Word: schoolroom
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...leaders had urged them to believe. You became an American by coming to a strange land and learning to speak somebody else's language. Broken English would be the only tongue that really expressed our history. No wonder, then, that education became our national fetish, for the public schoolroom was the frontier of the mind, where children of older nations learned to speak a common language...
...father, off in Spain, is never seen. His sister drops out of sight and becomes a fashion model who plays cozy with the Germans while looking for a chance to make her escape. Michel, the boy, lives with his mother and grandmother, and is subjected to playground and schoolroom humiliations because he is a Jew. His mother, trying to remain inconspicuous, changes the family name and shuttles from one apartment to another. But there is no way to avoid the pogrom except to flee the country. She sends Michel ahead, joins him later with her mother, and the three...
...permanent pair of bluejeans, a mangy checked lumber jacket, a 1950s ski hat and striped track shoes. He is the chief. His functions being primarily spontaneous, he preserves the peace by banishing drunken men to the hills behind the houses and stopping children from stampeding into the empty schoolroom or playing with the useless firehose that found its way in there along with four enormous pairs of fireman's boots. Gifts from the Great White Government. Out of the pouring rain, Pierre would bring in firewood for our stone-cold stove and water that we were too lazy...
There are recollections of adolescence: scatological pranks in a schoolroom, masturbation contests in a car, an encounter with a fat, aging woman with enormous breasts. There are asides (Titta's grandfather lost in the fog and thinking himself dead), bits of local color (practically the whole town moving out of the harbor in small boats to cheer a new ocean liner). Under all, there is a steady stream of events that do not change: a family death, a wedding...
...because the motivation and perhaps the capacity of a child depends upon the background and environment from which he come each day, a concentration of children from poor and black inner city neighborhoods is likely to provide less mutual stimulation in the schoolroom than classes made up of children from varied backgrounds...