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

by Tony Danza

  I’d like to lend Monte a hand, but I’m restricted by the rules of the Student Teacher program, which the other students are more than eager to enforce. When I do tell the others to pipe down and give Monte a chance, Charmaine shouts, “He’s the teacher, Mr. Danza. He’s gotta make us.” As usual, she’s got me.

  Monte soldiers through to the end of class, but he reminds me of a tire with a slow leak. By the time the bell rings, he’s running lopsided and his treads are just about shot. While everybody else shoots off to lunch, Monte sinks into a seat and I debrief him the way David usually does me. We review what he did that worked, and what he would do differently next time. Then I ask him if he’s picked up any useful advice for me.

  Monte looks down at his copy of Mockingbird. He leafs through it until he gets to a scene in which Atticus is explaining to his daughter, Scout, why it’s a mistake to judge people on the basis of their appearance. Monte reads, “ ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

  “Would you consider a truce?” I ask.

  Monte gives me a sheepish grin, then he stands up and formally extends his hand. We shake on our new understanding.

  One kid at a time, I think as I watch him head off to lunch. More and more that seems to me the essence of teaching: one kid at a time. The problem is that there are so many of them, and unlike most of them, Monte actually wants to learn.

  ACHIEVING PEACE with Monte makes me feel good, but it hardly proves I’m the boss. Al G has just come back from this week’s three-day suspension when I catch him cheating openly on the makeup test I was nice enough to let him take. Even though he sits in the back of the room, I don’t need a telescope to see that his book is open on the floor beside his desk. I cannot get over his gall, cheating like that on his first day back, but I don’t speak to him until the next day, when I try, try again.

  “I could write you up so you get another suspension,” I tell him, “or we can make a deal. First, you apologize for cheating. And you mean it. Then you say, ‘I want to do the work, and I will do my best the rest of the year.’ ”

  Al G almost sneers in my face, but he manages to contain himself. I keep it up. “It’s not that long until summer, and the way you’re going isn’t working. How about trying something different?”

  I think what finally does the trick is my reminder that the year’s almost over. Al won’t give in right away, but after a few rounds, he apologizes for cheating, and then says after me, “I want to do the work, and I will do my best the rest of the year.” I’m not fool enough to think this will be the end of my headaches with him, but at least he acknowledges that another suspension won’t benefit either of us.

  It just so happens that the next day’s lesson plan calls for a conversation about moral education, which helps to seal my deal with Al. I’m working off a model that identifies six stages of moral development. In the most basic, first stage, behavior is motivated only by the desire to avoid pain; in the highest stages, action is motivated by a strong sense of personal principle and concern for the welfare of others. The class generally agrees that Atticus Finch, in our novel, represents the highest stages of moral development, while his daughter, Scout, moves up from the lower stages over the course of the book. Then I ask the kids to decide where they stand in their own moral development. This is just the kind of question somebody should have asked me when I was in tenth grade.

  Some of the kids say they behave—or misbehave—to impress their friends (Stage 3). Others say they’d probably misbehave more except that there are rules, and they feel like they have to obey the law (Stage 4). Since everybody loves Atticus in the story (especially as played in an Oscar-winning performance by the late great Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version, which we’ve screened), the kids agree that they’d like to reach his level of moral development someday, but right now, friends’ opinions have more sway over their actions than the common good does. I thank them for their honesty.

  Then I pose the question to Al G, who’s been frowning in silence at the different stages I’ve written on the blackboard. “I guess I’m stuck at Stages Two and One,” he decides. “I only do things for a reward or to avoid punishment.” He seems proud of himself for reaching this conclusion.

  “Haven’t you ever done something for another reason?”

  “Nope, not me.”

  I don’t believe him, and despite his smug comeback, I sense that he’s thinking about some possibilities he’s never considered before. If you act out of concern for others or because of a code of honor you’ve created for yourself, you make your own rules. That has a certain appeal for a kid like Al, though at this moment he’s not about to let me know it.

  I’M ALONE IN MY ROOM a few afternoons later when a sophomore named Brittiny stops in. We’ve never spoken, but I’ve been told she’s one of Northeast’s “older students”—kids who are in danger of aging out of public high school without graduating. Brittiny’s uniform shirt is wrinkled and untucked, the sleeves rolled up to her skinny elbows. She looks like a tough fourteen-year-old, but I’ve heard that she’s actually nineteen. “Come on in,” I beckon.

  Brittiny seems surprised by my welcome. She looks over her shoulder as if I’m talking to someone else and almost disappears, but then sidles in. She stays close to the door as she checks me out, then trains her eyes on the student projects that festoon the walls. After a minute or two she asks, “Did your students do all this stuff?”

  I wonder who else she thinks could have done them. “Yes,” I say. “Those displays you’re looking at there are about To Kill a Mockingbird. You ever read that book?”

  She shrugs a familiar shrug. It’s a gesture of shame and frustration meant to look like indifference. “I can’t really read,” Brittiny says, as flatly as if she’s telling me she doesn’t roller skate.

  But she doesn’t say don’t; she says can’t. “What do you mean?” I challenge her. “Sure you can.”

  I grab a copy of Mockingbird from my desk and direct her to take a seat. Dropping next to her, I open to the first page, point to the first line, and read, “ ‘When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.’ ” I check her expression as she tracks the words after me. “Right? What comes next?”

  She scrunches up her nose, but her eyes don’t leave the page. She reads haltingly, “ ‘When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were ass-ass-yu—’ ” She halts and shuts her eyes. Her voice turns bitter. “I told you.”

  “No, no. That’s a tricky word. It’s pronounces ah-sway-j’d. Can you say that?” She repeats assuaged. “Can you figure out from the sentence what it means?”

  Her whole body is tense, and I can almost feel her holding her breath, but she works through it, glaring at the first paragraph. “Means he’s not afraid no more.”

  “There you go! That’s right. Assuaged means healed, or made better. He could put those fears behind him and move on. See? The rest of the sentence reads, ‘he was seldom self-conscious about his injury’ after that. Self-conscious, like you are about reading.”

  As Brittiny picks up and reads the next sentence without being prompted, I say a silent thank-you to Ms. Harper Lee. But by the second page, I’m biting my tongue. As Brittiny bravely attempts to decode the paragraphs that chronicle the history of Atticus Finch’s forebears in Alabama, her breath stutters and her dark eyes flood with frustration. I relieve her by reading the sentences that contain words like apothecary, and stinginess, irritated, and descendants. But she’s more familiar than I would expect with persecution, brethren, chattels, and impotent.

  “This boy’s granddaddy owned slaves?” Brittiny regards the page suspiciously.

  “More like his great-great-granddaddy. The boy’s father is a white lawyer who defends an innocent black man from his white accusers. That’s a lot of what the story’s about. How the effects of slavery were passed down
in the South, and what personal courage and intelligence it takes to challenge those effects—to fight injustice.”

  Brittiny will not meet my eyes. She frowns at the book, and I suspect she’d like to throw it across the room. Instead, her lips begin to move as she prepares to continue reading aloud. We trade passages for over half an hour. When the bell rings, a look of panic crosses her face, as if she’s just failed a test.

  “Want to come back and keep going tomorrow?” I ask.

  Brittiny doesn’t say anything. She just nods.

  That afternoon I visit Brittiny’s counselor, a well-intentioned and brutally overworked woman named Ms. Kinney, who does her job with a smile and real concern for the kids and, as best she can, keeps track of their home lives. But like most public school counselors, she can do little more than monitor the hundreds of “problem kids” assigned to her, and she generally intervenes only when emergencies arise.

  As we talk I flash back to a heart-wrenching video that was shown to us during orientation at the beginning of the year. The narrator of the video told a story about a student who kept falling asleep in class. The girl’s teacher, treating the situation purely as a discipline problem, kept admonishing her to pick her head up and pay attention. No one ever asked why this student was so sleepy. The girl barely managed to graduate and went to work at a fast-food restaurant to support her ailing mother. One day her mother took a turn for the worse. The girl rode with her mother in the ambulance to the hospital, but shortly after they arrived her mother died. Later, the paramedics asked if they could drive the girl home, but she asked instead to be taken back to school. She’d been taking care of her mother night and day for years. That’s why she was so tired in class. Nevertheless, school was the only place where she felt hope. The story then took a surprising turn, as the narrator admitted that she had been that young girl. She closed by urging her fellow teachers to find out what’s going on in their students’ lives, especially when they exhibit unusual behavior.

  Now Ms. Kinney tells me that Brittiny has been through the wringer. Like so many of the kids at Northeast, this girl is growing up without a father, but even worse, her mother passes her around to various relatives and, when that doesn’t work, to foster homes. Not only is Brittiny behind in her studies but her friends are troublemakers and she’s been suspended for fighting. She’s tough and always on guard. “It’s not surprising,” the counselor tells me. “The way she lives, she has to be constantly vigilant and ready to defend herself physically.”

  Brittiny remains on my mind all night. Until this year I took it as an article of faith that kids belong with their parents and that parents always want what’s best for their kids. Our reading of To Kill a Mockingbird has confirmed that ideal. My students identify with Scout, a young girl whose mother has died and who gets into fights and doesn’t like to go to school, but the character who makes the greatest impression is Atticus, the ultimate father figure who never yells at his kids and, instead, reasons with them and respects them. Every kid should have an Atticus. However, I know from experience how tough it is to be a good father. Few of us can live up to Atticus’s example, no matter how hard we try, and unfortunately, not all dads actually do try that hard. Fortunately, a lot of the single mothers I’ve met more than measure up to Atticus, and I even have a couple of students whose parents have gone missing but whose grandparents are totally there for them. Most kids have somebody. I’m not sure if Brittiny has anybody, and between no parents and only bad parents, which is worse?

  The next day when Brittiny comes by my room, I give her half of my sandwich to let her know she’s a member of our increasingly crowded club. This afternoon Alex, Courtney, David and Dion, Arturo, Tianna, and Stephanie are all vying for attention. Other kids come in for a bit, grow frustrated, and leave. Brittiny quietly waits until I’m free. Determined to improve her reading, I give her my copy of Twilight, from earlier in the year. It’s less intimidating than Mockingbird.

  “I can keep this?” Brittiny asks.

  “If you promise to read it.”

  Her face crumples. “I want to read it with you.”

  Be careful what you wish for. “All right,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

  She jumps up, and we each take a desk. She opens the book and starts.

  Predictably, the more she reads, the more fun she has. As the days pass and we get deeper into the book, her confidence soars and it becomes fun for us both. I don’t know or ask for the details about what Brittiny’s been through at home. To be honest, I’m not sure I can handle the truth, and what do I do after I know it? I figure my job is to keep her mind on the positive. And it seems to be working. “I wish I could be in your class just for one day,” she tells me. “Not many people believe in me or have faith in me.”

  “Ah, Brittiny.” I give her a hug. “I’ve got enough faith in you for all of them put together.”

  The problem is that those other voices are always with her. One day, outside the auditorium, I catch her eye just as she’s heating up for a fight with another girl. The issue is the same one that plagues many of the disagreements in school. One kid seems to “disrespect” another. It could be a wrong word or a look; it doesn’t take much when you think the whole world is against you. Meanwhile, at the other end of the hall, Ms. DeNaples is heading their way. I speed-walk toward the girls and step between them, pleading, “Stop, Britt, it’s me. Brittiny, don’t do this.”

  For an infinite second I’m not sure what she will do. Then she catches herself and backs off just as Ms. DeNaples arrives—a very close call. If she’d gotten into the fight, Brittiny would have been suspended, and a nineteen-year-old sophomore does not need to miss more school.

  Unfortunately, this is not the end of it. When she comes to my room the next day, she’s beside herself. Some of the kids are saying she punked out because of me, and that has to be corrected. “I’m done foolin’ with her,” she explodes. “I’m just gonna hit her the minute I walk into eighth period.” This is not for show. She’s determined.

  I get her to calm down enough to tell me what’s really going on. As it turns out, the problem is not just between her and one other girl. “Her friends are bitches, and my friends all want me to hit her.”

  “Are you sure these kids are your friends?”

  I realize my mistake even before I notice Brittiny’s expression start to harden. Her friends mean more to her than her family. They are her family. They’re all she’s got. I know that many of the kids feel this way, and I should know better than to attack Brittiny’s friends, so before the words can sink in, I quickly change tactics. “Never mind,” I say. “What else is going on in your life? Anything besides wanting to beat up some dumb girl?”

  She folds her arms and paces the room a couple of times without answering. Fortunately, no one else comes in, so she has my full attention. I wait her out. Sometimes I think that’s what these kids need most—just someone to be patient and pay attention.

  Finally, as if to appease me, Brittiny says today is her great-grandmother’s birthday.

  “Great-grandmother!” I cry. “You have a great-grandmother?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “How old is she?”

  “Ninety-nine,” she answers, as if everyone has a ninety-nine-year-old great-grandmother.

  “Wow, do you know how lucky you are?” The irony of calling Brittiny lucky is not lost on me, but I’d like to think that if she can see herself as lucky, she can start to change her luck. And if Brittiny cares enough to remember this birthday in spite of all her anger and hurt, maybe this is one way to reach her. “Do you ever talk to her about her life or ask her for advice?” I ask. “She’s been around a long time, just imagine all the things she has seen. I wish I had my grandmother, let alone my great-grandmother.” I mean that, but it’s also another attempt to convince Brittiny that she is lucky. I ask, “What are you getting her for her birthday?”

  She hesitates and then says, “I don’t know, she’s kin
da hard to buy for.”

  Speaking of luck, my thought-for-the-day calendar this morning instructed me to make a homemade card for someone’s birthday. What an idea! And my classroom is stocked with colored construction paper, colored string, markers, and glue. “Let’s make your great-grandma a card,” I suggest. “You can write her a birthday poem. And we’ll take a picture of you with the Polaroid and put it in the card.”

  “It’s not much of a present,” she says.

  “Are you kidding? She’ll love it, I promise.” I know I’m right.

  We make a card that looks like a wrapped present—pink with purple string and a bow. It’s beautiful, and Brittiny writes a short inscription for the inside: “Happy Birthday, Great-Grandma, we are all lucky to have you.” I make her sign it and write how much she loves her great-grandma. “We just need a picture of you for the inside and we’re done,” I tell her. I pull my trusty Polaroid from my desk.

  “I want you in the picture, too,” she blurts out.

  “No, it should just be you.”

  But Brittiny won’t hear of it. She tells me her great-grandmother is a fan of mine.

  I laugh uncertainly. “I know I’m getting old, but your great-grandmother’s a fan?”

  “Uh-huh.” Brittiny doesn’t see what’s so funny. The young can be so cruel.

  Nakiya pokes her head in the door to see what’s up. “Hey, Nick,” I say. “Take a picture of us, will you?”

  Brittiny turns out not to be the most willing subject. She folds her arms, hunches, and scowls, but Nakiya’s my go-to girl for all things technical and celebratory, and she’s a pro with the Polaroid. “Get closer,” she directs us. “Hold up the present, Mr. Danza. Look at me and smile, Britt.”

  It’s a shy smile, a little crooked, and she’s hugging her elbows as if her stomach hurts, but on balance we both look pretty happy. I know I am. We glue the picture inside the card, and Brittiny still has that smile on as she heads for eighth period, where once again, she squeaks through without fighting.