Melanie was spending so much time in Room 6 that she was starting to think of it as her own. She had to share it with a few boys, but they weren’t objecting to her little acts of propriety, and they were even taking cues from her about where and when to sit.

All of the inhabitants were supposed to sit at all times – that was one of the purposes of Room 6 – but the group wasn’t very rowdy considering their outlaw status, and Mr. Peterson was starting to leave them unsupervised for quarter hours at a time.

Four of them were regulars. They made it to Room 6 just about every schoolday. Usually there was an additional student or two. Melanie can’t recall a time when there were more than seven kids in the room. She was always the only girl.

The core four came from the same classroom. Their teacher couldn’t handle them and requested their removal. Miss McDaniels wasn’t a strong personality and was a mediocre instructor. But she had 28 other students; she had to extract the bad four or she would have had chaos in the classroom and zero educational progress.

Four bad apples in a barrel of 32, Melanie thought much later. That seemed like a high percentage of unacceptable behavior. One-eighth, she calculated: 12.5%. Sometimes statistics astounded grown Melanie: like the time she counted up the excellent teachers she’d experienced (four), and divided by the number of the profession she’d had through high school (at least 67) and obtained the dismal 5.9% that made her challenge the cultural conclusion that teachers in general were unsung heroes.

The academic year of Room 6 was 1960-61. The place was Chula Vista. The grade was sixth. The students were members of the huge cohort that would be called baby boomers, and they were pioneers in crowding. They were blazing trails without vocabulary. When they became parents there would be words like detention and autism, acronyms like ADHD and DSM IV, phrases like “disruptive behavior” and “behavior contract” and “zero tolerance policy.” But in 1960, there wasn’t much more than “not working to potential.”

The core four delinquents in Room 6 were a mixed lot. Keith was ugly and truculent, Steve was handsome and dashing in an obnoxious way, Patrick was nondescript in appearance and distracting in speech, and Melanie was contentious. She argued with teachers, staff, students, textbooks, and test questions.

Physically the four were average. Keith was chubby, and to Melanie he looked like Fred Flintstone. Steve was athletic and could have been the son of Superman and Reggie. Patrick ran like a girl and reminded her of Dobie Gillis. Melanie aspired to Katy Keene and achieved Little Dot. But they were all in the acceptable range. It was their actions that set them apart from their classmates.