The Blackboard Jungle by Hunter Evan;

Author:Hunter, Evan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-05-10T17:17:15+00:00

7

The day Rick had his brief encounter with Arthur Francis West was, coincidentally, the same day that Joshua Edwards brought his record collection to school. It started like any ordinary day starts, except that Rick had grown wary of ordinary days, knowing that the students of North Manual Trades had a peculiar knack for turning the ordinary into the extraordinary within a matter of minutes. It was this peculiar ability to twist the mundane into the grotesque that made the job so difficult, Rick thought. You could never really plan because you never knew exactly how your plans were going to work out.

It wasn’t like working in an office somewhere. It wasn’t like consulting a rigid schedule: call Andrews at 11:00 to close deal, lunch with Mrs. Mahaffey at 12:30 to discuss Bigelow account, interview prospective stenogs at 3:00, get memo off to Frisco office re delinquent payments. Nothing like that. Because, barring the small office annoyances that came up, it was usually possible to call Andrews at eleven, or wine and dine Mrs. Mahaffey at 12:30, or hire the stenogs, or get off your memos.

It wasn’t like that at Manual Trades. Rick spent a good part of every evening planning his lessons. The lessons all looked good on paper. They were the same kind of lessons which had garnered A after A in his education courses at Hunter. There was only one hitch: they didn’t work. Because if he started out to show the difference between “shall” and “will,” he invariably wound up trying to make himself heard over the roar of a class that preferred discussing the coming Election Day holiday, or the damage they would wreak on Hallowe’en. And if he started out to teach the correct form for a friendly letter, he almost always wound up giving the class a test to keep them quiet and busy. Or sometimes he just gave up and sat there, telling them they’d get a test the next day on the material they should have covered today, and then watching the kids complain and fuss and fidget into silence, only to burst into disorder again when they discovered he’d really meant what he’d said.

So on this very ordinary day, with its very ordinary beginning, the loins of Richard Dadier were girded for whatever surprises the students of North Manual Trades had up their collective sleeves.

The first surprise came in 55-206, and that was no surprise because 55-206 was just full of surprises. It would, in fact, have been surprising if 55-206 had come up with no surprise.

There was something peculiar about the class on that day. Rick noticed it when he was taking the attendance, nipping over the Delaney cards of those boys who were absent. He didn’t know quite what the difference was until he came to Miller’s seat, and then he realized what had changed.

Miller was absent.

“Well,” Rick said aloud. He was truly surprised because Miller had attended his class religiously, even when the other boys were indulging in wholesale cutting.

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