Chapter 19 begins around Christmastime. The inmates will be away from their families, so Mark brings a cake to help cheer them up. At this point Nathaniel, Jimmy, and Patrick have all been transferred to the county jail. Their loss weighs on Mark. In the meantime, the class grows beyond Mark's ability to manage it:

Within a month, the class grew from four to fifteen members. My triage skills proved useless in the face of such overwhelming need […] Naturally, the class lost focus. I spent all my energy moving from one clique to another, trying to get them to stop talking, stop teasing each other, stop picking on Wong, stop pulling the erasers out of my pencils, stop drumming on the table (216).

Mark wants to keep Benny Wong from being picked on, but knows from experience this will only exacerbate things. Unfortunately, Mark still inadvertently ends up making things worse. As things continue to deteriorate, Mark begins to learn that the relative freedom of his classroom has its consequences:

[T]he others all agreed that the class worked because it was the one place where they knew they could express themselves without fear of being judged, and I was the one adult they could count on not to play the role of authority figure (224).