I am a retired teacher, and I volunteer in an elementary school library once a week; usually, I read a picture book to the kindergarteners, and then I help them all find books. It’s chaos. I said the other day to the librarian that I love volunteering because I miss the stimulation and the interaction with the kids, but doing it once a week is enough to remind me I don’t have to do it all week any more.

And I do love it. I love the chaos. It’s my element. I belong there.

It’s easy for teachers to get sucked into only dealing with the easy children, the ones who can sit “criss-cross applesauce” and who listen intently and raise their hands and wait to ask questions. Many people become teachers because they love that kind of interaction with the good children. It’s the naive view of teaching, the “transmission” model where the teacher teaches and the students dutifully take it all in.

That view is false. And I like the students who are having a hard time being “good.”

One little boy, for instance, comes marching in, stepping out of line to return his books, because he is so happy he remembered to bring them. The teacher reprimands him and gets him back in line, but as soon as he gets his books returned he darts to the back of the rug to pick out his next books, and no matter what I say or do, he persistently has his back to the teacher and is rummaging in the shelves. He believes that library time is about getting books, and that everything else is irrelevant. He also has a fixed gaze like I do, and is in constant motion.

Another child, a little girl, spends the whole rug time crawling around on the floor and behind the shelves, ignoring any attempts to redirect her.

Others interrupt constantly, wanting to share their knowledge, ask questions, and make irrelevant comments. Others don’t talk at all.

I became a teacher because I was one of the “bad” students. I’m still a bad student. Bad, that is, in terms of behavior, not of achievement.

It’s one of the most unsettling things about having me in class.

In my senior citizen French class, for instance, I arrive and sit myself down like a perfectly ordinary older woman.

Then, for the rest of the class, I fidget, mutter, rock in place, stare, and interrupt.

I don’t do it to be annoying, honest I don’t. It’s just that if I want to focus in class, I have to be intense. It’s as if I’m operating a jackhammer that is in constant motion. The jackhammer is not a separate instrument, it’s my whole self, and it is vibrating and likely to shoot off in every direction if I don’t hold on.

Oh, I could behave in class. That’s easy. All I would have to do is sit in the back row with a book in my lap and read, or draw an elaborate illustration in my notes, of a dragon flying over a house, or a cat erupting in flowers, or just curlicues and spirals. I would look as if I was paying complete attention, and I wouldn’t learn anything.

Luckily, I already know some French, thank god. Because I learned and forgot French in high school, and because I have been studying it on my own a little each day for two or three years now, I know enough of the language to construct a recognizable sentence. I was also an English teacher, and I taught grammar, so I know what the hell the teacher is talking about when he uses the term “indirect object.” That means I am even more annoying, because most of my classmates are struggling with both those things.

Last class, when the teacher asked for volunteers to go to the board and conjugate a verb, I waited long enough to realize no one else was going to volunteer, and then raised my hand. “You might as well, you know more than everybody else,” said someone grateful I was acting as sacrifice for the rest of them.

I am not actually the top student. There is a woman in the class who speaks fluent English, though with a Russian accent, and she may be learning French in a second language, but she knows more French than I do.

It’s just that most of the rest of my classmates learned French as adults, so their pronunciation is atrocious and they step on all the little mines of grammar that can trip you up in French: elisions, pronunciations, placements of negatives and pronouns, and conjugations, not to mention the long gaps between words that happen when you’re trying to remember what comes next.

Someone after class commented on my accent. “I took French in high school,” I said.

“What did your teachers do that worked so well?” my classmate asked.

“Mostly they screamed at us,” I told her. “But we were young. I don’t really know French. I couldn’t utter a complete sentence in France when I was there.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “The young are so much better at learning.”

I was so incredibly grateful that she made allowances. I’m lucky my classmates seem to accept me for who I am, so far. I’m trying, I really am, just as the kindergarteners are trying.

Last time I volunteered in the elementary school, I started talking to a little girl who was wandering around vaguely, not responding when I asked her what she liked. She certainly looked like a behavior problem, and those are the ones that interest me.

I picked out a popular book and sat with her on the rug, and read the book to her, waiting patiently after I asked a question until she hesitantly pointed to the thing in the book that answered the question.

“She doesn’t talk,” said a little boy impatiently, because he wanted me to read to him instead. It was the little boy who always has his back to me on the rug.

“But she can listen,” I said, and continued reading with her. We can all do something. She may not talk, but she can listen. I may not be able to sit still in class, but I can conjugate a verb like a monster.

It’s the job of the teacher to find out what kids can do, not what they can’t.