by Dan Brown
When I met my class in the cafeteria, an unfamiliar girl in pin-stripe pajamas was chatting and laughing with Lakiya and Deloris (mortal enemies the week before). I asked the girl who she was. “As-ante Bell. I'm in your class.” She was right, although I had listed her as a no-show for missing the first ten days.
“Where have you been, Asante? This is the third week of school!”
She shrugged. “I had things to do.”
The nonchalant response caught me off guard, but I knew better than to begin my relationship with this truant girl by sermonizing on the importance of showing up for school. Instead, my mind scrambled for where to place Asante in the delicate 4-217 seating scheme. I decided to put her with Lakiya, risking a two-headed monster in group five in the hope that their company would abate Lakiya's apathy.
Monday, September 22, was also the kickoff day of our Success for All literacy program. I was very hazy on how this 8:45–10:15 daily segment was supposed to run, but fortunately Fran Baker came in to coteach with me, and she was an expert. Although SFA was brutally maligned by my colleagues, I had been secretly anticipating its kickoff because it sent my homeroom kids to other teachers for a precious hour and a half. The 270-minute blocks without SFA were killers.
In welcome contrast to the gigantic range in abilities in my 4-217 class, SFA students were grouped by skill level. Mrs. Baker and I had kids on a third-and-a-half-grade reading level. SFA periods were regimented to the minute. The first twenty minutes were “Listening Comprehension,” in which the children gathered on the carpet for a read-aloud. This was the only part of the tightly codified literacy block that afforded any teacher input. The rest of the period involved a litany of reviewing charts and administering tests.
On the first day of SFA, I understood nothing. When the children appeared empty-handed in my room at 8:45, I learned I needed to provide pencils for every kid in the group. Marge Foley had given me a fistful of official, shiny yellow New York City Department of Education pencils for my homeroom last Friday, but I had not sharpened them. While Mrs. Baker did the read-aloud on the carpet in the back of the room, I frenetically jammed pencils into my electric Boston sharpener, one of the fruits of my summer spree at Staples.
Near the chalkboard, the machine emitted a cacophonous drill-buzz that was clearly audible in the hall. Within seconds, assistant principal Ms. Guiterrez was scowling in my doorway. “What are you doing, Mr. Brown?” She left before I answered.
A minute later Mrs. Boyd was in my room. “You're making a racket, Mr. Brown,” she muttered with deep annoyance. “Why are you doing this?”
“I just found out I need to supply pencils to the SFA kids, so I was trying to sharpen them while Mrs. Baker did the read-aloud,” I said. Boyd's face did not resemble the woman I'd interviewed with in the summer.
Her slow and staccato cadence transcended ordinary hierarchical condescension. “Mr. Brown, you are a teacher, not a pencil sharpener. Okay? It's your job to be leading the class with Mrs. Baker, not doing petty tasks while she does all the teaching.”
“Right, although I wanted to save time by getting this done now…”
“Bulletin boards are due up Friday. You got the memo, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Your classroom is your résumé, Mr. Brown. I personally hired you, so I have a special interest in making sure that fine work is displayed. You have the teaching gene, but it's not worth a thing if you can't maintain the professional responsibilities that go with the job. Pull it together.”
My teeth clenched as Boyd stormed out. I took a seat beside Fran Baker and left the pencils alone.
One morning, I received two more new students: Daniel Vasquez and Reynaldo Luces. Diminutive Daniel was quiet, so he was fine by me. My attention was drawn to Reynaldo, whose hysterical cry-heaving made for an instant spectacle. Randazzo said, “Reynaldo is transferring out of Boswell's room. Why anyone would want out of PAC [Ms. Boswell's gifted Performing Arts Class] I have no idea.”
I had an idea about it. The boy's flailing, full-body sobs made it impossible to gain order, let alone teach. Several kids tried to comfort him, but he only wailed harder when Athena blurted, “That new kid is CRY-ing!”
I took Reynaldo out in the hall several times with consoling words and offered him drawing paper. He wrote a letter in Spanish to his mother saying he wanted a new teacher and he wanted to change his class. Reynaldo's social worker, Ms. Schultz, his guidance counselor, Mr. Schwesig, speech therapist, Ms. Ruiz, and Mr. Randazzo all took him out for brief bits, but each time he was escorted back shrieking and decimating any momentum in the room. I had never seen such long-distance endurance crying. Finally, Randazzo took Reynaldo away and I never saw him again.
During free writing time, I was happy to see the kids get excited with the freedom of jotting anything they wanted in their notebooks. Hamisi, one of my stronger academic students, wrote in his shaky hand, “I gat blood on shos when I shot the poles and ran the street” [I got blood on my shoes when I shot the police and ran down the street].
Maimouna, who always filled her page, wrote, “I go to school every day on time and wear my uniform every day. Do you know why? Because I want to get a good education. Mr. Brown is a very nice teacher. I work hard in school and I am good. Sometimes I get wiped.”
“Wiped?” I asked her.
“Whipped,” she whispered.
Dismissal was a disaster. I let them see me upset, which was happening more and more frequently. I took deep breaths to check myself. Deloris Barlow became my worst enemy in the afternoons, always the last out the door. When I would yell that she was holding up the class, she smiled and screamed, “Sorry! Sorry! SORRY!” With a grin she tried to hug me. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mr. Brown!”
Meanwhile, Verdad lost his bookbag, and at the water fountain I saw little Cwasey Bartrum shove Julissa Marrero to the floor. He thought Julissa was drinking for too long. When I yelled at Cwasey, he turned his back to me and said he didn't do it. “Who did?” He pointed at Tayshaun Jackson.
“Thas bootleg!” Tayshaun cried.
“Relax, Tayshaun,” I said. “I saw you, Cwasey! Don't lie to me. Lying makes it worse.”
“It wasn't me,” Cwasey muttered coldly, turning away again. I felt betrayed, still clinging to the moment on the first day when Cwasey had readily proffered his respectful suggestions for our class rules.
Three minutes later in the parking lot, I released the kids and commotion broke out. I saw Cwasey weeping, holding the remains of his stomped eyeglasses. “Lito broke his glasses!” Dennis shouted. A rubbernecking crowd of students rushed Cwasey to see the damage. Lito was unapologetic at first, then decided to say he didn't do it, even though a crowd of witnesses screamed he absolutely had.
“Shut the fuck up!” Lito screamed, sprinting away. Cwasey sobbed inconsolably.
Pat Cartwright, my army neighbor who now had custody of Fausto, spotted me reeling in the parking lot during the dismissal fiasco and approached me with some helpful ideas. “Sneak attack them. Call their parents during the prep period so the parents are waiting for the kids when they get home. The rockheads want to see you rattled. It's sick. They try to push your buttons. And they lie so much that they convince themselves they're telling the truth. I'm just teaching lessons. I didn't give birth to twenty-six children!”
“Neither did I,” I said, and we chuckled darkly.
I went to the movies by myself for temporary escape. On the walk home, I fueled up with some kind of hyperbolic moral mania. Send me the whole borough! I will not be cowed or muscled out by the misbehavers or bureaucrats! These kids are not bad people; many have just been raised in loveless and confining environments. I can give them something good. I can show them the importance of school and good character. I will live through this and I will win!
Daniel was easily the smallest kid in the class. He had just moved to the Bronx, sent from Detroit by his mother who could not afford to keep him. Now he lived with his grandmother, or
“abuelita,” who spoke no English.
With Reynaldo's crying marathon and its resulting mayhem, I was barely able to pay any attention to Daniel on his first day, which made me feel lousy. Being the new kid is an extremely fragile thing. At first, the teacher is the closest thing you have to a friend. I had not been there for him; I had to make it up to Daniel.
I didn't have a free second until the middle part of the 10:30 math lesson, when everyone was filling in their line graphs. I came around to Daniel's desk to find the board notes he was supposed to copy were chicken scratches in his notebook. He did not answer for a long time when I asked if he had ever studied graphs in Detroit.
“G-g-graphs…I don't know… Maybe a l-l-little.” The kid was terrified, and his stutter was severe.
My mind raced. My first thought was that I could not teach him graphing in this ninety-second mini-conference. Daniel was clearly not close to a fourth-grade academic level. At the grade-level meeting in the Teacher Center next period, I would ask what to do. Meanwhile, I could already spot trouble brewing between Deloris and Destiny in the far corner of the room. Deloris's hand was inside Destiny's desk, and Destiny looked upset. In another ten seconds unchecked, one or both would be crying. Bernard, who sat next to Daniel, understood graphs well.
“Bernard, help Daniel out. I'll be back.”
I speed-walked to the front of the room and planted myself between the two would-be combatants, stifling their tiff. I glanced at their math papers. Deloris's was blank. Destiny's was filled in, but she had mislabeled her axes in the beginning and, now confused, drew random points and lines all over the paper.
“I don't know what to do,” said Athena from across the room.
“Me either,” chimed Lito.
“Mr. Brown, can you help me?” Destiny asked.
It didn't seem to make sense. The class had done quite well with bar graphs, with Athena leading the way. I had explained and modeled everything and answered questions about line graphs during the mini-lesson. Everyone had appeared to get it. Athena and Lito had answered oral questions correctly. Now an avalanche of confusion overran the room.
I felt a literal tug at my sleeve. I looked down and saw Daniel's expectant eyes. “Help me,” he said.
“Get back in your seat!” I screamed, not recognizing myself. My immediate impulse was to penalize Daniel's group points as a deterrent for his walking across the room without permission. Wandering to the coat rack, sink, pencil sharpener, and bookshelf had recently ballooned into a major problem, and I had publicly declared war on it at lineup that morning. I didn't want to zap Daniel, but something told me I had to.
“Two points off group six! Absolutely no walking around the class without permission! And two points off groups two, five, three, one, and four for calling out! Now pay attention carefully and we will review together, step by step, how line graphs work…” By the period's end, Athena fully understood line graphs (her face at the moment of clicking realization was priceless), but I wasn't sure about the rest of them.
Cat Samuels came in to teach a social studies lesson, and I made a speech about how Ms. Samuels controls huge numbers of points and also holds supreme clout over the Rewards and Detention lists.
Every Tuesday from 11:30 to 12:20, all fourth-grade classroom teachers had a prep period. We were supposed to meet for support and cooperative lesson planning, but the meetings were often canceled or hijacked by the administration for paperwork tasks. Despite many pleas for organized coplanning time, it only happened two times all year.
The subject of that day's common prep meeting was something on the very front of my mind: special education referrals. I recalled the mandatory summer training seminar at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School when the thundering Department of Education official had explicitly told us of our critical duty to refer children with special needs.
Dr. Helen Kirkpatrick, a gentle-voiced white woman in her sixties, ran the seminar. Her tone was genial but rueful. “It's nice to see some new faces. Is it four new classroom teachers in the grade?”
“Five,” special ed Fellow Marnie Beck piped up. She may have been relegated to a room in the basement, but Marnie was a fourth-grade teacher and hated when people forgot her. Karen Adler, Pat Cartwright, Melissa Mulvehill, and I were the ones Dr. Kirkpatrick asked about, but Karen, Pat, and Melissa each had a year of experience as P.S. 85 cluster teachers. I was the real newbie.
Dr. Kirkpatrick introduced herself as the school's special ed supervisor. I remembered this was the position previously held by Marianne Renfro, although Renfro also used to occupy a regular administrator's office and conduct formal teacher observations. Ms. Renfro's name had been on the school stationery that officially announced my hiring back in July. I had never seen or heard of Dr.Kirkpatrick until now, and I thought I had been pretty thorough in getting out to meet or at least recognize most of P.S. 85’s key players.
“I used to run the SBST [School Based Support Team], but that's now been dismantled because of budget cuts. Ms. Martinez and I are trying to do the work that the SBST used to do, but since there used to be four of us and now there are only two, and combined with my new paperwork responsibilities, it's very tough.”
The School Based Support Team was responsible for following up on teacher-initiated special ed referrals. If you had a student who you thought could not make it in a regular class, they would check it out. They were trained professionals.
A pained grimace came over Edith Boswell, the fourth-grade gifted Performing Arts Class teacher and a three-decade veteran. With passive fury, she appeared to be finally receiving some long-expected disappointing news. Early in the August Professional Development sessions, I had made Ms. Boswell's facial expressions my secret barometer for the legitimacy and importance of school announcements and initiatives. I heard that years ago she had won some kind of New York State Teacher of the Year award.
Dr. Kirkpatrick bit her lip and continued, “I'll say it directly, and trust me, I don't like saying it. Don't shoot the messenger, you know what I mean? But the school is looking to suppress referrals for administrative reasons. If you think you have a kid that might be special ed material, experiment with all possible alternative teaching methods for six to eight weeks.” She paused. “That's it.”
A bomb had hit the room. Edith Boswell's lips were pursed tighter than I had ever seen them. “What are the administrative reasons?” I asked, my first time speaking in a faculty meeting.
“Well, it's complicated,” Dr. Kirkpatrick began uncomfortably. “A couple years ago, Eighty-five was SURR [School Under Registration Review], and we don't want to go back to that.”
“No, we don't,” Ms. Boswell murmured.
“For the people who are new, when you're a SURR school, you've got city people coming in all the time, sometimes every day, watching you like hawks. It's very intense oversight. That's why we're still an extended-hours school. The way the city is realigning its education initiatives, one of the criteria for judging schools is the referral percentage. The lower, the better.”
“So, no referrals,” Catherine Fiore, a perpetually grouchy fourth-grade veteran, translated with disgust. Her motto, as she explained to me in an aside during an August meeting, was “I don't play.”
Dr. Kirkpatrick fumbled, “Well, we can't say no referrals exactly…”
“Good, because I have a kid that can't read his name,” Fiore shot.
“Me too. I can't teach a kid like that, no matter what alternative strategies you suggest,” added Mulvehill.
“I have one too,” I said, thinking of Daniel. I also thought of Lakiya and Eric, who could read their names but had a poisonous combination of low skills, outbursts of violence, and general disrespect for the class. They would definitely function better in a modified environment.
“These are complete nonreaders, you're sure?” Dr. Kirkpatrick asked, evidently hoping we were exaggerating. We were all sure. Dr. Kirkpatrick took a list of the illiterate students’ names and
home-rooms, promising to check out each one personally. I walked back to room 217, stunned that schools were punished for recognizing and attempting to seek help for at-risk kids.
Later, Karen Adler and I got lunch at the corner deli—the gunplay in the street caused only a one-day lapse in our new routine—and ate in 217 at group two. I sat at Sonandia's desk. Karen was the lucky final recipient of Reynaldo Luces. She said he had stopped crying and now constantly drew pictures of red hearts, always giving them to her at the day's end.
We griped about the bulletin board work that was due up by Friday. I became alarmed when she said her kids’ work was done and it just needed mounting. I had work from my students, but virtually none of it was pretty or “error-free,” as mounted work was mandated to be.
“Spend all your class time on it, seriously,” Karen said. “Or they'll be all over you.” Then, in a dead ringer for Mrs. Boyd, she bellowed, “Mr. Brown, your bulletin boards do not reflect enough academic rigor, and we're going to have a nice long chat, you and I, in my inner office.”
Karen had a secret skill for impersonation. She did a perfect Randazzo and Barbara Chatton, and a frighteningly dead-on Guiterrez.
I took Karen's advice about the bulletin boards and scrapped my afternoon map skills lesson. I told the class that this new birthday data table and bar graph would be our most important yet. “Everyone's finished work will be on display and then placed in your permanent portfolios!”
The empty red portfolio folders sat in a crate on my desk next to the ancient iron cumulative records canister. Teachers were supposed to insert one meaningful, official New York State standards–bearing piece of math and literacy work in the folder each month. Thus the portfolio charted progress and could also be used in an appeal for promotion for a student with poor Test scores.