by Dan Brown
The dividends for those who attended were many. Teachers College blended well the elements of theory and practice. I took hardcore pedagogy courses in English Methods, Teaching of Reading, Teaching of Writing, and Teaching Shakespeare, as well as a mixed salad of “foundations” courses like The History of Student Activism, and Diversity in the Secondary Classroom. Classes were in the evenings to accommodate teachers’ schedules, so most nights I came home around ten o'clock to my wife. Colleen and I got married the summer I started at TC.
It was time to get back in the New York City public school fracas. My fall student teaching assignment led me to East Harlem's Francis Bacon Middle School, under the wing of mentor-teacher Denise Silva, a hyperkinetic Theatre Arts teacher who loved kids but went berserk when they didn't do what she wanted. When no one volunteered to play her warm-up improv games, she lashed out with harangues of disappointment. When the class was chatty upon entering the room, she screamed her frustration. She called it “tough love.”
I felt awkward playing second fiddle to Denise. On the fourth day of class, a boy called her “sexist” and, neck veins bulging, she got into it with him right there. “Do you have any idea… “ was an opening she recycled liberally. Later in the hallway, another student, Hector, quietly assured me, “Don't worry, we know you not sexist.” I said thanks, but pointed out that neither was Ms. Silva. I knew it was my professional responsibility to back her up—even though she did, in my perception, display a marked preference for her female students.
Even when the kids were hooked on a class activity, forces at Francis Bacon seemed to conspire to prevent coherent lessons. The school stood adjacent to a massive construction site, and the grating industrial groans of heavy machinery never took a coffee break. During one fifty-eight-minute lesson I led on extracting key information from monologues, the construction equipment went mercifully quiet, but we were interrupted by a lengthy public address announcement about something called a “penny harvest,” three loud-ringing phone calls notifying individual students about their guidance counselor appointments, NYU undergraduates entering the room to observe, a woman from the Settlement House somehow affiliated with the guidance department showing up to give out literature about her organization, and a tutor arriving to spirit away five students. The lesson required sustained concentration; achieving it from the whole group was impossible.
Still, there was much to learn by parachuting into a school for fourteen weeks to survey the lay of the land. For example, Francis Bacon held a Fall Field Day, which was a real success as a community building exercise. I thought it was a great idea to have Field Day at the beginning of the year, instead of the very end. I placed second in the faculty egg-and-spoon race.
Also, Denise had a great system called “Notes of Praise” that set clear criteria for students to earn a positive note home. The kids bought into this; those fourteen-year-olds really wanted their families to be proud of them. Unfortunately, Denise got overwhelmed within a month and the Notes of Praise fell by the wayside. The kids were resentful when they finally caught on that their earned Notes of Praise were long overdue. I saw firsthand that even when you're overburdened, consistency is crucial.
I was also reminded of the power of out-of-classroom interactions with kids. One morning I was spacing out while riding the First Avenue bus to school when Denise climbed on. She sat next to me and we chatted about class. A stop later, Henry, one of our volatile seventh-graders, boarded the bus. Just the day before, Denise had nailed him with lunch detention and a searing lecture about self-sabotaging his future prospects in life.
I quietly cringed, since Henry was about to see Denise and me riding the bus to school together and would certainly assume we were an item, information that would spread like wildfire among our students. I was stunned when Henry calmly leaned in for a quick, onearm hug from Denise and said with a smile and a charming mock bow “Good morning, my teachers!” Then he shuffled to the back of the bus.
Later in the day, Henry came into our empty classroom during lunchtime. Denise was out of the room, so I was the only one there. Henry was on some kind of gum-scraping detail. I said hello to him, and he came over to me.
“I saw you on the bus today,” Henry said.
“Yes. I was there with Ms. S.,” I replied, not sure where to take the conversation.
“I get on at 96th Street. Two stops on the limited and bam, I'm at school.” The floodgates were open. “I know I need school to get a good education and a good job. You and Ms. S. are my nicest teachers.”
Here was a boy who just wanted to talk. We made a standing lunchtime date.
One day, I shadowed eighth-grader Hector Gago and his peers in class 822. I picked Hector and his class because they already knew me well as their Theatre Arts student teacher, and it would be easy for me to be invisible among them. Since I'd spent so much time with these kids, I was interested to see what their day was like outside of my class.
Hector seemed able to strike an impressive tightrope balance between achieving academically and being a male who fit in with his pals in El Barrio. Navigating the two worlds of “cool” and “smart” was challenging, if not impossible for many kids, but Hector seemed to pull it off. He was the class treasurer, a consistent participant in class discussions, and an animated presence in the hallways between classes. On Back to School Night, his extended family beamed when I told them how well Hector was doing in our class. I wanted to see the trajectory of his day.
I was profoundly let down.
The day began with a ninety-minute humanities class, devoted entirely to test prep. Ms. Jones, the student teacher running the class, actually opened by saying, “Okay guys, today we're doing more test prep. I know it's boring, but the Test is in January, so we gotta get through it.” The kids, some of whom can frequently act rambunctious and oppositional, seemed terrified of the Test and did exactly as they were told for the full hour and a half.
Each kid got a copy of last year's English Language Arts (ELA) test. It seemed that the school photocopier was in need of new toner, as I had to strain to read the light grey print on the pages. I sat in the back of the room with Hector and some other children and could not read a single word of the transparency Ms. Jones was annotating on the overhead projector. There was no room for student participation; Ms.Jones told the students—in a genial tone, at least—which sentences were important and should be underlined. Then she looked at the questions, gave the kids a minute to come up with their answers, and told them which answers were correct. On two of the questions, they were allowed to conference in pairs.
“Now you guys do the rest,” she said, prompting fifty minutes of quiet while the kids worked over the problems.
I did the test too, and after an interminable silence, Ms. Jones asked for the students’ answers. Other students cheered when they agreed with an answer announced to be correct.
The hallway transition from the test prep period to Spanish was predictably raucous. For my part, I felt like freaking out too, after the boring, pressure-laden ninety minutes we had all just tolerated.
Spanish class didn't provide much of a reprieve. The kids started with fifteen minutes of copying words and definitions. The teacher announced he had a personal situation going on, and took a cell phone call in the hall. When the actual lesson started, the kids participated eagerly and the teacher praised them for their answers.
After Spanish, the students returned to their homeroom for a one-hour formal “diagnostic” standardized math test. The hour was silent and awful. I was so bored that I left. What I missed was an afternoon math class where the teacher reviewed the answers to the standardized diagnostic test.
I came away feeling sorry for the kids. They were silent, bored, and scared. Also, they didn't get to walk away as I did, since they had been trained not to question what was demanded of them involving the scary Test. Their trusted principal and teachers—with varying amounts of zeal—shoved it down their throats. I'd like to see advoca
tes of high-stakes testing actually try to sit through a day in the life of this assessment regime.
I'd planned to observe Hector specifically, but his experience was no different than the other kids’. At least I had a little more context for why they blew up in Theatre Arts class.
When my time was about to expire at Francis Bacon, I asked the students the fill out a “Report Card for Mr. Brown.” The sheet prompted: How much do you feel you learned in Mr. Brown's class? What did Mr. Brown do well as a teacher? What do you think Mr. Brown could do better? Please explain your answers. Almost all of the seventh- and eighth-graders appeared to take time and give thought to their responses. Here's a representative sample:
He could do better I think if he could controle his temper.
You didn't yell that's why everyone liked so he really didn't have a reason. He doesn't need teachers like ms. s to help him because all she does is scream.
Mr. Brown explained a lot and he also gave chances. I think Mr. Brown should not yell a lot.
Mr. Brown can do better when the class is misbehaving yell as much as I know he Dont like yelling.
I learned a lot because he didn't screamed a us and he took it step by step.
Sometimes it boarding and sometimes it fun. Have patantion with kids. Don't tell alot. unless they are bad. Give exaple more often. I like you teaching.
Mr. Brown could screm or be louder to the class when they don't pay attention because he has to wait for the class and we miss some of the lesson. His a fun teacher to learn from and gives us an apportunity to say what we have to say on question he asks on the lesson he teach even though we're wrong.
He screamed and made kids raise there hands and made the lessons fun.
The kids were fixated on yelling and not yelling. My first year in the Bronx was fraught with shouting and in the time since, I'd cultivated a teaching persona that—I thought—never yelled out in anger or frustration.
Yelling in the classroom under any circumstances is counterproductive and emotionally exhausting from a teacher's perspective, and evidenced by the report card comments, for the kids it's downright scarring. Even so, a number of my Francis Bacon students still perceived me as a yeller. In a classroom full of human beings, you never know what comes across.
My second student-teaching placement lasted from January to June as the main teacher of two eleventh-grade Honors English classes at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. I'd long awaited this return to the borough that had knocked me out. Four and a half years had passed since my first day as a teacher, and here was my opportunity to get it right.
Since classes at Clinton are semester-based, I got to be the lead teacher from the first day of the course. My juniors didn't know I was a student-teacher and I never told them. My mentor, Jim Garrity, sat in the back and offered incisive lesson dissections and planning ideas.
Working with Jim at DeWitt Clinton was a desirable placement that I had angled for. The school, one of the last large comprehensive high schools in New York, served close to 5,000 students and boasted an august hit parade of alumni including legendary writers James Baldwin and Countee Cullen, composers Richard Rodgers and Bernard Hermann, the creators of Batman (Bob Kane) and Spider-Man (Stan Lee)… Within the building, “small learning communities” (SLC) operated on their own schedules. My classes were part of the “Macy Honors” SLC, a prestigious college-prep program that was the pride of the principal. Landing in the Macy program was a relief because—indicated by an unsettling dropout rate and the main entrance metal detectors—not all of Clinton's classrooms were conducive to focused, high-level inquiry.
My first day ever as a teacher, back in the P.S. 85 days, had devolved into a fracas partly because of my transparently benign, help-me-help-you stance. One would think that now, over four years later, when I stepped in at Clinton to face my Bronx teenagers, I'd take a harder edge.
However, by this time, I'd learned that you do not need to fashion yourself into some kind of drill sergeant to teach in a tough neighborhood. By presenting yourself as organized and interesting, you can actually win over the students who might disrupt; they'll want to be part of the community if you make it enticing enough. A majority of behavior management issues can be defused by a teacher's organization and students’ engagement. Juggling that solid teacher persona and student buy-in with substantive academic activities is the great challenge. Being new—lacking experience and institutional knowledge—compounds this challenge and can tip the scales towards chaos.
Yelling and scaring students have ephemeral benefits—you'll achieve quiet for a moment—but negative long-term returns. I hadn't grasped that as a rookie. With a renewed opportunity at DeWitt Clinton, I wanted these students to want to impress me. I also knew that, at five-foot-eight, I had no shot of intimidating them.
I also weighed the advantages I had going in; these kids had applied for the Macy Honors program, so their grades mattered to them. When kids bring intrinsic motivation for academics, they are far less likely to antagonize the teacher. While my ultimate goal was to engender a love of reading and learning and all that good stuff, it was comforting to know that I could, if absolutely necessary, dangle grades over them to further my ends.
My opening gambit was a syllabus review complete with an anti-plagiarism speech modeled after a TC professor's style. The students actually seemed to perk up during my amateur psychoanalytic probe into why people plagiarize. (They've procrastinated and they're freaked out.) I think some bells were ringing. I liked feeling the focused attention of the group, and the speech had the added benefit of making it sound like I had experience teaching high school students.
Next I handed out a personal letter; their first assignment was to respond in kind.
Dear Students,
Hello, I'm Mr. Brown, your English 6 teacher. Although we will get to know each other pretty well in person in our five periods per week together, I wanted to introduce myself to you in black and white as well.
I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1981, which makes me a lifetime Philly sports fan. Every year, the Eagles break my heart. (I'm pulling for the Giants over the Patriots in the Super Bowl, though.)
I attended public school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. As a high school student, I became obsessed with movies. There was an elective course in the school called “Film Appreciation,” where Mr. Truitt, a teacher who had been there for thirty years, showed all kinds of movies on an old-school 16 mm projector. I had never seen a foreign movie, or a silent film, or really very much besides Hollywood stuff like Indiana Jones movies. Mr. Truitt showed films from all over the world, and we had amazing—and often heated—discussions picking them apart. He introduced me to artists that I came to love and never would have found on my own.
One film that Mr. Truitt showed that stands out in my mind is The 400 Blows, a French movie from 1959. It's a low-budget, semi-autobiographical work by Francois Truffaut, about himself as a fourteen-year-old in a working-class Paris neighborhood. I was used to movies where the main character is heroic, but Antoine, the main character of The 400 Blows, is not heroic in any normal way. He lies, steals, and ultimately gets disowned by his parents and sent to a reform school. There's no happy ending.
At the end of The 400 Blows, I didn't quite know what to think about it. Everyone in the class had different opinions. Some dismissed Antoine as a worthless troublemaker; others thought he was a Jesus-like martyr. My classmates’ opinions were all over the place, and Mr. Truitt forced each student to back up his argument. We never came to a consensus about one correct way to interpret The 400 Blows, and we eventually realized that wasn't the point. The valuable part was the exploration. This was a revelation to me.
After graduating from high school, I moved to New York to attend New York University. In 2003, I became a teacher. I am excited about the journey we will take together this semester. We will explore a wide range of material, and I look forward to picking it apart with you. My goal is for you to feel that
when you walk into English class, you are walking into a place where ideas matter and everybody has a voice.
Sincerely,
Mr. Brown
This worked well. The next day I received thoughtful replies filled with admirable goals—ones that I could leverage in one-on-ones if their behavior or work ever strayed. I was happy. So I drowned them in homework.
I didn't mean to. Our first unit was on the Harlem Renaissance, so I'd decided to set it up with some essays by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois to provide some historical context. Our second class together, my students followed me into—and then took over—a nuanced analysis of Washington's “cast down your bucket” brand of self-help as public policy. We were on fire!
From the back of the room, Jim signaled discreetly that we had two minutes left before the bell. Snapped out of my reverie, I responded by sweeping up several manila folders I'd laid out containing future assignments and, in an irrational rush, handed out the next three nights’ work. I dumped on them the challenging The Souls of Black Folk excerpt with an accompanying written response, a T-chart comparing/contrasting Washington and DuBois's ideas, and then a prompt to write a newspaper election editorial endorsing one of the candidates, Washington or DuBois over the other, for the mantle of Chief African American Spokesman. For models on editorial writing, I threw them the New York Post presidential primary endorsement of Barack Obama and the New York Times piece supporting Hillary Clinton. In the final minute of class, each of the thirty-three students received five different sheets of instructions. Of course, the bell sounded in the midst of my frantic paper-passing, and immediately around me a huddle of kids materialized. They were eager to get all the papers and get jogging to their next honors class across the massive building. A physics teacher waited for me to get out so he could use the classroom.