by Ilana Garon
We don’t have enough chairs for all my students. Several of the chairs in one of my classrooms had bubble-gum all over them this Monday morning; the students refused to sit, so I called maintenance in to deal with it.
“Just have them put a piece of paper over the gum,” the maintenance men said.
“I don’t think so! You try telling my clothing-obsessed fifteen-year-olds that,” I responded. The students, overhearing the conversation, said, “Yo, that’s mad wack! Stop beastin’ and give us some chairs, yo!” So we got our chairs, and that was good.
Last week, some grocery store near the school started selling these plastic eggs containing little toys—in this case, miniature guns that you assemble yourself and use to shoot rubber bands. So all my ninth-grade boys bought loads of these things (I bet they bought out the whole supply) and started shooting each other’s faces during Advisory, which is basically group counseling in the form of a half-credit course. I asked them once to get rid of them, but every time I’d turn my back, they’d be shooting each other again. Finally, this kid named Sammy put his down on the table for a minute, and I ran and grabbed it before he could get it again. He asked for it back. I said no. He accused me of being “racissist.” Go figure.
I brought this plastic gun to the dean of security. “I just thought you’d like to know what all the ninth-grade boys are coming to school with,” I told him.
“Shit! That’s a Level 5 security report!” he said. “They’re not allowed to bring any kind of weapon, even a facsimile, to school. You’re going to have to attend a court hearing.”
“Shit!”
So all the deans barged into my classroom together during ninth period to “arrest” half my male students. They searched the boys’ clothes and backpacks. The ones on whom they found the plastic guns (a few were smart enough to get rid of them) got some sort of note in their juvenile files, a hearing to follow, etc. Suspensions were given out. It was a wild time. The girls were thrilled. “That’ll teach them to bring mad stupid toys to school,” they said with obvious glee.
But the girls were not so innocent either. Friday morning, I had them all sitting at their tables doing work. Somehow, Felicia accused Quantisha of “copying.” Quantisha gave her “a look.” When you’re a fifteen-year-old girl here, getting “a look” is the equivalent of being called a “pussy” for a fifteen-year-old boy. So words were exchanged. It was about to come to blows. “I’mma stab you in the face!” said Quantisha to Felicia. The girls stepped out into the hallway at the end of the period. They started removing their jewelry, giving their rings and name-necklaces to their “handmaidens” to hold for them during the fight that was seconds from ensuing.
“Um . . . I don’t think so,” I said. I grabbed the key players from one faction and brought them into the class. “You guys are going to wait ten minutes and cool off before you go to math,” I told them. I made them sit down and relax while I gathered up papers, put things away, etc.
“Are they fighting in your class?” I asked their history teacher later.
“They are!” he told me. “Wanna send ‘em to peer mediation?”
We went down and made the referral. The peer mediators, all twelfth-graders assisted by guidance counselors, went around and pulled everyone out of class. They listened to every side of the story. Eventually a “contract” was written up.
Two of the girls came to see me later that day. “So that contract was satisfactory?” I asked them.
“Yeah, it’s great! If Quantisha looks at us one more time, we get to beat her up!” they said gleefully.
And so it goes . . .
CHAPTER FIVE
Felicia
Her name was Felicia, and I taught her in my second year of teaching, when I was twenty-three. Her parents were having a reverse custody battle over who didn’t have to take care of her. The odds of her being totally screwed up by this were astronomical. But she smiled. She played. She said funny, witty things. She teased me for things I had never told the students (hell, was wary of even thinking about)—“Miss, you blush whenever Chris walks into the room. He’s cute, right?”—and she would be right on the money, because I did have a totally mortifying crush on Chris the security guard with all his chains and crazy tattoos and dreams of being a rap superstar. Then she would link arms with me confidentially, knowing she was right, and smile.
At fourteen, she was no taller than four feet, ten inches, with curly light-brown ringlets and gray eyes, a tiny, explosive little firebrand with a sharp tongue and a quick smile. When I could get her to stand still, I’d try to ask her about her life—mainly how her classes were going, or what boys she was interested in. And she would turn it on me like lightning, and start guessing—alarmingly good guesses, often.
“So are you going to go out with José? He has a huge crush on you,” I would say.
She would reply, “Oh, what a coincidence that you should ask, since you’re the one getting your ass stared at by Mr. Marcus every time you walk down the hall! Yeah, don’t even lie—I know who those flowers were from! Anyway, so let’s talk. Are we your favorite class, or is eighth period? You can tell me. I already know we’re the only class you brought donuts for last Friday!”
To some degree, I reluctantly confided in her. You never confide in students. It is one of the cardinal rules of teaching. But she solicited these confidences so easily. It was so natural and quick to tell her something: “Okay, you’re right, Mr. Marcus did give me the carnations. But he’s twice my age, and I’m not interested, and I’m terrified of getting the rumor mill started—so don’t tell anyone about that, or about the donuts, okay?” She would nod her head understandingly and put her little hand on top of mine.
School required no academic effort of her. She was already in a class of exceptionally bright kids; they were far and away the most intelligent and motivated group of freshmen I have ever taught. Felicia was in another league. During the first month of school, she told me she was bored with the young adult novels in the library, so I gave her Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. She finished it in two days (“It’s the best book I ever read, Miss!”) and moved on to Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, which she disliked, but finished and understood enough to come in and recount for me the various ways in which Eugenides needed a better editor.
“Seriously, this shit’s about one hundred pages too long,” she told me. I had liked Middlesex a lot, but there was no denying she had a point.
She should have been enrolled in some kind of Gifted and Talented center. She had, in fact, taken the test and qualified for specialized high school placement, but her parents (in a typical fit of irresponsibility) had given their then thirteen-year-old the burden of independently choosing and enrolling in a high school. So she had picked the one closest to her home—ours, with its rock-bottom test scores and constant police patrol—and gone there. She made solid grades—not what she was capable of, but solid. I tried to encourage her to make an extra effort, citing the incentive of college scholarships for motivated minority kids. And she would just look at me with this expression of “Get real, Miss.” Defeat? Apathy? Disdain? A little bit of all three? I was never sure.
______
Early that fall, a flyer advertising a high school poetry contest was put up in our department office. I mentioned it to the class, and the next day Felicia brought in a poem to enter. Its title was something along the lines of “Why I’ll Be a Divorce Statistic at Twenty-Five.” She turned it in quite willingly, and that surprised me, because her writing perhaps demonstrated more vulnerability than anything else she would ever have exposed voluntarily.
In the hopes of enticing other students to enter, I made her read her poem aloud in class. She was a cool kid; maybe if the kids saw that she was entering, they would want to do it, too.
Usually they listened to whatever she said. The boys were all in love with her, and the girls were all afraid she would kill them, in light of Felicia’s calm threat to a girl who had “trash-talked
” her: “Listen, bitch, I swear to God I will stab you in the heart with a pen if you ever do me like that again, you feel me?” But that day they were tired, preoccupied. Maybe it was too close to Christmas break. Regardless, they didn’t pay attention. She stood up in front of the chalkboard, reading her divorce poem to a class of thirty kids, all of whom were talking, throwing paper balls at each other, passing notes, and generally acting like the fourteen-year-old goofballs that they were.
She looked up and stopped midsentence. The other kids didn’t notice. She stamped her little foot on the linoleum, registering her impatience, but they kept on talking, acting like she wasn’t even there. I yelled at them, but my belated intervention, while it sobered them, didn’t do much for her. She looked at me forlornly, and then gave up entirely.
“That was discouraging, Miss,” she whispered to me as she slunk back to her seat. The other kids didn’t notice.
After class she handed me a sad, crumpled little piece of paper and I took it home, where I typed it, spell-checked it, and sent it to the contest with a $10 check and a letter explaining that the kid who wrote this poem was from an inner-city school and to please give her the recognition I felt she deserved.
(In point of fact, we would never hear back from the contest. It was probably a scam; I can only conclude that they took the entry fee I paid on her behalf and fled the country.)
She asked me about it, though, a couple of times. “When do you think I’ll hear from the contest, Miss?” she asked me. It was her study hall period, and I had come barging in because, peering through the window in the door of the classroom, I had seen her sitting uncharacteristically alone. The other kids were looking over at her, confused. Why didn’t she want to play? I walked in and brought myself down to her, desk level. “When will the contest let us know, Miss?” she asked. It was December then; I said I hoped April, maybe May. I didn’t know for sure. I asked her if she was okay. She smiled at me, but there were tears in her eyes. She refused to tell me why.
______
The semesters changed, and suddenly I was not her English teacher anymore. I was working with tenth-graders that term, and it was difficult, because they were a rowdy bunch, and by an unfortunate coincidence, all male. I had been assigned to them on the heels of a beloved teacher—a benevolent ex-baseball player aptly named Claus—who had been very “cool” with them, as they put it. Now that he was on a semester-long leave for shoulder surgery, I was teaching the class. It often felt like they were angry with me purely for not being him.
“What can I do to make you guys not hate me so much?” I asked one day, exasperated. For the past few days they had been throwing baby carrots, stolen from the lunchroom, at my back every time I turned to write on the board. I could never whirl around fast enough to catch the culprits.
“We don’t hate you,” they told me. “We just miss Claus.”
One of the toughest guys, a kid named Alberto who was a foot taller than I was and about twice my weight, looked at me with a pained expression. “Mister Claus . . . Miss, no one was like him. He was just like this cool older brother,” he said wistfully.
When he said this, I felt like crying.
In light of my ambivalent relationship with the boys, it seemed all the more important to maintain some vestige of closeness with the class that Felicia was in, a class that, I believed, loved me the way the boys loved Claus. I came to their advisory class one morning to say hello. Felicia greeted me with her characteristic charm—“Do you miss us, Miss Garon?”—but she seemed distracted.
It was around that time that I found out how much her grades were slipping. Her history teacher was the one who told me. “She’s pulling a ‘D’ in my class,” he said. “She isn’t doing any homework and she basically failed the last test.”
I had never seen Felicia break a sweat. She already knew so much. She watched and understood The Daily Show at fourteen. She made jokes about Communism and wore a Che Guevara shirt when most of her peers couldn’t have identified Latin America on a map. She was so much more sophisticated, more worldly than they were. How on earth was she failing freshman history?
I went to her guidance counselor to see what was up. “Yeah, she’s gone down in everything,” the counselor said. She probably was not even supposed to tell me that, the counselor, but she did anyway.
I pulled Felicia from class during her lunch period. I was professional. “You wanna tell me what the hell is going on, girl?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not seven.”
“Right. You’re fourteen going on twenty-eight. Answer my question.”
“Miss, don’t you think you’re just insecure about your role as a young teacher?”
“Woah, this isn’t about me! We’re talking about you.”
“Why do you care, Miss?” Exasperation.
“Because I do. Because you’re brilliant, and you know it, and I hate seeing you slip like this.”
“Can I go now?”
“Yeah. Just try and pick your grades up a little, okay? And come see me if you want to talk. . . .”
She scampered off.
______
I kept my distance. I tried to give her the space she clearly wanted, as much as it worried me to see her grades going down the toilet. If she had looked happy, maybe it would not have bothered me so much. But when I saw her in the halls, though she was always surrounded by friends, she would laugh with bitterness that I didn’t recognize. She had stopped coming to see me altogether.
So I went into her advisory class again, ostensibly to see how all the kids in that class were doing. She was in the back of the room, goofing off. Her sleeves were rolled up, and on one of her wrists, there was a little tree. Just like that—a neat little tree carved into her skin, the angry welts having been reduced to perfect red branches.
I came over and picked up her wrist. “What is this?”
She immediately pulled away, moved her wrists out of sight. “Nothing.”
“That’s not nothing.’”
“My cat scratched me.” Sleeves rolled up. Hands tucked under her arms.
“That’s one hell of an artistic cat.”
She laughed sardonically. “You know it is.”
______
As a teacher, I’m a mandated reporter: legally obligated to inform the guidance counselors if I see a student in a potentially harmful situation. I gave the word. They had her in the guidance office fifteen minutes later.
______
As I expected, she was livid. First, she told the guidance counselors that I was a liar and an idiot. She wouldn’t let them see her arms. Then she told them I was stalking her. That hurt. “It’s pretty common for them to say stuff like that,” the guidance counselor told me by way of comfort. “Kids who have never had anyone care about them in their lives don’t know how to handle it when someone demonstrates that they do.” Somehow, that just made me feel worse.
In the hallways, if I saw her, she would turn and run the other way. She wouldn’t even make eye contact with me or look in my direction. I eventually started taking a different stairwell so that I wouldn’t have to run into her anymore.
One of her friends came to find me. “She’s really mad at you, Miss,” Jennifer said. She said this with a note of glee. Jennifer liked drama. Jennifer also liked having someone who was as miserable as she was; she, too, was a veteran of self-mutilation, but I’d only learn that much later.
“I know,” I said. I gave Jennifer a book to borrow. “You can let Felicia read it when you’re done, if she wants to.”
“She’s really pissed. She, like, hates you.”
I sighed. “Well, tell her I still care about her, and that if she wants to come and scream at me in person, she’s welcome to.”
I talked to another English teacher about it. “Leave your door open,” he said. “You did the only thing you could do, by law. So just leave your door open. Eventually she’ll come back.”
The math teacher and the history teacher bot
h tried to intervene. “Ms. Garon loves you. She cares about you. That’s why she did what she did.”
“I f—ing hate that bitch,” Felicia said to them. “She better leave me alone.”
The worst part was that the rest of my special, smart, talented class turned on me, too. Graffiti appeared on the walls: “Miss Garon is a snitch.” I could have pled that this wasn’t the same as ratting out a peer, that I’d done it because I cared about Felicia, or that it was illegal not to. But I didn’t bother.
Except for once. Another student in that class, Naomi, confronted me online. I’d given the kids my screen name so that they could ask me questions when they didn’t understand their homework assignments. So Naomi sent me an instant message saying, “You’re a snitch.”
“Naomi,” I typed back, trying to rationalize with her, “This incident was not so clear-cut. I think Felicia needed help. I did it because I thought she was hurting, not because I wanted to get her in trouble or whatever.”
“You helped no one,” Naomi typed in response. “To hell with you.”
She signed off before I could respond and copied and pasted the conversation on her MySpace page.
______
Humiliated by my bad judgment (Who in their right mind tries to rationalize with angry fourteen-year-olds?) and a little bit afraid that I would incur someone’s wrath (administrators or other students, I wasn’t sure), I went and talked to the social worker who was counseling Felicia by this point.
“I know you can’t tell me anything about her,” I said to him, “but I just don’t know what to do anymore. I wish they’d all stop hating me. I wanted to help her, and I feel like it’s totally backfired.”
Then I started crying. I had been holding it in for a while, but at that moment I realized how hurt and sad I was. I loved Felicia. That was the bottom line. And she hated me.
The social worker listened patiently.