by Ilana Garon
Twenty-four hours later, we were back in school, and Kayron had already developed the photos. I came into the classroom to find all the students gathered around his desk, laughing and pointing.
Kayron got up and came over to me, photo in hand. He put one arm around my shoulder and showed me the photo.
“See, Miss? That’s you!” he told me, pointing at the picture. “God, I thought since you were leaving school, you’d at least try to look nice or something.”
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The remainder of my year with Kayron progressed in much the same manner. His top priority in life continued to be tormenting me. But as the term drew to a close, he begged me to give him my phone number and to tell him where I lived. I refused to do either.
“You have a stalker, Miss,” the other kids laughed. I rolled my eyes.
The students’ final day of school came around, and I thought that at last I would be rid of him. A week later, I exited the school on a sunny day. The campus was pretty quiet by that point. Teachers were the only people wandering the school halls; we were in the middle of grading state exams, so the students weren’t in attendance. I was ravenous. I bought a sandwich at the local bodega and unwrapped it as I walked towards the Pelham Parkway station. I was bringing the sandwich toward my mouth when my innate clumsiness took hold—turkey, lettuce, and tomato fell out of the bun and landed on the sidewalk.
Instantly, I heard hysterical laughter. “You dropped your sandwich!” someone called to me. I looked up about thirty feet and saw Kayron standing on the top of the stairs to the elevated platform of the station’s northbound side. He peered down at me through the bars in the railing. I noticed he was sporting his usual cargo shorts and white t-shirt, and thought how small he looked from this vantage point.
Sticking his arms through the bars, he waved at me.
“Kayron,” I called up to him. “Can’t you find someone else to follow around?”
“I liked you! You were the best teacher ever!”
“Come on,” I called. “You’re in tenth grade now. You don’t need me anymore.”
“But you need me!” he said, rolling his eyes. “Sometimes I really wonder about you. . . .”
This is a good one:
I try to enter my classroom for twelfth period, but I’m blocked by this girl named Crystal, who keeps trying to rub up against me with her rear end. Weird. Once she lets me in, I barely have enough time to put my stuff down before she and Kayron start slugging the daylights out of each other for no apparent reason.
I step over them—they are rolling on the floor by this point—and go to the classroom phone to call security up to deal with this. My helpful students are chanting in the background “Kayron’s fighting a girl! Kayron’s fighting a girl!” I get hung up on. I dial again. Crystal hears someone say the word “Security” and, figuring correctly that she’s about to get in trouble, leaps off Kayron and jets from the room. Kayron sits back down in his seat as if nothing has happened. Two minutes later, security—in the form of a lone school safety officer—arrives at the door to my classroom.
“What’s the deal?” the school safety officer asks, looking bored.
“Kayron and Crystal had a fight,” I say.
“You started a fight with a girl?” the officer asks Kayron incredulously.
Kayron shrugs. The security guard asks where Crystal is, and I tell him she ran away. “She’s wearing a pink coat,” Crystal’s best friend tells the officer. I love the loyalty here. The officer tells Kayron to get his stuff and hauls him to room 125, the security office, where he tells me to send Crystal in the unlikely event that she should return.
I try to restart the lesson. I get maybe thirty seconds into it when there’s a knock at the door. It’s Crystal. “You’re supposed to be in room 125,” I tell her. “Oh,” she says, and walks out of the classroom again. I look into the hallway for a dean or school safety officer to make sure she actually goes there, but seeing as there are none, I decide just to try and continue with the lesson.
Just then, a different school safety officer shows up at the door. “Do you know where Crystal is?” he asks me.
“She ran off before your other guy got here—didn’t they tell you?”
“She’s wearing a pink coat,” the students say with glee. “And she beat up Kayron.”
“Kayron got beaten up by a girl?” the officer asks in disbelief. Then his eyes light up, and he says, “Oh, is he the really gay one?”
“No, that’s Cookie,” says one kid. “But Kayron’s gay, too,” adds another. The security guard looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Is this, like, the gay class?” he asks. “Uh . . . I’m not sure,” I say.
Suddenly, Natasha screams. “Natasha!” I say. Her scream is loud enough to draw the attention of the assistant principal, who happens to be wandering down the hallway at that moment. He comes in. “What’s the problem?” we ask, as she jumps out of her seat, runs across the room, and starts hitting a seventeen-year-old punk named Brandon, who barely ever attends class and, when he does, insists that he is “VIP.”
“Brandon’s tearing Kayron’s journal,” Natasha yells. I look over and realize that she is correct, though why that warrants screaming on her part, I have no idea. Kayron must have left his journal behind when he was brought down to room 125 and now ripped pages of it are strewn all over the floor. “Brandon! What’s your problem???” I say, but that’s the only thing I can think of because, to be honest, I’m stunned.
The assistant principal says to Brandon, “Get your stuff. You’re out of here.” Brandon mimics him, saying in a prissy voice, “Get your stuff, you’re out of here,” and the students giggle. I say in horror, “Brandon! This is the assistant principal! You can’t mess around with him like that!”
“Then what the f—k is he doing in this class?” Brandon says. “Get that motherf—r out of here!”
“Brandon!” I say, shocked. The assistant principal is livid. “Get your stuff!” he yells again.
“But I’m VIP,” says Brandon.
The assistant principal looks confused.
“Brandon, just go with him, please,” I say.
“But Miss, I’m VIP,” he repeats genially. The kids are laughing now.
At this point, I’ve had enough, and I say something I really shouldn’t. “You’re VIP of what exactly???” I ask him. “Of people who are seventeen and still acting like fools in ninth-grade English?”
He seems completely unfettered by this remark, and as he exits the classroom surrounded by security guards he says, “I know! What’s the problem with this place?”
I keep wondering the same thing.
Two months ago, I gave a quiz to my ninth-grade English class wherein I used the word “punks” and the term “jack sh_t” (spelled that way, intentionally incorrectly) to slyly signal the wrong answer on a multiple-choice question. I agree that it was excessively bad judgment—I don’t remember what I was thinking, save that I was trying to be exacting but with a sense of humor. Now I feel like a complete idiot. I guess the gravity of subtly cursing on paper didn’t occur to me; bear in mind that these kids are fifteen/sixteen, and this is the class where I’ve had to discipline students for calling me a “cock-sucking whore.” Also I’d seen other quizzes (from other teachers) where students had been referred to jokingly as “suckers,” and where references had been made to marijuana, and I guess I figured if those kinds of things were acceptable then my quizzes were probably okay.
Yesterday, at 5:45 p.m., the principal and the assistant principal called me into their offices and gave me this lecture about how some parent complained to them about my quiz, how I’m “defacing the name of teaching” (they literally said this), and said I have to write a letter to all the parents and apologize to them for offending them.
Since the parents who came to parent-teacher conferences all told me what a good teacher I was and how glad they are that their kids have me, I am kind of upset at the thought of embarrassing myself an
d undermining my authority with all of the parents. I’d rather speak to the complaining parent one-on-one rather than inviting all the parents to criticize my quizzes.
I am ticked off at this whole school. As my Teaching Fellows mentor pointed out a few months ago, it’s an organizational nightmare. I’ve had problems with sexual harassment from faculty members, which I took straight to the principal, who then said she’d make an announcement at the next faculty meeting, but never did.
I also think the mentoring system is a joke: Joe, my in-school mentor, had to drop me when baseball practice started because he’s coaching.
I’m beginning to think that perhaps I should switch to a new school if I can and get a fresh start. Maybe I would be better off in a middle school; the line of appropriateness would be less confusing for me because the kids would be younger. I’m going to be wary of what I put on my quizzes from now on, I’m going to write whatever letters to parents they tell me to, and I’m going to just try and be a model teacher. But I feel like they’re out to get me here, and I’m so scared.
My letter to the parents after the quiz incident (with my private notes to David, another teacher, in italics):
Dear Parents,
It came to my attention on the eve of Spring Vacation that some of you objected to the language that I used in a quiz I administered to your children several weeks ago [a make-up in response to their all having failed the first quiz on the Harlem Renaissance . . . like I said—punks!]. Looking back on this quiz, I am embarrassed at my lack of judgment, and I want to apologize for any discomfort or insult that I may have caused you and your children. Please know that I meant no offense and will do whatever it takes to rectify this mistake on my part.
Your children will tell you that, though I am a demanding teacher, I am also a fair teacher who cares about them immeasurably and seeks to use humor as a means of encouraging them to take their studies more seriously. However, I deeply regret the poor example I set for the students. [Note the fact that I avoided taking digs at them for not attending parent-teacher conferences and for one of their kids calling me a “c—k-sucking whore” in the middle of class. Go self-restraint.] I encourage you to please contact me in the English office if there is anything you would like to discuss with me concerning my teaching or your child’s performance in English 2. You can also send a note with your child that tells me when would be a good time to call you. We are partners in your children’s education; please let me know what I can do to hold up my end of the bargain.
Sincerely Yours,
Ilana Garon
CHAPTER FOUR
Kenya & Crystal
Part I: The Research Question
I decided late one night, when I was drinking a beer and staring at the ceiling, that if my students were to graduate from ninth grade without ever having written a research paper, I’d be a failure as a teacher. So the next day I gave them their first ever research assignment. The sheet I’d created that morning instructed them to find a subject in which they were interested, write about how they became interested in this subject, research the subject in a library, and then interview an expert on the subject.
“Your topic shouldn’t just be a subject—like, baseball—it should include a research question,” I told them. “And that should be a question that isn’t a yes-or-no kind of thing, but something deeper. Like, my research question could be ‘What is the history of baseball?’ or ‘What is the role of women in baseball?’ or something like that. You want it to be sort of focused. Now, can someone give me another example of a good research question?”
Immediately, the hands flew into the air.
“Yes, Kenya.”
“Why do only white people get abducted by aliens?”
I burst out laughing. “That’s a great question, but I don’t know how you’re going to research that. Let’s try something a little more . . . down to earth.”
“Why do only white people get anorexic?” she offered.
“Okay, maybe something away from the white people . . . yes, Carlos.”
“Football!”
“Alright, that’s a good start. But remember what we said about how it had to be a question . . .”
Carlos thought for a minute. “Like, ‘What is football?’”
“Closer. You’re getting there. Think about some part of it that is specific—something that you could really research . . .”
One of the kids yelled, “SEX!”
I’d been waiting for that one.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I told him, much to the class’s shock and awe. “But you better have a good research question, or else . . . I’ll call your mom and read your paper to her . . . capisce?”
“Noooo! Miss! That’s OD!”
I gave a quiz later that week, in which the kids had to identify the good and bad research questions in the bunch. Here were the choices:
1) Why does the locker room smell bad after gym?
2) What was the role of African Americans in World War II?
3) Is Ms. Garon’s class the most awesome one in the school?
4) What is hockey?
5) Are drugs good or bad?
6) What do teenagers know about the transmission of HIV?
______
Part II: The Experts
I had told the students they had to speak to someone who was an expert on their chosen topic.
“So how am I supposed to call up Michael Jordan to ask him about basketball?” one of the kids asked, irritated.
“Okay, great question,” I said. “I think we have to revise the meaning of the word ‘expert’ for the purposes of this project. Say you’re doing a report on something relating to sports . . . who’s someone you might be able to interview about that?”
A hand went up. “Yes, Miguel.”
“A gym teacher?”
“That’s perfect. Great idea. Okay, say you’re doing a report that has to do with health, or diseases. Who might be a good person to talk to about that?”
Dead silence in the room. Then, one quiet girl, Nicola, raised her hand. “Maybe I could ask my sister? She’s a nurse,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“Nicola, that’s perfect. Thanks for helping us out with that.”
We went around the classroom and discussed whom each student might interview for his or her respective project. Someone’s uncle was a police officer—perfect for a paper on crime in the area. Someone’s mom worked in a real estate office—a reliable source, I hoped, for a paper about the criteria for living in a housing project.
Ranfi, one of the class’s Resource Room kids, asked, “What about drugs, Miss? Can I ask Mr. Porteno?”
Mr. Porteno was a special education teacher.
“Why is he an expert?” I asked.
“Because he’s done all of them, Miss. He told me. Can I interview him?”
Demetrius, a football player who, for all his brawn, defied all stereotypes by being smart and sensitive, raised his hand and asked, “What if you’re doing that one about teenagers and what they know about STDs?”
Someone hooted across the room, “Yo, Demetrius, ask your mom!”
“Hey now—none of that!” I said. The kids kept laughing, so I sat down on my desk and crossed my arms. In a moment they quieted down.
“I think Demetrius is wondering about something we should all consider,” I told them. “And I think a lot of you might want to research topics that will force you to ask difficult questions. Which means we’ve got to practice . . .”
______
Part III: The Interview
I set up two desks facing each other in the middle of the room. Then I had the rest of the class gather around us, fishbowl style. I looked around for someone who wasn’t paying attention to be my first victim.
“Crystal, come help me demonstrate how we do an interview,” I said.
“Ooooh, Miss. Are you picking me?”
The correct spelling of Crystal’s name, as written on the official attendanc
e record (though Crystal herself never wrote it that way), was “Crystle”—an obvious misspelling by what I suspected was a teenage mother. She was a strange, feisty girl who tended to start fights with boys.1 Periodically she would start laughing uncontrollably in the middle of class, and no one would have any idea why.
“Yeah, you. Come sit at the desk that’s facing me.”
I pointed at the seat opposite me, and Crystal sat down.
“Okay, guys,” I said, addressing the class, who were all watching in fascination now. “I’m pretending that Crystal is my expert, and I’m interviewing her.”
I turned to Crystal. “Good morning, Ms. Crystal,” I said to her, in an emphatically slow, polite, stage voice.
“Oooh, Miss. You’re turning me on.”
“Crystal! If you can’t participate maturely, I’m sending you out. Are you ready to behave?”
“Yeah, Miss, go on.”
______
1 As witnessed in the journal entry for March 2, 2004.
“Okay, good.” I cleared my throat and began again. “Good morning, Ms. Crystal.” I shook her hand, all the while looking meaningfully at the students to make sure they were noticing my gesture. They were riveted. “How are you doing today?”
“Gooooood . . .” Crystal said, in a sensual voice. I ignored it.
“Great. My name is Ms. Garon, and I’m doing a research paper on . . .” I hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. “On the Middle Ages.”
“Yo, Miss! That’s mad boring!” the students groaned in unison.
“Okay, fine! I’m researching STDs. Better?”
“Yeah!” they all yelled.
“Great. Now, Ms. Crystal,” I said, returning to my stage-voice. “I’m doing a research paper on STDs, and I wondered if, as a nurse, you might be able to answer some of my questions.”
“Ohhh, yessss!” Crystal said. She sounded as though she was intoxicated, and her eyes were shining a little too brightly.