by Donna Foote
Her meetings with Samir left her feeling lousy. Even so, she would take his notes and put them on the table in her bathroom as a reminder of the things she had to improve upon. Just looking at them made her feel bad. She figured she could work twenty-four hours a day and still not be good enough. TFA was like the parent you could never please. She knew she was falling into an anorexic mind-set. When she wasn’t reminding herself to be careful, her mother was. “Taylor, you’re not trying to be the best, are you?” she would fret.
One Wednesday in early November, Taylor thought for the first time: You know, I don’t want to be here. A week later, she drove home in tears. Teaching was challenging enough; now she had to deal with racial and cultural tensions that had been building in her classroom since mid-October.
It all started the morning she found the words “brown pride” scribbled all over her classroom. The tagging enraged her. She felt violated, as if someone had broken into her home.
Gustavo, one of the few Latino kids on the football team, ratted the taggers out. It was two girls—one of whom, Lucia, was a favorite of Taylor’s. The other was a tough gangbanger named Estrella. The pair ditched school for two days afterward. When they returned, Taylor was ready for them.
“As far as I’m concerned, you were tagging on my desks!” she charged, over their vehement denials. “You are a couple of liars. I know it was you. You are not touching my stuff! Get out! It’s your choice. Go to the dean’s office or Mr. Sampson’s class next door.”
When they returned with the one-hundred-word essay she required for admittance back into her class, Taylor handed them graffiti remover and ordered them to scrub the desks. She stood with one arm on the door. “If you have attitude, I don’t need you here. Go. Transfer out!” They cleaned the desks and stayed. Not long after that, Estrella got beaten up in a fight and was out of school for a while with her injuries. When she came back, Taylor simply said, “I’m sorry about what happened. Let’s get you caught up.” They’d been friends since then.
But the tensions among her students continued. The day she finally broke down and cried, she’d had to mediate three separate incidents with clear racial and cultural overtones. It was a nightmare. The first occurred when a Latino kid who rarely showed up took the seat normally occupied by Mighty Mikel, a little black kid with a big personality and a propensity for anger. “Nigga, you get the fuck outta my fuckin’ seat, motherfucker!” Mikel demanded. Taylor threw Mikel out of the room without even giving him a destination or an assignment. During the next period, an explosive fight erupted between a black girl, one of Taylor’s best students, whom she had chosen to be a class tutor, and a Hispanic boy. This time, both were ejected from class. The third incident was the one that made her cry: a girl fight was planned for right after school in the alley of 109th Street. Taylor kept one of the putative street wrestlers, Breana, after school.
“I heard about the fight,” Taylor told her. “I know where it is, and I called the cops. Your friends are big blabbermouths. You are fourteen years old! And you fight! You have to be crazy, Breana! I don’t see a good future for you! What can I do to help you?” Taylor was in the girl’s face, competing with the incessant knocking on the door and the school-yard chant beyond it: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Breana promised to reform. The fight never went down. The cops followed the kids there and broke it up before it could begin.
These kids had so much anger. Their short fuses freaked Taylor out. Even the girls were explosive—even the ones you didn’t think had it in them sometimes erupted. Through her tears, Taylor made some decisions. The next unit she taught would be about race. The other teachers were doing Hemingway and Anne Frank. Not Taylor. She needed to address the serious cultural issues in her classroom.
In her graduate class at LMU, one text theorized that the educational system in the United States was created for the white hegemonic culture and could not accommodate or appreciate the needs of the Hispanic student, who too often dropped out in frustration as a result. LMU—and TFA—were big into multicultural textbooks, and Taylor knew that all kids want to read things that remind them of themselves. She was afraid that her instruction until then had been too white. From now on, her classes were going to confront racial issues head-on.
Her epiphany coincided with a two-day break from the classroom. The first day would be spent in professional development with the other ninth-grade teachers. On the second day she was going on a TFA-sponsored “excellent school” visit to Marlborough, an exclusive all-girls campus in tony Hancock Park. The only thing Taylor knew about the school was what she had gleaned while in the hospital. She had the impression that Marlborough was a feeder school for the UCLA eating-disorder unit.
But now Marlborough was a revelation. Its halls were strewn with backpacks. The concept of leaving a bag in a hallway unattended was mind-boggling to Taylor. But that was just the beginning. The first classroom she visited had no desks. The girls were sitting on sofas arranged in a semicircle and discussing epic metaphors in The Odyssey. They didn’t use a whiteboard, and wrote in their notebooks as they went. It was like a college class. The instruction was literature-based. Taylor watched in amazement as ninth-grade girls engaged in real discussion.
When she returned to Locke, the kids knew right away that something was up. They were uneasy. She told them that she had gone to visit another school. They immediately assumed she was looking to leave Locke. “You leaving school? You going? You like that school? Were the kids quiet there? Do you like them better?” The questions came so rapidly she couldn’t answer them all.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. In fact, she was just getting started. She was going to push her students to a higher level. The rest of the world might think they were dumb, but Taylor knew better. They were crazy smart.
She had taken away a lot from her day at Marlborough. For starters, she was going to rearrange the desks in her classroom so that the space was circular and more conducive to discussion. To enhance comprehension, she was going to introduce close readings, which would require that she stop and ask questions about the text as students read aloud. The questions would stimulate conversation and make the students think critically about what they were reading.
Taylor understood that much of what Marlborough was doing assumed prior knowledge and that classroom management was not an issue there. So she was not surprised when her first stab at a meaningful conversation with her Locke ninth-graders went sideways fast. There were some kids she just couldn’t shut up, and there was nothing more disheartening than to have a kid raise his hand out of nowhere, only to get drowned out by someone else talking over him. But she could see right away that the kids were more engaged, and she knew the close readings would make them examine the text more critically. As far as classroom management went, she decided to take the advice of one of her LMU profs. She was going to treat them like adults in the hope that they would act like adults. No longer would she send kids to the dean’s office, or even to another colleague’s room to write an essay as punishment. Now, when a kid misbehaved, she would just say: “If you feel the need to step outside, go on out and come back when you feel better and are ready to learn.”
For the first close read, Taylor picked Always Running by Luis Rodríguez, a book about a boy who emigrates from Mexico with his family and settles near Locke High School, where he joins a gang. Praised by TFAers and the mainstream press for its raw depiction of life among Los Angeles’s gangs, the book was banned by some school districts, including LAUSD. But Taylor didn’t know that. She assumed she couldn’t find copies of the book in the school book room because it was so disorganized, so she photocopied each chapter as they went along.
She started the book with a class discussion guided by four statements about immigration. The first was: Immigration is an easy, painless process.
Challenging hands shot up.
Selena said, “I disagree. Some people cross over and die.”
“I got papers,” Alfredo
volunteered.
“Why do you say that?” Taylor asked. “Do you think people will accuse you of being illegal if you don’t agree that immigration is easy?”
“I do,” he said.
“It’s not that easy, because you could get shot,” Ricardo opined.
“They got rifles that go pop pop. You don’t jump quickly, you dead.”
When Taylor asked rhetorically if any of them knew someone who had immigrated to the United States, they all laughed.
The next statement: Americans embrace and accept all who choose to immigrate to the U.S.
“I don’t agree,” Mariana said. “That is not true.”
“I disagree,” Alfredo said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger—they were gonna give us a license but he decided no. He’s an idiot, since he’s an immigrant, too.”
Xavier said Schwarzenegger was from England. Alejandro said no, he was from Japan. And then Ricardo asked Taylor if she embraced immigrants.
“Yes, my family came from Russia,” she replied. “My family was Jewish. They came from nothing.”
“Didn’t they kill people? Did they get to meet Hitler?” they wanted to know.
Statement number three: Growing up in Watts is difficult.
“I agree,” said Eleesha. “People dying young, getting killed.”
“Ah, that happens everywhere,” said Alejandro. “It happens here—not every day.”
“What if you walked in Beverly Hills, would it be the same?” Taylor asked.
“The same thing could happen, but even worse,” said Alfredo. “You have to go on the freeway.”
Taylor taught Always Running until she got a visit from her administrator, Mrs. Jauregui, who reluctantly informed her that the book was not district-approved for ninth-graders. It was too racy. Though the kids were really into it, Taylor stopped teaching it as instructed. But she thought, I can’t believe I could get into trouble for teaching a great book while other teachers sleep at their desks.
The Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend was hard for Hrag. He had flown out of Los Angeles the Wednesday before, as soon as school was finished, excited to be going home for the first time since June. Thanksgiving had always been his favorite holiday; it was the whatever holiday. So relaxing, no pressure; all you had to do was eat deep-fried turkey with all the trimmings plus a side of lamb, Armenian-style, and pass out. Hrag had obliged. He felt like he was home from college. He parked himself in front of the TV. He had assumed that he’d hit the local bars every night, but when he got home he didn’t want to go out. He just wanted to see his parents and sister. And to stop thinking about teaching. His family was dying to hear all about his experiences in the hood, but he refused to talk about it.
It felt so good to be home and to have his parents taking care of him. Learning to cook, clean, and shop for himself in Los Angeles had been a shock to his system—yet another thing that made him feel old. But he had quickly gotten into a routine. On Sundays, he went grocery shopping for the week. He bought chicken, tortillas, and the fixings for salad. Then he cooked up all the chicken and stored it in Tupperware. He was careful to keep his food separate from Mackey’s. It was kind of weird. Hrag and Mackey never shared a meal. Although they had attended Boston College together, they hadn’t come into Teach For America as close friends. Hrag had tremendous respect for Mackey, but theirs wasn’t a I’ll-cook-tonight-you-take-tomorrow type of relationship.
The only TFA Locke teacher Hrag really felt a connection with was Rachelle. They had a lot in common. They both taught biology, and they seemed to approach the job in the same way. Rachelle didn’t appear to be working herself to death, even though, as a special ed teacher, she had her hands full. Like Hrag, she did her work, but she was realistic about the job.
He and Rachelle had been invited to attend a weekend science conference in Palm Springs. They got to know each other better on the hundred-mile drive, and when they arrived at the hotel where the conference was being held, they sunbathed by the pool before checking in. It was so liberating. Hrag could joke around with Rachelle. Everyone else at TFA was so wound up and so on top of things. Take Taylor Rifkin. She acted really laid-back, but at work she was fiercely engaged and efficient.
Hrag hadn’t bonded with any of Locke’s male TFAers. Though he and Phillip shared the same hallway, they rarely spoke. And Mackey and he were friends, but they were very different people. They had stopped carpooling to school fairly early on. They weren’t on the same clock. Mackey liked to get to school early and didn’t mind staying late—he was the kind of guy who went out of his way to stop and chat with other teachers. Hrag, on the other hand, didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary at work. He was never late for school, but he wasn’t exactly an early riser. He had difficulty making small talk, and when he was done working, he wanted to get the hell out of Locke.
The Monday after Thanksgiving, Hrag arrived at school uncharacteristically early, well before 7 a.m., so he could get to his room and prepare for the day. But after he parked, he couldn’t get out of his car. That awful knot in his stomach was back. He was so nervous, he couldn’t bring himself to open the car door, so he tilted back the driver’s seat, closed his eyes, and just lay there, half asleep, half awake. When Mackey arrived twenty minutes later and saw Hrag stretched out behind the wheel, eyes closed, he panicked. Pounding on the car window he cried: “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
Hrag asked himself the same question again and again. Time and experience didn’t make it easier to answer. It just kept rattling around in his head, growing louder and more insistent as the days passed.
The question was loudest during fifth period. He had had trouble keeping order in period five from day one, when Cale and José got into their fight. He had yet to get it right. He couldn’t figure out how these kids thought. They had all kinds of issues. He discovered that one student who was driving him nuts couldn’t understand a word of English and belonged in a bilingual class. Another girl had the same problem, but he couldn’t get her switched out. He didn’t know what to do; he didn’t speak Spanish well enough to teach biology in that language. Hrag noticed that kids came into class cut up. One boy brought Hrag a book of his poetry and it was filled with blood. The poetry was pretty good; the blood was disgusting. And José had a huge scar on his cheek. Hrag couldn’t bring himself to ask how it got there.
José was already in the juvenile court system, on probation; a school suspension would send him to jail. Hrag liked the kid. If they were the same age, he thought, they would probably be friends. But as a student, José was Hrag’s worst nightmare. The kid couldn’t sit still, and he was an instigator. On the days he came to class, he brought trouble with him. And Hrag’s newly adopted classroom-management policy, in which he sent the errant student to a nearby classroom to write a one-page reflective essay, didn’t work with José. Other kids hated writing; just the thought of it whipped them into shape. Not José. If Hrag sent him out and demanded three pages, José would dutifully come back with three pages. And the thing was, his work was thoughtful and surprisingly well written. A reader would think the kid was a choirboy. Far from it; José was a failing student who lived with his mom and had some kind of problem with male authority. Managing him was exhausting. Hrag toyed with the idea of switching him to Vanessa Morris’s class, thinking that José might perform better for a female. But he was reluctant to let him go. He didn’t want Morris to think he couldn’t handle the kid.
But José was incorrigible. One Monday in mid-November, right before the parent-teacher conferences, Hrag walked into his room to find “FUCK YOU MR. H” scrawled across the board. The message was signed “SNAPS.” At first, Hrag was unfazed. Yet another whatever moment at Locke. He got some alcohol and wiped it off—only to discover that Snaps had tagged the entire classroom. “Snaps” was scribbled on the walls, on Hrag’s desk, on the door, on José’s chair, and on the table where he sat.
It was José. Hrag knew it. But just to be sure, he starte
d making casual inquiries. “Anyone know Snaps?” he asked the kids in another class.
“Why?”
“You guys tell me,” responded Hrag. “Does the name start with a J?”
“No,” came the answer, accompanied by a knowing smile.
When everyone had left the room, a girl who sat in the front row, a quiet girl who did her work, confided that she had seen Snaps. It was clear that she was referring to José.
Hrag confronted him. “I don’t have proof,” he conceded. “But kids talk, and I know you did it. I’m trying to help you, José. I don’t appreciate an FU on the board.”
“Yeah, man, you’ve been disrespected,” allowed José. “But I didn’t do it.”
When Hrag called José’s mother, she wanted to know if Hrag had proof that José was the tagger. Then she said she didn’t know what to do with him and gave Hrag his father’s number. Hrag told José that he had called home.
“Man, why do you care so much about me?” he asked. “No one else cares. You know I come [to class]. I wish you’d lay off my back. Stop caring.”
José had caught him off guard. Hrag had already typed a letter to the dean detailing his offenses. Now he decided not to hand it in.
Unlike José, Cale was not an instigator. He was a reactor. There was something about the kid that scared Hrag, and fascinated him, too. Cale should have been failing biology. But he came to class fairly often, and when he wasn’t there, he made a habit of coming in at lunch and making up the work he had missed. Like so many other kids at Locke, Cale had never been trained to sit and learn; he had been trained to get through the system. So he was getting a B.
He wasn’t a bad kid—yet. But he seemed to have deep-rooted problems. Again, Hrag thought it was a male thing. The kid was looking for a father figure. As far as Hrag could tell, he lived with his aunt and his grandmother; he couldn’t figure out if he had parents around or not. Every time he asked, the grandmother or aunt would mumble something about what a rough childhood the boy had had. Still, Cale was always fashionably dressed. And when he applied himself, he could do anything that was asked of him.