I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High

by Tony Danza

  WE END CLASS on Friday with ten contestants left to hear on Monday, but by midnight the Blizzard of 2010 has begun. Over seventy inches of snow will drop on the city in the next week and a half, breaking all records. There goes my momentum.

  There was a time when I thought snow days were the best deal going. I remember lying awake winter nights as a kid, counting the inches piling up on my windowsill and hoping against hope that there’d be enough by morning to cancel school. If the schools closed, it was big news, worthy of a radio or television announcement, and as much a surprise to our teachers as to us, which meant that we almost never had homework over these breaks. So SNOW spelled FREEDOM. All the kids on the block would turn out to take on the mountains of soft pack that the plows piled high on every corner. We’d build igloos and forts and tunnels, and I was especially good at knocking everyone else off the hill when we played King of the Mountain. Our snowball fights usually ended with us whiting out cars and running like hell when the drivers stopped. Good times, but that was then.

  Now, as I watch day after day of whiteout through my magic window, all I can think is, How will we make up this lost time? Every teacher feels the ever-present tick-tock of the curriculum clock. You have only so much time to cover so much. You sit home and worry about losing the momentum that you painstakingly gained before the storm. You wonder what the kids are doing with their free time, but you know full well they’re not catching up on schoolwork. So you won’t just be delayed when the storm is over; you’ll be behind where you left off. You’ll need to backtrack at least one day before moving on.

  Which is just what we do when we finally reconvene after a full week of snow days. The remaining students recite their poems, and then, because the scores are so close, I ask those who read before the storm to run through their poems again. Only Al G refuses. “I’m not winning anyway,” he says. “I’ll take the score I got.” I don’t fight him.

  The judges boil the finalists down to Emmanuel with Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” Janae with Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” and Daniel with Sandra Tolson’s “He Sits Alone.” Because it’s a three-way tie, we bring in the ultimate arbiter—the principal—to make the final call.

  Before we hear the three finalists, however, I invite Al G to recite his poem for the principal. If his look could kill, I’d be down for the count, but this is an offer Al knows he cannot refuse. He stands up, comes forward, and performs his poem well. For once, I smirk at him.

  Daniel is the last of the finalists to read. “He Sits Alone” describes an old man left in a nursing home to die, and Daniel recites it slowly, quietly, accompanied by a piece of low, sad instrumental music. Beside him rests a colorful portrait he’s painted of a bearded man weeping by a window. By the time he finishes, Ms. Carroll, too, is crying.

  After Daniel takes his bow, I ask, “What line in the poem stands out to you?”

  He answers without hesitation. “ ‘I can’t imagine what he thinks as he wipes away his tears.’ ”

  “And why did you choose this poem?”

  “I have a grandmother who lives far away, and I don’t get to see her that often. She’s healthy but so far away.”

  It’s unanimous. The judges all hold up tens. The kids cheer, and Daniel gives us the kind of sweet smile that I usually associate with saints and wise men.

  Ms. Carroll is still drying her eyes as she congratulates Daniel. Then I surprise the other finalists by bringing out three flip cams, so they each receive one. When the excitement of that presentation dies down, Ms. Carroll addresses the whole class. “I’ve had a rough week,” she tells them. “The kind of week that makes me question why I’m even here. Thank you. You reminded me why I do this work.”

  The kids have made me look good in front of the principal and turned the poetry contest into a highlight of my year. I would even venture a guess that some of the kids remember their poems. I remember “If.”

  TEACHERS’ LOUNGE

  Happy Hour

  Ever since the teachers’ talent show, I’ve been trying to figure out why teachers at Northeast don’t socialize. Outside of the twenty or so teachers in their Small Learning Communities, some barely know each other’s names. The only time they see each other is when signing in each morning, and even within the SLC, there’s little real opportunity to interact. Policy announcements and paperwork dominate the daily meetings, and after school everybody just scatters.

  I understand that with two hundred overworked teachers, there are bound to be some who don’t have the time or energy to spend with colleagues outside of school. But by the same token, there are probably many who’d welcome the chance to connect. Freshman teachers, especially, need to get to know veterans who can help them through the rigors of Year One. I decide to try an experiment.

  If the teachers at Northeast worked at an office, chances are good that at least a few of them would get together over drinks at the end of the week, so why shouldn’t a Friday happy hour work for teachers, too? Just down Cottman Avenue, a few blocks from school, there’s a blue-collar bar called Nick’s Roast Beef. It has a side room that always seems to be empty and would be perfect for our purposes. Before I get too carried away, though, I decide to check with Kelly Barton to make sure my plan won’t violate any administration policy. After my nearly catastrophic vodka at Patsy’s in New York, I’m not taking any chances. But now Kelly tells me sure, as long as no students are present and we’re off school grounds and on our own time, a teachers’ happy hour sounds like a fine idea.

  “I take that back,” he says. “It sounds like an excellent idea. Give people a chance to relax and get acquainted.” On second and third thought, Kelly likes the idea so much that he offers to come himself and pay for a spread of food each week. “Encourage folks.”

  I reserve the side room for Friday afternoon, invite a few teachers from my SLC, and enlist Crystal Green and Joe Connelly to recruit some of the other new teachers. When we arrive, we find a small contingent of Teach for America teachers from our school who’ve discovered Nick’s on their own. I pull these young women in, and pretty soon we’ve got the makings of a regular party.

  The conversations run the gamut. Politics, city government, and the Phillies are all fair game. However, the talk always seems to circle back to work. The more beer that’s poured, the more candid the comments get, and it soon becomes clear to me that the number one concern among these teachers is job security.

  “You’re at the mercy of the administration and the district,” Tim Flaherty, an old hand, tells one of the new teachers. “That’s not so scary when you have a strong principal like ours, but if you have a weak one, watch out.” Mr. Flaherty, Northeast’s choirmaster, has one of the highest teacher ratings in the school, so it startles me to hear his blunt warning. “Some administrations operate like a personality contest, and if the principal doesn’t like you or you make some rookie blunder, then if it weren’t for the union, you’d be gone.”

  Now I happen to be a union man. My father was in the public employees’ union and I’ve been a member of the Screen Actors Guild for almost thirty-five years. But I’m curious what this group thinks about the political knocks on the teachers’ union. What about the charge that the union protects bad teachers? That it supports giving tenure to teachers who don’t deserve it, and then makes it virtually impossible to fire tenured teachers? “I mean,” I say, “everybody here is giving two hundred percent in the classroom, but what about the teachers who don’t?”

  A pall falls over the group. Nobody wants to admit it, but we can all point to several teachers who ought to find another profession. Once when I asked David Cohn what percentage of teachers at our school he’d rate as really good, he surprised me by answering “A small percentage.”

  Joe Connelly volunteers a story about his wife, Sam. When she started teaching middle school, she used to tutor students during lunch. One day an older teacher objected to Sam’s decision to give up her lunch break. He said he’d stood in a picket line to
ensure that teachers had time to eat lunch without any additional duties. He felt as if Sam was disrespecting all the people who were involved in that fight. He even accused her of compromising the gains that were made as a result of collective bargaining. “Sam said she was willing to donate her time for the sake of the students who needed additional support,” Joe concludes, “but she got his point and is still wrestling with it years later.”

  One of the Teach for America recruits, who looks like a schoolgirl herself, gets pretty worked up as she says to Joe, “I’m with your wife. What about those kids? With all the layoffs and cutbacks, it’s the students who get screwed. To stop her from volunteering her time seems just wrongheaded—as wrongheaded as packing classrooms with fifty kids to save money.”

  I know what she means. Concessions have to be made on all sides to get us through the financial crisis, but how do we cut back on costs while still attracting and retaining good teachers and helping them do what it really takes to educate these kids?

  Joe nurses his beer. “I think the union’s more vital now than ever. We need them to outline what aspects of the contracts are necessary and what aspects are negotiable. I feel like certain police and fire locals have set a good example. They agreed collectively to take a hit on individual salaries to keep all of their members employed and their neighborhoods safe.”

  Everybody seems to be onboard with that, though Mr. Flaherty warns, “Sometimes when you give an inch, they demand a mile.” This unleashes a wave of grousing about all the district mandates that are intended to keep bad teachers in line but make good teachers feel like their wings are clipped. Crystal Green mentions the phrase charter schools, and the older teachers explode. “Private schools for the masses!” It’s not meant as a compliment.

  Charter schools are nonunion, but they also run the gamut from good to just as bad as and worse than low-performing public schools. Tim Flaherty shakes his head. “It’s criminal the way charter schools are being held up as if they’re some sort of educational panacea.”

  Kelly Barton changes the subject to the latest outrage on the Philadelphia education scene: a scandal in a suburban school district, Lower Merion, where a family is suing the district for using a webcam in a school-issued laptop to spy on their son. Science teacher Russell Gregory, a.k.a. Dr. G., lets out a gallows laugh. “This gives a whole new meaning to the term technology initiative. They gave out twenty-three hundred laptops—one to every single high school kid in Lower Merion. That’s quite a peep show.”

  “Well, it’s not a total loss for English teachers,” Lynn Dixon says with a laugh. “Anybody who teaches Orwell’s 1984 in Philadelphia now has a 2010 example of Big Brother.”

  Kelly says, “Even Orwell wouldn’t come up with an assistant principal dumb enough to show the parents a photo from the webcam.” He tells us that the photo was supposed to prove their son was using drugs, but when the parents went ballistic the principal had to admit that the district had activated the camera remotely. This meant that they could watch whatever was going on in the boy’s bedroom—or wherever any of the school-issued laptops happened to be sitting. “It seems they captured some four hundred shots of this kid, and who knows how many of all the other students, and their families.”

  “You gotta wonder what those Merion school officials were on,” somebody says.

  “That’s easy,” Dr. G. answers. “Money.” He means the money in Lower Merion, which is as affluent as the area around Northeast is poor. “What I could do for my science lab with the cash it took to buy those laptops—not to mention the dough they’re going to have to shell out to settle this thing.”

  I think back to the first day of school, when Dr. G. stopped by my classroom pushing a cart with a giant aloe plant in a large pot. With his long, crazy hair, white lab coat, and rapid talk, he struck me as the epitome of a weird science teacher, and I’d come to admire him as one of the most inspiring in the school. “For your room.” He nodded at the plant. Touched by the gesture, I set the pot in a place of honor by the window and thanked him effusively. I told him that my mother always kept an aloe plant on hand and used the gel inside the leaves as a salve for cuts and sunburns. Now I’d think of her every day because of him and his gift. Dr. G. listened with his arms folded. “That’s sweet,” he said. “But this isn’t a gift. You’re just taking care of it till the end of the year. Then I’ll take it back.” His message was clear. At Northeast, everything was shared. It had to be; there was no surplus for extra gestures.

  Nine

  Our Atticus

  ONE MORNING a few days after the poetry contest, a tenth grader who’s not in my class wanders into my room before school and starts strolling along the wall where I’ve hung my students’ poetry posters. This boy is slight and pale, with dark buzzed hair and shadows where he’ll soon have sideburns. A widow’s peak shapes his face into a heart. Some kids have trouble written all over them, but not this one. He’s quiet as he takes in the biographies of poets on the wall and the images that illustrate their poems. I sit at my desk and pretend not to be watching.

  Although I don’t know his name, I know this boy has most of his classes near my room. First semester, when I was walking down the hall with my cameras in tow, he and I would often nod to each other. One day as I passed, he extended his hand to shake mine. Always looking to be friendly, I reached out, and just as I did, he pulled his hand away, stuck his thumb up, and got me. He laughed. Since then we’ve been on fist-bump terms.

  Finally he turns to me. “Had a poetry contest, huh?”

  I glance up, low-key. “Yeah.”

  Silence. He continues his perusing. “You know, I write poetry.”

  “No kidding.” I give him my attention. “Hey, what’s your name?”

  “Name’s Alex.”

  “And what do you write about?”

  “Mostly about my dad. He was killed in a car accident.”

  The sound of kids in the hall gets louder. I want to get up and go to this boy, but I stay put. “Alex, I’m so sorry. I lost my dad, too. I was older than you, but I know how you feel.”

  He shrugs, as if it’s no big deal, and I let a few seconds pass. Then I ask, “Do you write about anything else?”

  His face goes blank. “Now I write about my mother.”

  I’m afraid to ask. “What do you write about her?”

  “She was stabbed to death.”

  Well, that catapults me out of my chair. I’m across the room in two steps. Alex accepts my bear hug. I can’t tell if he welcomes it, or tolerates it, but he doesn’t push me away. After a minute I stand back. My heart is hammering and I’m fighting tears. What was it that teacher in SLC warned me about at the beginning of the year? “Adoption fantasy,” he called it.

  I screw up my courage. “Who do you live with now?”

  “Me and my sister live in a foster home with my stepuncle.”

  Stepuncle takes me a while to figure out. It’s clear that this boy’s life is beyond anything I can imagine. I ask him if he’d let me read some of his writing.

  He looks at his feet. “Sure.”

  The next day Alex brings me an overstuffed binder of his work. Not only is he prolific but the poems are good. He writes about bullying and sorrow and teen suicide and helplessness. One long poem, “I’m an Oxymoron,” speaks to his own inner conflicts and really shakes me up, but it’s hopeful as well, which is what kills me about this boy. The last lines read:

  I’m the bright part of life even though it’s dark

  And at last I can be myself

  I have the ability to give up

  The choice of wealth

  I have the advantage to win

  I’m the sickness to my health

  Overwhelmed with thoughts they start to talk

  Worried about myself so I forget about this world and everything in it,

  I’m an oxymoron of death

  I’m life without breath

  I’m that dead person living

  That
lost soul I struggle to find

  I’m nothing just words that were spoken

  I am

  Poetry.

  Alex wants to compete in poetry slams, and I urge him to go for it. We discuss the confidence you need to be a good performer, and I show him how to improve his enunciation and stage presence. Pretty soon Alex is a regular in the half-sandwich club.

  On Earth Day he turns up in my room again before school starts. This time he clutches a poem he’s written about the environment. “You think Ms. DeNaples would let me recite it over the school intercom?” he asks me.

  Fat chance is what I think. Ms. DeNaples is as jealous with that intercom as if she’d won it at the Oscars. But I don’t tell Alex that. After all, she did let me use it to promote the teachers’ talent show. “Can’t hurt to ask!” I say, and down to the office we go.

  Ms. DeNaples seems to have a special on good humor going for Earth Day. Against all odds, she not only accepts Alex’s offer but also invites him to make the morning announcements. This is unprecedented.

  Alex clears his throat, and I remind him to stand straight and breathe. He takes the mike in hand. “Good morning,” he announces gravely. “This is Alex, and here are today’s announcements.”

  The office staff is mesmerized. I imagine the entire school staring at the loudspeakers in disbelief. Ms. DeNaples yielded the intercom to a student? A tenth grader, no less? Who is this kid?

  Finally, after the announcements of the day’s events, Alex says, “Today is Earth Day. This is a poem I’ve written in honor of the earth:

  “If mother nature had a favorite color,

  it would be deep sea blue like Poseidon’s bones,