair, Mrs. Sunners selected a committee of math whizzes to judge our idea for the projects. I sat opposite Guy, a boy who looked like he had been paying a steep mortgage and working as a CPA for fifteen years. I told Guy about my idea for growing lima beans and watering them with Diet Fresca. He told me to forget I ever had that idea.

 

Instead he told me I would be making a life-size astronaut. At first I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the prospect. What should I make it out of? What kind of suit should it have? Guy made a little sketch of an astronaut with pockets on the arms and legs for space food and laser guns. He also advised me to give him a red visor or red sunglasses to protect him against the alpha rays. I fell in love with the idea. I was convinced that this astronaut was going to be a winner. I would regain my rightful place in the classroom. Mrs. Sunners would like me. I would prove myself and maybe even get to show my science fair project at the Brooklyn semi-finals, along with the clay volcanoes and the play-dough planets.

 

I immediately set to work on my astronaut. Luckily my big sister was home from college for a few days so she helped me with the head, which was the trickiest part. We bought wonderful shiny red plastic for the space goggles and used one of my mother’s styrofoam wig stands as a base. My father had a customer who owned a clothing factory and one night he brought home pounds and pounds of rags for the stuffing. We used my father’s old long underwear for the body and sewed pockets on, with each one clearly marked: Laser Gun, Tang, Moon Rocks, Walkie Talkie, etc.

 

When my astronaut was done, he was a thing of wonder. He was perfectly life-size, and what he may have lacked in scientific accuracy he made up for in stuffing. His only problem was his head, which kept flopping down, no matter how much duct tape I wound around it. My sister told me I would have to stand next to him and prop up the head during the presentation. There was one other peculiarity about my astronaut. As hard as we tried to redistribute his stuffing, the force of gravity on this planet caused much of the stuffing to settle in the crotch area. This was accentuated by the style of the underwear which had a very large and obvious flap in the front. It didn’t disturb me at all but my sister found it so funny that my parents had to tell her to act her age.

 

There were two last hurdles with my astronaut. These were how to prop him up for display and how to transport him up the stairs of P.S. 216 to my fourth floor classroom. My father came up with the idea of attaching him to two wooden planks and carrying him up in a shopping wagon. On Monday morning, my father and I began our journey with my astronaut. My father pulled him up the stairs in the shopping wagon where he lay in a heap, head temporarily detached. I followed him with the two planks of wood which were actually in the shape of a cross although neither of my parents seemed to notice this, maybe because of our being Jewish.

 

My father helped me set up my astronaut in the back of the classroom, next to all the other modest-sized, ordinary science projects. I spent the hour before the presentation winding the duct tape around his head and anticipating the glorious reception my astronaut would receive.

 

When Mrs. Sunners came around to my astronaut, she did not even ask me to present him. She looked him up and down and began to shake her head, her hair moving en masse, in gathering fury. What happened next was so painful and thoroughly unexpected that I can only remember it in pieces.

 

Mrs. Sunners began to shriek. She yelled things like,”What kind of nerve do you think you have….making a mockery...this is no astronaut...Christ on a cross...no science fair project...disgusting…” and so on. Then she pulled off his head, plunged her hand with the long red fingernails, into my astronaut’s body and began pulling his stuffing out and throwing it on the floor.

 

Everyone in the class was standing quietly at their science projects, awestruck, looking at Mrs. Sunners and looking at me. I was sobbing when my astronaut finally fell off his cross and into a pile on the floor. Then Mrs. Sunners began to control herself and said in a quieter voice, like someone talking to a dangerous criminal, “I will call your mother and tell her to come to the classroom and remove this thing from the premises.” Then Mrs. Sunners resumed her inspection of the science projects.

 

My mother arrived with the shopping wagon and we quietly loaded up my astronaut and his stuffing and went home. The next day, I was given a new science project. I was instructed to mount two plastic propellers on a piece of wood and make them turn with the help of a large Eveready battery. There was really nothing to be learned from those plastic propellers on a piece of wood. My astronaut, however, while not destined for greatness, taught me about the unpredictability of life on Earth.