The Great Expectations School

by Dan Brown

  * * *

  I finally met Asante's mother outside the office when she came to sign Asante permanently out of P.S. 85. At long last, Asante would be going to school in Queens. Mrs. Bell, a young mother, nodded in agreement when I said that this transfer would make things much better. She burst into tears. I scrambled to grab a tissue in the office but all they had were industrial brown paper towels. I gave her a few and Mrs. Bell buried her face. “Thank you, thank God for you, Mr. Brown… oh, Jesus, I don't know what to do…”

  I hugged her, and she cried into my shoulder. “It's going to be okay, it's getting better,” I said. I had never felt more like a kid in a costume. “It's okay, it's going to be okay.” I had not been any kind of great teacher to Asante. My brief attempts at investigating her dire situation were quickly rebuffed, and I had let it drop in the face of a tidal wave of other problems. Now I was telling this woman that things are getting better?

  “Your Rewards List,” Mrs. Bell said, wiping her eyes. “You made her so happy when she was on your Rewards List. Thank you so much for everything.”

  I said good-bye to Mrs. Bell and Asante and walked back to 217, full of a feeling that escaped easy definition. Asante spent most of her time in class chatting, so her name rarely appeared on the Rewards List by the day's end. When it did, I never noticed any exceptional exuberance in her.

  Until that moment, I didn't know I had had any impact on her at all. As Karen had foretold, something comes across.

  Who else had I unknowingly touched? As a student, what had I taken from my teachers, unconscious to them?

  My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Tomasso, lost her husband the year I was in her class. The day after the funeral, she returned to school and explained her feelings and told us about her husband's life. At seven years old, I absorbed her grief and love. Did she have any idea how much I grew up in that hour?

  My high school English teacher, Mr. Truitt, showed François Truffaut's The 400 Blows to a class of sophomores. Then we had the most honest, far-reaching class discussion I have experienced. Before that week, had I ever considered the idea of poetry in failure? He shined a floodlight on unexplored regions in my brain. Can he know how much that class opened my mind?

  In the moment that Asante and her mother turned to leave, the far-reaching influence of teachers upon children took tangible, heartbreaking form. This job was going to kill me.

  Test stress reached a critical boil that week, despite the miraculous surprise of Wednesday's snow day. The zero hour was at hand, and the kids were terrified. Four students threw up. Dennis tapped his foot nervously and could not stop.

  But they were well-behaved. Also, the repetitive, boring, scary, mandatory Test preparation required minimal exertion on my part. I liked being calm, sharing the room with quiet children. It was a frightening microcosm.

  February

  Stressed and Assessed

  I SHOWERED LAKIYA RAY WITH PRAISE and Juicy Fruit gum for her docile new attitude. Before lunch on Monday, February 2, she handed me an ancient ziplock bag containing her thick dog-eared stack of prized Yu-Gi-Oh cards and asked me to hang on to them for safekeeping.

  While finishing lunch with Karen in my otherwise empty classroom, I opened my bottom desk drawer to discover the cards were gone. My stomach dropped. Scouring the area, I broke into a sweat. I replayed our transaction over and over. Room 217 had been empty during the ten minutes when I shepherded the class to the cafeteria and stepped out to buy my lunch. No one that I knew of came in the room at odd times. The cards should be in the bottom drawer. After Deloris got the boot in December, though, thefts in the classroom had gone from constant to zero. I felt nauseous thinking about having to tell Lakiya what had happened, especially since we were finally making headway together.

  When I picked up the class, I gushed apologies to Lakiya and offered to buy her a new deck. She shrugged and said, “Nah, that's okay. Forget it.” I detected no passive aggression in her. She immediately turned back to her conversation with Epiphany, as if my news was holding her up from important business. For five months I had been Lakiya Ray's teacher, and at that moment I understood her less than a stranger.

  * * *

  The Test is a three-day extravaganza. Part One is all multiple-choice questions regarding basic reading comprehension skills. It is graded by machines (I envisioned Terminator robots) and carries the most weight of all three sections. Part Two involves students listening to and taking notes about a long passage that is read to them in a monotone by their proctor. The students use their notes to answer essay questions. Part Three is all essay responses to passages in their Test booklets.

  Before the Test commenced, I gave a brief speech about how I was confident and proud of them. Relax and do your best. I believe in you. I relinquished control to my coproctor, “Big” Mrs. Little, a tutor and twenty-year teaching veteran. Mrs. Little read instructions in the recommended monotone and sharply warned them not to begin an instant before the second hand hit the twelve. I could see Destiny Rivera's pencil shaking.

  An hour later, we were claw-dancing the disappointment away. The Test seemed harder than any of the simulations or practice materials we had used. At our 11:30 common prep meeting, the fourth-grade teachers shared arched eyebrows that evinced knowledge of impending disaster. At least I was not alone in thinking that my students had just gotten hammered. Marnie Beck said, “Special ed kids should not be put through this.” I agreed, unsure any nine-year-olds should.

  I thought the massive cram that led up to this abrupt pressure release on the days of the Test was like jamming ice cubes into a fever patient's mouth in hopes that by quickly checking the temperature, the reading would come out a normal, acceptable ninety-eight point six. The thermometer is not corrupt, but the hospital staff is. If P.S. 85 had more family outreach and year-round, small-group support services for kids struggling with literacy fundamentals, I believed the Test scores would be higher because the kids would be better readers, not savvier multiple-choice guessers.

  In terms of support services beyond my instruction of 4-217, only six of my students were pulled out for fifty minutes daily in September through January. All of that time was dedicated to studying Test-taking strategies. Eddie (who had been held back three times), Lito, and Lakiya received nothing. Keeping with the hospital analogy, this was akin to basing a sick patient's progress on periodic blood tests without substantive treatment between assessments. The hospital can claim without lying that it has the most expensive, state-of-the-art instruments for measuring one's health. However, the appropriation of enormous focus on diagnosis or assessment, not treatment, is disastrous for the voiceless, unwitting patients. Using standardized testing as the sole barometer of students’ and schools’ achievement is a deeply misguided practice. The sick system cannot get healthy through this means alone.

  During Part Three on Thursday, I stood near Eric Ruiz, watching him leave his entire Test booklet blank. He was supposed to write a letter to the principal requesting permission to start a ham radio club, drawing ideas equally from a supplied article about ham radios and his own creativity. Several times I covertly kicked his desk, but he did not pick up my message of “Take the Test.” I felt deflated, knowing there was virtually nothing I could now do to move Eric up to fifth grade. He signed his holdover slip that day.

  It did not take long after the final booklet was collected for the relative tranquility of Testmania to explode. Midway through our first math activity back on the normal schedule, Epiphany approached me on the verge of tears. “Mr. Brown… Cwasey just…” She started whimpering.

  I gave her a tissue and put my hand on her shoulder, unsure what else to do. “It's okay,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Cwasey said, ‘Bend over and make me money.’”

  My mouth fell open as my mind raced to decipher this unfathomably lurid command. Cwasey looked up, infuriated. “She lie!”

  “No I don't!” Epiphany wailed.

  “Cwasey! Shut yo
ur mouth and get out of our classroom! Stand right here in the hall!” I threw the door open.

  Cwasey shoved his chair in disgust as he stood up and walked toward the hall. As he passed Epiphany's group, he loudly proclaimed, “Your mother's a liar.”

  Epiphany broke out in tears. She bolted from the room, her face in her hands. Mr. Randazzo was not around, so I couldn't toss Cwasey in his office. Instead of letting Epiphany and Cwasey be out in the hall together, I grabbed Cwasey and yanked him back in the room.

  Lakiya whooped, mimicking, “Your mother's a liar!” When Marvin and Joseph saw Lakiya laughing, they cracked up too. The Pandora's box of “your mother” insults was blown open.

  At lunch I told Mr. Daly what Cwasey had said and asked for advice on how to handle it. “He's probably repeating something he heard,” Daly surmised. “I'll make him say he's sorry. We'll leave the parents out of this one.”

  At that moment, I spotted Bernard hyperventilating at the table, wearing his I'm-about-to-have-a-rage-attack face. I sat down next to him. “Bernard, what's up?”

  Instead of answering, Bernard lunged across the table at Tayshaun. I pulled him back. “He talkin’ about my mother!” Bernard screamed.

  “No I didn't! Stop lying!” Tayshaun retorted, now walking around the table, toward us. He waved a taunting hand in Bernard's face.

  Bernard snapped. I had him in my arms, but he struggled and writhed against me, reaching again and again to punch Tayshaun. Mr. Daly was now at the far end of the room breaking up another fight. “Bernard! He doesn't know your mother! What he says means nothing! You still have a choice to do the right thing and calm down. Take a deep breath!”

  Bernard continued pushing against me, but my grip was firm. Finally, he got tired. I sent Tayshaun to fifth-grade lunch detention in the other cafeteria. I gave Bernard to Mr. Daly with instructions to deliver the fuming kid to Ms. Devereaux's room for the afternoon. After the progress he had been making in controlling his temper, I couldn't let this outburst go unpunished.

  The air went out of me when Bernard returned to 217 a few minutes before dismissal, grinning and wearing his forbidden-in-school Yankees hat. “I had mad fun!” he gushed. “I went on the Internet with Mr. Daly and played games!”

  That night I racked my brain for a new game plan. I had no choice but to go it alone with discipline. The administration could not be relied upon, and the other fourth-grade teachers were swamped. I had already withheld parties, candy rewards, points, and stickers from the problem causers. I called homes over and over again. They still did not behave for prep teachers or guests. I had sent kids to Mr. Randazzo, Mr. Daly, Ms. Devereaux, and Ms. Guiterrez. (Catherine Fiore had even sent me a misbehaving kid on that icy January day.) Nothing worked for the long term. It was like putting Band-Aids on a sucking chest wound. I called Karen.

  After venting, I felt a little less crazy and decided to break up the mandated group-seating scheme. Early on the morning of February 6, I rearranged the desks to make individual rows. Maybe if the kids weren't bunched in so tightly, they would stop picking on each other's mothers.

  In the hall, before sending the students inside to find their new desk location, I announced, “Anyone who makes a comment about someone else's family is talking about something they know nothing about. That is wimpy and cowardly. Anyone who talks about someone else's family is automatically on lunch detention, banned from the Rewards List, and has lost my respect, probably forever! This is the end of it!”

  Twenty minutes later, Lakiya said to Marvin, “Fuck your fat mother!” Everybody heard. Marvin, despite his significant disadvantage in size, flew at Lakiya with his head down and fists flying. I tore them apart, banishing each to opposite corners of the room. When the dust cleared from the sudden fisticuffs, I noticed something very strange. Tiffany had left her desk and was standing still at the front of the room, right in my usual spot for blackboard-writing. She stared at the floor, no clear expression on her face.

  Tiffany was the class space cadet, but she was smart. She was quiet and did well on her practice Tests, so I gave her leeway, particularly in her using our spare bookcase as her personal storage space. Her voice was extremely high-pitched, and she often snuck toys in her desk. She doodled more often than she did her work, but usually had the right answer when I spontaneously called on her. Also, she loved my stuffed blue “Mr. Lizard” more than anybody else, and jumped for joy when I occasionally brought him out of his home in the top closet shelf.

  “Tiffany, go back to your seat.” She made no acknowledgment of hearing me, so I repeated myself. Nothing. “Tiffany, are you okay?” She looked catatonic. Some kids started snickering, and I immediately shushed them. Tiffany's hands stayed at her sides, completely still. “Do you want to go to the library with Destiny?” No response. Was this a trance? “Tiffany, you have to get back in your…”

  “DON'T TOUCH ME!” Tiffany shrieked, yanking herself away the moment I touched her forearm.

  “Tiffany. You must answer me. Who do you want to talk to? If you tell me what you want to do, I can help you.” She resumed her original standing position and said nothing. She seemed to be having a psychological meltdown, and I had no idea why.

  I called Mr. Randazzo and Ms. Guiterrez, but neither answered the phone. I rang Ms. Devereaux, who showed up in a huff. “What's this, she doesn't wanna sit down?” Devereaux observed, reaching for Tiffany's arm.

  “NO!” Tiffany responded with another piercing screech.

  “You have to move! This is your last chance!” Ms. Devereaux shouted in her stentorian I-am-serious voice. Still nothing. “I'm getting security.” She left and reappeared a minute later with campus patrolman Mr. Joe.

  “Are we taking her out?” Mr. Joe asked.

  “I don't know. She won't move or talk,” I said.

  “Let's take her,” Mr. Joe decided. He and Ms. Devereaux grabbed Tiffany, who went limp and redoubled her wild screams as the two adults dragged her across the dusty tile and out the door, slamming it shut behind them. In 217, we could hear Tiffany's wrenching cries fading farther and farther away before cutting off altogether. How was I going to teach after that?

  Sick to my stomach, I sat down in Tiffany's chair. None of the kids seemed fazed by the episode we had all just witnessed. I remember when I was in fifth grade and Ilene Lambert's knee locked up during our class trip to the Philadelphia Zoo. She cried hysterically in front of all of us, and the rest of the day was creepy and sad. Everyone seemed to feel guilty enjoying themselves if Ilene was laid up in the bus with a chaperone.

  I visited Tiffany in the office during my prep. Guzzling a cup of Sprite, she showed no indication of having thrown an apoplectic fit a few hours earlier. I felt like I was walking on eggshells, telling her we were looking forward to having her back in 4-217. I never found out the exact cause of her meltdown, but later in the day, Stacy Shan-line, Tiffany's third-grade teacher, told me that Tiffany had had the same kind of episode last year at approximately this time on the calendar.

  Just before dismissal, I noticed Seresa sniffling as I called students over to the closet to get their coats. I brought her out in the hall, where she started sobbing hard. “I'm not used to this, Mr. Brown… in Antigua, we don't treat the teachers like this. They're so mean to you.” She blew her nose.

  “I'm okay,” I said. “That stuff doesn't bother me.”

  “But Lakiya was saying you're a bad teacher. She said you don't know how to make the kids act right.”

  “What Lakiya says means nothing. She's not in charge of your year in fourth grade. You're considerate to think of me, and it shows that you're a good and generous person, and I appreciate that. What I care about is that I've got students like you and Jennifer and Sonandia and Evley and some of the others. I don't let kids who act mean bug me. You don't have to worry about me, I'm all right. All that yelling is acting anyway. How are you doing?”

  Seresa shrugged. “You're still good friends with Jennifer, right?” I asked. Now she
started tearing up again.

  “I don't know. Sometimes she follows Lakiya, and she says things to me like ‘Why don't you have a man?’ and they laugh at me.”

  “Jennifer asks you why you don't have a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow, that's ludicrous.”

  “Ludicrous?” she asked.

  “Ludicrous. It means ridiculous. Silly. Absolutely crazy.”

  “Ludicrous,” Seresa repeated.

  “Exactly. Completely ludicrous for Jennifer to say that. She knows you're her real friend. I'll talk to her. You're in fourth grade. None of you have, or should have, a boyfriend. Okay? You're a wonderful girl, and I'm very happy that you're in my class.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Mr. Brown.”

  Our conversation ended when I saw Bernard and Hamisi near the closet, punching each other in the face. My instinct was to rush in and wrench them apart, but I checked myself, remembering that Bernard's flailing at Tayshaun in the lunchroom had increased when I restrained him. In a kind of surprise at my nonintervention, the two fighters stopped hitting and went their separate ways. In the line two minutes later, they were chatting about Grand Theft Auto: Vice City like old pals.

  I know that many children reach out for attention and love in strange ways, but after that day, I was thoroughly baffled as to what goes through some of their heads.

  Seth Owings, an old college friend of Greg's, came to our apartment on Sunday to watch basketball and shoot the breeze. He was in his second year of teaching freshman English at Central High School in Newark with Teach for America. With each Pabst Blue Ribbon we drank, I became more entranced by his stories.

  “My principal doesn't know how to talk to people,” he said. “He's always on some weird power trip and is totally out of touch with how it is to try to teach these kids day in and day out. The administration is always having meetings and sending out things about standards and bulletin boards and that kind of crap: basically everything that's cosmetic. But we have no solid curriculum. I just have a vague construct in my head of what we're kind of supposed to teach. It's nice in a way, because no one will ever call me out on giving any kind of unorthodox assignment, but it doesn't matter because almost none of them can write a real paragraph anyway.