And, of course, to the teachers: no character in this book was based on any real-life teacher. However, I am indebted to the hundreds of teachers who took time over the years to speak with me about their experiences, let me observe classes, or share insights into their subject matter. Special thanks to science teacher Carlos Draschner, whose crow-themed lesson plan I used in its entirety, and Bill Harrington, whose lunar-colony activity and related comment about plants inspired aspects of Hernan’s character. And to Coach Alex Terry, who showed phenomenal patience in answering my football questions.
Thanks, also, to the people who offered help and opportunities as my first book, See Me After Class, made its way through the world. These include: Rita Rosenkranz, Michael Sprague, Arielle Eckstut, David Henry Sterry, Dave Barry, Rick Hess, Alexander Russo, Dan Brown, Larry Ferlazzo, Carolyn Guthrie, and many other generous professionals in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools; Davar Ardalan and Michel Martin of NPR’s Tell Me More; Lori Crouch, Emily Richmond, Gregg Toppo, and the whole wonderful Education Writers Association; Ellen Moir, Jane Baker, Tracy Kremer, and Kathy Raymond with the New Teacher Center; Meg Anderson and Cory Turner of NPR-Ed; The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; The Miami Book Fair and Miami Writers Institute; the volunteers who started the Miami chapter of the New Leaders Council; John Norton, Barnett Berry, and the rest of the folks at the Center for Teaching Quality. The doors and windows you opened offered views of the education world that would never have been visible from my classroom.
I’m tremendously grateful to the people who read drafts of this novel and provided a vital mix of feedback and encouragement: Andy Baldwin, Jennie Smith-Camejo, Nadine Gonzalez, Natalia Sylvester, Tamica Lewis, Kathy Pham, Zakia Jarrett, Nick Garnett, Ginger Seehafer, Inga Aragon, Cathy Kelly, and John and Jackie Ermer.
The work of many other writers has influenced this book and my writing in general. I am indebted to the many journalists and memoirists who have taken time to describe what goes on in classrooms, provide context, and search out what is hidden from view. Works of nonfiction that informed parts of this book include The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein, Hope Against Hope by Sarah Carr, We Own This Game by Robert Andrew Powell, Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote, Making the Grades by Todd Farley, Tested by Linda Perlstein, The Same Thing Over and Over by Frederick Hess, Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors, by Alexander Russo, Disintegration by Eugene Robinson, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, Friday Night Lights by H. G. Bissinger, Against Football by Steve Almond, Life in Prison by Robert Reilly, The Great Expectations School by Dan Brown, and Teaching in Circles by Nathan Miller. The poem that Lena plays in her classroom is a nod to “First Writing Since,” by Suheir Hammad, a poem I played many times for my own students, and one that proves the power of the right words arranged in the right order. I’ll stop there. But the truth is, there are so many books, both fiction and nonfiction, that have influenced my writing and continue to do so. (Mine is an English teacher’s soul in the end. I always look for the symbolism. I always notice the hand imagery.) With that in mind, fellow readers are welcome to join me on Goodreads, where I catalogue every book I read in weirdly precise categories.
Accolades for an earlier version of this novel go out to Molly Lindley Pisani, an intuitive editor who understood exactly where I was trying to go and helped me get there, paragraph by paragraph; to Katie Herman, meticulous master of the well-placed comma and finely turned phrase; to cover designers Alan Dino Hebel and Ian Koviak; and to Pauline Neuwirth.
Finally, thanks to my family, who provided invaluable early reads, equally invaluable final reads, listening ears, vocal support, private pep talks, childcare, and love. Thanks to my parents, Phyllis Mandler and Gary Elden, for all the ingredients that led me to become a teacher and later a writer. Merci beaucoup to my mother-in-law, Myrtha Volmar (aka “Grandma Tita”), who gave her time and love to help with two babies so I could work on the book. To Erica, for reading and listening to more of my words than anyone should ever have to, and Bryan, for feedback on the manuscript and interesting conversations on many of the issues I hoped to tackle in this book. Thanks to Brenda and Lucien for making holidays special and to Dony for the pictures and soundtrack that pull the whole movie together. Thanks to Stephanie, a true “lead(H)er,” for sharing female business lady advice when I needed it, and to Tammie, Marty, and Wendie for encouragement and good times. Special remembrance to my two grandmothers, Sylvia Elden, a voracious reader and unfailing supporter who I always wanted to make proud, and Barbara Mandler, whose shiny red nails and outspoken negotiating skills live on in my memory. Thanks to all the Volmars, Siclaits, and Dewsburys who showed up to events, spread the word, helped with the kids, fed me fantastic food, and made life better in so many ways.
To the Zs: You are my favorite people to read books with. I hope you’ll both grow up to be big readers and writers—even if it means that your minds (like your mother’s) are sometimes elsewhere.
And to Claude, who always treated this book as an inevitability rather than a dream, and without whom this and so many other things would never have been possible. Muah.
ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS
Roxanna Elden
This reading group guide for Adequate Yearly Progress includes discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Roxanna Elden. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
TOPICS & QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
The novel begins with the line “Brae Hill Valley High School did not sit atop a hill.” Why do you think the author chose to begin the novel this way? What does the focus on the school itself suggest?
In an early scene, teachers at orientation hear two extended metaphors, about a starfish and the moon, although “Hernan noted some scientific discrepancies in the moon-and-stars metaphor”. How does this scene set up and introduce concepts that will resonate throughout the novel?
Dr. Barrios makes a major misstep with the new superintendent, Nick Wallabee, while attempting to be friendly and is accused of “defending the status quo”. How does the dichotomy between achievement and the status quo recur in later sections?
How does Lena’s interest in spoken-word poetry influence her work in the classroom?
Maybelline learned two things from her mother: “1. Don’t depend on a man. 2. Don’t ever, ever become a nurse”. What does this say about her outlook on life, and how do her relationships with her family—Rosemary, Allyson, and Coach Ray—adhere to or diverge from this advice?
At a colleague happy hour, Kaytee begins grading her students’ “exit tickets” at the table until Lena tells her she’s “killing everyone’s buzz”. Kaytee takes this personally. What does she do to set herself apart from her colleagues? Does this idea of herself and her role change in the course of the school year?
Brae Hill Valley High School takes football seriously. Why do you think football is set up in opposition to academics?
Describe how each teacher interacts with his or her students. Do you think that one teacher is particularly effective?
Maybelline Galang promised to “leave no room for error or chaos” after a classroom altercation a decade ago. How does Andres Medina’s story affect her life? Do you believe that this was a formative experience for her as a teacher? Do others at the school have similar experiences?
Hernan thinks like a scientist in many ways. How does he apply logic and the scientific method in his own life?
When Kaytee goes home, she notes that her father “could never understand what it was like on the front lines in the fight for educational equity”. What aspects of her job do her parents’ differing beliefs make clearer for her? How does she reconcile her upbringing with her adult life?
How does Lena’s relationship with Hernan develop throughout the novel? How does it differ from her relation
ship with Nex Level?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
Compare your high school experience to those of the characters in the novel. Was your experience similar or different?
Slam poetry is a vibrant community. Attend a reading with your book club or look up (the many!) videos online. A few of the author’s favorite slam poetry videos include Dana Gilmore performing Wife, Woman, Friend, Suheir Hammad’s First Writing Since, and Rives’s Sign Language. You can also watch Lin-Manuel Miranda perform an early Hamilton song at the White House as part of a poetry event.
Visit the author’s website RoxannaElden.com for more on education, writing tips, and this novel.
A CONVERSATION WITH ROXANNA ELDEN
How did the idea for this novel come about?
For years, as an English teacher, I’d used bribes like extra credit and pizza parties to get my students to participate in National Novel Writing Month. This is a challenge in which people around the world commit to writing the first words of a novel on the first day of November and finishing a 50,000-word first draft by November thirtieth. To complete the work within this strict timeline, you have to write so fast you can’t possibly second-guess yourself, so it seemed like a great way to get high schoolers to write without feeling self-conscious. In all this time, though, I’d never tried it myself. Then, one year, a student said, “How about you, Ms. Elden? Are you going to participate?” There’s probably no better way to get a teacher to write a novel than this exact scenario.
You were a high school English teacher for more than a decade. How did that experience inform the writing of this novel?
Teaching students to write prepared me to read like a writer. A common strategy among language arts teachers is to share excerpts of “mentor texts” to showcase specific aspects of writing done well. We might ask students to copy the structure or rhyme scheme of a poem. They might even mimic the punctuation of one wonderful sentence to harness its rhythm. My all-time favorite lesson on how to write a good setting centers on a two-page, actionless chapter in the middle of Scott Simon’s book Windy City, which starts, “It was the worst—by far the worst—time of year.” It was only a small jump from this teaching strategy to one of my favorite habits as an author: cataloguing books on Goodreads in weirdly precise categories, then trying to reverse engineer what I love about the writing. At last count, my profile had fifty-nine virtual bookshelves, with titles like classroom scenes ring true, dialogue done well, etc. Taken together, the bookshelf titles read like a vision board of what I hope to do in my own writing.
What do you hope readers take away from this book?
My goal was to write a page-turning story that anyone would enjoy, but it was also important that the details rang true to teachers. I’ve always had a problem with the Hollywood version of the teacher story, where one self-sacrificing hero battles her terrible colleagues to save the kids. In those stories, it’s too easy to identify the heroes, the villains, and the exact right thing to do. Of course we’re rooting for the teacher who flamboyantly cares about her students, who plans fun lessons that relate to their lives—and also happens to be played by a beautiful actress. In real schools, the lighting is harsher, and the questions are more complex. What happens when that fun, relevant lesson plan goes off the rails? What happens when a teacher cares, but is also coming into school the day after a breakup? And what’s already going on in the classroom when a voice comes on the PA to announce the newest success initiative?
You’re still actively involved in the education world as a speaker, workshop leader, and blogger. What large changes have you seen in the community and how did you apply those fictionally?
Every workplace has conflicting personalities and competing agendas. In schools, there’s an additional layer because there are so many different ideas about how to do education right. There also tends to be a cycle to competing ideas: The newest big fix is often a reaction to the last big fix that didn’t quite work as everyone hoped. And every idea has the potential to be oversold or done badly. I hoped to show all these competing forces at play in one school.
This novel has been described as a “gentle workplace satire,” and it is very funny! Did the humor come easily? Are there aspects of the teaching experience that lend themselves particularly well to humor?
Many of the scenes that people have said made them laugh out loud were those that captured emotionally true moments. Rarely did I write a line with the intention of making someone laugh, but I was always aiming for emotional honesty.
Each section and chapter has its own title, which is rarer in fiction than in nonfiction. What did you hope to convey with these?
Each of the chapters is named after a curriculum standard or initiative, but each of the concepts can also be applied to what’s happening in the lives of the characters. This is also true of the novel’s title. “Adequate yearly progress” might not fit everyone’s idea of a happy ending, but it’s actually not such a bad goal.
This novel features the perspectives of six characters. What made you decide to write from multiple points of view?
My own favorite novels have been by authors like Zadie Smith, Tom Wolfe, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. These authors tell their stories through a range of fully rounded characters, and the result is a panoramic view of the world they are writing about. Having multiple characters allows a story to filter through different personalities and opinions. It also allows each character to have blind spots that are only apparent through the eyes of others. Teachers are a diverse group of sometimes-heroic, often-flawed, and occasionally hilarious humans doing a complicated job no one has quite figured out yet. Multiple points of view felt like the best way to capture this.
Kaytee writes an anonymous blog about her teaching experience. Why did you choose to include nontraditional forms—like a blog—to tell this story?
I wanted to touch on the many ways that stories about teaching appear in the media. This includes, among other things, stories teachers share about their own classrooms on blogs or social media. It felt important to include this type of perspective in the book, and to show some of its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, the internet can offer a direct line for teachers to share what is happening in their classrooms. Educators aren’t trained to communicate like politicians. They’re usually at a disadvantage when they have to summarize their thoughts into nine-second sound bites. Blogs allow them to add to the conversation without having to do this. At the same time, it can be hard to be objective about a story that just happened and in which you are an active character. It can also be hard to fully participate in an experience if you know you’ll be writing about it later for an audience.
Are there any stories from your teaching days that inspired this novel?
None of the book falls into the “real events with names changed” category. A lot of it, however, was sparked by ideas I had during the course of the school day. There are some observations that can only come from sitting through a test-prep pep rally, or thinking back on a conversation with a student, or seeing how teenagers react when a giant cockroach crawls through a classroom. Over the course of several years, I would jot down thoughts on sticky notes or e-mail them to myself during lunch. Then, on the weekends, when I sat down to work on the book, I’d think about how those new ingredients might fit into the recipe.
You feature a wide range of perspectives from teachers. How did you do research for the characters?
Each of the six biggest characters is a composite. They combine bits of myself, bits of people I’ve known, and additional research. Some of this research was from books by education journalists and memoirists—so much so that there is a list of nonfiction books in the acknowledgments. But a lot of research also involved interviewing other teachers and sitting in on classes.
Did you learn anything unexpected while doing research for this book?
An unexpected detail I learned, especially from classroom visits and interviews, was that teachers’ experiences in t
he same school can be very different depending on the subjects they teach. There are details I would never have considered by just relying on my view from the English department. Science teachers, for example, have to worry about lab safety—and they’re more likely to have plants or animals in the classroom. Touchy cultural subjects are more likely to come up in a history class than a math class. And athletic coaches spend a ton of extra time on the job.
Which scene was the most fun to write?
The scenes that were the most fun to write often included obnoxious behavior or awkward moments I’d experienced in real life and didn’t have a good response to at the time. Writing the scenes gave me a chance to dissect these interactions and figure out what made them so obnoxious or awkward.
Were there any scenes that were especially hard to write?
Sometimes moments that are objectively bad—like a fight in the classroom—are not the ones that make teachers feel the worst. In fact, handling a crisis correctly can even boost a teacher’s confidence that he or she is the right person for the job. Other times, though, an event that would seem like no big deal to anyone else can drag a teacher’s faith through the mud in an inexplicably horrible way. A lot depends on context. It can be hard to show why a moment might be hard for a particular teacher, but it was something that felt important to capture in the book: the worst moments as a teacher aren’t always the most dramatic. The good news? The best moments aren’t, either.
What has the reaction from fellow educators been like?
One of my favorite responses to the book came from a former colleague who sent me a picture of something she found behind a file box in her classroom. It was a piece of half-eaten candy, stuck to a piece of chewed gum, covered on both sides with human hair. Underneath she wrote, “This lends massive credibility to your narrative.” More broadly, I’ve been thrilled and honored to hear from teachers who appreciate that someone got the story right. It now seems I wasn’t the only teacher talking out loud during classroom scenes in movies, saying things like, “I don’t think a student would RAISE HIS HAND to tell the teacher he hates her!” Or, “Really? Everyone did the assignment? Everyone? ” Many teachers have told me they’ve read the book in book clubs with their colleagues, and readers from forty-two states have requested signed stickers for copies they were giving to teachers as gifts.
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