I SHOWERED LAKIYA RAY WITH PRAISE and Juicy Fruit gum for her docile new attitude. Before lunch on Monday, February 2, she handed me an ancient ziplock bag containing her thick dog-eared stack of prized Yu-Gi-Oh cards and asked me to hang on to them for safekeeping.
While finishing lunch with Karen in my otherwise empty classroom, I opened my bottom desk drawer to discover the cards were gone. My stomach dropped. Scouring the area, I broke into a sweat. I replayed our transaction over and over. Room 217 had been empty during the ten minutes when I shepherded the class to the cafeteria and stepped out to buy my lunch. No one that I knew of came in the room at odd times. The cards should be in the bottom drawer. After Deloris got the boot in December, though, thefts in the classroom had gone from constant to zero. I felt nauseous thinking about having to tell Lakiya what had happened, especially since we were finally making headway together.
When I picked up the class, I gushed apologies to Lakiya and offered to buy her a new deck. She shrugged and said, “Nah, that's okay. Forget it.” I detected no passive aggression in her. She immediately turned back to her conversation with Epiphany, as if my news was holding her up from important business. For five months I had been Lakiya Ray's teacher, and at that moment I understood her less than a stranger.
* * *
The Test is a three-day extravaganza. Part One is all multiple-choice questions regarding basic reading comprehension skills. It is graded by machines (I envisioned Terminator robots) and carries the most weight of all three sections. Part Two involves students listening to and taking notes about a long passage that is read to them in a monotone by their proctor. The students use their notes to answer essay questions. Part Three is all essay responses to passages in their Test booklets.
Before the Test commenced, I gave a brief speech about how I was confident and proud of them. Relax and do your best. I believe in you. I relinquished control to my coproctor, “Big” Mrs. Little, a tutor and twenty-year teaching veteran. Mrs. Little read instructions in the recommended monotone and sharply warned them not to begin an instant before the second hand hit the twelve. I could see Destiny Rivera's pencil shaking.
An hour later, we were claw-dancing the disappointment away. The Test seemed harder than any of the simulations or practice materials we had used. At our 11:30 common prep meeting, the fourth-grade teachers shared arched eyebrows that evinced knowledge of impending disaster. At least I was not alone in thinking that my students had just gotten hammered. Marnie Beck said, “Special ed kids should not be put through this.” I agreed, unsure any nine-year-olds should.
I thought the massive cram that led up to this abrupt pressure release on the days of the Test was like jamming ice cubes into a fever patient's mouth in hopes that by quickly checking the temperature, the reading would come out a normal, acceptable ninety-eight point six. The thermometer is not corrupt, but the hospital staff is. If P.S. 85 had more family outreach and year-round, small-group support services for kids struggling with literacy fundamentals, I believed the Test scores would be higher because the kids would be better readers, not savvier multiple-choice guessers.
In terms of support services beyond my instruction of 4-217, only six of my students were pulled out for fifty minutes daily in September through January. All of that time was dedicated to studying Test-taking strategies. Eddie (who had been held back three times), Lito, and Lakiya received nothing. Keeping with the hospital analogy, this was akin to basing a sick patient's progress on periodic blood tests without substantive treatment between assessments. The hospital can claim without lying that it has the most expensive, state-of-the-art instruments for measuring one's health. However, the appropriation of enormous focus on diagnosis or assessment, not treatment, is disastrous for the voiceless, unwitting patients. Using standardized testing as the sole barometer of students’ and schools’ achievement is a deeply misguided practice. The sick system cannot get healthy through this means alone.
During Part Three on Thursday, I stood near Eric Ruiz, watching him leave his entire Test booklet blank. He was supposed to write a letter to the principal requesting permission to start a ham radio club, drawing ideas equally from a supplied article about ham radios and his own creativity. Several times I covertly kicked his desk, but he did not pick up my message of “Take the Test.” I felt deflated, knowing there was virtually nothing I could now do to move Eric up to fifth grade. He signed his holdover slip that day.
It did not take long after the final booklet was collected for the relative tranquility of Testmania to explode. Midway through our first math activity back on the normal schedule, Epiphany approached me on the verge of tears. “Mr. Brown… Cwasey just…” She started whimpering.
I gave her a tissue and put my hand on her shoulder, unsure what else to do. “It's okay,” I said. “What happened?”
“Cwasey said, ‘Bend over and make me money.’”
My mouth fell open as my mind raced to decipher this unfathomably lurid command. Cwasey looked up, infuriated. “She lie!”
“No I don't!” Epiphany wailed.
“Cwasey! Shut your mouth and get out of our classroom! Stand right here in the hall!” I threw the door open.
Cwasey shoved his chair in disgust as he stood up and walked toward the hall. As he passed Epiphany's group, he loudly proclaimed, “Your mother's a liar.”
Epiphany broke out in tears. She bolted from the room, her face in her hands. Mr. Randazzo was not around, so I couldn't toss Cwasey in his office. Instead of letting Epiphany and Cwasey be out in the hall together, I grabbed Cwasey and yanked him back in the room.
Lakiya whooped, mimicking, “Your mother's a liar!” When Marvin and Joseph saw Lakiya laughing, they cracked up too. The Pandora's box of “your mother” insults was blown open.
At lunch I told Mr. Daly what Cwasey had said and asked for advice on how to handle it. “He's probably repeating something he heard,” Daly surmised. “I'll make him say he's sorry. We'll leave the parents out of this one.”
At that moment, I spotted Bernard hyperventilating at the table, wearing his I'm-about-to-have-a-rage-attack face. I sat down next to him. “Bernard, what's up?”
Instead of answering, Bernard lunged across the table at Tayshaun. I pulled him back. “He talkin’ about my mother!” Bernard screamed.
“No I didn't! Stop lying!” Tayshaun retorted, now walking around the table, toward us. He waved a taunting hand in Bernard's face.
Bernard snapped. I had him in my arms, but he struggled and writhed against me, reaching again and again to punch Tayshaun. Mr. Daly was now at the far end of the room breaking up another fight. “Bernard! He doesn't know your mother! What he says means nothing! You still have a choice to do the right thing and calm down. Take a deep breath!”
Bernard continued pushing against me, but my grip was firm. Finally, he got tired. I sent Tayshaun to fifth-grade lunch detention in the other cafeteria. I gave Bernard to Mr. Daly with instructions to deliver the fuming kid to Ms. Devereaux's room for the afternoon. After the progress he had been making in controlling his temper, I couldn't let this outburst go unpunished.
The air went out of me when Bernard returned to 217 a few minutes before dismissal, grinning and wearing his forbidden-in-school Yankees hat. “I had mad fun!” he gushed. “I went on the Internet with Mr. Daly and played games!”
That night I racked my brain for a new game plan. I had no choice but to go it alone with discipline. The administration could not be relied upon, and the other fourth-grade teachers were swamped. I had already withheld parties, candy rewards, points, and stickers from the problem causers. I called homes over and over again. They still did not behave for prep teachers or guests. I had sent kids to Mr. Randazzo, Mr. Daly, Ms. Devereaux, and Ms. Guiterrez. (Catherine Fiore had even sent me a misbehaving kid on that icy January day.) Nothing worked for the long term. It was like putting Band-Aids on a sucking chest wound. I called Karen.
After venting, I felt a little less crazy and decided to break up the mandated group-seating scheme. Early on the morning of February 6, I rearranged the desks to make individual rows. Maybe if the kids weren't bunched in so tightly, they would stop picking on each other's mothers.
In the hall, before sending the students inside to find their new desk location, I announced, “Anyone who makes a comment about someone else's family is talking about something they know nothing about. That is wimpy and cowardly. Anyone who talks about someone else's family is automatically on lunch detention, banned from the Rewards List, and has lost my respect, probably forever! This is the end of it!”
Twenty minutes later, Lakiya said to Marvin, “Fuck your fat mother!” Everybody heard. Marvin, despite his significant disadvantage in size, flew at Lakiya with his head down and fists flying. I tore them apart, banishing each to opposite corners of the room. When the dust cleared from the sudden fisticuffs, I noticed something very strange. Tiffany had left her desk and was standing still at the front of the room, right in my usual spot for blackboard-writing. She stared at the floor, no clear expression on her face.
Tiffany was the class space cadet, but she was smart. She was quiet and did well on her practice Tests, so I gave her leeway, particularly in her using our spare bookcase as her personal storage space. Her voice was extremely high-pitched, and she often snuck toys in her desk. She doodled more often than she did her work, but usually had the right answer when I spontaneously called on her. Also, she loved my stuffed blue “Mr. Lizard” more than anybody else, and jumped for joy when I occasionally brought him out of his home in the top closet shelf.
“Tiffany, go back to your seat.” She made no acknowledgment of hearing me, so I repeated myself. Nothing. “Tiffany, are you okay?” She looked catatonic. Some kids started snickering, and I immediately shushed them. Tiffany's hands stayed at her sides, completely still. “Do you want to go to the library with Destiny?” No response. Was this a trance? “Tiffany, you have to get back in your…”
“DON'T TOUCH ME!” Tiffany shrieked, yanking herself away the moment I touched her forearm.
“Tiffany. You must answer me. Who do you want to talk to? If you tell me what you want to do, I can help you.” She resumed her original standing position and said nothing. She seemed to be having a psychological meltdown, and I had no idea why.
I called Mr. Randazzo and Ms. Guiterrez, but neither answered the phone. I rang Ms. Devereaux, who showed up in a huff. “What's this, she doesn't wanna sit down?” Devereaux observed, reaching for Tiffany's arm.
“NO!” Tiffany responded with another piercing screech.
“You have to move! This is your last chance!” Ms. Devereaux shouted in her stentorian I-am-serious voice. Still nothing. “I'm getting security.” She left and reappeared a minute later with campus patrolman Mr. Joe.
“Are we taking her out?” Mr. Joe asked.
“I don't know. She won't move or talk,” I said.
“Let's take her,” Mr. Joe decided. He and Ms. Devereaux grabbed Tiffany, who went limp and redoubled her wild screams as the two adults dragged her across the dusty tile and out the door, slamming it shut behind them. In 217, we could hear Tiffany's wrenching cries fading farther and farther away before cutting off altogether. How was I going to teach after that?
Sick to my stomach, I sat down in Tiffany's chair. None of the kids seemed fazed by the episode we had all just witnessed. I remember when I was in fifth grade and Ilene Lambert's knee locked up during our class trip to the Philadelphia Zoo. She cried hysterically in front of all of us, and the rest of the day was creepy and sad. Everyone seemed to feel guilty enjoying themselves if Ilene was laid up in the bus with a chaperone.
I visited Tiffany in the office during my prep. Guzzling a cup of Sprite, she showed no indication of having thrown an apoplectic fit a few hours earlier. I felt like I was walking on eggshells, telling her we were looking forward to having her back in 4-217. I never found out the exact cause of her meltdown, but later in the day, Stacy Shan-line, Tiffany's third-grade teacher, told me that Tiffany had had the same kind of episode last year at approximately this time on the calendar.
Just before dismissal, I noticed Seresa sniffling as I called students over to the closet to get their coats. I brought her out in the hall, where she started sobbing hard. “I'm not used to this, Mr. Brown… in Antigua, we don't treat the teachers like this. They're so mean to you.” She blew her nose.
“I'm okay,” I said. “That stuff doesn't bother me.”
“But Lakiya was saying you're a bad teacher. She said you don't know how to make the kids act right.”
“What Lakiya says means nothing. She's not in charge of your year in fourth grade. You're considerate to think of me, and it shows that you're a good and generous person, and I appreciate that. What I care about is that I've got students like you and Jennifer and Sonandia and Evley and some of the others. I don't let kids who act mean bug me. You don't have to worry about me, I'm all right. All that yelling is acting anyway. How are you doing?”
Seresa shrugged. “You're still good friends with Jennifer, right?” I asked. Now she started tearing up again.
“I don't know. Sometimes she follows Lakiya, and she says things to me like ‘Why don't you have a man?’ and they laugh at me.”
“Jennifer asks you why you don't have a man?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, that's ludicrous.”
“Ludicrous?” she asked.
“Ludicrous. It means ridiculous. Silly. Absolutely crazy.”
“Ludicrous,” Seresa repeated.
“Exactly. Completely ludicrous for Jennifer to say that. She knows you're her real friend. I'll talk to her. You're in fourth grade. None of you have, or should have, a boyfriend. Okay? You're a wonderful girl, and I'm very happy that you're in my class.”
“Okay. Thank you, Mr. Brown.”
Our conversation ended when I saw Bernard and Hamisi near the closet, punching each other in the face. My instinct was to rush in and wrench them apart, but I checked myself, remembering that Bernard's flailing at Tayshaun in the lunchroom had increased when I restrained him. In a kind of surprise at my nonintervention, the two fighters stopped hitting and went their separate ways. In the line two minutes later, they were chatting about Grand Theft Auto: Vice City like old pals.
I know that many children reach out for attention and love in strange ways, but after that day, I was thoroughly baffled as to what goes through some of their heads.
Seth Owings, an old college friend of Greg's, came to our apartment on Sunday to watch basketball and shoot the breeze. He was in his second year of teaching freshman English at Central High School in Newark with Teach for America. With each Pabst Blue Ribbon we drank, I became more entranced by his stories.
“My principal doesn't know how to talk to people,” he said. “He's always on some weird power trip and is totally out of touch with how it is to try to teach these kids day in and day out. The administration is always having meetings and sending out things about standards and bulletin boards and that kind of crap: basically everything that's cosmetic. But we have no solid curriculum. I just have a vague construct in my head of what we're kind of supposed to teach. It's nice in a way, because no one will ever call me out on giving any kind of unorthodox assignment, but it doesn't matter because almost none of them can write a real paragraph anyway.
“Your expectations go so low that you start praising the shit out of your kids who can just get through something, not ’cause they're really producing anything of any quality. The math teachers have it a little easier, because just by nature math is a little more black and white. You either get it or you don't, and the kids like that. But a lot of them just throw dice in the hall and eat the free lunch.” This reminded me of my week of seventh-grade summer school at M.S. 399, when one of the seemingly brightest boys in the class told me candidly, “Seventh grade was out in the hall, man.”
Seth went on about gang colors and receiving writing assignments from Crips with gang-mark slashes on every “c” and cross-outs through every “b” or “p,” since the latter is an upside-down version of the former. The writer would not want anyone looking at the paper—from any angle—to mistake him for exhibiting sympathy for the letter “b,” representing his rival gang, the Bloods.
Seth's stories were a little comforting in that I wasn't alone in my desperation, but his comment about lowering expectations made me worry. I absolutely had lowered my expectations from the first day of school when I delivered my “We Are a Team” speech. Now my priority seemed to be eking through the day without anyone bleeding. I didn't even think about great expectations anymore.
Was Sonandia really an exceptional student, or had I attributed so many wonderful qualities to her because I needed something to hold on to? Would other teachers in other schools share my enthusiasm about her? My Sunday-night sleeplessness was worse than usual.
On Monday, February 9, I turned twenty-three. In celebration, I received a new student, Christian Salerno. I also got a note from Ms. Guiterrez about collecting my planbook tomorrow morning, and my name appeared at the top of the list of classes Mrs. Boyd's team would inspect on Friday's upcoming Learning Walk. All interior and exterior bulletin boards needed to be changed for the benefit of Friday's visitors. I received eight handmade birthday cards from my kids, most of them including drawings of flowers and lists of school subjects. Then I taught all day and went to Professional Development.
Mrs. Boyd adjourned our monthly whole-school faculty meeting in the auditorium with the hollow encouragement, “Failure is not an option.” Filing out in the aisle, Ethel May Brick, P.S. 85’s longest-tenured teacher, tapped me on the shoulder. “I heard it's your birthday. Happy birthday!” Her voice always quivered in a jolly grandma kind of way.
“Thank you,” I said.
“It's so nice, just so nice, that young and intelligent people like you come to work at a school like this.” Her face saddened. “It's a shame you can't stay.”
“Why can't I stay?”
“Oh come on, Dan. This school is a hell. And right now it's the worst it's ever been. This neighborhood is collapsing. I know the area looks bad, but it's really much worse than it seems. You wouldn't believe how drug-infested it is. Do you know the projects next to the firehouse?”
I knew that building well. In front of it was where the September shooting happened and where guidance counselor Mr. Schwesig gashed his head by walking into a Dumpster. “There was a bust there last year, and the police found more drugs moving in and out of that building than any other building in New York City. We didn't know till the bust.”
Ms. Brick clearly wanted to chat, and I had one burning question about the children of P.S. 85. “What do you think about the full-moon phenomenon?” I asked.
She answered without hesitation, “Full moons make people crazy. Before I started working here in 1965, I thought it was a silly superstition. But every month of every year, the tension builds on the full moon. It's especially bad when it's waxing like last Thursday and Friday. Now it's waning. When it's waxing there are more fights, more noise, more aggression. I mark the full moons on my calendar with red circles.”
The authority in her tone took me aback. “My class was terrible last Thursday and Friday,” I said.
“The whole school was in shambles,” she replied. “Really, ask any emergency room nurse about full moons. But it's especially bad right now because of Valentine's Day coming up. We're in the winter doldrums, and that's bad. And the fourth-graders are coming off the big ELA Test and that's really bad. But Valentine's Day is always horrible here. Remember that most of these kids are being raised by single women who have been left by men.Valentine's Day has a lot of anger here, and you can feel it. The only worse time of year is Mother's Day. Then everyone's mad at the mothers.”
She did not explain the last part.
I met wild resistance when returning to regular lessons after the rigidly structured cram sessions for the Test. The class was becoming more and more academically polarized and the addition of Christian Salerno was no help. I seated him in well-behaved group two, and his nudnik ways quickly awakened the sleeping beast of Gladys Ferraro's mouth.
Gladys was my Student of the Month in October, but the award had had the opposite of my hoped-for effect. She griped loudly and constantly about her peers “bothering her,” but she was given to touching other people's belongings, putting her on a collision course with everybody.
Christian and Gladys F. were instantly at each other's throats. I banished Christian to group six, where, before I realized it, he fell under Lakiya's back-of-the-room influence.
Pat Cartwright was absent on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Her class was deemed too rowdy for a sub, so they were split up every day under the direction of Mrs. Hafner. I was sure Hafner still hated me, evidenced by her nonresponses to my “Good mornings,” as well as her red-cheeked clam-up in the Teacher Center when I walked in on her emphatically extolling Abba's Mamma Mia. She sent me Sayquan (Dequan's brother) and Asonai, two renowned nightmare children. To temper the blow, I also got Kimberly and Mary, two “contained” students.
Asonai and Lakiya had fistfought at lunch the previous week, and their enmity was still in full force. The two slung insults across the room all day. Sayquan asked to go to the bathroom early in the day, and I let him. He returned a half hour later and got upset when I refused his next dozen requests to leave the classroom.
As I walked around during the independent problem-solving part of our adding-fractions-with-unlike-denominators lesson, a flurry of thoughts rushed through me:
1. Destiny is adding the denominators, the same mistake that she made yesterday, even though I conferenced with her for a long time. I'll quietly point it out to her now while I'm circulating, then make sure she's getting it when we do the whole-class review.
2. I should check on Marvin Winslow. Is he calm? No! Pat him on the shoulder. Okay, his head is down.
3. Why is Athena's head down? She loves math. Wait, she's crying! Did something serious just happen? I should talk to her in the doorway.
4. Three kids are holding up their pencils for sharpening. They'll have to wait.
5. How long should I wait to call the class back to order? Three, six minutes? I have twenty-two minutes until my prep. A fifteen-minute review is probably sufficient, but I don't want a lag before or after the review. I'll give them five more minutes.
6. Where's Eddie? He went to the bathroom fifteen minutes ago.
7. Cwasey and Dennis are talking. Have to stop that.
8. Lakiya's not doing her work, but now Jennifer's following her! Need to talk to Jennifer privately about it later.
9. Here's Ms. Devereaux collecting donations for Ms. O'Reardon, whose house was robbed. Five dollars feels sufficient.
10. Damn, I forgot to fill in the backup attendance sheet again. Can't do it now, must remember at lunchtime.
11. Asonai is looking around the room ominously. Give her more drawing paper.
12. My mouth is dry beyond belief.
During my Thursday prep, I mounted my new exterior bulletin board and brought Sonandia and Gladys V. in the hall with me for moral support. They performed cheers and an original song called “Go! Go, Mr. Brown!” I cracked up and became immediately aware that I had not laughed in school in months. P.S. 85 and laughter felt like two familiar but cordoned realms where an intersection was a marvelous and novel occurrence, like swimming and nighttime.
On Friday morning, the Learning Walk paid 4-217 a visit in mid-lesson. Mrs. Boyd and her four helpers inspected my walls for “Clear Expectations,” as I sweated through a discussion about Lincoln's quote, “A house divided cannot stand.” In fifteen minutes they were gone, and my breath came easier.
At dismissal, gateway to the nine-day midwinter break, Marvin Winslow made a comment about Lito Ruiz's dead mother. Lito slugged Marvin, and wailing Marvin ran down the stairs and out the door. Sayquan and Asonai got keyed up from the excitement and took off in pursuit of the crying boy.
Back in empty 217 after the wild finish, I was organizing clipped bundles of math packets and Lincoln-quote-response second drafts to take home and mark when Elizabeth Camaraza walked in. She listlessly dropped her bag on Seresa's desk. “I can't ever come back here,” she said, suppressing tears. She told me about Ms. Guiterrez's refusal to go to bat for her to keep her new seating arrangement, Mrs. Boyd's blistering bulletin board criticism in front of the students, and the catastrophic new RFR situation.
I had never heard of RFR, so Elizabeth explained it to me. An administrator had greenlighted the $60,000 purchase of a new third-grade literacy curriculum called Reading for Results, based on the idea that this program would supplant Success for All. However, Region One signed on for Balanced Literacy as the new curriculum, rendering RFR useless before it was ever used. In order to justify the $60,000 expenditure, or simply to disguise its wastefulness from any potential auditors, P.S. 85’s third-grade teachers were mandated to attend weeks of RFR “online module classes,” complete with sessions after school and at 7 a.m. Everyone knew the program would never enter a real classroom, and it made the teachers irate with festering disgust.
“I used to empty bedpans on the midnight shift with two babies at home and no husband, and this is worse than that,” Elizabeth said.
“Yoo-hoo, Mr. Brown!” Mrs. Boyd summoned me from the hall. I answered the call and Elizabeth made a move to leave, but I quickly asked her to stay for a minute.
Mrs. Boyd stared at my exterior bulletin board, eyeing it with a perplexed expression, like someone trying to count jellybeans in a jar. “You've shown improvement, Mr. Brown, but not enough. What I caught of your lesson this morning was superb, but you already know what I think of your ability to communicate. Your classroom environment is bare-bones. The elements are there: the minimal elements. Look at this bulletin board. There's no…” She paused, looking for the right word. Not finding it, she moved on. “If you want to stimulate students to learn, stimulation must flow out of every aspect of their experience in school. Do you agree?”
“You say that, but I don't think you understand what it requires of you.”
“You want my room to look nicer,” I interpreted in monotone.
Mrs. Boyd seemed to take offense at my accusing her of something so superficial. “I want you to put a little more of yourself into this job.” She walked away.
“Venomous wench,” I heard Camaraza mutter from inside the room. “You know she screams into her pillow every night. Let's go, I'll drive you downtown.”
Schools were closed the next week, but without any therapeutic Hygienists shows scheduled, I couldn't seem to break out of my mental funk. I looked at the calendar in my room and wished I could fast-forward through time, zipping directly to June.
On one particularly stir-crazy evening, I grabbed one of the new stuffed animals my mom had bought for 4-217 and made a surreally weird four-minute camcorder movie, Courage Bear. Featuring only the title character and me, with narration by the bear, the flick follows us as happy roommates (with a highly self-pleasing inclusion of Babs Streisand's version of “Someone to Watch Over Me”) until the opening of an unwelcome piece of mail sends me into a rage, during which I launch Courage Bear out the third-story window. Landing on the icy pavement below, C.B. transforms into a creature of the night, drifting ethereally above the dingy Lower East Side snowscape. He ultimately returns to the cold, wet pavement outside our former home. Unheeded by slow-motion passersby, altered Courage Bear mutters his final incantation:
I am that bear in the shadow
I am the bear in the cold
I am the one in the rough gray ice
If you pass me…SAY HELLOOOOOOO!
When I came back to school on Monday, February 23, my lessons were ready, but I did not feel sufficiently recharged to take on the tidal wave of 4-217. First thing in the morning, I got word that Pat Cartwright would be out all week, meaning I would still have four of her kids to babysit.
Where was Pat? Back in December, she made comments about quitting, saying that Fausto was driving her over the edge, but they seemed like dark jokes. She was raising a three-year-old son on her own and I knew the boy had been sick several times in the fall. I hoped Ms. Cartwright was all right, but my hoping was useless. Now I had to deal with Sayquan and Asonai, two bonus “challenges.”
Meanwhile, despite the barrage of crises and cruelty in 4-217, my skills of anticipation and preemption were becoming more and more well-honed. For every time Bernard fought, there were four or five instances when I rushed in to extinguish the fire when it was still just a spark. But, I remembered, it's not how you fall that matters; it's how you land. If I could barely keep them from hurting each other, what would happen when there were no teachers around to check them?
On the way to pick up my paycheck, Ms. Guiterrez waylaid me to say that she wanted to see my planbook first thing tomorrow morning. This would be her second perusal of it this month, despite a satisfactory review last time. Disgusted, I went home and fell into bed, unconscious by 7 p.m. My alarm sounded at 3:30 a.m., and I reformatted the whole book with elaborate form-sheets I made on my computer. I came to school carrying a thick dossier of standards, benchmarks, aims, objectives, Bloom's taxonomy implementations, multistep procedures, and other like information. I hoped this comprehensive showing would get the watchdogs off my back. By now, the consistently glowering inspections really ticked me off. I knew I was making progress. Timid Evley, who had broken the ice with me with his mysterious private-part problem, was beating his fear of public speaking. Lito Ruiz was writing creative narratives. Almost all of them could explain multiplication and division inside out. The administration did not see those things. They saw my unattractive board displays, the disconcerted flailing in November, and my young age.
Ms. Guiterrez was nowhere to be found before school, so I retired to my room, the fancy folder tucked under my arm.
At 10:45, a lovely surprise came my way. Julianne Nemet, a social worker from the Montefiore Health Clinic (our privatized nurse's office), showed up to do the last in her series of three monthly lessons on “Friendship and Acceptance.” Her first lesson about anger management was taught to every class in the school; the students responded to hand signs and chants of “Baby sleeping! Tai chi!” as a signal to shift from kerfuffle to tranquility.
This time, Julianne wrote “RESPECT” in block letters on the board. She had not done much more when Mrs. Boyd burst into the room… with Dilla Zane! “Keep going. Ignore us,” Mrs. Boyd ordered to Julianne.
Dilla Zane (her first and last names were always said together) was the Region One, Network Five Instructional Superintendent: Mrs. Boyd's direct boss. Her reputation for white-glove-caliber inspections for compliance to city regulations was well-known in the halls of P.S. 85. She came to schools at 7 a.m. and entered empty classrooms with a camera to photograph the bulletin boards for standard-adherence scrutiny. She pulled random notebooks out of student desks and scoured them for proper formatting and content. Dilla Zane zapped people, and the word around the campfire said Mrs. Boyd was in her crosshairs.
The duo descended on me in the back of the room. Dilla Zane riffled through my lesson plans. “Very thorough,” she commented. I had picked the right day to tidy up my paperwork. “Show me a portfolio.”
I picked out Sonandia's, and Mrs. Boyd frowned. “Not Sonandia's. She's your best student.”
“You can look at any one you like,” I said.
“How about your worst student? Show us that one,” Mrs. Boyd said. I didn't like being put on the spot to name my “worst” student to my principal. Dilla Zane reached into the crate and picked out a random red folder.
Deloris Barlow's. She had been discharged from my class two months ago and barely did any work when she was in it. I started to explain, “That girl actually—”
“Just let Dilla look,” Mrs. Boyd said with quiet hostility. Dilla Zane closed the folder after five seconds and did not pick out another.
“Mr. Brown is one of our new, very intelligent first-year teachers,” Mrs. Boyd said. “He graduated from the prestigious NYU film school and is going to be starting a new after-school film club for advanced students.”
Dilla Zane looked to me. “Yes,” I said.
“What is the most challenging aspect about being a teacher, Mr. Brown?” Dilla Zane asked.
I was ready. “For me, it's the constant classroom upkeep. I'm getting better, but it's like another full-time job. I've had some issues with management and that's taken the front burner over keeping my displays as current as they should be.”
“You can see he has quite a long way to go,” Mrs. Boyd chimed.
“What changes do you think could best help you overcome your obstacles?”
This was the real question I had been hoping for. “More allotted time for collaboration and coplanning. We need more sharing of successful practices among teachers. I think the culture of the school could foster that more. We could be more of a team,” I said.
“Are you saying you don't feel supported?” Mrs. Boyd asked, aghast.
“No. I definitely appreciate all the help you gave me with the coteacher situation and Ms. Barrow and everything else. And Barbara has been great as a mentor.” Dilla Zane and Mrs. Boyd shared a nod. “But the atmosphere in the school is very isolated, and I think everyone could work better with more teamwork built into the schedule.”
Dilla Zane shook my hand. “Thank you for your honesty,” she said. Mrs. Boyd showed no expression, and they left.
Upon the administrators’ exit, hums of chatter instantly ignited. Sayquan and Asonai had already done this lesson in Pat Cartwright's class and started crawling on their desks. Julianne Nemet looked to me to shush the class, and I did several times, but a minute or two later, some kid would naturally start talking. They were actually in much better form than usual, but Julianne Nemet was clearly flummoxed.
“This lesson is about respect, and if you don't show me respect, I'm going to leave,” she said through gritted teeth. Sayquan laughed mockingly, and Julianne grabbed her satchel. “Fine. Good-bye.”
And she left. I peered out in the hall, thinking this was some kind of joke, but she was gone. I had eighteen minutes until my prep, an awkward amount of time for any substantive activity. I made the kids write apology letters to Julianne Nemet, even though she owed the class and me an apology for hanging me out to dry for eighteen minutes, and reinforcing a pretty lousy life lesson about abandonment.
Tayshaun Jackson grinned crazily as he wrote:
Dear Ms. Nemet,
I feel terrible about what happened. Please forgive us. That was so terrible about how you was mad.
Love, Tayshaun
I collected the letters and, after school, chucked them in the Dumpster.