September 2012:
Eight months before graduation
THE PLAN FOR THE STUDENT council election was simple: videotape the students’ campaign speeches in advance, then play them over the old TV monitors in the classrooms. But in some classrooms, the images played with no sound. In other rooms, they didn’t play at all. So Mr. Fuller ordered all the students to watch the recorded speeches on a single big screen. That meant moving more than 1,000 teenagers to the auditorium, in groups of 30 or so at a time, and everyone knew it would eat up much of the morning. “Shoot me now,” chemistry teacher Jihad Haidar muttered. As the kids trickled into the auditorium, student Tri Nguyen began fiddling with a VCR and a sound mixing board. “I’m not sure where this goes,” he said, holding a wire with red, white and yellow plugs. As he worked, bursts of static sounded over the speakers.
Mr. Fuller explained his reasoning to a few kids in the front rows. “The easiest thing to do is let this go, but I wanted to make sure I do right by the children,” he told them. The young candidates for student council had done everything adults had asked: practiced their speeches, posted campaign signs. The least he could do was let their classmates hear what they had to say.
English teacher Jacklyn Martin saw the lengthy election process as a complete waste of time, and she knew she’d have to throw out her plans for the morning. When she’d gone to school, she’d received a higher quality of education than this. Isaias came in carrying a book he’d been reading called Naked Economics and took a spot in the rows of wooden folding chairs. Isaias said he saw the chaos as a sign that someone at the top was irresponsible. “Things like this happen. Very unorganized. It’s always done a lot on the spot.” He was used to it by now. “I don’t mind anymore. It being my senior year, I don’t know what it is, I just don’t care much.… I don’t care that the online classes still haven’t gotten going. I don’t care. I don’t care that we’re wasting a whole day here. It’s like ‘All right.’ Plus what are you going to do, right?”
The whole process took more than three hours.
* * *
Kingsbury sometimes felt like a little world unto itself, and the most influential person within that world was Carlos Fuller.
Mr. Fuller grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, the oldest of four brothers. His parents and his three brothers graduated from North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black college. His mother was an administrative assistant at the college, and his father worked in community relations for a county school system.
Mr. Fuller’s parents emphasized education, but early in life, he didn’t stay on the path they wanted. “Let’s just say that I kind of drifted in and out during my college years,” he said. “Trying to find my way in some cases. In some cases, hanging with the wrong people.”
He described how he’d stayed in a small room in a rough neighborhood in Durham, North Carolina. “One night I just looked up at the ceiling like ‘Man, it got to be a better way than this. Has to be a better way.’”
He said he found a part-time job, went back to school and registered, but still kept the same type of questionable friends. “And then my girlfriend at the time got pregnant.” He was about 26, but he said he was roughly as responsible at the time as the average 18-year-old. The birth of his daughter made him take life more seriously, and though his relationship with the girl’s mother didn’t last, he said he continued to support the child financially. He later married another woman and had three more children.
Mr. Fuller eventually graduated from North Carolina Central University in Durham and moved with a fraternity brother to Memphis, where he started a career in education, first as a classroom teacher. He went through leadership training and served as an assistant principal and briefly as a principal of an alternative school for troubled students before taking the leadership of Kingsbury in 2008. He was a father of four and turned 50 during Isaias’ senior year.
And that year, Mr. Fuller said his job was at risk. He told me much later that if the students failed to meet certain standards, he could lose his job. “Once you’re a ‘striving school’ and you agree to come into the striving school, you sign a contract that if you don’t get the scores, you can be released,” he said.1 And Mr. Fuller said one of the most important standards for keeping his job was the graduation rate. That year’s benchmark was to raise the rate from 61 percent the previous year to 67 percent.
Graduating from Kingsbury was relatively easy. If students didn’t do work, they got many chances to make it up. Some twelfth graders showed serious weaknesses in basic skills like reading and writing. Naturally, some teachers and counselors said the school system graduated students who were so unprepared they shouldn’t have passed—and that the pressure to raise the graduation rate played a role.
“I think like most people in any other business, educators have a certain value of self-preservation,” Mr. Fuller said. “And sometimes you have to do what you have to do.… I’m not telling you not to fail kids. But I am saying ‘work with them.’” Mr. Fuller’s view: try every intervention imaginable before giving the student a failing grade.
Mr. Fuller told me his secretary said he had attention deficit disorder. “That’s what I say sometimes when I get distracted,” he said once. “But I have not legally been diagnosed.” Sometimes he made snap decisions that dismayed teachers.
Teachers were judged by student performance, too, and if they had less time to prepare their students, it could hurt everyone. History teacher Ron Barsotti frequently criticized Mr. Fuller’s leadership and saw the wasted time at the student council election as one more count against him.
Yet Mr. Fuller often showed a fatherly interest in the students that went far beyond his job description. He routinely referred to them as “my children,” and he wasn’t kidding—he often worked 12-hour days and showed up at athletic and academic events on weekends.
Many months later, Mr. Barsotti, the history teacher who had criticized Mr. Fuller, told me he’d changed his mind about him and said that he’d helped the school. “He’s been really good to me, and I almost feel guilty being so critical of him.”
* * *
One person who knew that not every school was like Kingsbury High was 17-year-old senior Estevon Odria. Estevon had only attended Kingsbury since tenth grade, when his grandparents moved into the neighborhood to cut housing costs. “I used to go to a more organized, better-in-nearly-all-aspects public school in the suburbs of Memphis, Tennessee, until my sophomore year,” Estevon wrote in an early draft of a college application essay.
At Kingsbury, Estevon said he saw that many students skipped class and seemed apathetic. He wrote in his essay that he refused to behave the same way. “I work my hardest to seize every nanosecond of my existence.”
Another experience shaped Estevon’s mindset: in the summer before his senior year, his grandfather drove him to the Memphis airport, where he got on a plane and flew to New England to spend five weeks at Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the nation’s most prestigious boarding schools.
Kingsbury guidance counselor Tamara Bradshaw had made it happen. She had grown up in Memphis, landed at Phillips Exeter herself, and recommended that Estevon join Memphis PREP, an organization that matched local high school students with summer programs at elite colleges and boarding schools. Estevon later called the Phillips Exeter program “the most significant, life-changing experience of my life.” Abraham Lincoln sent his oldest son to Phillips Exeter. Other famous alumni included Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook.
At Phillips Exeter, Estevon went on cross-country runs four times a week with speedy students from Hong Kong. Like many of the kids from Memphis, he’d never learned to swim. Now he finally did, and he went to the beach. He explored the streets of Boston. He wrote in an essay that he considered mathematics and science “the light rays that pierce the very depths of my soul,” and he took courses in calculus, astrophysics and electronics.
Normally, tuition for this summer school cost more than $7,000, but because of the Memphis program, Estevon didn’t have to pay anything.
“And I realized, like, my place in the world,” Estevon said later. “Like, there are these other kids who are so much more advantaged.” They’d gone to boarding school not just for a few weeks, but all the time, a privilege that at Phillips Exeter cost $45,000 per year before financial aid.
Estevon’s peers came from different cultures, ethnicities and religions, but as he wrote in an essay, one thing united them: the will to better themselves. “I will never forget the tears fighting to run down my face when a close friend from Beijing signed my soccer ball on the last day with the words, ‘I hope you enjoyed your summer, and I know that you will make all of your dreams come…’”
And then Estevon was on a plane back to Memphis, and back to Kingsbury High, where hundreds of kids sat in the gym for days, doing nothing. He wished he were somewhere else.
What he wanted was to get out of the neighborhood—not just to go to a state university in Tennessee, but to a really good school, far away, maybe Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where a younger sister lived with her father’s family, or one of those shining, hard-to-reach schools in the Northeast. He’d seen the kids at Phillips Exeter, he knew where he stood, and he realized he would have to fight harder.
He was quiet, with a dark mustache, a long nose, long eyelashes, and sometimes a sleepy expression and a shy smile. He didn’t socialize much. When he talked to people, he sometimes looked away. He liked to crack unusual jokes, and through the course of the year, his English teacher, Jinger Griner, kept a running list of Estevon-isms: “Are you being cereal?” “You’re my white Mama.” “My toilet paper was moving last night.” “I wish I had gotten hit by a taco.” “I’m tired of your sass, Ms. Griner.”
Estevon Odria. (Photo by Karen Pulfer Focht/The Commercial Appeal)
He ranked as one of the top five students in Kingsbury’s senior class. He had already scored a 29 on the ACT and had loaded his schedule for the final year with hard courses, including Advanced Placement Chemistry.
Estevon was born in Miami, which made him a U.S. citizen. It did not guarantee an easy life. Estevon’s mother, Nadine, was a U.S. citizen from a Mexican-American family, and she had given birth to him when she was only 16. Estevon’s father, Alfred Odria, was also a teenager born in the United States, with a mother from Cuba and a father from Peru.
Nadine married Alfred Odria. Then they broke up, and Alfred ended up with the baby. Nadine would later say she was tricked into giving up Estevon. By this point, Nadine’s parents had moved from Miami to Memphis. The young father asked Nadine’s parents for help, and they agreed to let him take the baby to Memphis and live with them.
Estevon’s father, Alfred, started working as a security guard and at one point took classes at the University of Memphis. Then in 2000, he went home to Florida to visit relatives. He died on Christmas Eve; he was 23.
Estevon’s grandfather said Alfred’s heart had given out suddenly. He said he believed Alfred had consumed alcohol at a party and that it reacted badly with medication he was taking. So at five years old, Estevon was left without a father. He was raised primarily by his grandparents. After Estevon’s birth, Nadine went on to have three more children with three different men. She lived with her youngest child, leaving the other two to be raised by their fathers’ families.
Nadine’s behavior frustrated Estevon. “I really don’t feel like she’s my mom sometimes. Because she still acts like she’s 17 years old, calling me for money, when she knows I’m trying to go to college, actually trying to do something with my life and trying to like graduate high school, which is something she never did. Like sometimes I just—I just really can’t—I don’t understand her.” His anger was palpable.
Months later, I spoke with Estevon’s mother at a restaurant. Nadine was 34, with red tint in her dark hair and an ankh tattoo on her right wrist and a rose tattoo on the left.
She said she’d fought often with her parents growing up, particularly her stepfather—Estevon’s grandfather. “I left the house when I was 15 because I didn’t like the way I was being raised,” she said, speaking English with a slight Southern accent. “I’ll just leave it at that. So that’s why I married [Estevon’s] dad and got emancipated and had a child, because I didn’t want to be home anymore.”
She had lived in Miami, Las Vegas, California, and Memphis, where at one point she got involved with an abusive man who threatened to burn down her parents’ house. She left that relationship, as she had left others. “I don’t put up with a lot.” She had dropped out of high school, but she later earned a GED and now was taking community college classes and working in information technology for UPS.
Though Estevon’s grandparents raised him, Nadine still played a role in his life. She remembered him asking her to buy him a Nintendo game system for Christmas. When she gave it to him, he took it apart to see how it worked.
“He’s really smart, he has a deeper understanding,” Nadine said. “He’s cynical. He’s got an odd sense of humor. He might be a kind of hurt, angry child too, at the same time.”
She acknowledged that yes, she’d asked Estevon to lend her money. “At one time I did,” she said. “Like, my lights were getting cut off or something. It was important.”
Nadine said she’d sometimes thought of herself as a bad parent. In the end, though, she said Estevon benefited from living with his grandparents. “He kind of grew up better. He probably was provided for better than I could have provided for him.”
Estevon lived with his grandparents in a modest white house that stood within easy walking distance of the school. Estevon’s grandfather, Francisco Gonzalez, was 51, with a salt-and-pepper beard. He was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and brought to this country at age three—illegally, he said, but it was easier to obtain papers back then, and his status was legalized when he was a teenager. His wife, Victoria, was 54 and was born in the United States near Los Angeles, where she met her husband. She had a lung condition, and an oxygen tube in her nose helped her breathe.
Estevon’s grandfather had served in the army and the National Guard as an engineer surveyor and worked for many years with a company that sent him to Miami to open a warehouse, then sent him to Memphis. It was the eventual loss of the job with that company that prompted the move to the Kingsbury neighborhood. Mr. Gonzalez had considered several neighborhoods but settled on Kingsbury in part because it would give Estevon a chance to learn more about his Hispanic heritage.
Unlike many Hispanic kids at Kingsbury High, Estevon spoke English at home. He had been exposed to Spanish early in life but couldn’t really speak the language until he studied it as a teenager and learned it well enough to take a part-time job as a bilingual phone operator for Pizza Hut. He used his earnings to buy ACT prep books and to pay for private cello lessons.
“We’re both proud of him and where he’s at right now,” Estevon’s grandfather said. And they wanted him to keep going. According to Mr. Gonzalez, his younger daughter—Nadine’s sister—had gone to a state college and dropped out, leaving her father still paying off debt. That meant Estevon’s grandparents couldn’t help pay for his college education. Estevon’s grandmother had completed the twelfth grade, and his grandfather had gone to junior college and hadn’t finished. If Estevon could earn a bachelor’s degree, he would have gone further than anyone else in his immediate family.
Estevon’s story and the hard relationship with his mother reflected the difficulties of teen parenthood. In a typical year at Kingsbury High, between 25 and 40 girls gave birth during the school year or already had a child, according to Tamara Bradshaw, the guidance counselor who worked with young mothers.
Intercom announcements would bring the girls together for support group meetings: “Teen moms, at this time please report to the parent resource center. Teen moms.” One day in September, six girls gathered around the table with adult counselors and volunteers for a session organized by a Christian organization called Young Life.
The counselors served pizza and did their best to keep the mood cheerful. But the girls still radiated loneliness. When one young mother talked about sharing a bed with her child, a girl named Lorena Gomez said she could relate. “I know. Last night I was thinking I need somebody to hug, so I got Bella out of the crib.”
Lorena smiled often and had dyed her dark hair red. She was 16 years old, an eleventh grader with academic ambition who was trying to graduate a year early. She said the best part about being a mother was having someone to care about. “And having someone who you know is going to love you forever now.”
The worst part? The unrelenting stress of meeting a child’s needs while trying to study, of staying up until 3:00 a.m., then getting up a few hours later to take a test.
As I spoke with Lorena in the living room of her house one day that fall, she looked weary, with dark circles under her eyes. Little Bella ran around the coffee table in blue overalls, her shoes clomping, and then she spilled a bottle of strawberry drink all over the table and floor. Lorena gasped, then started to clean up the mess.
A moment later, Bella threw herself down and began to wail. “Fea,” Lorena said. The word means “ugly.”
“It’s fit after fit after fit,” Lorena said. “And it’s kind of annoying. And I guess all of that builds up anger. And I’m trying to not build anger toward her, because then I don’t want her to be raised like I was raised.” Lorena’s own mother, Erika Gomez, was only 14 when she gave birth to Lorena. Now Erika was a grandmother at 32, and she often fought with Lorena. It got so bad that Lorena moved to Dallas for a while to stay with her dad, but she had trouble enrolling in school and came back. Lorena had a difficult relationship with the baby’s father, too.
Maybe the life of Estevon’s mother, Nadine, had once been as hard as Lorena’s. Maybe that explained why Nadine would let her own parents raise Estevon and why, for so many years, her relationship with him was so strained.
Estevon saw the failure all around him. But he felt he wasn’t alone in his quest to succeed. His dead father had left nothing else in the world but his son, and Estevon believed that even now, his father wanted him to go to college and make something of himself.
“He does not want me to give up, and I understand that,” Estevon said in his grandparents’ kitchen. “He’s not here but I feel him. Like his spirit, his soul.”
Throughout my talk with Nadine in the restaurant, her tone of voice remained level, even as she described leaving Estevon behind or how the ex-boyfriend had threatened to burn down the house. Estevon certainly felt emotions, but sometimes showed little expression, and his mother seemed to act the same way.
I asked Nadine what made Estevon so driven.
“I’m that way,” Nadine said. And much as her son would do, she looked away from me, through the glass of the restaurant window and toward the parking lot.
* * *
The first few weeks of the school year passed in disorder, but finally, the class-change buzzers began to sound at normal times. School clubs started meeting, including the Knowledge Bowl team, and at one practice they played along to a video of a Jeopardy episode. On a Saturday in mid-September, six weeks into the school year, Isaias and the other team members went to a trivia competition at St. George’s Independent School, a local institution far different from their own.
At Kingsbury, the first thing that greeted visitors at the front door was a walk-through metal detector. At St. George’s, the front door led to a luxurious space something like a living room, with bookshelves and a giant slab of petrified wood that served as a coffee table. A chandelier of antlers hung from the ceiling, giving it the look of an old hunting lodge. Knowledge Bowl coach Jacklyn Martin had heard that a staffer had apologized for not turning on the gas fireplace. If Kingsbury hosted a tournament and wanted to treat visitors to a roaring fire, they’d have to play a video.
That day the Kingsbury trivia team lost its first three games. They had three more chances, but it was looking increasingly unlikely that they would make it out of the six preliminary rounds and play for the championship on the big stage. Teams got ten points for buzzing in and answering a toss-up question correctly. They then got an exclusive shot at a bonus question worth 20 points. In other words, the rules favored a team that could correctly answer more than one question in a row, something Kingsbury was having trouble doing. In the common room just beyond the hunting lodge, Mr. Fuller started strategizing with the team. Geography and social studies seemed to be sticking points. Maybe the school could start a geography class and put Knowledge Bowl kids in it. He offered some encouragement. “You guys did well though, man. I loved it! I loved it!”
They fell silent.
A screen flashed the pairings for round four. Kingsbury would face a team from Memphis University School, the city’s elite private boys’ institution. The kids made their way down the hall and walked into a math classroom where chairs were arranged for two opposing teams with four players each. Kingsbury had brought five players this day, so one always sat out. As the top player and captain, Isaias always stayed in and played the biggest role in the games. Mr. Fuller settled in to watch and marveled at the school’s wall-to-wall carpeting.
Then the opponents walked in: two Asian boys and two white boys, freshmen, the weakest of several teams that Memphis University School brought to the tournament. They looked as though they’d barely entered puberty. Now, maybe, Kingsbury could pick up a win. Early in the game, one of the freshmen answered a question correctly and moved to the bonus. “The topic is religious edicts. In 1521, the Edict of Worms declared what German religious reformer to be an outlaw and banned the reading and possession of his writings?”
MUS conferred and missed.
“Kingsbury?” the moderator asked.
“Martin Luther?” Isaias said, his voice rising in uncertainty.
“That’s correct.” Surprised laughter rippled from the Kingsbury team. They seemed to expect to lose. For question six, the moderator read some lyrics and asked the students to identify the song.
Breanna Thomas buzzed in for Kingsbury. “Jambalaya?” “Jambalaya is correct!” Surprised laughter again.
The moderator read question 11. “In 2012, the U.S. Senate narrowly rejected a Republican-sponsored measure that would have bypassed the Obama administration’s objections to the construction of what pipeline from Canada to…” Isaias buzzed in before she finished. “The Keystone pipeline.”
“That’s correct.”
But by the time the moderator read question 17, the momentum had shifted. “After Thomas Jefferson was authorized to organize the Corps of Engineers, it was stationed at what New York facility to establish an American military academy?” MUS got the answer: West Point. The Kingsbury students were fading in the late stages of the game, just as they had earlier that day. Watching from the back, Mr. Fuller made a quiet sound of frustration. Within minutes, it was all over. Kingsbury’s best students fell to the ninth graders, 140 to 70.
The next game, against Ridgeway High, was even worse. At one point an expression of disgust crossed Isaias’ face, and he sat back with his hand on his head. The team members walked to yet another game. “Can I sit out the next one?” Isaias asked Ms. Martin.
“Why?”
“I just want to.”
Ms. Martin believed the results reflected a stark difference in social class. Kingsbury was facing teams of kids from schools that set higher standards, with parents who worked as lawyers or professors and took them to the symphony or on nice vacations. And in many cases, the other students had more experience playing Knowledge Bowl. Mr. Fuller had only tapped Isaias and several other kids the previous year. If you looked at it that way, with all the obstacles the Kingsbury students faced, they did well. She knew they could improve. But she felt proud of them.
Kingsbury hadn’t always been a disadvantaged school. It opened its doors in 1950 to serve a new working-class suburb. Back then, every student, teacher and administrator at Kingsbury was white.
School segregation had been enshrined in the Tennessee constitution for decades. The first class of Kingsbury twelfth graders graduated in 1959, and the yearbook showed no African-Americans other than custodians and cafeteria workers. The number of black faces increased sharply in the 1960 yearbook—not because the school had integrated, but because the students had put on a minstrel show, a crude imitation of the people then known as Negroes. According to the yearbook, the show was “a howling success.”
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education had struck down segregation, but in Memphis, neighborhood segregation kept schools separate. The NAACP filed a lawsuit in 1960 to force the Memphis City Schools to finally desegregate. By the early 1970s, the NAACP was winning the court fight, and the school system would soon start transferring kids from school to school to achieve racial balance. They would do it with buses.2
A mostly white organization called Citizens Against Busing rallied opposition to the plan and organized theatrical protests and stunts, most famously staging the public burial of an empty bus in a giant trench.
In April 1972, Citizens Against Busing urged students to stay home for two days. Kingsbury High, one of the premier all-white schools in the system, recorded the highest total number of absences. Including junior high students, 2,205 kids stayed home on the second day, 84 percent of the student body.
But the protests and lawsuits couldn’t stop busing. An early round of busing started in January 1973, and a few months later a federal judge issued a desegregation plan he called “Plan Z,” thus designated because he hoped it would mark the end of years of bickering over the subject. A newspaper ran two pages of small type breaking down the school-to-school transfers. The entry for Kingsbury High was succinct: “Swaps with Douglass; Sends 200 whites, receives 350 blacks. Projected enrollment; 355 black, 857 white.”
It didn’t happen like that. Instead, many white students left.
In 1970, the school system enrolled more than 71,000 white students, 48 percent of the total. By the fall of 1973, the number had dropped to 39,000, or 32 percent. At Kingsbury High, the proportion of white students dropped from 100 percent in the early 1970s to 48 percent by the 1981–1982 school year. In the following years, the school’s white population dropped further as whites left not just the school, but the neighborhood. Not all the white flight out of public schools in the years after desegregation was due to racism. Regardless of their views on race, families recognized that the Memphis City Schools often failed to offer a good education.
In a strange way, the all-white school enabled the creation of the multicultural one that Isaias attended. If whites had not left, property values would not have dropped, and far fewer immigrants could have afforded homes in the area. By the time Isaias entered his senior year, handwritten signs hung on telephone poles near the high school: “Casas baratas”—cheap houses. That said, significant numbers of whites stayed in the Kingsbury neighborhood, and white youths still accounted for 15 percent of Kingsbury High’s student population during Isaias’ senior year, one of the highest proportions in an overwhelmingly African-American school system. Isaias’ Knowledge Bowl teammate and close friend, Daniel Nix, was white. So was a boy named Cash Price and another teammate on the Knowledge Bowl team, Skylar Sutton.
Across the country, public schools were becoming increasingly minority, and increasingly poor. In Isaias’ senior year, the proportion of low-income students in American public schools reached 51 percent, marking the first time in at least 50 years that poor kids made up the majority. Public school poverty was particularly bad in Southern states. In Tennessee, 58 percent of public school students were poor. In Mississippi, 71 percent.3
The increasing poverty wasn’t due primarily to flight to private schools, said Steve Suitts, a researcher with the Southern Education Foundation. He said that since the 1980s, the proportion of kids in private schools had remained relatively steady. Instead, Suitts pointed to other factors: national anti-poverty programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children were declining, and wages were stagnating. Both factors often meant that families had less money. Low-income groups had more children than higher-income groups. Internal migration increased the concentration of poverty in certain areas, and international migration played a role, too, since immigrants tended to be poorer than the native born.
Knowledge Bowl coach and English teacher Jacklyn Martin said that students sometimes assumed that her white skin and teacher’s credential meant that she’d never struggled. They didn’t know that although she had been born into a wealthy family, she and her mother had plunged into poverty when her parents divorced. In eighth grade, she found herself in a program for at-risk youth, and adults told her not to get pregnant. To her, it seemed that society created two tracks: a track for people expected to make something of themselves and a track for poor people to whom society sent the message “Try not to be a loser.” And she saw in Isaias a smart, weird, quirky student who, like her, had landed on the second track.
They’d talked about the line Kermit the Frog sang about being different: “It’s not easy being green.”
“Stay green,” Ms. Martin would tell Isaias.
She was in her late 20s and in her short teaching career, she’d never encountered another student so brilliant. She cared about him, too. When he won an award in her English class the year before, she offered to get him any prize he wanted. He asked for Altoid mints, the ones that come in a blue box. She had to go to three stores to find them.
Isaias became her personal symbol. “At one point I had to ask myself if I was a phony in the classroom. Here I was telling these students ‘Hard work pays off!’ and ‘If you learn how to write this essay and you learn these skills, then you’re going to have a good career and you’re going to be okay, and you’re gonna be able to go to college.’”
Eventually, you had to question if that was true, especially with the uncertainty around Isaias’ immigration status. “Seriously, the idea of him not going to college made me not want to teach. I can’t keep selling this dream to them if it’s not real.”
In the private school’s hallway between rounds at the trivia competition, Ms. Martin convinced Isaias to keep playing. Minutes later he and his teammates faced off against suburban public Collierville High School in a biology lab. The players took seats on metal lab stools.
“The translation of the capital city of what South American nation literally means, ‘The Peace?’”
Isaias buzzed in. “Bolivia.”
“Bolivia is correct. Bonus round, square root.” Isaias groaned.
“What is x if the square root of 2x + 15 = 5?”
Isaias paused. “Um, 5.” Correct.
Kingsbury was scoring, but not enough. “Bonus Kingsbury. Last lines. This is the last line of what Hemingway novel? ‘The old man was dreaming about the lions.’”
A conference, then Isaias said, “The Old Man and the Sea.”
“Old Man and the Sea is correct.”
Both teams missed the twentieth and final question. Lab stools scraped as the students stood up. Kingsbury had lost for the sixth time in a row.
Ms. Martin tried to cheer them up. “You answered so many questions correctly.” As the group moved down the hall, she told them that not so long ago, Kingsbury’s Knowledge Bowl team had routinely gotten scores of zero.
The students seemed ready to think about something else. Daniel Nix announced, “I’m looking at the bear” and walked off toward a big stuffed beast mounted on all fours in a glass case. The other kids followed. Later, Ms. Martin took them to lunch at a Chinese buffet near the high school, and when they finished their meals, a waitress brought the group a plate of fortune cookies. Skylar Sutton read aloud from the white strip of paper. “You will enjoy doing something different this coming weekend.” Daniel’s said the same thing. They continued around the table, and Isaias read his: “You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily.”
“I don’t know about that,” Isaias said. “I used to think these things were very accurate.”