Broomstick

The wretched voice of an unintelligent woman wined through a third-grade classroom in Kansas, Mo., one morning last week:

"I'll give you just 15 seconds to rell how many 4's are in 32!" It was one Mary Hickman, teacher, addressing spindle-shanked Jimmy Edwin Christman, aged nine.

"But I can't answer it, Miss Hickman."

The miserable woman's head swam. In her helplessness she brought a broomstick into the classroom, which she sat gripping in her hand like an angry witch. Quivering with impotent fury, she looked at her wrist watch.

"Very well, then!" she muttered, and smashed the boy across the shins with her weapon, three resounding whacks. "Will you answer it now?"

But the child's lips were locked. Seized with black despair in the face of ignorance that she could not dispel, and of suffering that she had caused, Teacher Hickman lapsed completely into the primitive. She lashed out with her broomstick in a shower of blows. She squatted on the floor, clenched her teeth and battered the child's shins until he toppled upon the floor, still silent about the 4's in 32.

An X-ray revealed a fracture in Jimmy Christman's left tibia. He lay abed in a plaster cast, reading the life of Napoleon Bonaparte.* His classmates were safeguarded against Teacher Hickman by her removal.

*The first Napoleon early developed great proficiency in mathematics.