I WORE A SERIOUSLY PISSED-OFF expression when I tramped into the cafeteria for morning lineup. I intended to march the children upstairs and deliver a quick, authoritative speech to the class outside the 4-217 door, announcing new systems for entering the classroom: Go straight to your desks with all of your belongings, unpack your bag completely, because the closet will be off-limits until dismissal, wait for your group to be called before anyone uses the closet (Violation will risk a severe consequence in group points!), place your homework on your desk so I can see it, and get straight to work on this math sheet that I'm about to hand you as you enter the room. Names go immediately on the Rewards List for following directions, the Detention List for failure to do so.
But something unexpected happened first.
The 4-217 line routinely passed Wilson Tejera's fourth-grade bilingual class on the way to our room. Mr. Tejera's group began each day by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as they entered their classroom and got organized. The bombs were bursting in air as we walked by that morning. I didn't see it, but apparently, Hamisi made some kind of mocking gesture at the singing students, and Tejera was out in the hall like a shot.
Wilson Tejera was a short, bolo-tie-wearing man with bushy eyebrows and a Rollie Fingers–style curlicue mustache. He had been at P.S. 85 for seven years and seemed genial in my brief encounters with him.
At this moment, his face was a deep crimson, cheeks vibrating with rage. He bent down, putting his nose an uncomfortable fraction of an inch from Hamisi's. “Don't you ever… ever… laugh at our national anthem.”
Hamisi looked past him. He had been yelled at by teachers before and spacing out was his way to handle it. I had witnessed this when Ms. Devereaux shouted at him.
Tejera's right hand flew up and seized Hamisi by the mouth, digging hard into his cheeks. “Do you have any idea how many people died so that we can sing this song?” Wilson's eyes gleamed. Now he had Hamisi's full, terrified attention. “You have no idea what people have sacrificed.” Tejera clenched tighter. “Never do it again.” He released Hamisi's face and disappeared into his classroom.
My mouth hung open. I half expected rebellious bedlam to break out right there in the hall. It wouldn't have been unjustified. Instead, no one reacted. Hamisi stared ahead, expressionless. Forgetting the traumatic face-squeezing from a few moments earlier, 4-217 would have looked like a perfectly behaved class. At our doorway, I issued instructions for the new systems in low-voiced commands. The kids followed them.
I took Hamisi aside and asked if he was all right. He looked at me strangely, as if to suggest, “I'm fine. Are you sure it isn't you who's not all right?”
An hour later, Success for All period was in full swing. I answered a knock at the door and saw Mr. Tejera, making his first ever visit to my room. “Mr. Brown, how are you?”
“I'm fine.”
“Good. I wanted to speak to you about what happened in the hall earlier with…”
“Hamisi.”
“Right. With Hamisi.” He pursed his lips, picking his words carefully. “You saw me talk very sternly to him, but you didn't see me put my hands on him because I never did.” He paused, indicating my turn to speak.
I had no idea what to say and started stammering a non sequitur. “I think it's great that you have the kids sing in the morning. It's a really good routine…”
Tejera calmly repeated himself. “You never saw me put my hands on him because I never did. I take the national anthem very seriously. Okay?”
My mouth curled into a small, bizarre smile. I imagined us in a spicy drugstore potboiler:
The spitfire hombre gnashed his sharpened incisors, thirsty to visit further vengeance upon defamers of his sacred national oaths. Reflexively caressing his bolo, he peered deeply into the timid neophyte's shit-brown eyes, reading Brown's vulnerability. Suddenly, unexpectedly, disastrously for the intimidator, a Zen calm glazed over the younger man's countenance, signaling a clean and abrupt end to his moral earthquake. With renewed confidence and sense of self, Brown stared back at Hamisi's assailant and knew what he must do…
Mr. Tejera filled the void. “You're uncomfortable with that, aren't you?”
“Yes.”
“Go with the flow.” He knocked his fist against the doorpost for a punctuating dramatic effect and ambled away.
I reeled back to my Success for All group. If I went to the administration, I would be a rookie, a few weeks in, blowing the whistle on a veteran teacher. Tejera seemed to be on buddy terms with the higher-ups. Was this a battle worth fighting? Hamisi's mood had not even noticeably changed after the confrontation. I decided not to initiate anything about the incident, but if asked by anyone, I would tell everything.
The residual stress from the incident shortened my fuse. When Jennifer walked to the closet without permission, I blew up on her, deducted four group points, and zapped her with lunch detention. My introductory lesson for our place value unit lost some steam with my rule-enforcement digression, but I decided it was worth it. I had to build the ship before we could sail it. I felt lousy nailing Jennifer, one of the only kids who showed any appreciation toward me, but she had broken the rule, and I needed to be consistent. Disappoint-ingly, the next offender out of her seat was Destiny, who started bawling when her name appeared in the detention box.
Lunch detainees sat at a separate cafeteria table from their homeroom friends. They queued up last in the lunch line, and the daily special would inevitably be gone by the time the detention kids got their turn, leaving only reviled peanut butter and jelly.
When I delivered them to the detention table, Jennifer sniffled in shame, but Destiny had a full-body sob attack. “Please, Mr. Brown. Please, please don't make me sit at the detention table!”
“Sorry, Destiny. Now you know the punishment for getting out of your seat without permission.” I wheeled and left the room. Neither Jennifer nor Destiny broke the rules for the rest of the year.
I received a memo from Ms. Guiterrez to inform me that she would be formally observing me on Monday, with a pre-observation meeting slated for Thursday during my prep. At literacy coach Marge Foley's recommendation, I planned another graphing lesson for the big show. “Avoid confusion during observations,” Marge said. “Teach them something they already know.” I thanked Marge and sketched out my observation lesson plan that night. It was two typed pages, complete with aim, objective, task, prior knowledge tapped, Bloom's taxonomy implementations, key questions, quotes I planned to say during the lesson, several paragraphs of procedural description, and some other bells and whistles. Some parts were bold, italicized, underlined, or a few at once. I included a copy of the post-activity questions they would answer—in complete sentences, of course—and a completed model bar graph and data table of my own.
Ms. Guiterrez opened our pre-observation meeting with some casual questions. “How is my dear, sweet Evley?” He was the silent boy who arrived on the second day of school with Jennifer and moody Joseph.
“Evley's my best-behaved boy. He's very shy, but he's starting to come out of his shell more and more. His effort is good. He shows good imagination in his writing, although sometimes he gets lost in the middle of a sentence and stops making sense. I'm trying to have as many writing conferences with him as possible to get him to verbalize his ideas orally, to make sure they make sense, before he writes them down. He's a really smart kid,” I answered, hoping a thorough response would not only answer her question, but demonstrate that I was working closely with and understanding my students, something I was not sure Ms. Guiterrez acknowledged.
“My heart breaks for him. We held him over one too many times. Do you have Deloris or Lakiya?”
“Both,” I said.
“Ugh. They are terrible. And the parents are no help.”
I immediately thought of Deloris's father's outgoing voice-mail message:
Wassup girl, this is MC Onyx. Uh, if it's really that imp-o-tant, hit me with a message at the beep.
Ms. Guiterrez scanned my lesson plan. She asked questions about what would happen first, next, and after that. She pressed me to tell her what exact words I would use with the children. Many answers to her questions were in black and white on my prepared sheet, but I answered straightforwardly, and she appeared satisfied. Then we hit a stumbling block. In order to maximize the use of space on my sample graph paper, I had scaled out two blocks on the y-axis for every one kid who liked a specific fruit. “Why did you make it big like that?” Guiterrez asked, like a cross-examiner cornering a witness into incriminating himself. She pointed to the two blocks between zero and one.
“I scaled it out. Otherwise the graph would have been small…”
“One is one, Mr. Brown. Have you actually been teaching it like this?”
Silence. I was stuck for words again. Does New York City not teach scales? Maybe scales had been outmoded by some super-progressive curriculum that I hadn't heard about because I was new.
“I have been teaching it like this, using scales. Two spaces for one, four spaces for two, six spaces for three, just as long as it's consistent,” I said, each word coming out more tentatively than the last.
Guiterrez shook her head in bemusement at my evident stupidity. “One is one, Mr. Brown. It is very, very simple. One is one. Okay? Fix it and we will meet again tomorrow.”
That night, Jess came over. “I think your hair is falling out,” she said. “You're ridiculously stressed out.” She was right on both counts. If I was writing in my notebook, before long many loose hairs would lie on the page. I didn't want to go bald at twenty-two.
I cringed at the idea of having to meet with Ms. Guiterrez. When my alarm buzzed on Friday morning, I pulled the comforter over my head, and for the first time, called in sick.
On Sunday, I took Jess to the Bronx. We got wings at Mom's Fried Chicken and walked around the perimeter of P.S. 85. “It's so…depressing,” she observed, snapping a telephoto-lens shot of some kids sitting on a stoop. “It really is a modern ghetto. A racial ghetto.”
“Yeah,” I said, hoping the stoop kids didn't see the white girl in the J. Crew jacket taking their picture.
“Is there even one white kid at P.S. 85?”
“No.”
“Unbelievable how society turns their backs. It's a cycle of disempowerment.”
I nodded, but had no desire to tease out socioeconomics with her. I wanted to show her my new life, where I came every day, maybe to impress her. Now that we were here, I regretted the whole trip.
“Do you want to go to the movies?” I asked.
“Is there a theater close by?”
“No, downtown.”
“Oh,” she said, shrugging. “I'm down for whatever. This place is so hopeless-looking.” She inflected her last sentence to indicate an inclination to stick around and check out the impoverished spectacle.
“MR. BROWN! OH SNAP, IT'S MR. BROWN!” Lito Ruiz, Tayshaun Jackson, and several of their cronies emerged around the corner.
“What's up, Lito, Tayshaun?” I said, giving out three-part handshakes.
“Mr. Brown is da man,” Tayshaun told his pals.
“Why you come around here on the weekend?” Lito asked.
“Just hanging out,” I said. “I'll see you in class on Monday.”
“All right!” Lito nodded, his smile eating his face. “Have a good weekend!”
The kids went their way and Jess and I headed toward the D train. “You're a celebrity,” Jess said.
“Those kids antagonize me nonstop during the week. Lito just broke a kid's glasses and lied about it,” I uttered. “It's a novelty for them to see me on the street. They don't even like me.”
“You're wrong,” she said. “You're their hero.”
On Monday morning, I held a special class meeting. “The word is out that the behavior in 4-217 is not good. Ms. Guiterrez is coming in at 10:15 to watch you, each and every one of you, to see who's doing a good job, and who needs to be sent back to third grade. [Marge Foley assured me of the efficacy, if not truth, of this threat.] Ms. Guiterrez will be taking notes about everything, so if I were you, my behavior would be absolutely perfect, the way it should be. And I'll bet you if everyone behaves, the class will be a lot more fun.”
After my speech, Evley raised his hand and asked to speak to me in the hall. He was exceptionally shy, and this request for a private conference was the first of its kind. I stepped outside with Evley, who looked at me with worried doe eyes. His voice was quiet and high-pitched. “Mr. Brown, you know my private part?”
I nodded, terrified of what was coming next. “Yes.”
This was out of my job description. My face blushed. “Go to the nurse, now,” I said, pointing in the vague direction of her office. “Just go to the nurse.”
Evley shook his head in panicked refusal.
“Then go to the bathroom. Go, go, go!” I urged. Evley went, returning to the class soon after. He made straight for his desk without a word.
At 8:45, as I directed kids out the door to their SFA rooms, Evley approached me again.
“Everything okay, Evley?” I asked.
“When I'm sitting down it's okay, but when I stand up and walk, it stings.” His voice cracked sharply on the last word. He did not wait for a response, joining the sea of students in the corridor.
At 10:15, Ms. Guiterrez did not show up for the observation, and I had to stall. Twelve interminable minutes later, she appeared. I began the lesson precisely as my plans dictated, and often-raucous 4-217 behaved like obedient students. I forgot about Guiterrez in a few minutes because it was a pleasure to teach such attentive kids. I opened the lesson by simply asking what are graphs, how graphs are useful, and to identify and explain each part of a graph. Hands shot up. I usually got zero to three raised hands, and almost always the same bunch of kids. Now everybody wanted to participate, and what's more, they had good answers! Eddie, Lito, and Lakiya wowed me with articulate mathematical definitions of axes, variables, vertical, horizontal, columns, and rows. I thought they had been out to lunch the entire unit. The class made beautiful, if small, bar graphs, adhering to Guiterrez's “one is one” school of scales.
The lesson fired me up to teach. Something had been getting through after all, despite the chronic chatting, fighting, and block-throwing. Ms. Guiterrez left at the lesson's end, giving me a nod that I translated as a pedagogical thumbs-up.
The rest of the day passed smoothly, except for an episode on the steps where Asante yelled at Deloris, “Shut the fuck up! My father's going to come and cut you like he cut that other guy!” When I took Asante out of the room to investigate the problem and tell her she couldn't say things like that, she started bawling.
“Deloris makes me crazy. She's always bothering me and making fun of me ’cause of my clothes and cause I live in a shelter in Queens. She never stops so I want to get my father on her. Then she'll stop.”
Shelter in Queens? This explained the chronic lateness and absences. And no phone number. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Don't worry about getting your father. I'll make Deloris stop.” I sent Asante inside the classroom and pulled Deloris out, unsure what magic words or threats I could pull out to mediate this cruel conflict.
“Deloris, why —”
“She always bothering me and hitting me!”
“Do not interrupt me. Listen. If you were friends with Asante yesterday, which I know you were, why—”
“I ain't friends with her! She bad and dirty!” Deloris burst out.
“Deloris Barlow!”
“Do not use my last name please.”
“Deloris Barlow. No one says those kinds of mean things in my room. You don't have to be friends with Asante, that's fine. But you two will stay away from each other and you'll both be better off!”
Deloris laughed coldly. “What do you know, you just a first-year teacher! You don't know nothing!” She doubled over with a belly laugh. “You a scrub! You don't know nothing!”
“Go sit in Mr. Randazzo's office. Get out of my sight.”
She skipped down the hall with a smile. The class cheered when I came back into the room without Deloris, a scene reminiscent of Fausto's 9/11 ejection.
When school was dismissed, I told the secretary that I had a student who commuted to school alone from a shelter in Queens. She shook her head sadly. “What a shame. These kids move from place to place so much that they don't change schools till they settle down. Poor girl. When Mom gets her feet on the ground, she'll change schools.”
I asked if there was anyone I could notify or anything I could do to expedite Asante's transfer to a Queens school. The secretary again shook her head. “Nothing we can do from our end.”
I told Barbara Chatton about how the kids rose to the occasion for the big observation. She seemed pleased and repeated her credo: “It's never as good as you think it is and it's never as bad as you think it is.” She sprang it on me that 4-217 had been a popular topic of discussion among administrators. The word was that my teaching was good, but my management needed work. This wasn't news until Barbara told me that the next day, class 4-217 would be broken up, so that I could spend the day shadowing Janet Claxton, a veteran third-grade teacher with stellar classroom management. “Then you can motivate them into submission,” Barbara said, patting me on the shoulder.
At lineup the next morning, Mr. Randazzo leaned into my ear. “Janet Claxton's a great teacher. Probably one of the strongest in the school.”
“I know, I'm looking forward to being in there with her,” I replied.
“Good,” Randazzo said in a low voice. “Really try to get all you can out of this. I don't want to give up on you.” He slapped me on the back and walked away.
I was suddenly furious. Did I just receive encouragement or a threat? Give up on me? Since when was anyone considering giving up on me?
I had a waking nightmare image of Randazzo, Daly, Guiterrez, and Boyd lounging around the principal's office with cigars and cognac. “What about Brown?” Daly asks. “We did give him the shit class of the fourth grade.”
Guiterrez blows a smoke ring and waves her hand dismissively. “His management is poor and his bulletin board is a disgrace.”
Boyd shakes her head ruefully. “It's a shame because he had the teaching gene.”
Randazzo snuffs out his stogie on my Department of Ed file and claps his hands together. “So we give up on him?”
Ms. Claxton was a tall, dark-skinned Jamaican lady in her mid-thirties. Her six-foot stature and authoritative voice scared children. She addressed the class as “ladies and gentlemen,” and when a student misbehaved, she immediately yell-asked if that was the way a lady or gentleman should act. When the group got noisy, Ms. Claxton clapped her hands, twice slow and three times fast. One-two, one-two-three! The class repeated the rhythmic claps, and after the last one, you could hear a pin drop. I held my clipboard and marveled.
Ms. Claxton's kids followed directions and did their work, with Thankgod Mutemi the only exception. He was a frowning, angry boy who occasionally pounded his fist on his desk and wandered around the classroom. Janet told me later, “Thankgod is dangerous. Anytime I'm not with him, he instigates a fight. They tell me I'm the only one who can control him, but what good is that?” (Thankgod was expelled a month later.)
Ms. Claxton seemed like the perfect teacher for these kids: intimidating, tough, smart, consistent, and maternal. She gave me hope (and a hand-clapping silence system), although I was not sure how I could ever intimidate the students of 4-217. Scariness appeared to be a crucial ingredient in the recipe for classroom harmony.
The brutal façade took a toll on Ms. Claxton. Two years earlier, she had suffered a stress-related heart attack. She also commuted two hours each way to get to Marion Avenue, something that did not seem to make sense. Any school would be lucky to have a Ms. Claxton. Why did she schlep all the way to hellish P.S. 85?
Ms. Claxton extended a magical offer to me. “Deloris Barlow is incorrigible. I know. If I've had them, they're always my children. Anytime you want her out, just give me a call, and you can send her right up.” I thanked her profusely for everything.
The next morning I received cheers when I arrived in the cafeteria for lineup. “Mr. Brown's here! All right!”
“Yay, Mr. Brown!”
“You're not gonna let them split us up again, right?”
“It was terrible!”
“Please don't let them split up the class. We want to stay with you!”
Thanks, Tayshaun, I thought. I didn't know you cared.
Despite the flare of class spirit in the lunch room, we instantly reverted to the deluge of mini-problems upon entering room 217. Hamisi was munching on Doritos and tried to hide them in his shirt when I noticed, so I trashed the whole bag. Six kids did not have pencils. Gladys Ferraro and Verdad suddenly could not bear sitting next to each other. Sonandia's group earned a star toward the much-rumored Halloween party, but Eddie cost everyone a strike and landed himself in lunch detention by roaming over to Lito's group without permission. Deloris called Destiny a fat lesbian again and Destiny cried. The little nothings were snowballing into a monster. I could feel the room tilting out of control.
Clap-clap. CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!
The kids stared blankly. Clap-clap. CLAP-CLAP-CLAP!
I was clapping hard with a crazed, welded-on smile. Clap-clap. CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! “Now you do it!” I shouted insanely. The kids could not discern whether I was serious or had just morphed into some psychopathic drill sergeant.
Finally, Sonandia clapped. I clapped back. Then they all followed. Then I clapped. They clapped again in response.
“Everybody get up!” I called.
The kids obeyed and I performed the rhythmic clap, striking a ready-to-pounce pose à la Michael Jackson's “Thriller” video. Everyone followed suit, cautiously smiling.
I kept the lively stop-start dancing going for a while, cavorting into consistently weirder freeze-poses. In moments, Destiny forgot all about Deloris's meanness. Eddie followed directions. Gladys F. and Verdad were laughing together. In mid-gyration, I glanced at the door to see Ms. Guiterrez peering in with a “what the hell is this?” expression on her face. I didn't care. Thank you, Janet Claxton!
P.S. 85 had a computer lab on the third floor with thirty Dell laptops in a metal case on wheels. The kids had Computers fifty minutes per week for one-third of the school year. Grades four and five were assigned to the first cycle, from September to December.
The head computer teacher, Valerie Menzel, was young but proved herself a decidedly unfriendly colleague. Ms. Menzel randomly paired kids together for each computer, stridently demanding total silence as she demonstrated the multistep processes of changing font sizes and colors in Microsoft Word. If the kids talked or touched anything during her harangue, Menzel would stop and slam the kid's laptop shut like some sort of Joycean schoolmaster.
Since sustained total silence is hard for kids anywhere and was supremely impossible for 4-217, Menzel would usually end by either threatening never to have us back and reminding us how incalculably far beyond us the other classes were, or she would grumpily capitu-late and say, “Type whatever you want.” I would have been more inclined to respect Ms. Menzel's austerity if she had cogent lessons to deliver, but all my students did under her was copy sentences from the overhead projector.
I was disgusted that this was the extent of my kids’ in-school exposure to computer technology. (My classroom had no computer, although I was promised one several times throughout the year. It never showed up.) Changing font colors for three weeks? Type whatever you want? I remembered, as a fourth-grader in 1990, getting excited about geography and history by playing the interactive Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego social studies games during specially designated class time. I learned keyboarding in school with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software, which was a blast.
Now in the new millennium, baffled students were told to type whatever they wanted on a blank screen with a blinking cursor. They had enough trouble writing anything with a pencil and paper when given very specific instructions. To me, this computer class exemplified the gap between schools in more affluent neighborhoods and P.S. 85.
This chilly mid-October morning was an indiscriminate-typing period. Gladys Ferraro and Bernard, unwilling partners, had been at each other's throats since entering the lab. When Ms. Menzel called open season on Microsoft Word, Bernard snatched the laptop. Gladys F. made a clumsy lunge to swipe it away and fell out of her seat. Lakiya saw this and laughed, causing Verdad, Eddie, and Asante to start laughing too. “Shut up!” Gladys F. cried. Ms. Menzel sped over and slammed Gladys F. and Bernard's laptop shut, confiscating it. Bernard clenched his fists in a slow burn. Minutes after returning to 217, Bernard upended Hamisi's desk, prompting Hamisi to swing his right fist into Bernard's temple. I tore them apart and sent them to Mr. Randazzo's office. Lakiya shouted that Hamisi “punched like a bitch,” and five kids cackled in concurrence. I scrambled to regain control, but the sudden, vicious fight threw the class energy way offkilter. The rest of the day was a mess that no amount of rhythmic clapping could salvage.
I had a recurring daymare of being shadowed by a small fleet of robotic Ms. Guiterrez clones. I imagined coming home to find one in my kitchen, dressed in floral pajamas, dancing to her iPod and cooking something that involved three frying pans. On the futon, a Guiterrez antagonized two others by insisting on watching reruns of Growing Pains, and the latter Guiterrezes lunged for the remote control. Another Googled herself on my computer, while a towel-turbaned Guiterrez sat on the edge of my bed, reading a printout of my journal. She snapped Bubble Yum and shook her head indignantly, mystified and offended by every word.
I have not met a teacher who has not occasionally wished for a specific kid or two to be absent. Every day I strode into lineup hoping not to see Lakiya Ray. She was always there. Eric Ruiz played with my hopes by coming in late four times a week.
But on Friday, I wanted them all there. It was Picture Day.
Lito Ruiz wore his Lamar Odom jersey. Cwasey sported a yellow collared shirt, something never again repeated by the resident Kid in Sweatpants. Sonandia's hair was up in Princess Leia side-buns. Even Asante was on time. We had everybody.
I could feel a landmark moment materializing as we arranged ourselves on the auditorium stage. The photographer, apparently free of any obligation to adhere to Department of Ed guidelines for how not to interact with children, snapped at my uncooperative characters. “Hey fool! Stop being stupid and stand up straight, or I'll make you fall down!” I stood beside Deloris Barlow, and we all smiled like a big family on vacation.
After the picture, Asante handed me a note from her mother. At dismissal the day before, I had scribbled a letter to Mrs. Bell asking if she had a contactable phone number or if we could arrange a conference in person. I opened Mrs. Bell's sealed envelope and found two splotched pages covered front and back in Asante's curvy handwriting with “I will be good in school.” I sent home another note, this time fully explaining what I wanted.
Gladys F., always on time and usually cheerful, was not in the class line Monday morning. At 8:30, Ms. Guiterrez delivered her to 217. Gladys looked at the floor, and I noticed a nasty, swollen purple shiner on her left eye. “It's okay. She's fine. She fell,” Ms. Guiterrez said. “Come to my office on your prep to talk about the observation.”
She left before I could mention that I already had a meeting scheduled with Tayshaun Jackson's social worker during my prep, so I sent Sonandia up to her office with a note. She responded that we would meet after school. Every time I dealt with Ms. Guiterrez, I felt a watery sickness in my gut.
My prep was slated for 11:30, but 11:30 came and went and the scheduled teacher, Randy Croom, did not show up. At 11:37, a man on crutches entered 217, claiming he would cover my prep. My mouth opened in astonishment at who I was about to hand over 4-217 to: Wendell Jaspers!
Wendell, a sixty-year-old, snowy-haired first-year Fellow, had been my think-pair-share partner for a week of Region One training in August. In our introductory activity, he had turned to me and explained, in a geriatric Jimmy Stewart voice, “I always believed that this Teaching Fellows program was intended for people who have gone out and made their mark on the world to come into a classroom and share their experience and expertise with young people. That's why I'm surprised to see so many young people. Like you, for example. Someone like you has made no mark on the world whatsoever. It's not your fault; it's just your youth. So, I really don't know what you could bring into a classroom.” Then, under his breath, “No mark whatsoever.” Most of our week passed in frosty silence after that.
“I'm an ATR now,” Wendell said as I handed him the 4-217 chalk. ATRs were subs. “Bounced around a bit trying to find a firm placement, but now it looks like I'm staying at Eighty-five, mostly with Cathy [Catherine Fiore]. She's a piece of work.”
I told the class that Mr. J.’s word was law, and that he had consummate reign over the Rewards and Detention lists. Jaspers made a sour face and proclaimed, “Thank you, Mr. Brown, but I have no need for your lists. These children are about to learn that I'm playing a much more severe game than that.”
I had no idea what that meant. Out of curiosity concerning the severe game, I decided to risk two extra minutes of lateness with Tayshaun's social worker. Jaspers withdrew a coin from his pocket and dramatically held it out, like Moses with his staff. I held my breath as he temporarily released one of his crutches.
“This… is a penny! Every student will receive one penny and one piece of paper. You will observe the penny. Whoever writes the most observations, wins.”
“What do we win?” several kids shouted.
“For the winner, I will replace that penny with these”—Jaspers took cash out of his pocket—“two one-dollar bills.”
“OH MA GOD!”
The class erupted with wild energy. Lito, Cwasey, and Joseph jumped up and down. Lakiya started hooting. Eddie paced frantically, and a desk in group five was suddenly on the floor. “Who will volunteer to give out the papers?” Jaspers yelled over the din.
Me! Me! ME! ME! ME!
I slipped out of the room and closed the door, the fracas clearly audible in the hall. The social worker, Ms. Rincón, politely deflected my apologies for being late and asked me what I thought of Tayshaun, so I launched into a state-of-the-union speech. I offered the idea of making comic books as an avenue for getting him engaged in narratives. I mentioned his exceptional computational math skills and his (occasionally excessive) sociability with his peers. I talked about how he shuts down so entirely when upset that it takes him a half hour just to speak again. Lastly, I mentioned his tendency to deal out homophobic epithets.
The social worker nodded. She told me Tayshaun's family is very tragic, touching lightly on his institutionalized twin brother and drug-afflicted single mom, her words corroborating Ms. Slocumb's account. After we finished our lengthy speeches, Ms. Rincón gave a nod of closure. “So what happens now?” I asked.
“I'll put it all in my report. Talk to Mom, see about the comic books. That's a really good idea, but it's tough to get progress. I have a lot of other cases.”
“How many?”
“Seventy-seven.”
I headed back to 217 to find a lawless rumpus. Baskets of classroom materials were dumped across the floor in the back of the room, with Lakiya and Verdad lifting fistfuls of linker-cubes and slamming them down against the tile. Joseph and Dennis were taking turns pummeling each other in the bicep. Destiny, Tiffany, and Athena (a newly formed vocal trio, inspired and named after the teenie-pop “Cheetah Girls”) were singing in hyper-soprano. Marvin and Daniel, my two illiterate kids, had covered their desks in dark scribbling. Wendell Jaspers yelled for order, slamming a meter stick against terrified Sonandia's desk. The noise was ear-crushing.
“Mr. Brown is here! Mr. Brown is here!” Jaspers boomed in futility.
I shut off the lights. Clap-clap CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! Several kids looked up. Clap-clap CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! Half of the class returned the claps. I did it again. And again. By the seventh set of claps, we had silence.
Jaspers spoke loudly. “Mr. Brown, because of extremely unfortunate unruliness, we haven't gotten to review our observations and find out who our two-dollar winner is. Do you think we could spend a few minutes now to finish it off?”
I glared. Maybe if you had been on time, Wendell, we could have found our two-dollar winner easily within the allotted period. Maybe some of the extremely unfortunate unruliness is your fault. And not maybe, but definitely, the clock says it's lunchtime, and the last thing I want to do is allow your bungled lesson to impinge on my eating minutes.
“Sure,” I said, receiving big cheers. “Silence! Or you'll get a strike.”
Mr. Jaspers called on Maimouna, the quietest kid in the class, to read her list. She speed-mumbled for a minute, her face three inches from the paper. The resultant lag stoked the room's wildness. Jaspers didn't know what to do. When Maimouna finished, he called on several other kids, but kept no master list of observations. Confused and hounded, Mr. J. gave one dollar to Maimouna and one to Asante. Kids cried in protest as Jaspers left, and we got to lunch sixteen minutes late. The rest of the day was a loose mess.
Immediately after dismissal, Wendell approached me on the blacktop. “Mr. Brown, I really respect how you handle that class. They are a tough group. I don't know how you do it.” I appreciated Wendell's compliment, but he immediately undermined himself. “I have my doubts about some of the young women here,” he said, in confidential tones. “This really is a man's job.”
I had a mental image of Janet Claxton breaking his crutches and bludgeoning him with them. “I have to go, Wendell.”
I jogged upstairs, entered Ms. Guiterrez's office, and sat down.
“Mr. Brown, what can I say? Your lessons are very good. Your management and classroom environment are terrible.”
My teeth clenched. It had been a hell of a day already. I was first to acknowledge that I didn't have complete order like Paul Bonn or beautiful student work bedecking the walls like Catherine Fiore. But I was not terrible.
“Your kids behaved fine for the observation, but observations are not shows. What is important is how they behave every day for you, and I know it's not like that. How do you feel in your classroom? How does the room around you make you feel?”
“All right.”
Ms. Guiterrez shook her head. “If you would just walk in now and sit down at your desk, how would you feel? Would you feel good?”
I suspected a trick question. “Yes,” I said tentatively.
“I don't think so. Your room is… not lively. It has no energy. On the walls, I mean.” The August memory shot to mind of Guiterrez forcing me to turn my mom's colorful borders backside-up. “And worst of all, it is a mess.”
She had a point that I had barely any student work on display. My teacher's desk was a chaos of papers. I had not made those things priorities.
“Ms. Barrow is going to help you get these things on track. When your classroom looks good, everything works better. Nobody likes to be in a terrible classroom. I also highly recommend that you walk around and look carefully at the rooms of some of the experienced teachers. It can be very helpful to you.”
Ms. Guiterrez shared her office with Abigail Barrow, a well-dressed older lady who helped with lower-grade teacher resource support. With the mention of her name, Ms. Barrow roused herself from reading some memo and joined the conversation. I was not thrilled about this new mentorship proceeding under Guiterrez's scornful eye, but I needed help and here it was. Ms. Barrow asked what I was teaching right now.
“In math, we're doing place value. In writing, we're doing memoirs. In social studies, we're finishing map skills. We're going to start Native Americans next week.”
Ms. Barrow's and Ms. Guiterrez's eyes lit up at the mention of Native Americans. Guiterrez inquired, “What are the focus points of that new social studies unit?”
“I think mainly the Iroquois and Algonquians from the New York textbook.”
The women exchanged a knowing glance. Ms. Guiterrez asked, “You need to have all of this planned out before you begin. What are the enduring understandings?”
I hesitated. There was definitely a preconceived correct response to this. “I guess they will have an enduring understanding of the Native Americans’ lifestyle and culture,” I offered.
Wrong answer. Guiterrez asked in a deeply patronizing voice, “Mr. Brown, does it really matter if the students understand the lifestyle and culture of the Iroquois people?”
I thought it did. Wasn't that what elementary school social studies was about? I remembered making a diorama of ancient Egypt, and bringing in a kimono for my fourth-grade report on kabuki theater. We took mental field trips to the battle of Gettysburg, and stared at photographs from different vantages of the Taj Mahal. I recalled social studies at Johnson Elementary as a mishmash survey across time and continents, and I loved it.
Ms. Guiterrez threw off my concentration with her pronunciation of “Iroquois.” She said it exactly like “Iraqi.” I also was not sure if her pointed question was rhetorical, but she answered it aloud. “It doesn't matter. What matters is literacy. How is your social studies unit going to be a vehicle for improving literacy skills? Do you think it will make a difference on the Test if your students know a lot about Iroquois lives?”
Now I picked my phrases straight out of the New York State standards book. “Well, one assignment could be writing a journal entry from the point of view of a Native American child. It would be good for creating a narrative procedure and responding to literature.”
Guiterrez laughed. “Okay! See? It's not so hard!”
I wanted out of that room. I did not like at all how every conversation with Ms. Guiterrez bore a discomfiting overtone of her exerting authority over me.
“The students should not write cold,” she added. “They must do a prewriting activity on a graphic organizer.”
I knew this already. Graphic organizers, or various kinds of thought outlines, went without saying. I wanted to add that I never intended to teach my students lists of meaningless facts; of course literacy skills would be central to our social studies activities. The moment had passed.
“Okay, I have some business to take care of,” she said, grabbing some papers and striding purposefully out of the office, handing me a typed two-page evaluation for the formal observation. I got a satisfactory rating with the criticism, “There is no evidence of developmental lessons…. Their [sic] should be evidence of a print-rich classroom.” As for missing the developmental lessons, I can only assume that Guiterrez figured that the kids were bar graph experts on observation day by blind luck or osmosis. And I couldn't help imagining inviting her to sit in on my upcoming “their-there-they're” lesson with the fourth-graders.
So began my short-lived but fruitful collaboration with Ms.Abigail Barrow. She talked to me as if I did not know thing one about anything regarding school, children, or human interaction, but she supplied some useful materials, including a thick batch of supplemental readings, questions, and activities about Native Americans.
She also ran 4-217’s closing map skills lesson by writing questions on big chart-paper sheets and posting them at five stations around the room. The kids got excited to work in teams and rotate to the stations. I kept Ms. Barrow's questions on the walls for months, scoring compliments from Mrs. Boyd for fostering a more print-rich classroom.
The Ms. Barrow meetings petered out because we both recognized that while the help with lessons was useful, it was really in behavior management where 4-217 had trouble. As a soft-spoken older lady who had been out of the classroom for years, she could not help me there. It looked bad for her when my kids acted up while she conducted the class.
Ms. Barrow left me an invaluable set of desk-size laminated maps with the United States on one side and the world on the other. The kids loved them, especially since each student got his own, and they provided endless material for geography lessons, games, and fast-fix time-fillers. Cat Samuels borrowed them often.
“They are lost in the woods,” my new self-talking self explained to the bathroom mirror. “You have a map. You can teach them. You are Mr. Brown.” I frowned at the lopsided Windsor knot of my tie and pulled it loose to redo it.
In reality, my confidence in my lessons was improving, but my attempts to control Lakiya, Deloris, Eric, Lito, Tayshaun, Cwasey, and Eddie went nowhere. I could not get all seven of them to be quiet at the same time. If they somehow were, Bernard would be squabbling with Verdad, or Destiny would be upset about something her best friend Tiffany had said to her. Occasionally, Athena or Gladys Ferraro called out disruptive things, which killed me, because I counted on them to be my stars. My sentences in class alternated: one about the lesson, one about discipline, one to answer a question, one to mediate a conflict. Getting into a rhythm was impossible.
Meanwhile, Daniel and Marvin stagnated in the back of the room. One time, Dr. Kirkpatrick picked Daniel up and returned him a half hour later. She told me that back in Detroit, Daniel was in intensive one-on-one special ed, and he should never have been placed in a regular class. She also asked me if I had noticed his stuttering problem and the long gaps of time he took before responding to a question. I told her of course I had. She explained that his speech problems were a blessing in disguise, because they could be the tipping point to push through a recommendation to transfer him to a specialized school. I filled out several forms with my analysis and anecdotal records about him.
Two months later, Daniel Vasquez left P.S. 85 to begin to get the help he needed.
Marvin Winslow was proving himself to be a dangerous boy. He stole Tiffany Sanchez's purple pencil sharpener, and when she asked for it back, he cold-cocked her in the cheek. I was reading with Dennis and Joseph and didn't see it. Sonandia tapped me on the shoulder and plainly said, “Tiffany is crying ’cause Marvin hit her.”
I spun to see Marvin darkly scowling at the sobbing girl. I flew into a rage.
“How dare you ever hit a girl! That is the weakest, most cowardly thing anyone could do! How dare you bring that into our classroom!”
I told Sonandia to take Tiffany to the nurse for ice. When they left, I continued my verbal lambasting, telling Marvin he was on lunch detention for a week, and if the class earned that Halloween party, he had certainly just thrown his invitation in the gutter.
“I don't care. I don't care,” Marvin muttered. “I don't care.”
He did care, because when the class lined up for lunch he remained in his seat, catatonic. The line got restless, and Tayshaun and Bernard started pushing each other. With the whole class's impatient urging, Marvin finally joined the line. Upon entering the cafeteria, he separated from the group and pressed his face into the wall, crying, “I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad.”
“What you did to Tiffany was very bad, but you are not a bad person. Look at me. Marvin, look at me! If you accept your punishment for breaking the rules, you'll have a clean slate. I'll even think about letting you come to the Halloween party. But no hitting in school and no hitting girls ever. This is very fair.” I patted him on the shoulder and walked away.
As I left him, he punched the wall and cried, “I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad…”
I walked to the fifth-grade side of the cafeteria to sit with my summer school coauthor Jimmarie. She didn't have many friends in Mr. Krieg's class and preferred to eat alone by the window. I often sat with her for a few minutes; sometimes we talked, sometimes not. We appreciated each other's company, briefly allowing ourselves to forget the people with whom we spent a majority of our day.
That night, I called Marvin's and Tiffany's mothers to tell them about the punch. Both thanked me for the explanation and that was it.
The next morning, Marvin came to school chipper as ever. We did math in the morning, the only subject where he had a fighting chance of holding his own with the class. He understood the rules of place value, but if you gave him a worksheet, he would be lost. He needed every problem started for him. His effort that morning was outstanding and when he told me that the 6 in 12,685 is actually worth 600, I was thunderstruck with pride.
Yesterday, I had promised him a week of lunch detentions, but that felt like a remote world ago. I decided not to enforce the sentence and no one seemed the wiser. Also, a teacher tipped me off to the rumor that for punishment, Mrs. Winslow locked her children in the refrigerator. How could you stay mad at Marvin Winslow?
Meanwhile, trouble was brewing with Verdad Navarez. He had been absent the day before, and now he was silent all day, seething, almost hyperventilating in the back of the room, staring at his desk surface. I took him out in the hall and asked what was bothering him. Verdad coldly mumbled, “Tomorrow I'm-a bring a gun to school and kill Eddie. I swear to God, I'm-a snuff him.”
Wait a minute.Verdad and Eddie were buddies. My skin pebbled with fear. I called the principal. Mrs. Boyd asked for Verdad's mother's phone number, but I knew their line was disconnected. Fortunately, Verdad's mom, Yvette Lara, was in the parking lot to pick him up at dismissal. She said she would talk to Verdad, and we arranged to meet in room 217 after school the next day.
The next afternoon, Ms. Lara and I sat down at group two while Verdad waited in the hall. She was probably my age. Biting her lip, she spoke in a straight voice. “You don't have to worry about Verdad bringing a gun to school. That's not him. He would never do that. He gets very angry sometimes. He's been very different since last spring when we think he found out… about his father. His real daddy died when he was a baby. My husband is his stepfather, but we never told him. He does have two brothers and a father with different last names than him.”
“Have you talked to him about it after you think he figured it out?”
“No. We should. He's got it tough. Please don't take it out on him, Mr. Brown.”
“No, of course not. I know Verdad is a great kid. Everyone likes him. And he's the number one mathematician in the class.” Ms. Lara cracked a shining, proud mother's smile. I showed her Verdad's flawless Birthday Bar Graph. “But he needs to bring a bag to school. And he needs to do his homework, especially in writing.” I showed her the class homework log. Verdad had completed his assignments decently in September, but in October he altogether stopped.
Her face fell. “He lost his bag. I don't know how he lost it, but it's gone.” I started to say something, but she continued, “I kept Verdad home the other day because he didn't have any clean clothes to wear. I don't know if I can get him a new bag. I need to get coats for three kids. They turned off my phone, which you know about…” She fell silent.
I didn't know what the hell to say. An idea flashed to give her the cash in my wallet, but all I had was six bucks, and that was the wrong move anyway. I called Verdad into the room. “Verdad, good news. You have a wonderful mom who loves you very much. She and I are going to work together to make sure the rest of the year is going to be better for you than it's been this month. You're a really smart boy, and I'm glad that you're in my class. Can we work together?” I extended my hand and he shook it. His face brightened, and I realized I had never before seen him smile. I think worlds were colliding for him to see his mom and teacher together.
Ms. Lara thanked me for meeting with her and she and Verdad went home happy. I felt good but a little strange. Nothing had changed in their desperate financial situation, but everything seemed sunnier from that day forward. Verdad did his work conscientiously and started bringing a bag to school. His demeanor was cheerful and his writing showed improvement. He was a changed boy for the rest of the year. That is, until his family moved suddenly over Christmas break and I never saw or heard about him again.
Halloween approached. I shut off the lights during Success for All and read from a Mom-supplied Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book, complete with sufficiently creepy charcoal illustrations. I had more leeway for antics with my SFA group, since they were a manageable bunch of half the size and one-tenth the volatility of 4-217. With a whoosh and a leap out of my reading seat at each story's terrible revelation, I drew delighted screams from Kelsie Williams, a polite girl from Ms. Mulvehill's homeroom, and the others. Switching the lights back on brought a chorus of disappointed moans as we beamed back to P.S. 85.
First-year Fellow Trisha Pierson brought in twenty-six pumpkins, one for each of her little first-graders to carve. She said it was the cutest thing she'd ever seen, and the children treated their personal pumpkins like gold. I imagined Lakiya Ray chucking Destiny's hypothetical pumpkin out the window, cackling as it splattered on the asphalt.
Several days before Halloween, I announced that our “Team Effort” board indicated the requisite number of stars over strikes. “Congratulations, we're going to have our first class party on Halloween, this Friday.” Unanimous cheers. “But I am now creating a list called the ‘Not Invited to Party’ list. If your name gets on there with two strikes next to it, we will be partying without you!”
The class had in fact not earned a party. My hope, though, was that through some good Halloween cheer and a fun 4-217 party, we could take a step forward as the originally hoped-for “team.”
The “Not Invited to Party” list was an effective misbehavior deterrent. Lakiya still did not do her work, but she was quiet all day. Daniel, who obsessed over being on the “Good List,” sat with folded hands, which influenced Marvin.
Wild card Eric, however, could not resist pushing Joseph down the steps (a favorite pastime), and Tayshaun slapped Athena in the face, landing the offending pair on the unfortunate list. Tayshaun slammed his fist on his desk and buried his face when he got the final strike. Eric looked totally unmoved.
I could not figure out Eric Ruiz. I was unconvinced his expression would change if I slid bamboo shoots under his fingernails or handed him a suitcase full of cash. Every year his teachers recommended that he be held back, but somehow he always got promoted.
I was sixty-one dollars lighter after arranging a junk food super-buffet, complete with precious Domino's pizza, which greeted the 217 kids when they returned from lunch on Friday. Lined up outside the room, Athena and Cwasey literally jumped for joy. I sent Lakiya to escort Eric and Tayshaun to Mr. Randazzo's office. (Lakiya displayed mirthful diligence in accompanying her peers to meet their disciplinary consequences.)
I had cleared the idea of stashing Eric and Tayshaun in his office with Mr. Randazzo the day before but now his door was locked and he was nowhere to be found. Ms. Devereaux could not be tracked down either, and all of the other rooms were having their own parties. I had ranted all week about excluding disrespectful kids from the party; now my threats proved empty.
I tried to spin my allowing Tayshaun and Eric's presence as a beau geste for better teamwork and class spirit for the coming months. The kids were dead silent during my awkward speech, their eyes fixed on the pizza and sweets.
For the next twenty minutes, everything was aces. I played Rubber Soul on Al Conway's borrowed boom box while the kids scarfed the candy and cupcakes with shocking alacrity. Marvin and Daniel found they could mix in happily when everyone was guzzling generic-brand orange soda. Hamisi said it was the best party of his life. Dennis nodded in vigorous agreement. When Lito and Joseph saw Dennis do that, they jumped in to affirm the motion.
Thank you, Mr. Brown, thank you, Mr. Brown. The party was a hit, and now I could use it as a tangible, long-term class goal. Nobody has a great first two months, I thought. But now I'm on track. We're all in this together. I can lead this team of struggling, beautiful kids.
Then the house of cards toppled. Tayshaun, on party probation, reasoned that it was a good idea to take the ice cubes out of his drink, sneak behind Julissa, and jam one in her eye. This happened while I was running a trivia game with some girls to determine who would take home the Domino's leaflet coupons, and by the time I was across the room, Julissa was clutching her face and crying. Lakiya poured her soda on the floor and pushed Verdad over it, causing him to slip. Mr. Randazzo came on the loudspeaker (there he was!) and announced that we were now having a “rapid dismissal,” and everyone needed to go directly home to minimize the risk of being hit by flying eggs. The announcement sent the class into a tizzy, scrambling for their coats and belongings. The floor turned into an instant morass of syrupy puddles of wet dirt.
I yelled my head off, but the scene had disintegrated into a wild derby of whirling dervishes. My previous reverie disintegrated like dead roses, and a sober thought passed through my brain: I have been kidding myself. They were right about me. I have no management, no control. I am a failure. My kids are crying and injured and dirty and screaming, and I can't stop it. I looked up and saw Principal Boyd in the doorway, deep disgust on her face.