Marie Knox
Marie Knox teaches fourth grade at Roosevelt Elementary, a school in Franklin Heights.
Be advised, Marie #Knox has placed Platypus Products worksheets in Google Classroom, along with a spreadsheet for tracking student performance. Three minutes of math each day after breakfast is a small price to pay for continued mastery of multiplication facts.
Marie #Knox asks her 4th graders to please check Google Classroom — she's uploaded a parts of speech worksheet. Be mindful of gerunds, which appear like verbs but function as nouns.
Marie #Knox is reminding her 4th graders to maintain neat penmanship in their journals over this indeterminate break. Flat loops, lazy connections, vertical drift — the easiest habit to break is the one that's never formed.
On her first day as a fourth-grade teacher, Marie Knox walked into room 114 and found a man.
“Excuse me,” she said, laying her bag inside the door. “Are you in the wrong place, perhaps?”
The man, in his early twenties like Marie, had been bent over her desk, peering at her computer mouse. Now he was upright but still held the mouse.
“No — I, uh … heard a noise,” he said.
She nodded to his hand. “From the mouse?”
He squinted at first, seeming to think she meant a real mouse.
Then he said, “Right, yes. I mean no. Not from the mouse.”
They looked at each other. The tails of his chunky flannel shirt had come untucked, and already — it was just now 7:00 a.m. — his broad, friendly face shone with sweat.
Marie knew exactly who this was: Ben Gillespie, the new kindergarten teacher. In preparatory meetings, her fourth-grade colleagues had mentioned Roosevelt had just two other male teachers, neither young.
She asked, “Is something wrong with my computer?”
He turned the device around in his hand. The corners of his mouth stretched and rose and fell like he was deciding between embellishments.
Finally he admitted, “It was going to be a prank. A first-day-of-school prank, you know?”
Marie carried her bag to the desk and began unpacking supplies from home—name tags, extra folders, an icebreaker game she’d made last night with animal cartoons.
“I’m familiar with pranks,” she said. “But I can’t say I know of any involving a computer mouse.”
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s super popular.”
Ben explained he’d just gotten it off his phone. You stick part of a Post-It note on the underside of the mouse (which must be wireless) and it stops working.
Marie listened patiently. “Then what?”
Ben’s eyes went wide and wacky. “I dunno, you have to call tech support? It’s funny?”
As pranks went, it wasn’t especially imaginative — and for some reason, watching Ben Gillespie’s weight shift now from foot to foot, Marie didn’t think he would go sneaking into her classroom early, on the first day of both their teaching careers, with an unimaginative prank.
Then she noticed the jello.
#knox #gillespie
Marie Knox, widely considered the strictest teacher at Roosevelt Elementary, commonly runs into parents and ex-parents at the Riverside farmers market.
“Mrs. Knox,” she heard today while browsing Clem’s, an artisanal cheese stall. “My son’s in your class.”
Marie turned with a subdued smile. It was the first week of school and she hadn’t met parents, but those close-set eyes were a dead giveaway.
“Kellen’s mother,” she said. “How do you do?”
To shake, she shifted a bag of cucumbers to her off-hand.
“It’s lucky I ran into you,” the mother said. “Kellen’s father and I are social scientists by trade, and we’ve been quite convinced by the body of research against mandatory homework.”
Marie kept her smile. “You’re at Tech then?”
“Yes, Franklin Tech. Department of Anthropology.”
Teaching in an affluent area, Marie was used to hearing statistics-based arguments on all sorts of issues.
“Galloway, Connor, and Pope, you mean?” Marie said. “2013, Stanford University?”
Kellen’s mother blinked twice.
Marie continued, “It’s sound scholarship, but I still find Cooper — 2006, Review of Educational Research — to be predominant. And I’ve seen for myself, firsthand, the confidence and competence a measured homework regime can instill in a child.”
Clem finished wrapping her Emmenthaler in plastic, then handed it over along with change from a ten.
The mother said, “We just want Kellen to have a positive fourth-grade experience.”
“Absolutely,” Marie Knox said, “and I want the same. Let’s keep the lines of communication open, yes?”
Kellen’s mother nodded. Marie noticed her canvas shopping bag was empty—she’d just arrived.
“I’d hurry if I were you,” Marie said, motioning to a stall right on the banks of the Shawnee. “The Deardorffs were almost out of Chanterelles.”
#knox #riverside
Read more: www.jeffbondbooks.com/franklin-marie-knox/
www.jeffbondbooks.com/franklin-farmers-market/