A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  “That’s not a teacher’s dress,” I said.

  “Not for you, for me,” she said. She looked at her belly and with a shake of her head put the dress back. At twenty-eight years old, she was seven months pregnant with her third child.

  “Soon you’ll get to go clothes shopping for yourself again,” I said. She smiled, and we continued down the racks. Mago and I had been drifting apart ever since she moved out of my father’s house when I was seventeen. When she was planning her escape, she had promised to take me with her, but she had left me behind to fend for myself. Since my father forbade me to see her, we had to sneak behind his back to spend time with each other, and it was always awkward between us. When I left for Santa Cruz, I thought I had succeeded in learning how to take care of myself.

  Now as we walked around Ross, there was a part of me that wanted things to go back to how they used to be between us. I missed the special bond that had seen us through our difficult childhood. I wanted to reconnect. I wanted to once again be her “Nena,” her little baby, but seeing her swollen belly reminded me that those times were long gone. She had her own children now.

  “How are you feeling about next week?” Mago said.

  “I’m afraid,” I confessed. I had attended a one-week training session hosted by LAUSD staff, where I had been shown how to fill out a roster, prepare a lesson plan, follow the standards, and become familiar with classroom procedures. But the crash course on teaching had left me even more frightened. I had never once taken an education class. At UCSC, my friend Claudia had majored in education. I wished now I had asked her more questions about her classes or gone with her when she did her student teaching. I made a mental note to call her and ask her what pedagogy meant.

  “Don’t be scared,” Mago said as we walked back to her car. “Act confident, pretend that you know what you’re doing. They’re just kids.”

  So am I! I wanted to say. I took a deep breath and decided right then and there that perhaps the time had come for me to grow up.

  In addition to buying new clothes, I did what I had tried so hard to avoid—I bought a brand-new car. Unlike Santa Cruz, where I could get by with a bicycle, it was nearly impossible to get anywhere in L.A. without a reliable motor vehicle, especially with such a long commute. So I added a car payment to my growing list of debts, and with that new burden, I finally entered adulthood.

  In January 2000, a few days after celebrating the new millennium, I drove my brand-new Toyota Corolla from East L.A. to South Central at 5:30 a.m. Classes started at 7:20, and I wanted to give myself enough time to get to my classroom and prepare myself mentally and emotionally for my first day.

  I wore a long-sleeved burgundy velvet dress and matching high heels. Mago had said heels were a must if I wanted to be taller than my students. “They’ll respect you more if they have to look up at you,” she said. But I had rarely worn heels, and as I made my way across the parking lot with my new briefcase in hand, I felt like a little girl playing dress-up.

  My classroom was out in the bungalows farthest from the main building. Except for the grassy lawn in the front, the school grounds were nothing but concrete. Since there were no flowers and only a few trees, I put in a lot of effort to make my classroom look beautiful and welcoming. The clock ticked by much too quickly, and I hurried to decorate my classroom with the pretty trimming and posters with inspirational quotes I had bought at a teacher supply store. I had spent the weekend reviewing the English textbook and was optimistic that my passion for reading and writing would more than compensate for my lack of teaching experience. I thought of my favorite teachers—Diana, Marta, Micah—and wondered what it was about them that I could try to imitate. Their kindness, their interest in me that went beyond my performance in their classroom, their willingness to help me reach my full potential—that was the kind of teacher I wanted to be. I would do everything I could to inspire and motivate my young pupils.

  The bell rang, and I opened the door and stood there as one by one my students walked in. Who knew eighth graders could be so tall? In eighth grade, I had been four-foot-eight! I stood as straight as I could in my high heels as I welcomed my students into my classroom, but sure enough, almost every kid who walked in was taller than me. They were all Latino, which made me happy until I realized most of them were little wannabe cholos—the very kids my father had kept us away from when we were growing up, the kids I grew up being scared of. But then I thought of Betty, of how the abuse and lack of support at home and school had driven her to want to join a gang. I wondered what kind of personal lives these kids had. I hoped I could make my classroom feel like a home for them and for me.

  The kids all knew one another. I was the outsider. There were sixteen boys and six girls. I had heard rumors that boys were tougher to discipline than girls. But as I inspected the girls and took in their heavy makeup and hard-core chola expressions, they seemed just as tough as the boys.

  “Good morning,” I said, but they continued talking as if I weren’t there. “Good morning,” I said, trying on my teacher voice. It cracked, and I had to clear my throat to continue, but it worked. The students grew silent and they all turned to look at me. “Hello, everyone. I’m Ms. Grande.”

  The class erupted with laughter. “Seriously?” someone exclaimed. I was used to the laughter. Growing up with such a grandiose name had made me the butt of many jokes. In that moment I once again hated my name with a passion. Reyna Grande, the little Big Queen. Why couldn’t I have a more sensible name, like María González or Lupe Martínez? Or an elegant name like my great-grandmother’s, Catalina Catalán. Or how about the name of the heroine in my favorite telenovela, La Dueña. Regina Villarreal would have been perfect, strong and fierce, especially if you added an extra roll to the r’s.

  “Can we call you Ms. Chiquita?” one of the students asked.

  The class erupted in laughter again.

  “No, you may not,” I said. My heart was beating so fast, I felt as if it was going to burst at any moment. “I am Ms. Grande.”

  “So, Ms. Chiquita,” one of the girls said, “where did you buy your dress?”

  They eyed me up and down, and I suddenly wished I had not listened to Mago and had bought myself a dozen pair of pants and long-sleeve blouses instead. Not the fashionable dresses and the pencil skirts that hung in my closet. The dress reached my knees, and there was nothing indecent about it, but now I tried to pull the hem down, feeling suddenly exposed. No matter how much I wanted to, the dress would not magically grow in length to my ankles.

  “So, Ms. Chiquita,” one of the boys asked, “do you have a boyfriend?”

  In the teacher’s cafeteria, I found terrified faces that were mirror images of mine. Young teachers who, like me, had been thrown into the classroom with one week of training. We were the majority. The minority were the veteran teachers, some of whom had permanent scowls. When I sat with them during lunch and they asked me about my day, and saw how flustered I was, they said, “It gets better. The first year is the hardest.”

  At first, I believed them and hoped things would get easier, that I could learn how to teach and engage and discipline my students, that I could learn how to follow the standards and create amazing lessons. But everything I tried ended in chaos. I would spend the weekends coming up with classroom activities that I thought would make learning fun, only to be met with boredom and apathy. I tried to channel Diana and Marta, to be kind and giving, to show that I cared, but I realized those things were easier to do when you had students who met you at least halfway. But the worst thing was that they could smell my fear, see it in my face, hear it in my voice, and they took great pleasure in it. The game of the day was How much will Ms. Chiquita take before she runs off like the others? Having chased away five substitutes already, why not chase away the new teacher and finish the school year never having to do any real work?

  Later I would discover that most inexperienced teachers like me were placed in inner-city schools. The Latino and black kid
s who lived in these neighborhoods had no say in the matter and were stuck with us. Since we held emergency credentials, we couldn’t request a transfer out of the school where we were placed. By the end of the year more than half of those new teachers would be gone, having quit teaching and moved on to another, less rigorous career. They would be replaced with new young faces looking as scared as I had on my first day.

  In the evening, I would arrive at Carlos’s house feeling emotionally drained and physically exhausted. And I didn’t have a room of my own where I could retreat and recharge. I was still sleeping on the couch in the living room. My writing waited for me to return to it, but I could write only a few pages before exhaustion overwhelmed me and I had to put my novel and short stories away, promising myself to return to them another day.

  In addition to the mountain of papers I needed to grade, the district personnel had also failed to mention in the training course that I wasn’t going to be doing much teaching. In middle school, I soon discovered, it was all about disciplining. Having grown up with a father whose only form of discipline was to insult us or hit us, I was rather limited in my resources. If I didn’t want to end up in jail, I knew I had to find a different approach.

  When I asked other teachers for advice, they said. “Do time-outs.”

  “What are those?” I said.

  I got a list of discipline techniques: give them time-outs, give them detention during lunch or after school, take things away. I could send the troublemaker to another class if I made prior arrangements with the other teacher. I could call their parents. I could send them to the principal or the dean if worse came to worst.

  None of it worked. I grew desperate. My classroom was a zoo. I was so ashamed I kept my doors closed so that no one could hear me trying to deal with the chaos. I didn’t want anyone to see the boy who insisted on riding his skateboard across the classroom; or the girls who huddled in a corner putting on their makeup and doing their hair, stinking up my classroom with hairspray and perfume; or the paper airplanes that flew above my head and crashed into the chalkboard before nose-diving to the floor; or the kids who pretended to listen to the audiobooks at the listening center but were actually pulling the tape out of the cassettes.

  Another teacher recommended positive reinforcement.

  “What’s that?” I asked, completely taken aback by the word “positive.” Could discipline be done in a positive way? Why hadn’t anyone told my father?

  “It means you reward them for good behavior,” she said. “And the more you reward them for the good things they do, the better they will behave. You can buy pencils, cute erasers, and stickers as prizes.”

  I tried to picture giving my students those “prizes.” They would throw those cute erasers at me instead of the paper airplanes. And did she really think eighth graders would want stickers?

  At seeing the doubt in my face, she quickly added, “You can also try popcorn and a movie on Fridays, or pizza parties at the end of the month. Or buy board games and reward them with free time.”

  “Blah,” another teacher said, waving the words away with her hands. “Don’t listen to her. That’s not discipline. That’s bribery.” She turned to me and said, “You’ll just end up spending a lot of your hard-earned money buying things to bribe them with. Don’t. All you’re doing is paying them to behave.”

  “You should go observe Ms. Hoang’s class,” another teacher suggested. “She runs a tight ship.”

  I glanced around the cafeteria to see if I could spot Ms. Hoang. I didn’t think I had met her yet.

  “She never leaves her room,” the teachers said. “She keeps prisoners.”

  During my free period the next day, I went to observe Ms. Hoang. She frightened me. Though she was only a few years older than I was—thirty, at most—she didn’t look young. Even though she was dressed in a silk blouse, black pencil skirt, and high heels, she looked like a drill sergeant. She held her body ramrod straight—rigid, tall, imposing. Her hair was pulled back in a bun so tight it looked painful. I sat in a corner by the door and watched the transformation in her seventh graders. The minute they walked into the classroom they stood straighter, their smiles disappeared, and whatever conversations they had been having in the hallways ended abruptly. They walked in complete silence. Chairs did not screech, shoes did not squeak against the linoleum, papers did not rustle, textbooks did not slam onto desks, gum wasn’t smacked. None of the sounds in my classroom existed here.

  The warm-up exercise was on the projector, and Ms. Hoang told them only once to take out their paper and start the warm-up. Like robots, they sat in unison, pulled out their pens and papers in unison, and got to work without being told twice.

  Ten minutes later, no sound had been uttered. Finally, Ms. Hoang broke the silence and said, “Time is up. Please turn in your work,” and what happened next was like a dance. The students on the far right passed their papers to the row to their left, and then that row passed the papers to the next row, and the next, until the papers magically ended up at the last desk in the corner closest to the teacher’s desk. That girl put the papers in a neat stack and placed them in front of Ms. Hoang.

  “Open your books to page 181,” she said. “And read to page 185. Be prepared to discuss it in ten minutes.”

  In unison, the students reached under their desks, took out their textbooks, and set out to do what they were told. Still not a sound, not a word from any of them.

  I stared in awe at Ms. Hoang, wondering what kind of magic this was. Surely, it had to be magic. I had only seen such a thing in stories like Harry Potter, where teachers literally used their magic wands to discipline their students.

  Afterward, when the students had filed out of her room, leaving as quietly as they had come, I approached her, a thousand questions in my head, but all I could say was “How?” I couldn’t even finish my thought.

  She shrugged. “You have to show them who’s in charge,” she said. “The first three weeks of school, we do nothing but drills. Drills and drills and more drills until they know the routine. And those who break the rules suffer the consequences. You can’t teach them anything until they respect you. Until they know you are in charge, not them.”

  Drills worked in the army, she said, why wouldn’t they work in the classroom?

  As she gave me a list of suggestions of the many ways I could humiliate my students into submission, her voice sent chills down my spine. She spoke as if she were giving me orders, even though she was giving me advice.

  As she recommended, I called the parents of my worst students and had them come sit in the class to observe their children. It backfired on me. Those kids—the ones who gave me the most grief—behaved like saints. I had never seen them so quiet and respectful, so eager to do their work and obey the rules. They even called me Ms. Grande instead of Ms. Chiquita. To make matters worse, the rest of the students, those whose parents were not there, behaved worse than usual.

  At the end of class, the three parents confronted me, and I cowered before them. “You made us take a day off work for this?” one of them said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my child. Are you blind? He’s a great student as far as I can see.”

  “Didn’t you see my son do all his work?” another said. “Which is more than I can say for the other students!”

  You should humiliate them, Ms. Hoang had said, but the one who was humiliated was me.

  22

  Saudade

  I DECIDED TO MOVE to my own apartment and I found a place in Boyle Heights. A friend gave me a stray kitten he had rescued from the streets so I could have someone to come home to. I loved my black-and-white kitty, whom I named Saudade, my favorite word in Portuguese. Saudade, a deep longing, melancholy, nostalgia, the Portuguese equivalent to the Spanish añoranza. But even my kitty’s comforting presence couldn’t take away the harsh realization that this next step in my life, to have my own apartment, came with more bills to pay. Now I had to pay for rent, groceries, my ca
r, my student loans, cat food, and litter. All of a sudden, what at first had seemed like a great salary no longer felt so great. With all my expenses, I didn’t have much left at the end of the month. And the job was so demanding that I would come home too tired and too overwhelmed to write. As the weeks stretched into months, I wrote less and less, until eventually I stopped completely. The words wouldn’t come anymore.

  I would sit down at my computer with Saudade on my lap and stare at the screen, searching for a story, an image, an opening line. But I couldn’t drown out the noise and chaos of my middle school classroom, the fear that gripped me every time the bell rang, or the feeling of incompetence that now dominated my every thought.

  The screen remained empty. My stories seemed to have left me.

  When they learned that I had some experience dancing folklórico, the Latino teachers asked me to volunteer after school to get the students ready to perform a few dances for the Cinco de Mayo event they were organizing.

  Every day after school I went to the auditorium to teach the kids some of the dances I had learned at UCSC. Since the polkas from northern Mexico were what I knew best, they were what I taught the students. To my amazement, the kids actually listened to what I said. They worked hard at learning the steps and choreography. They didn’t argue, fight, or cause mayhem the way they did in my classroom. What was different? Finally, I realized that the kids who stayed after school were there because they wanted to be there and were interested in what they were learning, which perhaps they had never been in my class. Also, they knew that the minute they misbehaved, I could ask them to leave. I suddenly felt confident and capable as a teacher, something I hadn’t felt once since I had started teaching.