by Ilana Garon
The only downside is I still have my horrendous commute (and my schedule is early—7:40 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.!), but they have all kinds of grants for resources and computers and trips and things, so it should be a significantly different experience than teaching at Explorers proper. I don’t know . . . I’ve been negative towards small schools because I see how bad it is for them to be in the same building as the larger school (in terms of using up resources and crunching the big school), but it seems that all big schools are headed to become small schools, anyway, whether I like it or not. And first and foremost I like being employed, and you don’t knock the hand that feeds you.
The teachers who work at this new school say it’s a really great place to work, that everyone’s friendly and organized and easy-going. In fact, the lead teacher of the department is one of the girls with whom I’ve taken classes all the way through City College in the Fellows program, and we’re very close, so it’ll be great working with her. And I’ll still be in the same building as all my Explorers friends, who promise not to shun me despite my having gone over to the “dark side.” So I think, in the end, this may be a good change for me.
2 Since the early 2000s, formerly huge public schools around New York City have been gradually broken up into “small schools,” all of which are housed in one building. On our campus, as many as seven schools have existed in the same building simultaneously, each with a separate administration. Often, the original “big school” is gradually phased out, while increasing numbers of small schools begin cropping up in its place. The result is acrimony between the different schools and an ongoing fight for space, resources, top teaching talent, and academic recognition.
YEAR 3
Having long voiced objections to small schools on the grounds that they mooch off the existing big school’s resources and spend a greater amount of money per student in a way that is unfair if the system can’t afford to do so for every kid, I do feel somewhat like a turncoat at this point. That said, the working environment is much more agreeable. For starters, I have my own room, and a lot of leeway about what books I teach: In eleventh-grade English, for instance, I am teaching To Kill a Mockingbird, Night, and The Bluest Eye just because I like them, and not because of what was available in the book room. I am also teaching an elective I made up called Creative Non-Fiction and the Personal Essay, and a study hall period for which the tentative title is Shut Up and Do Your Homework or You have Lunch Detention. For the elective and study hall, I team-teach with the history teacher on the grounds that there are about a billion kids in the class at once. I told him I’d do the teaching and he could impose martial law. So far it’s worked out fine.
This stupendous program couldn’t last long, though, even in a well-run school. Apparently the kids have already managed to drive two of their teachers out with their bad behavior. One, they consistently taunted about her accent (and, allegedly, threw a stapler in the general direction of her head) to the point where she felt uncomfortable addressing the class. The other was openly gay, and though he cites “health reasons” as his impetus for leaving, common belief amongst the staff is that he left due to intolerance and resulting disobedience on the part of the freshmen. So the school was left scrambling to fill several spots this week. I received a knock at my door early Friday morning.
“I heard a nasty rumor about you,” said the principal.
“Oh yeah, what is that?” I asked, worrying that he was going to chide me for lateness.
“I heard you can teach math.”
“Um . . . I barely passed calculus.”
“What? You don’t need calculus to teach freshman math. You have the requisite number of credits. Please, we’re desperate.”
So now, in addition to my already existing course load, I am teaching ninth-grade math. This week I have to teach them about “box and whisker” graphs, which apparently are intended to give a visual representation of a set of integers. I never learned this in school (I feel like they just invented this kind of “new math” recently) and so I kind of want to call it a “bells and whistles” graph and march into class blowing a kazoo.
CHAPTER NINE
Adam
It felt like a first date.
During a school-wide faculty meeting the previous June, the assistant principal had pulled me aside.
“I have some bad news,” he told me quietly, glancing around to make sure no one else could hear. “There were some last-minute budget cuts, which meant we couldn’t afford to keep all the teaching positions . . . and so we had to excess some people. And it goes by seniority . . . so . . .”
I grabbed his forearm. “What? You’re firing me?”
My eyes began to well up, but the vice principal said, “No, no! Don’t cry! I didn’t forget to take care of my girl!”
“You didn’t?” I sniffed, while privately thinking, That’s a first.
“No. The small school upstairs is looking for a new English teacher. I told them I’d send you up as soon as I talked to you.”
I was interviewed that very day and hired the next. Within twenty-four hours, I had a new job. As I cleaned out my locker, it dawned on me how lucky I was to have been given an eleventh-hour reprieve from unemployment—surely other excessed teachers throughout the city had endured worse troubles.
But now, on my first day in the small school, I was shaking with nervousness. Supposedly, these kids were more studious than the ones in the main school—at the time, small schools could select their own students based on performance in middle school, cap their class sizes at seventy-five, and attendance average was close to 80 percent. By comparison, I was used to hundreds of students per grade in the main school, with attendance at closer to 50 percent. Most of these kids will actually show up, I realized. I had never had a class with decent attendance, and somehow, the prospect of having a full house each day was daunting.
I wiped my clammy hands on my blazer, an item I had never worn in the main school, and smoothed my hair. I had to make a good impression.
A boy and a girl walked into the class. Adam and Tonya, they told me. Juniors. I would be teaching them.
Neither looked big enough to be in eleventh grade, I thought. Adam couldn’t have been more than my height of five feet, five inches—for a sixteen-year-old boy, that seemed quite small. He had a shorn head and a baby face. Tonya was probably under five feet, made only slightly taller by her platform shoes. She was rail thin, with her hair in cornrows so tight they looked painful.
“Whore,” Tonya suddenly said to Adam, seemingly without provocation.
“Slut,” he returned. I stared open-mouthed. Then they collapsed into giggles and hugged each other. Apparently this was an in-joke.
I introduced myself, and then started babbling awkwardly about whether I had bought enough pens for everyone. Adam, sensing my distress, reached out and hugged me. It surprised me how grateful I was.
“Don’t worry, Miss,” he said. “We’re all a big family here. You’ll be fine.”
In class that day, I gave the students index cards and told them to write something on the cards that they felt I should know about them. Then people who wanted to share could read their cards aloud.
“What do we write?” the kids wanted to know.
“Anything,” I told them. “You can write about what you did this summer. Or, if . . . say . . . you love reading—or, if you hate reading—you can tell me about that.” I paused. “Or, you could just tell me about your hot new girlfriend or boyfriend.”
The class giggled. When it was time to share, Adam’s hand shot up, his neatly pressed little dress shirt only slightly rumpled from the day’s affairs. I called on him.
“My name is Adam. I love reading. I do not have a hot new boyfriend, though I certainly wish I did,” he read off his card, matter-of-factly.
Interesting, I thought. I had not realized Adam was gay until that moment. Not one of his classmates batted an eyelash. I thought, fleetingly, that he had them very well-trained; in t
he big school, any mention of being gay would have caused the class to erupt into screaming, with the boys all yelling “No homo!” as if this would ward off any suspicion of same-sex interest on their parts.
I had only had one openly gay male student before. He had insisted on being called “Cookie,” which I found difficult to do without cringing. His classroom behavior had been so problematic that it pushed to the backseat any attempts to discuss with him the struggles he was undoubtedly going through being a gay teen in that school. Mostly, he had enjoyed instigating fights between people by writing gossipy notes, throwing things, and making public offers of sexual favors to the boys in our class, much to their horror. He got away with it because he was bigger than any of them.
I could tell that Adam was different.
______
“Adam is gay, right?” I asked one of the other teachers, just to make sure. I’d been off before—it seemed safer to verify in case I had somehow misunderstood.
She laughed and said, “As the day is long. He came out last year, in a grade-wide assembly. . . . He just got up on the stage in the auditorium and said, ‘I have an announcement: I’m gay.’” She chuckled, remembering. “Actually, the kids were remarkably cool about it, considering.”
I’m certain that Adam would have stuck out even if he hadn’t been openly gay in the Bronx public schools. He wore light blue or periwinkle dress shirts and gray slacks to school, no matter what day it was. He carried a day planner everywhere he went. He spoke both English and Spanish with near perfect elocution. He was one of those kids you immediately identify as a teacher’s pet, but somehow, he pulled it off without seeming saccharine or disingenuous.
“Miss? Can you help me with my math homework?” asked Callum, one of the eleventh-graders. It was study hall during the first week of school, when everyone was still keeping up the pretense of using that time to do homework.
“Sure . . . what’re you guys learning about?” I walked over to his desk and looked down at his homework. “My mortal enemy. Logarithms . . . we meet again.”
Callum burst out laughing. “Miss, it’s okay—I’ll ask Adam.” He turned and yelled across the room, “Hey, Adam! Genius! Can you help me with math? Please?”
“No problem!” Adam cheerfully pulled a chair over to face Callum’s desk. I watched to see if Callum would just end up copying Adam’s homework, but that didn’t happen. Adam explained the rule and patiently talked Callum through the steps on the hopelessly outdated scientific calculator that the school had provided.
“Adam, thank you so much—that was mad helpful,” Callum said when the bell rang.
“Yeah . . . Adam, you’re a good teacher,” I told Adam, who was packing up his planner. “I really appreciate your helping out.”
Adam smiled. “It’s all my math teacher, Ms. Lambert,” he said. “She explains everything very clearly—it’s impossible not to be interested!”
I stared at him, open-mouthed.
“I’ll see you later, Miss Garon,” he said, gathering the remainder of his stuff and strolling off to his next class.
______
Teachers had to send out midterm reports to any students running a 65 or lower in their respective classes.
“Adam, you didn’t get any reports, did you?” I asked, not looking up from the ones I was filling out. We were in study hall again. I noticed Adam’s desk had somehow made its way over to abut mine. Callum’s was in satellite orbit nearby.
He paused a little too long before answering. I looked up. He cringed.
“Nooo!” I cried. “What subject could you possibly be failing?”
“It’s gym,” he said mournfully.
“Gym? What the hell, Adam? All you have to do to pass gym is participate. Oh, and wear deodorant. And change into stupid clothes.”
“That’s the problem.”
“Huh?”
“I haven’t been wearing the right sneakers,” he said vaguely.
I looked down at his feet. He was wearing black penny loafers.
“Why not? What do they require?”
“White soles.”
“So, wear the right ones. What’s the problem?”
He squirmed uncomfortably, and I realized with horror that I had made a crucial miscalculation. I had unconsciously taken Adam’s slacks and button-downs to be a sign of, if not wealth, at least relative comfort compared to other kids in the school. I understood suddenly that he wasn’t wearing his church clothes to make a fashion statement. These were his only clothes—at least, the only presentable ones. No wonder he seemed to have so many blue shirts. He must have washed and ironed the same two or three several times a week.
Adam was looking at me. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said, with an attempt at levity. “I’ll get ’em soon . . . no biggie.”
I have to make this right, I thought. I wouldn’t be able to look Adam in the eye otherwise. So I stood up next to him, and playfully lined up my own small, pink-sneakered foot next to his. “Hey, well, I’d lend you mine, but I’m not sure we’re the same size. . . .”
He grinned. “Yours have spikes anyway,” he said. Since my first year, I had taken to wearing Puma track shoes to school for reasons too idiosyncratic to explain. “They’re against the rules—they’d wreck the gym floor.”
“Rules, rules. What shoe size are these canal boats anyway, big guy? Twenty-five?”
“Right. Twenty-five,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Try eleven?”
A period later, I left the building under the pretense of going to buy lunch. Instead, I headed for the discount shoe store near the 2 train.
“I need men’s shoes, size eleven, with white soles,” I told the salesman.
He picked up a box from the display case and opened them for me. “These look okay?”
I peered in. They were Champions, a brand I recognized from my own youth. It wasn’t Nike, but it wouldn’t fall apart right away either.
“How much?”
“For you, $30.”
As I reentered the building, a nosy, twenty-year veteran teacher from the main school looked at me suspiciously.
“What’s in the bag?” she growled, in her six-pack-a-day smoker voice. “You know you’re not supposed to be using prep periods for your personal errands.”
I had always been scared of this woman. The fact that she no longer governed me made no difference. “I’m on lunch,” I said. “And I had to get something for a student.”
“You got shoes for a student?” She glared at the logo on the bag and growled, “You can’t do that! If you do that for one kid, they’ll all start wanting them! Never do that again! Go demand that your principal give you back your money!”
I fought back tears. I needed to do this; it was penitence.
“I’ll deal with it.” I ran upstairs before she could see how she had upset me.
I realized I did not know how to give Adam the shoes. I did not want him to know they were from me—at least, not with any certainty. And I couldn’t let on to any of the other kids.
In the end, I decided to chance another administrator. I went to the school secretary.
“Can you give these to Adam?” I asked her.
“Awww, you bought him shoes? Honey, that’s so sweet!”
“Listen—don’t tell him they’re from me. Say . . . say they’re from the ‘Committee for the Importance of Gym’ or something. Or say they’re from the PTA. Whatever.”
“We don’t have a PTA.”
“Whatever—say anything! Just don’t tell him they’re from me!”
I made it to ninth period before my little secret was found out. As I was getting ready to leave, Adam appeared in my classroom, bag of shoes in hands. His face was tear-streaked, but he was beaming.
“Miss, someone got me sneakers!” he said.
“Great—now you have no excuse for not passing gym.” I busied myself wiping the board, despite the fact that it was blank.
“See, the funny thing is, the secretary says they
’re from the PTA. . . .”
“Well, isn’t that nice.”
“But I know we don’t have a PTA.”
“Hmm. Interesting.”
“So . . . you know who I think they’re from?”
“Beats me. I’ve never seen these shoes in my life.”
“Oh, Miss Garon,” he said, his eyes welling up again. “You are ridiculous!” He grabbed me with both arms, and hugged me to his chest so tightly that I nearly choked.
______
If I had had a “teaching husband,” a partner in raising my adorable brood of 115 high school students, it would have been Dan.
He was a science teacher, about a year and a half younger than I was. It was his first year teaching, and my first year in the small school, so we got along brilliantly. We taught all the same kids. He was creative, brilliant, and totally scattered. He was also gay: “Cute barrettes,” he had told me one day early in the year, by way of a greeting. “My boyfriend, some of the other teachers, and I are going drinking tonight. Wanna come?”
I loved Dan. I loved his earnest brown eyes, the way he would crack up laughing whenever we were really stressed out (leading me to do the same), and his passion for making science exciting to the kids. I was envious of his zany lesson plans. One time, he had the kids create a double helix DNA strand out of multicolored lollypops. If they did it right, they were allowed to eat the lollypops afterwards. The kids loved it, and I wished I had thought of it, despite the fact that I wasn’t even teaching science.
“I don’t want the kids to know I’m gay,” he had told me early on.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know if they’ll respect me.”