On Monday mornings, after the pledge, I tutor the boys of Ms. Leedholm’s second grade class.

Mondays are the ideal day for this — coming down off the weekend, the booze, the bad decisions, the late nights and disorganized mornings. Monday mornings, the halls of West Park Elementary are high-pitched, busy, rampant with excitement, feather-light vinyl book-bags, runny noses and attendance card-takers. Because it’s so dog-gone early, I arrive at West Park before I check the news, before my second cup of coffee. It’s the first thing I do every week.

In West Park Elementary there are two kinds of people: those that are more than four feet tall and those that are not. Because the school runs only through third grade, the majority of the population falls into the latter category. And because we live in a democracy, majority rules. Desks are small, handles are low. I spend most of my time hovering, kneeling and looking down. The tall people learn very early to yield at corners and to open doors slowly, speak loud and clear, omitting swear words and slang and to limit conjunctions. The tall people learn to smile a lot, even if it’s Monday.

When I arrive to the classroom and I put down my coat and grin at the flock of 20 small people, every one is reading silently. Ms. Leedholm runs a tight ship and she uses those 15 minutes to attend to the very important clerical matters of her career, bubbling in forms and taking lunch orders.

After the announcements, Ms. Leedholm hands me a stack of worksheets with the names filled out and I take them out into the hall with a timer and a pencil and I set up my shop on a table, which is roughly a foot and a half high. One by one, much like a trip to the shrink or the dentist or the court, I summon the boys by name. They emerge and usually trip, stumble or just wipe out. Their hair’s a little crazy, their snow pants are still on, but it’s early and the margin for perfection is large in second grade. These are my men. We get started.

Thanks to Bush and his No Child Left Behind brilliance, I sit there with a kitchen timer with an earbleed chime and big red button. I ask my 7-year-old soldiers to read a paragraph about polar bears. As they read, I tally their mistakes. At the end I run how many words they read against how many they missed and calculate something called a “cold score.”

My job is to sit there and tally and when we hit a wall, I let them stammer out words like “trapped” and “white” for as long as it takes. Then I call them incredible and we go to the next sentence. After it all, I take five minutes, messing up twice, and give them their “cold score.”

Now these are boys. By the first sentence a shoulder is jerking and a knee is sort of out to the side and their hands are either in their pockets or on their head or both and they look at me like I’m asking them to swallow whole grapes. I hate these sheets. I hate this score thing. I am so sorry, little soldier.

It appears that 7-year-old boys have Vaseline on their butts because they cannot stay in their chair. It’s me and them with one table and two chairs and there’s no one else in the hall but without fail, around mid-way, word number 93, they hit floor. The physics of the situation are dazzling.

When reading with 7-year-olds, the last thing I give a hoot about is a score. This is the worst part of the whole process, I tell them. When the minute’s up, they look at me and ask me how the kid before them did and how they did and I lie and say their score was very good and it’s Monday and these are hard words. Let’s talk about polar bears instead. But before we can actually use our own words, thoughts and sentences, we have to navigate through six multiple-choice questions, in painfully ambiguous coding: most, about and in the story. A through D. It sucks. Big-time.

From these lame worksheets, an incredible relationship was born. We finally departed from the cold score nonsense and now I spend time reading and talking with my boys, sans timer.

I work with one little boy in particular, Jayson (not his real name), a sweet peanut with big glasses and an impossible learning curve. He has a special box with baby-level books.

What I don’t know is how to help Jayson read, but I do know that I’ll show up every Monday to wade through the agony right there with him. The baby books in the “Jayson Box” are demeaning even if it’s on his level, so I’ve begun to take out books from the library for him. I borrow books on nasty boy-topics like squids and eels and dirt.

We break deals. I’m a saleswoman peddling pages. I tell him I’m so dang good at reading I can read upside-down. It might as well be a superpower for how impressed he is when I do it. Hell, I can read them backwards, I tell him, upside-down too. I’m so good at reading, you can time me. These powers, I tell him, are all possible with a little practice.

I worry about him, though. When the school year breaks and summer comes, there’s no way he’s going to willingly subject himself to that kind of suffering. He has a contempt for books like I’ve never seen. He’s smart enough to pass second grade by the skin of his teeth and the system will keep ushering him along but he’ll never learn to read well or love literature. Second grade is the time to address all these gaps. I insist on reading multiple books, multiple times. Now is the moment, I tell him, to learn this stuff.

I brought Jayson a print-out from the BBC Web site about a colossal squid they found off the coast of Antartica. It was a big sucker, nearly sixty feet long. The burden of proof, in second grade, always falls on who’s talking so I’m standing there, at 8:30 in the morning, pacing out sixty feet.

“Whoa.”

These are my men. I don’t want to be a teacher or a mother. I don’t know the right technique to sound something out. But I’ve realized that I don’t have to have an ed degree to teach a seven-year-old about squids or that books are OK. The only thing I really have to do is show up.

My time at West Park on Mondays lends incredible perspective. The biggest thing in Jayson’s day is learning about a squid that is longer than a bus. Anyone could do what I do — sit there and wade through a daily language exercise and then talk about bunnies or giants or Sascha’s cup of juice for an hour.

And I do this for my sanity, I do it for the germs. I do it to remind myself that children exist and are oftentimes more interesting than adults.

I’m sitting there waiting for Jayson to work out the word “light” and I think, “If we were in Sierra Leone, he’d be a soldier. They’d smear cocaine into his wounds and tell him to kill his brother.”

But we’re not in Sierra Leone, we’re in Moscow, Idaho, and in this place we think children are great. You can say what you want about public schools, but I see the finger paintings, the smiling custodians and the Band aid-dispensing secretary; I hear the first-grade teacher down the hall with the sing-song voice summoning her 6-year-olds for another round of centers. I see the seniors, sitting diligently in the corner, licking envelopes or assembling “packets.” I see the principal scolding a naughty third grader but then give her a hug and send her back to class.

The cafeteria lady comes by and confirms Jayson’s lunch order. The usual, he says. Chicken nuggets.

It’s a world of processed poultry and low clearances. It’s a land of snowsuits, mittens on strings, sweet treats and reading tricks. It’s a world, after my Mondays of observation, I don’t worry about for one minute.

There’s a lot of love at West Park Elementary. I see a school like that and I know we’re doing something right.

–Originally published in the University of Idaho Argonaut, 13 April 2007