The Great Expectations School

by Dan Brown

  “Tiffany, come here. I want you to take care of him for me.”

  Tiffany's mouth dropped open. “Mr. Lizard?”

  “I think he should live with you. The closet is too stuffy for him. Is that okay?” “Yes! Thank you!” Tiffany squeezed Mr. Lizard and giggled with surprise. My entourage and I continued toward the parents, my eyes getting more watery with each step.

  Clara's aunt was the first to see me. “Oh boy, you're supposed to be happy!”

  I replied quietly, “It's been a long year.”

  “Oh no, Mr. Brown! You're going to make me cry!”

  I looked at my crew for the last time. “Have a great summer, guys.”

  “You too, Mr. Brown.” And they dispersed.

  I stood by the door, frozen. Out of the milling pack of adults and children, Sonandia came running back, throwing her arms around me. A few seconds later, she was gone, out of sight.

  I leaped up the steps three at a time, knowing a second's delay could spell disaster. I reached desolate 217, shut the door, and sat in a chair against the closet wall where no one from outside could see me.

  Teacher Found

  On the first day of the following school term, I was in southern Croatia. Holed up in a villa outside the coastal city of Dubrovnik, overlooking the royal Adriatic Sea, I began recounting on paper my year in the Bronx. While at P.S. 85, I hadn't planned to write about my experience; I was simply focused on surviving it. Now I felt a compulsion to tell the story to myself, to relive the myriad failures and successes. The year had changed me. Alone in Europe, I pored over my dog-eared notebook.

  After three months abroad, something else propelled me back to America: Colleen MacMillan. She was also a Fellow, a third-grade teacher at P.S. 70, a Bronx institution of 1,700 students. Our first date, dinner and drinks at downtown haunt 7A, was exactly a month before my planned departure for Europe. We laughed, told teaching stories, drank Long Island Iced Teas, and shared a quick kiss as I put her in a taxi at 3 a.m. I stood on the Houston Street sidewalk to watch the cab disappear in traffic. I needed to see Colleen again. The month became a whirlwind romance that put all my previous relationships in perspective. When we said goodbye at a Greyhound bus station, a shockwave of emotion overtook me. I was ridiculously in love with her.

  I returned in time for Thanksgiving. I kept up with my teacher friends, as well as Sonandia, Seresa, and Jennifer via email. Sonandia thrived at the top of the PAC class and got accepted to a selective middle school academy in the Bronx. Seresa and Jennifer drifted apart, finding their niches with different groups of friends, though both had strong academic years and received solos in Karen's marvelous, reinvented PAC show. Marvin Winslow did come back to P.S. 85 (enrolled in Ms. Beck's fourth-grade special ed class) on October 18, when his mom decided to stop keeping him at home. The family had never moved to Manhattan, but rather to a shelter in the Bronx. His mother had another baby, and Marvin missed over sixty days of school. When he came, he was relatively well behaved in his small class. Epiphany and Lakiya teamed up to raise hell in Marc Simmons's class. Eddie became an achiever in Evan Krieg's room and formed a friendship with Seresa's crowd. Destiny moved somewhere down the Grand Concourse, not to return to P.S. 85.

  Eric Ruiz got moved up to fifth grade in spite of his dual Test failures and my recommendation to keep him back. This was in accordance with a much-rumored directive to promote the 2003–2004 fourth-grade failures and hold back third-graders scoring a “one” on any Test. The Department of Education's goal was to strengthen New York City's 2004–2005 fourth-grade population, whose February ELA scores would, prior to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's first reelection bid in November 2005, supply the definitive “after picture” data for measuring the effectiveness of the mayor's reforms. Needless to say, Bloomberg's political goals were met.

  Dilla Zane retired, and P.S. 85 revised its stance on print-rich classroom environments. Under new leadership, the mania over bulletin boards was deemed excessive and unnecessary. Ms. Guiterrez likely would not again confront a teacher over the spelling of “announced,” although she continued to strike fear into the hearts of P.S. 85 rookies.

  Weekly art periods were extended to the entire school, but the Visual Arts Club was discontinued.

  Barbara Chatton does not mentor anymore. Sarah Gerson, my summer training Fellow Advisor, resigned from the Department of Education.

  Besides Tim Shea, who defected for a pharmaceutical sales job, and me, however, all nine of the other Cohort 6 Fellows at P.S. 85 stayed to complete their two-year commitments and Mercy College master's degrees. Each graduating Fellow received $4,750 in tuition reimbursement from Americorps. As of June 2011, five of my fellow Fellows, including Trish Pierson and Cat Samuels, are still teaching at P.S. 85.

  Watchdog advocacy group Inside Schools rated P.S. 85 three stars out of five, noting the school's “indomitable spirit” and observing, “Their work, displayed with great pride and care—hallway bulletin boards are covered in protective plastic—is truly superior.” Kendra Boyd also got high marks for “personifying the strong sense of continuity at the school.” They noted little downside beyond “the usual strains of chronic overcapacity” and one parent's complaint that the administration may be sluggish in responding to problems.

  Days before the 2006–2007 school year began, Ms. Boyd retired.

  On Black Friday, an envelope arrived from the New York City Department of Education. Enclosed was a “Notice of Overpayment” invoice for $3,315. My never-received termination pay and unused vacation time were deducted from my debt, reducing the amount owed to $1,760. The stated explanation was that I had received extended-time pay when I was entitled only to the base rate. I was actually happy about the paper when I looked it over. Since I did work extended time at P.S. 85, clearly the DOE had made a mistake and I could receive my outstanding $1,555. A polite lady in the payroll department explained that since I had broken my contract, I was required to give back my overtime pay.

  “I worked those hours. I taught a half-hour longer each day than base-rate schools, and I went to all that extra professional development.”

  “Trust me, I empathize. I wish these weren't the rules. And you're not the only one this is happening to. You're actually lucky. I know you probably don't feel lucky, but the Department is sending these notices out now to people who left two, three-and-a-half years ago. They're tracking everyone down,” she said.

  “This is insane. No one ever mentioned anything about giving back money for time that you were physically there. I've never heard of anything like this.”

  “It's the rule. Three-year contract to keep your extended-time earnings.”

  “You mean two years,” I said. “The Teaching Fellows contract is for two years.”

  “I don't know anything about that, but it's three years for an extended-time school, Teaching Fellow or not. If you leave before that, you owe a year's worth of the overtime. Or else it will be a serious problem for your W–2.”

  My mentor, Barbara Chatton, an email enthusiast, did not respond when I wrote to her. I learned that Article 12.II.C of the United Federation of Teachers’ contract (lapsed on May 31, 2003) outlined this three-year requirement for Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) and ex-SURR school overtime pay. P.S. 85 had used extended-time salary as a carrot for prospective teachers, banking that no one would comb the thirty-two-article contract for loopholes in which the DOE could take back paychecks. There had been no fine print on the Teaching Fellows commitment form. I buried my anger and sent my pay back to the Department of Education.

  A year after I left the Bronx, the United Federation of Teachers agreed to a new contract with the city, raising teachers’ salaries and increasing hours, effectively switching every school to an extended-hours schedule.

  I knew my future was in the classroom. After leaving P.S. 85 I felt a continual itch: a longing for some kind of a second chance with a kid like Lakiya Ray. Her hug on the last day of school had stuck with me. I couldn't�
��didn't—want to shake a nascent, giddy epiphany that I really mattered when I taught.

  But my New York City Department of Education file was unsavory. A return to the classroom had to happen outside the public schools, the place where I most wanted to work.

  For several months after my return from Europe, I delivered flowers until, with the help of a Teacher Dance Party screening, I was asked to teach Digital Filmmaking at a summer arts camp in Brooklyn. Several weeks later, the Collegiate School, an all-boys Upper West Side independent school that serves the polar opposite of P.S. 85’s socioeconomic community, hired me as a fourth-grade co-teacher. According to the school's website, yearly tuition for a K–12 Collegiate student in 2011–2012 was $37,500. Elizabeth Camaraza wrote my letter of reference.

  Life at Collegiate was different and delightful, yet not without a culture shock. On my first day a fourth-grader, writing about his summer, asked me, “Mr. Brown, how do you spell Tuscany?” Soon after, the boys enjoyed the buffet-style school lunch of tilapia, corn chowder soup, organic Greek salad, and strawberry shortcake.

  I got the green light to lead a daily read-aloud and selected Neil Gaiman's Coraline. I wrote on the board the book's epigraph by G. K. Chesterton:

  Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

  The students were rapt, and vigorously offered predictions and analysis. This was how I should have started my year in the Bronx, I thought. But then I checked myself—for this type of classroom discussion to work, the students had to balance enthusiasm with self-control, a skill that seemed to be well practiced on the Upper West Side. In class 4-217, the same lesson would likely have stirred up bedlam.

  Our opening discussion on Coraline was the tip of the iceberg. The students had great stamina for read-aloud time and independent work, so we covered material more quickly, avoiding stagnation or boredom. Teachers collaborated constructively, with minimal rivalry—not at all the case with the faction-splintered staff back in the Bronx. We took an overnight trip to Boston and walked the Freedom Trail.

  Each year, the Lower School staff voted to select a topic of study to build a special school-wide unit from scratch. We picked “Structures” and I signed on as the resident expert on canals. This assignment sent me off on my own inquiry process since I knew virtually nothing about canals. I built from scratch lessons on the science and engineering of canals, world geography, canal math on locks and water levels, and the in-class building of our own canals. We sang “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal” and examined how building the Erie Canal changed New York City forever. It was beautiful. I improved as a team member and as a teacher.

  The boys received both physical education and recess four times a week, with two sessions of art, computers, library, and science lab. Reading, writing, and math coaches join the two classroom teachers for most core subject lessons, putting three teachers with twenty-two students, or sometimes eleven, if a half-group is away at art or science. Every child experiences many opportunities for public speaking and one-on-one support. Weekly assemblies and intergrade “buddy” systems foster school unity. There are no standardized tests, or even grades until middle school.

  Of course, a well-endowed independent institution is bound to differ from a massive public system. Strikingly though, many sources of Collegiate's success derive from efforts with no line items in the school budget. For example, administrators in the Collegiate Lower School know every child. Their priorities are clear, because they meet with each set of classroom teachers once a week and often drop in for lessons. This community spirit emanating from the top runs deep. Parents understand and appreciate the administrators’ commitment to their children and thus view them as allies, not adversaries.

  The students are invested in their academic future, so disruptive behavior is rare. Simply, the kids recognize that school is important. They are surrounded by role models who value scholastic achievement, and their calm, professional school environment implicitly does not tolerate anti-school rebelliousness. Standardized tests are not necessary to ensure diligence from teachers and achievement from students. Rather, comprehensive portfolios of student work, evaluated by teachers, administrators, and parents, demonstrate a more rounded picture of a student's readiness to move forward. The absence of testing pressure affords flexibility in scheduling too. Unlike the public system, Collegiate does not mandate five blocks of in-class reading per week. Instead, they fit in three reading periods to make room for creative, exploratory “specials” like art, science, music, and computers.

  Teacher collaboration is built into the schedule. During weekly faculty meetings and students’ daily gym periods, lesson planning becomes a cooperative process, rather than a solitary one. In delivering lessons and handling classroom business, two or more teachers are in the room at a time. The dividends of this investment in personalizing education are manifold.

  Midway through my first year at Collegiate, I was no longer a shell-shocked rookie and the mistakes I did make did not incite an instant fracas as they had in P.S. 85. Still, I saw every day that the most successful teachers wisely leveraged their experience and relationships to coax the best out of their students. As a new guy, I had a ceiling on how much I could accomplish.

  This was never clearer to me than the day I happened to look at a first-grade bulletin board. Each kid had written one sentence about the book Old Henry and had drawn a corresponding picture. One of these caught my eye every time I passed by. The picture was chicken scratch and the words read: “HE WAS DFAT AND THAT WAS OK.”

  There was something charming to me about how this six-year-old had mangled whatever adjective this was supposed to be. I brought over another young colleague and showed it to her, and she couldn't make sense of it either. It became a running joke where one of us might say during a prep period “I'm feeling dfat,” and the other would immediately assure that it was okay. It's okay to be dfat.

  A week later, I mentioned to the veteran first-grade teacher how much that one phrase tickled me. Without a moment's hesitation, she said: “Oh yeah. He was different and that was okay.”

  The translation made perfect sense. The teacher, in her eighth year working with first-graders, understood the child's intent immediately. She spoke the language of first-graders.

  This exchange stuck with me. I think it crystallized the challenge of being a rookie. I thought of myself as dedicated, enthusiastic, and relatively intelligent, but so many times, I just didn't speak the language. I imagined if I had been assigned to teach that first-grade class, there's no way I would be able to bring those students nearly as far in their learning as their veteran teacher would. I couldn't even decipher what they were communicating.

  Interestingly, when Mayor Bloomberg's appointment of magazine publisher Cathie Black to be New York City public schools chancellor ended calamitously in early 2011, less than four months after she took the job, Black told Fortune Magazine: “It was like having to learn Russian in a weekend—and then give speeches in Russian and speak Russian in budget committee and City Council meetings.” Experience and institutional knowledge count in education. Black was too dfat to be OK.

  As the year at Collegiate drew towards a close, I knew I had to make a move. I was twenty-five and engaged to Colleen. I enjoyed so much about Collegiate, but after two laps of teaching fourth grade, I didn't see myself surrounded by elementary school kids when I gazed five or ten years down the line.

  Literature was what I really loved. Well-told stories had drawn me to film school. I wanted to explore creative and reflective writing with young people who needed outlets for their tangled, evolving worldviews.

  I wanted to become a high school English teacher: an ink-stained sharer of the best ideas ever conceived, an agent for sparking adolescents’ power of expression. My students would read widely, debate vigorously, write passionately, and in the end, depart my class with the unmatchable, lasting confidence of someon
e who can genuinely express himself with the written and spoken word. Grandiose visions swam through my head: I'd be a man of letters, Teddy Roosevelt's “man in the arena.”

  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

  As a naïve college grad enrolling in an alternative certification program, I had drunk the Kool-Aid that intelligence, grit, and a prestigious degree predestined me for success in the classroom; that had been a folly. Now, with better reference points for navigating classrooms and a focus on high school English, I felt ready to go through a legitimate teacher education program and come out the other side, in the parlance of federal legislation, “highly qualified.”

  Half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. I had already contributed to that statistic once; I was determined to arm myself with the skills to stay and thrive. In May 2007, I started a graduate degree program for Teaching of English (Grades 7–12) at Teachers College, Columbia University (TC).

  Preparing myself to be a good teacher, and not cannon fodder, was expensive. In the 2010–2011 academic year, TC tuition cost $1,178 per credit, plus books and fees. My program required thirty-eight credits.

  Fortunately my parents covered my costs in graduate school. My socioeconomic advantages were reflected in the homogeneity of much of my TC cohort: mid-twenties, upper-middle-class, and white. It's extremely problematic that most top-tier programs preparing people for public service are cost-prohibitive to a majority of would-be applicants.