by Ilana Garon
The mother glared at Charlene. Charlene, in turn, glared at me. I wished for a hole to crawl into and thought glumly that Charlene would probably never show up to my math class again.
Toward the end of the evening, I was standing by the door to my classroom scanning the emptying hallway when Tyler and his mother came by.
“Tyler!” I said, genuinely glad to see him. When he hugged me, his little shaved head only came up to my chin. I shook his mother’s hand.
“Miss Garon? Do you have any . . . candy?” he asked, peering eagerly behind my back and into the classroom.
“Not now, baby,” Tyler’s mother told him. She was a dignified, middle-aged woman with a well-cut brown suit, spectacle glasses, and a bun. It turned out she was a teacher as well—fourth grade, she told me. She and her husband were very invested in Tyler’s education. We stood at the doorway and talked shop for a few minutes while Tyler played a videogame he had brought with him.
Compared to a lot of these kids, Tyler was lucky. He had two parents. They cared about whether he passed his classes. His mother didn’t seem inclined to hit him, at least not in public.
“We wish he could have stayed in your class instead of going up to tenth-grade math,” his mother said. Tyler was still absorbed in his videogame and seemed to be ignoring us.
“But it’s good that he can have a more challenging curriculum now.”
“I know,” his mother said. She furrowed her brow. “But compared to the students in this new class, he’s so young . . . his teacher says he acts up. He’s just not mature enough to be with the tenth-graders. I wonder if he wouldn’t have done better just staying put.”
______
As it turned out, his mother was right. Tyler got kicked out of math class several days in a row. After that, as far as I could tell, he stopped going altogether. He would come to my room instead, and press his little face against the glass window of my closed door, peering in plaintively.
“Awww, it’s baby Tyler!” the girls in my eleventh-grade class would coo almost in unison, or “Oh, he’s mad cute—he looks like Kermit the frog!” I didn’t quite see the resemblance. “Let him come in, Miss—he’s sad!”
So I would open the door, and Tyler would bound into the room, sit down at my desk, and wait to be made useful. The first few times he showed up, I denied him entrance, begging him to go back to math or threatening to call his mother. It didn’t work; he’d leave that day, but would reappear at my door twenty-four hours later. If I mistakenly left the classroom door unlocked, I would turn around to find Tyler seated in one of the desks, having quietly snuck in and now trying to blend in with the rest of my students.
I gave up trying to kick him out—I just didn’t have the heart to do it so many times. When I had materials to sort or distribute, I made him my personal assistant. Otherwise, I would give him a pen and instruct him to do his homework quietly.
Midway through the year, I knew he wasn’t doing well. In the beginning of the term, Tyler had been pulling a 90 average—I had seen his first report card. Now, the names of students who had made the Dean’s list were posted outside the principal’s office. Students who made at least an 80 average were eligible. Shawn was near the bottom.
Tyler’s name wasn’t on the list.
______
My second chance with Tyler came the following September, when I found him on my roster again—for tenth-grade English. This time, he had been separated from Shawn, apparently at the behest of both of their parents. The extra year had given him some height—he was now nearly as tall as I was—but he had maintained the same open, doe-eyed expression that had endeared him to me in the first place.
His behavior was less endearing. I would pass him in the hallway with his arm around one of a rotation of girls he was apparently seeing, and he would wink at me conspiratorially. In class, he was chatty, constantly yelling at his friends across the room, getting up out of his seat to go visit with his latest romantic conquest, and generally causing a ruckus.
“Tyler, come on!” I said, after I caught him standing across the room from his partner during pair work, discussing the previous weekend’s game with one of his fellow JV football players.
“Awww, Miss! I’m done already! Just one more second,” he begged, as he leaned back down to chat with his friend.
I looked across the room at his work partner, Gerard, who sat at his desk with his chin in his palm, looking irritated. Gerard was a sweet, motivated kid, unapologetically nerdy—all of my conversations with him somehow ended up being on the subject of battleships. I had a hunch that he was doing the work for both of them. Now, I met Gerard’s gaze and raised an eyebrow. Is Tyler done? Gerard caught my meaning immediately. He shook his head.
I was disappointed. True, Tyler had always been very social. But he seemed to have lost that spark he’d had as a ninth-grader, when he had jumped up and down excitedly upon finding the answer to the challenge math question. Somehow I had assumed that innate intelligence and good parenting would keep him motivated, even when the environment around him wasn’t exactly oriented towards academics.
Reluctantly, I called home. His mom answered. “Oh, hi, Ms. Garon. What’s he done now?” she said.
I found myself trying to console her. “It’s really not all that bad . . . he’s so smart . . .” I stammered. “It’s just that he really isn’t focused. He’s so chatty. He just wanders around the class socializing instead of doing the work. He’d be a top student if he could just buckle down. . . .”
“You know, he learned to read when he was four,” she told me wearily. “His father and I have spent so much time working with him. This just disappoints us so much—we want him to get a college scholar ship, and that won’t happen if he keeps carrying on like this. It’s tenth grade—he’s not in middle school anymore.”
______
The morning after my conversation with his mother, Tyler was livid. He skulked into class and seated himself all the way in the back row. Then he put his head down on the desk. Another student asked him what was wrong, but he ignored her totally.
“Tyler, your seat is in front. Move up please,” I said.
Instantly, he sprang up, and shot me a look of pure hatred. I flinched.
“What, you gonna call my house again? Just leave me the hell alone!” he shouted. Then he put his head down on the desk again.
The other kids looked at me questioningly. I inclined my head towards him and motioned “cut” with my hand—Let him be, guys. They got the message.
Tyler gave me the silence treatment for the rest of the week, which seemed terribly long. He ignored any attempts I made to address him and rolled his eyes at anything I directed to the entire class. He sat at his desk either with his head down or with his arms crossed, sulking. Periodically, he would utter a sound that I would describe as a “bored noise”—it was sort of an irritated huff—that was a little too loud and pointed to be accidental.
The kids who were chronic discipline problems—the ones who would get suspended constantly, fight in class, curse at teachers, or just walk out spontaneously when they got bored—found Tyler’s antics too childish to even bother with. But the “good” kids were interested. I could tell they were torn between their desire to register their admiration at his refusal to participate, by flashing surreptitious grins in his direction that they thought I couldn’t see, and their fear of being associated with someone who was being such a badass. The fact that he was, strictly speaking, one of their own—a smart kid who generally wasn’t so much “bad” as overly social and loud—made him all the more accessible as an icon of rebellion. By the end of the week, they were all imitating him, putting their heads on the desk and complaining, “Aww, this is mad boring!” regardless of what I told them to do.
It was time to cut my losses. I approached Tyler while the kids were doing group work.
“Can we talk for a minute?”
“Miss, I got nothing to say to you.” He angled his face away fro
m me.
“Okay, then just listen. I’m sorry I called your house. I wish I hadn’t felt like I had to. But you’re being very disruptive. It’s hard for me, as your teacher, to conduct class when you’re distracting everyone. And when I tell you not to, you don’t listen. You just ignore what I say. It makes me feel . . .”—I paused for effect—“very disrespected.”
That got his attention. He whipped his head back around, his expression one of surprise.
“Really?”
“Yeah, and the other students really look up to you, so—”
“Miss, I am so sorry,” he said. He genuinely looked it, too. “This will never happen again. If you ever have a problem with me, or feel I am disrespecting you in any way, I want you to call this number.”
He scrawled ten digits on a piece of notebook paper, ripped it out, and handed it to me.
“It’s my cell,” he told me.
“So, if I have a problem with you again, you want me to call . . . you.”
“Exactly,” he said. Then he reached across the desk and gave me a hug.
______
The rest of Tyler’s year was unspectacular. His grades went down in every subject, including my own. When calculating his term grades, I found myself looking for excuses to push him up to an 80, just because I hated seeing such a smart kid get such poor grades.
It wasn’t like he deserved extra points. Though he was significantly less “disrespectful” to me personally, he showed little interest in any of the work we were doing. His assignments were sloppy, clearly intended to fulfill only the bare minimum requirement, and were usually late to boot.
At one point, the school underwent some sort of evaluation based on an hour-long standardized test that all the tenth-graders were supposed to take. Naturally, the English teachers were told to administer the tests during our forty-five-minute periods, thereby guaranteeing that no student could possibly finish on time.
The kids complained. “Aww, Miss! How they expect us to do this?” they cried.
“Look, just do your best—the school’s being evaluated here, not you individually,” I told them, hoping it was true.
They got to work, not without the requisite grumbling. The room was quiet. About ten minutes in, Tyler got up from his desk and swaggered towards me, his Scantron® Sheet in hand.
“What’s up, big guy? You done?” I whispered.
Tyler grinned. “Check out my paper. It’s a present for the test people.”
He had neatly bubbled in “F_ _ _ _ Y O U” in three-inch-high letters on his sheet.
______
Looking back, I can chart how Tyler slipped, each step that separated the lackadaisical student he became from the true scholar he could have been. I know what happened, but I cannot say why with any certainty. Tyler had brains, parents who encouraged good study habits, and a slew of teachers who, had he shown the smallest glimmer of motivation, would have bent over backwards to help him with schoolwork, specialized summer programs, or scholarships. He had so much promise, so many people rooting for him. He should have been our school’s great success story.
The only culprits I can identify are shadowy ones: the environment of our school, and the implicit messages of Tyler’s peers. Athleticism was universally valued. So was sex appeal. Clowning was rewarded with laughs. Good grades, however, were a double-edged sword—though your teachers and parents might be thrilled, you didn’t get any claps on the shoulder from your peers for making straight A’s. In fact, they were liable to turn on you, to mock you for your scholarly habits. Even worse, they might accuse you of the ultimate treachery: “acting white.”
As a young black kid, Tyler must have understood this reality. He must have figured that if he scraped by on the academic margins, doing the bare minimum, he could ultimately pass his classes while still maintaining the social status he found so alluring.
He prioritized accordingly.
______
The following year, when I went off to graduate school, the students would occasionally IM me to say hello, report on the results of a soccer game, complain about their teachers, or ask for help with homework.
One night in late spring, Tyler popped up on my computer screen.
“Hey Miss. What’s up? I’m applying for a job at Target . . . can you recommend me? All you have to do is tell them I did really great in your class,” he typed.
In fact, he had barely pulled a 70 in my class. Furthermore, I knew from the guidance counselor, with whom I was still friendly, that Tyler’s grades had continued to go down since my departure. He had all his credits, she told me, but just that—he’d be lucky to get into a community college.
“It’s a shame,” she told me. “He’s so intelligent . . . but he’s lazy as can be.”
In my mind’s eye, I still saw the thirteen-year-old math whiz who wanted candy and admission to my classroom. I had never had the heart to say no to that kid—for better, or for worse.
“Of course I’ll recommend you,” I told him.
Sometimes I feel depressed about the difficult situations that my students encounter on a daily basis: During the recent NYC transit strike, for instance, some resourceful young men in my English class formed a “bike club” so that they could ride to school together. The impetus for organizing this little group was to avoid getting “jumped” by thugs who would have found it amusing to hurt them and steal their bicycles. It makes me angry that these teens could not even ride their bikes to school in broad daylight without considering the need for an armed escort. But as the kids pointed out to me, the Bronx is that kind of place.
And yet, through this, they flourish. I got back from Boston this afternoon, where the top thirty students and I (along with nine other chaperones) have been visiting Boston University, Northeastern, and Harvard. These highly motivated kids (among them, all the members of the bike club) have been working steadily throughout the last three years. Graduation is a realistic goal for them, and there is hope that they might be able to attend college. Certainly they will require huge amounts of support, financial and otherwise, but as we’ve told them, there are scholarships out there for tough, smart, inner-city kids.
1t was a joyful experience to walk around the campuses with them. Some of these kids have never been out of New York save for occasional trips home to the Dominican Republic; they were wide-eyed and delighted by the green and open spaces of the Boston Public Gardens, as well as the mix of historic and modern buildings that dot the city.
1t is these bright spots, such as touring Boston with this promising group of kids who wouldn’t stop taking photos with their camera phones, that make me stay in this tough school, that reinforce for me (when I am doubting it) that I have made the right decision by choosing a “socially responsible” career over one that would make it easier to afford my rent.
This year I am teaching four sections of tenth-grade English and one section of twelfth-grade advanced placement (AP). The AP class is my special project. Last spring I told the principal that I thought the school’s main hope of legitimacy lay in offering some classes that would make its students competitive in college applications. I urged him to start an AP program in our school, which should have included a variety of courses.
As it happened, AP English was the only course that materialized, and (as I hoped he would) the principal offered it to me. I went to the AP training course this summer in Virginia to become certified and am now piloting our school’s fledgling AP program.
So. The class was to be capped at twenty. I hand-selected the top twenty students at the end of last year, based on their performance in my English class. I told these twenty students that they were going to be in AP. They were very excited.
I ordered books for twenty students. In mid-July, I stamped and posted summer reading assignments (from my home) to these twenty students. So imagine my surprise when I come into class the first day and there are twenty-seven kids on the roster.
This is by no means the end of the
world, but it is frustrating. The point of keeping AP small was so that the students could get a lot of individual attention in their preparation for the exam and college. It is far more difficult to do that with twenty-seven students. Also, the seven new ones have not read the summer reading book (How could they have? No one even told them they were taking the class until last week!), and so everyone is on a different schedule.
Plus, I am five books short for every novel we’re going to read this year. Let that be a lesson to me: never order only two extra copies in a class set.
There are 112 tenth-graders in our school, and I teach English to every one of them. I am still getting new students virtually every single day, and we are already at the end of the second week of school. I have never in my life taught this many students at once. Usually I have the same number of classes, but I’ll have an advisory or something, where I get a repeat of the same students I had earlier in the day.
Also, in “Big Explorers,” my previous school, I easily had that many kids on my roster—but they would never show up.
The tenth-grade class came to me with a reputation for wild behavior. The teacher who had them last year balked at the prospect of dealing with them again, and so I took them off her hands (feeling gracious because I’d been given my special AP course . . . silly me). And I have to say that so far, they are everything I’ve expected, and more. Mostly, they are rambunctious . . . they jump out of their seats constantly, wander around the class without permission, and scream at their peers across the room. It is like having a class of thirty-three hyperactive five-year-olds, except these kids are sixteen. An alphabetical seating arrangement and threats to call parents did little to calm them, and so I have resorted to my favorite pedagogical method: publicly deriding their ability to shoot baskets and impress girls. It has mixed results.
At one point, during a particularly tiresome argument with one student, in which he was refusing to move himself to the front of the room, I finally said, “Look at me. This is not a democracy. This is a teachocracy. I’m in charge. Now get your rear end to the front, stat!” The students roared. Then one said “Hey, wait, that was corny!” and the rest decided it was corny, as well, and the ensuing discussion of my relative corniness (“Mr. Carver is even cornier, yo!”) lasted several minutes until I managed to threaten enough students with calls to home to make the majority of the class calm down.