by Dan Brown
Wilson Tejera was a short, bolo-tie-wearing man with bushy eyebrows and a Rollie Fingers–style curlicue mustache. He had been at P.S. 85 for seven years and seemed genial in my brief encounters with him.
At this moment, his face was a deep crimson, cheeks vibrating with rage. He bent down, putting his nose an uncomfortable fraction of an inch from Hamisi's. “Don't you ever… ever… laugh at our national anthem.”
Hamisi looked past him. He had been yelled at by teachers before and spacing out was his way to handle it. I had witnessed this when Ms. Devereaux shouted at him.
Tejera's right hand flew up and seized Hamisi by the mouth, digging hard into his cheeks. “Do you have any idea how many people died so that we can sing this song?” Wilson's eyes gleamed. Now he had Hamisi's full, terrified attention. “You have no idea what people have sacrificed.” Tejera clenched tighter. “Never do it again.” He released Hamisi's face and disappeared into his classroom.
My mouth hung open. I half expected rebellious bedlam to break out right there in the hall. It wouldn't have been unjustified. Instead, no one reacted. Hamisi stared ahead, expressionless. Forgetting the traumatic face-squeezing from a few moments earlier, 4-217 would have looked like a perfectly behaved class. At our doorway, I issued instructions for the new systems in low-voiced commands. The kids followed them.
I took Hamisi aside and asked if he was all right. He looked at me strangely, as if to suggest, “I'm fine. Are you sure it isn't you who's not all right?”
An hour later, Success for All period was in full swing. I answered a knock at the door and saw Mr. Tejera, making his first ever visit to my room. “Mr. Brown, how are you?”
“I'm fine.”
“Good. I wanted to speak to you about what happened in the hall earlier with…”
“Hamisi.”
“Right. With Hamisi.” He pursed his lips, picking his words carefully. “You saw me talk very sternly to him, but you didn't see me put my hands on him because I never did.” He paused, indicating my turn to speak.
I had no idea what to say and started stammering a non sequitur. “I think it's great that you have the kids sing in the morning. It's a really good routine…”
Tejera calmly repeated himself. “You never saw me put my hands on him because I never did. I take the national anthem very seriously. Okay?”
My mouth curled into a small, bizarre smile. I imagined us in a spicy drugstore potboiler:
The spitfire hombre gnashed his sharpened incisors, thirsty to visit further vengeance upon defamers of his sacred national oaths. Reflexively caressing his bolo, he peered deeply into the timid neophyte's shit-brown eyes, reading Brown's vulnerability. Suddenly, unexpectedly, disastrously for the intimidator, a Zen calm glazed over the younger man's countenance, signaling a clean and abrupt end to his moral earthquake. With renewed confidence and sense of self, Brown stared back at Hamisi's assailant and knew what he must do…
Mr. Tejera filled the void. “You're uncomfortable with that, aren't you?”
“Yes.”
“Go with the flow.” He knocked his fist against the doorpost for a punctuating dramatic effect and ambled away.
I reeled back to my Success for All group. If I went to the administration, I would be a rookie, a few weeks in, blowing the whistle on a veteran teacher. Tejera seemed to be on buddy terms with the higher-ups. Was this a battle worth fighting? Hamisi's mood had not even noticeably changed after the confrontation. I decided not to initiate anything about the incident, but if asked by anyone, I would tell everything.
The residual stress from the incident shortened my fuse. When Jennifer walked to the closet without permission, I blew up on her, deducted four group points, and zapped her with lunch detention. My introductory lesson for our place value unit lost some steam with my rule-enforcement digression, but I decided it was worth it. I had to build the ship before we could sail it. I felt lousy nailing Jennifer, one of the only kids who showed any appreciation toward me, but she had broken the rule, and I needed to be consistent. Disappoint-ingly, the next offender out of her seat was Destiny, who started bawling when her name appeared in the detention box.
Lunch detainees sat at a separate cafeteria table from their homeroom friends. They queued up last in the lunch line, and the daily special would inevitably be gone by the time the detention kids got their turn, leaving only reviled peanut butter and jelly.
When I delivered them to the detention table, Jennifer sniffled in shame, but Destiny had a full-body sob attack. “Please, Mr. Brown. Please, please don't make me sit at the detention table!”
“Sorry, Destiny. Now you know the punishment for getting out of your seat without permission.” I wheeled and left the room. Neither Jennifer nor Destiny broke the rules for the rest of the year.
I received a memo from Ms. Guiterrez to inform me that she would be formally observing me on Monday, with a pre-observation meeting slated for Thursday during my prep. At literacy coach Marge Foley's recommendation, I planned another graphing lesson for the big show. “Avoid confusion during observations,” Marge said. “Teach them something they already know.” I thanked Marge and sketched out my observation lesson plan that night. It was two typed pages, complete with aim, objective, task, prior knowledge tapped, Bloom's taxonomy implementations, key questions, quotes I planned to say during the lesson, several paragraphs of procedural description, and some other bells and whistles. Some parts were bold, italicized, underlined, or a few at once. I included a copy of the post-activity questions they would answer—in complete sentences, of course—and a completed model bar graph and data table of my own.
Ms. Guiterrez opened our pre-observation meeting with some casual questions. “How is my dear, sweet Evley?” He was the silent boy who arrived on the second day of school with Jennifer and moody Joseph.
“Evley's my best-behaved boy. He's very shy, but he's starting to come out of his shell more and more. His effort is good. He shows good imagination in his writing, although sometimes he gets lost in the middle of a sentence and stops making sense. I'm trying to have as many writing conferences with him as possible to get him to verbalize his ideas orally, to make sure they make sense, before he writes them down. He's a really smart kid,” I answered, hoping a thorough response would not only answer her question, but demonstrate that I was working closely with and understanding my students, something I was not sure Ms. Guiterrez acknowledged.
“My heart breaks for him. We held him over one too many times. Do you have Deloris or Lakiya?”
“Both,” I said.
“Ugh. They are terrible. And the parents are no help.”
I immediately thought of Deloris's father's outgoing voice-mail message:
Wassup girl, this is MC Onyx. Uh, if it's really that imp-o-tant, hit me with a message at the beep.
Ms. Guiterrez scanned my lesson plan. She asked questions about what would happen first, next, and after that. She pressed me to tell her what exact words I would use with the children. Many answers to her questions were in black and white on my prepared sheet, but I answered straightforwardly, and she appeared satisfied. Then we hit a stumbling block. In order to maximize the use of space on my sample graph paper, I had scaled out two blocks on the y-axis for every one kid who liked a specific fruit. “Why did you make it big like that?” Guiterrez asked, like a cross-examiner cornering a witness into incriminating himself. She pointed to the two blocks between zero and one.
“I scaled it out. Otherwise the graph would have been small…”
“One is one, Mr. Brown. Have you actually been teaching it like this?”
Silence. I was stuck for words again. Does New York City not teach scales? Maybe scales had been outmoded by some super-progressive curriculum that I hadn't heard about because I was new.
“I have been teaching it like this, using scales. Two spaces for one, four spaces for two, six spaces for three, just as long as it's consistent,” I said, each word coming out more tentatively than the last.
; Guiterrez shook her head in bemusement at my evident stupidity. “One is one, Mr. Brown. It is very, very simple. One is one. Okay? Fix it and we will meet again tomorrow.”
That night, Jess came over. “I think your hair is falling out,” she said. “You're ridiculously stressed out.” She was right on both counts. If I was writing in my notebook, before long many loose hairs would lie on the page. I didn't want to go bald at twenty-two.
I cringed at the idea of having to meet with Ms. Guiterrez. When my alarm buzzed on Friday morning, I pulled the comforter over my head, and for the first time, called in sick.
On Sunday, I took Jess to the Bronx. We got wings at Mom's Fried Chicken and walked around the perimeter of P.S. 85. “It's so…depressing,” she observed, snapping a telephoto-lens shot of some kids sitting on a stoop. “It really is a modern ghetto. A racial ghetto.”
“Yeah,” I said, hoping the stoop kids didn't see the white girl in the J. Crew jacket taking their picture.
“Is there even one white kid at P.S. 85?”
“No.”
“Unbelievable how society turns their backs. It's a cycle of disempowerment.”
I nodded, but had no desire to tease out socioeconomics with her. I wanted to show her my new life, where I came every day, maybe to impress her. Now that we were here, I regretted the whole trip.
“Do you want to go to the movies?” I asked.
“Is there a theater close by?”
“No, downtown.”
“Oh,” she said, shrugging. “I'm down for whatever. This place is so hopeless-looking.” She inflected her last sentence to indicate an inclination to stick around and check out the impoverished spectacle.
“MR. BROWN! OH SNAP, IT'S MR. BROWN!” Lito Ruiz, Tayshaun Jackson, and several of their cronies emerged around the corner.
“What's up, Lito, Tayshaun?” I said, giving out three-part handshakes.
“Mr. Brown is da man,” Tayshaun told his pals.
“Why you come around here on the weekend?” Lito asked.
“Just hanging out,” I said. “I'll see you in class on Monday.”
“All right!” Lito nodded, his smile eating his face. “Have a good weekend!”
The kids went their way and Jess and I headed toward the D train. “You're a celebrity,” Jess said.
“Those kids antagonize me nonstop during the week. Lito just broke a kid's glasses and lied about it,” I uttered. “It's a novelty for them to see me on the street. They don't even like me.”
“You're wrong,” she said. “You're their hero.”
On Monday morning, I held a special class meeting. “The word is out that the behavior in 4-217 is not good. Ms. Guiterrez is coming in at 10:15 to watch you, each and every one of you, to see who's doing a good job, and who needs to be sent back to third grade. [Marge Foley assured me of the efficacy, if not truth, of this threat.] Ms. Guiterrez will be taking notes about everything, so if I were you, my behavior would be absolutely perfect, the way it should be. And I'll bet you if everyone behaves, the class will be a lot more fun.”
After my speech, Evley raised his hand and asked to speak to me in the hall. He was exceptionally shy, and this request for a private conference was the first of its kind. I stepped outside with Evley, who looked at me with worried doe eyes. His voice was quiet and high-pitched. “Mr. Brown, you know my private part?”
I nodded, terrified of what was coming next. “Yes.”
“It stings.”
This was out of my job description. My face blushed. “Go to the nurse, now,” I said, pointing in the vague direction of her office. “Just go to the nurse.”
Evley shook his head in panicked refusal.
“Then go to the bathroom. Go, go, go!” I urged. Evley went, returning to the class soon after. He made straight for his desk without a word.
At 8:45, as I directed kids out the door to their SFA rooms, Evley approached me again.
“Everything okay, Evley?” I asked.
“When I'm sitting down it's okay, but when I stand up and walk, it stings.” His voice cracked sharply on the last word. He did not wait for a response, joining the sea of students in the corridor.
At 10:15, Ms. Guiterrez did not show up for the observation, and I had to stall. Twelve interminable minutes later, she appeared. I began the lesson precisely as my plans dictated, and often-raucous 4-217 behaved like obedient students. I forgot about Guiterrez in a few minutes because it was a pleasure to teach such attentive kids. I opened the lesson by simply asking what are graphs, how graphs are useful, and to identify and explain each part of a graph. Hands shot up. I usually got zero to three raised hands, and almost always the same bunch of kids. Now everybody wanted to participate, and what's more, they had good answers! Eddie, Lito, and Lakiya wowed me with articulate mathematical definitions of axes, variables, vertical, horizontal, columns, and rows. I thought they had been out to lunch the entire unit. The class made beautiful, if small, bar graphs, adhering to Guiterrez's “one is one” school of scales.
The lesson fired me up to teach. Something had been getting through after all, despite the chronic chatting, fighting, and block-throwing. Ms. Guiterrez left at the lesson's end, giving me a nod that I translated as a pedagogical thumbs-up.
The rest of the day passed smoothly, except for an episode on the steps where Asante yelled at Deloris, “Shut the fuck up! My father's going to come and cut you like he cut that other guy!” When I took Asante out of the room to investigate the problem and tell her she couldn't say things like that, she started bawling.
“Deloris makes me crazy. She's always bothering me and making fun of me ’cause of my clothes and cause I live in a shelter in Queens. She never stops so I want to get my father on her. Then she'll stop.”
Shelter in Queens? This explained the chronic lateness and absences. And no phone number. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Don't worry about getting your father. I'll make Deloris stop.” I sent Asante inside the classroom and pulled Deloris out, unsure what magic words or threats I could pull out to mediate this cruel conflict.
“Deloris, why —”
“She always bothering me and hitting me!”
“Do not interrupt me. Listen. If you were friends with Asante yesterday, which I know you were, why—”
“I ain't friends with her! She bad and dirty!” Deloris burst out.
“Deloris Barlow!”
“Do not use my last name please.”
“Deloris Barlow. No one says those kinds of mean things in my room. You don't have to be friends with Asante, that's fine. But you two will stay away from each other and you'll both be better off!”
Deloris laughed coldly. “What do you know, you just a first-year teacher! You don't know nothing!” She doubled over with a belly laugh. “You a scrub! You don't know nothing!”
“Go sit in Mr. Randazzo's office. Get out of my sight.”
She skipped down the hall with a smile. The class cheered when I came back into the room without Deloris, a scene reminiscent of Fausto's 9/11 ejection.
When school was dismissed, I told the secretary that I had a student who commuted to school alone from a shelter in Queens. She shook her head sadly. “What a shame. These kids move from place to place so much that they don't change schools till they settle down. Poor girl. When Mom gets her feet on the ground, she'll change schools.”
I asked if there was anyone I could notify or anything I could do to expedite Asante's transfer to a Queens school. The secretary again shook her head. “Nothing we can do from our end.”
I told Barbara Chatton about how the kids rose to the occasion for the big observation. She seemed pleased and repeated her credo: “It's never as good as you think it is and it's never as bad as you think it is.” She sprang it on me that 4-217 had been a popular topic of discussion among administrators. The word was that my teaching was good, but my management needed work. This wasn't news until Barbara told me that the next day, class 4-217 would be broken up, so that I co
uld spend the day shadowing Janet Claxton, a veteran third-grade teacher with stellar classroom management. “Then you can motivate them into submission,” Barbara said, patting me on the shoulder.
At lineup the next morning, Mr. Randazzo leaned into my ear. “Janet Claxton's a great teacher. Probably one of the strongest in the school.”
“I know, I'm looking forward to being in there with her,” I replied.
“Good,” Randazzo said in a low voice. “Really try to get all you can out of this. I don't want to give up on you.” He slapped me on the back and walked away.
I was suddenly furious. Did I just receive encouragement or a threat? Give up on me? Since when was anyone considering giving up on me?
I had a waking nightmare image of Randazzo, Daly, Guiterrez, and Boyd lounging around the principal's office with cigars and cognac. “What about Brown?” Daly asks. “We did give him the shit class of the fourth grade.”
Guiterrez blows a smoke ring and waves her hand dismissively. “His management is poor and his bulletin board is a disgrace.”
Boyd shakes her head ruefully. “It's a shame because he had the teaching gene.”
Randazzo snuffs out his stogie on my Department of Ed file and claps his hands together. “So we give up on him?”
Ms. Claxton was a tall, dark-skinned Jamaican lady in her mid-thirties. Her six-foot stature and authoritative voice scared children. She addressed the class as “ladies and gentlemen,” and when a student misbehaved, she immediately yell-asked if that was the way a lady or gentleman should act. When the group got noisy, Ms. Claxton clapped her hands, twice slow and three times fast. One-two, one-two-three! The class repeated the rhythmic claps, and after the last one, you could hear a pin drop. I held my clipboard and marveled.
Ms. Claxton's kids followed directions and did their work, with Thankgod Mutemi the only exception. He was a frowning, angry boy who occasionally pounded his fist on his desk and wandered around the classroom. Janet told me later, “Thankgod is dangerous. Anytime I'm not with him, he instigates a fight. They tell me I'm the only one who can control him, but what good is that?” (Thankgod was expelled a month later.)