by Donna Foote
She was getting lots of positive feedback from the school. One assistant vice principal, Mr. Yette, had asked her to take over a twelfth-grade English class from a longtime tenured teacher. It was all hush-hush. He said that he wanted to make sure that all the seniors had portfolios and would graduate in June. Taylor took that as a compliment. The two UCLA literacy coaches also saw the promise in Taylor and took her under their wings. Chad Soleo was happy to hear all the good reports. One of his trusted colleagues literally gushed whenever she visited Taylor’s bungalow. Taylor knew it was tough to keep new teachers, and she appreciated all the kudos, but even she thought it was all a little over-the-top: I could tell them I’m gonna write “shit” and “fuck” all over the walls and they might say, “What a good idea!”
Samir was the exception. He spooked her. When she saw him at the one-hundred-days celebration at the Hollywood nightclub in early fall, he had a drink in his hand and was talking and laughing. Not long after that, he came into her classroom, said two words, and left after forty-five minutes.
She was giving a grammar lesson the day Samir came in, and even as she was lecturing, she knew he’d be tripping out about it. The lecture was too long, and the lesson that followed wasn’t thematically linked. She couldn’t bring herself to read the e-mail he sent afterward. She knew it would get her down, and then she wouldn’t want to meet him for the follow-up. Samir was pretty amazing. His notes were minute-by-minute, and he’d write things like “12:35, student’s head on desk.” It was scary and nerve-wracking whenever anyone came in to observe her. But when it was TFA, she felt like the weight of the world and all the poor children of America were resting on her performance. Again and again she thought: TFA is the parent you cannot please. You can jump through hoops and still not get there and not know what to do to make them happy. What if my numbers don’t go up? What if they go down?
On the day before school let out for Christmas, Samir brought his supervisors into Taylor’s room to observe him. He had called at twelve-thirty that day to warn her—and to ask Taylor to e-mail her data and fill him in on what she wanted to talk about. When they showed up at three-thirty, she was listening to Prince at full volume and the room was abuzz with kids coming in and out. Samir walked in looking like the consummate professional and proceeded to do a great job. He was so smart and so articulate! He was able to pinpoint things Taylor hadn’t even thought of, and he gave her very concrete, very specific things to do. She was so grateful for his help. She talked him up to his bosses. He was an amazingly talented guy. He was growing on her.
That night she was scheduled to meet the man who had “adopted” her through Teach For America’s Sponsor a Teacher program. Sponsor a Teacher is one of TFA’s major fund-raising efforts directed at individuals and small companies, and it accounted for 16 percent of the organization’s funding base in 2006. SAT, as it is called, requires a donation of at least $5,000 to help defray the annual $12,500 cost of recruiting, selecting, training, and supporting a corps member. During summer institute, corps members had been asked if they were willing to be sponsored. Taylor signed right up. Based on a short spiel she wrote about herself, TFA had matched her with John Wong, a young guy who worked for the Capital Group, a giant investment management firm based in Los Angeles.
Taylor had looked forward to the meeting with Wong. It was being held at Loyola Marymount. Taylor knew exactly how it would go. Like everything else that TFA did, it would be professional—indeed, beyond professional. The affair would start on time and end when scheduled. There would be drinks, food tables, and the obligatory speakers. From there, it would be a sorority rush. Having been a Greek at USC, she had the rush down. She knew exactly what was required of her. It was a connection thing. She understood that the donor wanted to see her, in the same way that people who send money to some poor kid in Africa or Asia always want a photograph. And if they could converse with her, all the better. One of the L.A. coordinators had called and then e-mailed the major talking points to her. TFA wanted to keep everyone on message. The sponsor would want to hear all the good things his money was doing; the teachers should try to accentuate the positive.
When Taylor got the cue (a look from one of the coordinators), she turned it on. She told Wong all about her TFA experience at Locke, regaling him with classroom anecdotes and showing him pictures of her kids that she had taken with her cell phone. She told him the reason she had joined—that she had wanted to do something meaningful, something that would give her a lot of responsibility and make her proud. And she asked about his reasons for donating. She was touched by his humility. He confided that he wished he had done something similar, that he was in awe of what she was doing. Taylor was perfectly capable of faking her enthusiasm, but she didn’t have to. She spoke from the heart. She was genuinely interested to meet someone who had given five thousand dollars—not because he needed a tax write-off, like so many people she knew in Santa Barbara, but because he had found a cause that he truly believed in. She invited her sponsor to come to Locke to see her teach and meet her kids, and she thanked him for his generosity.
Afterward she met Mackey, Hrag, and Rachelle at Sharkeez. She had recently been hanging out with Mackey some—they both worked in the bungalows on the edge of campus and shared a lot of the same students. And she had always liked Hrag, though she had heard he was a bit of a ladies’ man. But it was the first time she had ever been out with Rachelle, and she really enjoyed getting to know her. Rachelle seemed to have it all in perspective. She worked hard, but she made it look easy. She wasn’t obsessively driven like so many other TFA women Taylor knew. So it was fun. Taylor had given up drinking—she suffered from vertigo and alcohol made her feel sick—but the others had a few. Taylor thought that Mackey might have a little crush on Rachelle, but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. When Mackey said he wanted to leave, Hrag drove him back to the apartment they shared in Hermosa Beach, just down the road. Taylor went along for the ride, and Rachelle headed home. Taylor ended up spending the night on Hrag’s couch. And her car, which was parked illegally, got towed.
But it didn’t matter. It was the last day of school before break. She tied her mane of chestnut hair in a ponytail topped with a black headband, put on a festive red velvet jacket, and turned every one of her classes that day into a Christmas party. It was probably a no-no as far as TFA was concerned, but she decided not to teach. She wrote “MERRY CHRISTMAS” across the whiteboard, put on some music, and watched as her kids had dance-offs. She felt great. The karma in room A22 was good, and she was leaving the next morning for a family vacation in Mexico.
But over the break, the ebullience gave way to anxiety. She couldn’t sleep at night. When she was able to rest, she woke up with her heart racing. She was thinking bad thoughts, generating awful, negative emotions. A lot of it was eating-disorder stuff—wanting to be perfect and not being able to let go of that. She didn’t want to have that negative thinking in her head. It was such a weight. But there it was: she was awfulizing.
Thinking back, she realized things had been tough for her since Halloween. She had been waking up at 4 a.m., unable to breathe and worried about what would happen when she got to school. She had weird dreams. One time she dreamed that they had bused a whole bunch of white kids into Locke; she was teaching white kids! In her real life, she couldn’t imagine ever teaching white kids. How could she?
Her dad talked her down. He was the person she spoke to the most—about everything. Having been a teacher himself, he empathized with her situation and was a font of wisdom. He was the one who told her early on to draw a line between her professional and private lives. He told her not to bring work home—even if it meant staying at school until five or six to finish up. And when she was worried that she wasn’t improving her kids’ reading levels, he was the one who said, “Look for the smallest successes and hold on to them.” So, during the break, when she was driving to see her boyfriend and awfulizing all the way, she turned to her father for help. Over
the car phone, he reminded her that she was creating the anxiety, that she was generating the awful ideas. She could also generate positive ideas. “You need to find the positive and make that your reality,” he advised. “Every day go in there and find something that makes it work for you.”
Her best friend since first grade, Allisha, said just about the same thing. She suggested that Taylor start reciting daily affirmations. She needed to ask for peace and give her fears to a higher authority. She needed to “let go and let God.” She recited the AA prayer, and suddenly it made sense: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” It was like an epiphany: I should focus on what I can control and see where the chips fall, and I am going to be happy and not let it get to me.
From then on, she did her affirmations every day. She would walk around her apartment saying out loud: “Today I choose to have peace in my life. I do not choose fear. My students need me. I’m happy.” And by the time she got to school, she would be okay. She was more than okay: she was very happy. She loved the job. She was doing a good thing—not perfectly, but it was the right thing for her.
Phillip could have done with some of the same bucking up. He felt like he had PMS. He was depressed, and he found himself tearing up easily. It happened to him every two months or so. He would spiral down and feel awful for some days, then cycle back up and feel good for weeks on end, only to inevitably fall again into another short depression.
When he returned to school after the Christmas break, he thought he was well rested. But, in fact, he came back burned out. And the kids seemed rowdier than usual. Over the break, graffiti artists had been out in force. The entire façade of the school entrance had been tagged. Inside, Phillip caught kids gambling in the hallways. It probably had something to do with it being the end of the semester—the kids figured they didn’t have much to lose. The bells were bonkers, too. For some periods they would ring three times; for others they didn’t ring at all.
He had a lot to accomplish before the end of the semester. He had slowed down instruction to help with comprehension and retention, but that came at a cost. His classes were behind. Even so, he determined to push ahead with his plan to do more activities to promote hands-on learning. On the first Tuesday back, Phillip introduced a lesson on corresponding parts by giving each student a protractor, a work sheet, and a triangle. As the kids chattered, he warned them that there would be no more activities in the future if they couldn’t come in, be silent, and follow directions.
“I want you to put your hands together,” he said. “I didn’t say put your lips together! When we’re talking about corresponding parts we’re talking about the relationship between two things—matching up. When you put your hands together, what’s matching up? Corresponding fingers! Are all your fingers identical? Do they all match up the same size?”
The kids shouted: “No!”
Phillip corrected them. “Your hands should be the same size,” he said. “So they are congruent. We are going to take this idea and relate it to shapes.” He told them to start doing their work sheets. He wanted them to match triangles by finding corresponding angles and sides.
A few minutes later Dr. Wells came in and sat down in the back of the room next to Phillip’s desk. He watched as Phillip modeled what he wanted the kids to do on the classroom’s overhead projector. As they worked, Phillip moved to the whiteboard in the front of the classroom, where he began to review the problems. He finished up the lesson by reiterating the concept and reciting the principles that they had discovered by manipulating the protractors and triangles. Moments before the class ended, Dr. Wells left the room. On Phillip’s desk was a yellow sheet of paper that was folded in two. Dr. Wells had written “Mr. Gedeon” on the outside; there was a smiley face below.
The entire time that Wells was in his classroom Phillip was thinking: Why is he here? What is he doing? What is he writing down? Phillip figured the principal had been in his room more than ten times since the year began, three to five times in the first week alone. He felt uncomfortable. And this third-period class was one of his wildest, not the class you necessarily wanted your boss to observe. It was the one period of the day when people would be perfectly justified in criticizing Phillip’s classroom management. It was heavily African American male, and Phillip ran a slightly looser ship than usual. Though profane language was forbidden in room 301, there were a couple of black students who habitually swore in class. They would immediately self-correct with “My bad, my bad,” and they never used the words maliciously. At first Phillip addressed the issue every time he heard a curse word. But after a while, he let it go. He saw the other side of the two offenders—he saw the sweetness in Andrew and the intelligence in Lemarr. If he couldn’t get past the bad language, he realized he would miss so much in them—and they were capable of doing such great things!
Phillip didn’t read the yellow note. He never read classroom observations right away. He preferred to wait until he had some distance and time to reflect on his own performance before reading someone else’s take on it. Phillip was unhappy with the way the lesson had unfolded.
That afternoon he was about ten minutes late for the faculty meeting. He dreaded going to them. At best, they were boring, a waste of time. At worst, they degenerated into ugly shouting matches. Phillip would never forget the first faculty meeting of the year. When the union rep challenged Dr. Wells and became disruptive, he threw her out of Hobbs Hall. That set the tone for the year. So Phillip was in no hurry to get to the first meeting after Christmas break. When he slipped into his seat, Wells was talking about some teacher he had seen that day. He was reminding the staff to have the day’s agenda posted on the board and objectives identified for all the students to see. Phillip always did that, so he tuned it all out. Later, when they broke into smaller department meetings, Wells came by, put his hand on Phillip’s shoulder, and asked the group, “Have you seen Mr. Gedeon teach? You need to. He gives administrators like me hope. I saw a master teacher at work. I was utterly amazed.” Then to Phillip he said: “Keep up the good work!”
When Dr. Wells left, the teasing began. It was embarrassing. Phillip felt awkward around Wells. The guy was always smiling at him. And Phillip didn’t want to let him down. The next day, another teacher stopped him to tell him what Wells had said in the beginning of the faculty meeting, before Phillip arrived. Wells didn’t name Phillip then, but it wasn’t hard to figure out which math teacher he was talking about. Wells explained that he had intended to stay for a only a few minutes, before seeing the science class next door, but he became so engaged in the math lesson that he stayed. “He did not say that!” returned Phillip.
“I’m telling you, he did,” the other teacher insisted. “He was speaking about you!”
At first he was blown away by the praise. Then it began to bother him. He knew that when one teacher gets singled out for praise, the others get resentful. It had happened to other teachers at Locke. When you have shown results, people don’t like you—either because they can’t do as well or because they can, and do, and are not similarly recognized. Phillip didn’t need to be praised in front of a crowd. He already had a reputation for speaking his mind—and for not being a team player. It would have been much better if Wells had taken him aside and said those things privately.
But what really got to him that week was the realization that, at Locke, he really was considered one of the best teachers. That was crazy! If I’m one of the best, what does that say about everyone else? He knew his kids were learning and achieving. But he was a first-year teacher; he had so much more to learn. He was only doing what should be the norm for every teacher: setting high expectations, holding his kids accountable, and working his butt off. There was nothing amazing about it. It should have been standard operating procedure.
That was one of the problems. There were no standard operating procedures at Locke. There were no systems at all. The s
chool wasn’t set up for success.
Classes needed to be smaller and longer. Kids needed to be tracked. The students failing all their classes needed to be doing double of everything: English two times a day, math two times a day. If a kid couldn’t write a history paper or read a textbook, why give him history? First teach him how to read. When he was up to level, then he could double up on science or history.
Someone had to stand up and say no to the status quo. The number of kids just falling through the cracks was breaking his heart. By the end of that first week back, Phillip was drained. He walked around his classroom in a daze. When he finally did get it together to go home, he had a bite to eat and went to bed. It was eight-thirty.
Why am I here? What can I do? How do I give both myself and my students hope?
Once she finished work on her IEPs, Rachelle did just what she promised herself she would do over the Christmas break: nothing. She relaxed, saw a few friends, chilled. But she found herself thinking about her kids. She wasn’t stressing over how she was going to teach them mitosis. She was wondering what they were doing for Christmas, and worrying, too: I hope they have family around. I hope they’re happy.
They were thinking about her, too, because a few of them phoned. One boy, Mario, a lovely Hispanic kid, called and said, “Hi, Miss.” When Rachelle asked who was speaking, he insisted that she guess. Rachelle got it wrong; she thought it was a girl on the other end of the line. “Is everything okay?” she asked.