BALL REFERRED TO HERSELF, Levin, and Feinberg as the three musketeers. But they more resembled Gladys Knight and the Pips. It was clear who was the lead singer and who were the backups.
Their chats at King Leo’s were playful tussles between Ball, who wanted some after-school relaxation, and her puppy-dog novices, full of questions.
“Can you tell me how you pace that reading lesson so quickly?” Feinberg asked, the minute they sat down for a drink.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I just got off work.”
“I know,” Feinberg said, “but I just want to know about this one thing.”
Her relationship with Levin was easier and deeper. They worked across the hall from each other. He would watch her, listen to her, and adopt some of her sharpest opinions. One popular slogan irritated her: “All children can learn.” That was not the right message, she thought. It ought to be “All children will learn.” The word “can” was too passive. It meant the child was capable. That was not enough. There was a big difference between capability and achievement. Many educators thought it was up to their students and their parents to summon the motivation to use their God-given talents. Ball took her responsibilities more seriously. She brought this up every time she saw the slogan: “Uh-uh, I don’t want no ‘can,’ “ she said. “All of us will learn. I will learn from the kids. They will learn from me. Ain’t no ‘can.’ We will all learn.”
When Levin and Feinberg came over to her house on weekends, she demonstrated the finer points of classroom management. She did not like, for instance, the way Levin drew the signs for his walls. “Dave,” she said, “you write like a drunk chicken.” His letters were thin scratches that wandered all over the paper. She cleared off her dining room table and spread out a sheet of butcher paper. Following her instructions, Levin and Feinberg cut the paper into pieces shaped like the word clouds hanging in her classroom. Each cloud had a word she hoped students would learn. She showed Levin how to make his letters in each of the clouds straighter, thicker, and clearer.
Watching Ball teach, Levin and Feinberg took careful note whenever she dealt with inattention or mischief. One of the mysteries of her classroom was how well-behaved and yet happy the children were. Hers was not a prison camp operated by an ogre with a teacher’s license, something they had observed in other classrooms. Her children seemed lively and free. Yet her class ran smoothly.
One day, Levin watched Ball approach a fourth grader who was daydreaming and hadn’t done any of his work. “What?” she said, leaning over and putting her nose close to the child’s face. She would often switch to street talk on such occasions. “You’re not doing the work? You got three choices.” She spoke very slowly and distinctly. “You . . . can . . . change . . . rooms.” She took a breath. “You . . . can . . . change . . . schools.” The next sentence she delivered in one quick breath: “But don’t nobody else want you but me.”
“Or . . . you . . . can change your attitude and actions. . . because I’m not changing.”
The child listened gravely. It was impossible to ignore Ms. Ball when she spoke to you. “Now, which one do you want?” she asked. She adopted the tone of an impatient waitress who had other customers. “Pick a letter, pick a letter, A, B, C . . .”
“I don’t want any of those, Ms. Ball.”
“You gonna pick one,” she insisted. “This ain’t Burger King. You don’t ‘have it your way.’ Change rooms, change schools, or you change.”
The child looked bewildered. Ball repeated the three-part question in a gentler tone. The student gathered himself together and made a choice—the third option. She said she would give him another chance. She reminded him that his being assigned to Ms. Ball’s class was a fortunate chance, and his permanent place in her world had to be earned. There were always those other classes, other schools, other universes she could send him to. The child heard the love and concern in her voice. He felt better. He had lost the need, at least at that moment, to express his rage at whatever was bothering him—what his brother had said to him or what his stomach felt like or how uncertain he was of what was to become of his life.
Levin and Feinberg were near the age of Ball’s oldest child. She acted like their cool mom. With Levin in particular, there was a lot of teasing. If someone asked Ball where she’d met the young teacher from New York, she would look startled and say, “Why, I am his mother. Where do you think he got that frizzy hair from?” If Ball and Levin felt particularly daring, they would suggest a romantic attachment. “This is my wife,” Levin said to one friend as he introduced Ball. “I love older women.” Ball kissed Levin on the cheek. “You know what they say,” she said. “Once you go black, you can’t go back” —a statement made in fun that eventually turned out to be more or less true for Levin.
BASTIAN ELEMENTARY WAS still a frequently chaotic school. Just before Christmas the principal announced a reorganization. Ball became the Title I teacher. She would be paid by that federal program to roam from classroom to classroom, helping everyone. She insisted that Levin take over her fourth-grade class. Another teacher took Levin’s sixth graders.
Levin regretted leaving his class. He thought he was making progress with them. But he was in no position to argue, having been a teacher for only four months. He was still in over his head. The change meant he could get more frequent instruction from Ball. She watched his classroom management techniques and his struggle to keep every child engaged. She was authorized to pull some of the most difficult students out of class for special attention, but Levin asked that she not do that in his case. He wanted to learn how to handle them on his own. She decided they would do some team teaching. Sometimes she would teach the class and he would watch. Other times he would teach and she would watch. Sometimes they would do it together. Levin began to see how two teachers in the same room could augment each other’s work. He discussed this often with Feinberg.
Years later, after Levin had become a nationally renowned expert on effective teaching, he would remember those first months with Ball as a perfect example of what teacher training should be. It was, he knew, hard for some young teachers to watch someone else run their class. But he was so convinced of Ball’s talent that he could suppress his considerable ego and take whatever she was giving him as a gift. He had to be extremely alert to what she was doing because she could not spend all her time with him. She would often stop in the middle of a lesson and say, “Now, Dave, you pick up.” After a while the students became accustomed to these handoffs.
Someone later asked if it had slowed his progress to take over Ball’s class, already housebroken by the master teacher. He smiled and explained that no class is trained for another teacher. He knew Ball well, and her students had seen him there often, but they treated him like any new teacher. Worse, they treated him like a substitute. He was an interloper, a worthy victim of their favorite fourth-grade tortures. He had to work even harder than he had in his old class to win their cooperation.
He was replacing someone who, it would become clear, was one of the best teachers in the country. Her students’ expectations of him were much higher than they would have been for someone replacing an average instructor. Levin had to hit those high marks or he was going to be a tall, curly-haired piece of roadkill. He worried that he could ruin what she had accomplished. It was like being asked to fill in for Hakeem Olajuwon as the Houston Rockets headed into game seven of the NBA Finals.
Levin noticed the way she talked to kids. Communication had to be positive. She would raise her voice, but with the proper tone. He practiced that voice, the combination of distress and love. His students needed to understand where he was coming from. He thought he had taken a possibly fatal risk when he picked Quincy up and dropped him in his seat, but Ball told him his instinct was right. The boy was harassing other children. That could not be tolerated. “If you don’t protect your kids, they won’t respect you,” she told him. “So you can’t walk by a fight.” There would henceforth be, in both Levin’s and Feinberg’s classrooms, no greater sin than hurting or even teasing another student. Both would be on top of the aggressor Ball-style, as fast as a grizzly bear mother seeing a wolf near her cub.
What their students needed most in their lives, Feinberg and Levin thought, was love. What they needed most in the classroom was help with reading. Their weak grasp of the language was the handicap that slowed what they did in math, social studies, science, and writing. There were some helpful Ball chants for reading, language mechanics, science, and social studies, but Levin and Feinberg found themselves making up most of what they were doing as they went along. They had the standard basal readers, full of simple stories that they could dissect with their classes. They would read, sometimes as a group and sometimes with one child doing the duty. Then they would ask questions, taking unusual care to make sure each student comprehended what he or she had read. They had games like vocabulary hopscotch: cards with words would be placed on the hopscotch squares, and students would hop and reach down to retrieve them from the classroom floor.
School ended at 3:00 p.m., but both Levin and Feinberg stayed late. Some students needed extra work. They found different ways to persuade children, particularly those who were far below grade level, to delay their walks home. Some, they just had to ask. Others, they bargained with. They always made sure they had parental permission to keep kids late. The parents seemed pleased, or at least unconcerned, that Mr. Levin and Mr. Feinberg were spending so much time with their children. Each of them would have about a dozen students after school, although often not the same dozen. It depended on who needed help with what. They would focus on the homework, sometimes guiding the students through it as a group and sometimes working with them individually.
Both teachers felt they were no longer so awful. The year had been horribly disorganized, with their bad starts, switching classes, switching schools. But they thought they were getting their classes under control, and they could not wait for their second year to begin.