Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  At lunch the next day, Patrick assured George that Laura was “in the bag.” George shook his head. “You are such a whore,” he laughed. “I love it.”

  But George wasn’t laughing now. Nor was Dorie, who shot Patrick a squinty, lipless glance. By the number of times he thrust up on his toes, it was clear X was reaching the climax of his presentation. Finally, he circled a large number eight in pink chalk. “In the end,” X said, “it comes down to this number. Eight more minutes. That’s the additional, unpaid teaching time the administration wants from us every week. That is what this new schedule would mean.” X slapped the chalk down in the chalk tray, smacked the pink dust from his hands, and sat next to C. An alarming number of Patrick’s colleagues, young and old, from every department and mini-school, were nodding their heads.

  “Thank you, Mr. Greenblatt,” said Silverstein, with practiced even-handedness. He looked over his faculty. “Anyone else?”

  Patrick turned to George, who gave him the thumbs-up. Patrick stood. “I have a confession to make: I got Cs in high school algebra.” He rubbed his chin. “Good thing I teach English.” Dorie, planted among the Lifers, let her lips re-emerge in encouragement. Laura Steiner, sitting in the back with the other “specialty subjects,” smiled politely but continued pulling on her right sleeve. “However, I’ve examined the new schedule backwards, forwards, and sideways and I don’t see any extra teaching time in it.” Faculty eyes went to X, who sat expressionless. He shook his head; the little terrier on top bristled. “But I won’t argue that point. I yield to Mr. Greenblatt’s computational expertise.” Patrick waved toward the blackboard. “Let’s assume that we might teach an additional eight minutes a week. Is that really a deal-breaker?” He wheeled to his right, putting his face as close as he dared up to Phil Sitkowitz’s ashy jowls. “Mr. Sitkowitz, how often have you said that you never have enough time to finish your chem labs? Wouldn’t fifty minutes make all the difference?” Actually, Phil’s every complaint stemmed from his inability to keep teenagers at bay for forty-two minutes, but he’d hardly voice that in this setting. Panicked at being singled out, he wobbled his head about his shoulders, an uneasy compromise between a shake and a nod. Patrick pointed toward the specialty subjects table. “And Ms. Steiner. Just as you get an entire class deeply engaged in an art project, it’s time to clean up. Am I right?” He gave her his most boyish grin. She smiled and nodded and let go her sleeve. “And Betty.” He dropped his voice and turned to the round, sweet-faced social worker at his left. Betty Goldberg was always Betty. “We have so many kids with special needs. How much would they benefit from fewer passing periods, fewer transitions?” Betty mouthed up at him, “You’re right.”

  Patrick stood tall, spreading his arms to embrace his colleagues. “We’re educators. The public may think we keep banker’s hours, but we know better.” Those who had nodded for X were nodding for him. A soft huzzah from George. “We didn’t become teachers because the hours were short. Or for the pay.” Laughs all around, even from the Lifers. “We’re here for our students, for what works for them.” He offered his palms to his audience. “I know this faculty. And I don’t see us letting eight minutes a week stand in the way of something so good for our kids.”

  Patrick sat. George leaned forward, clapped him on the shoulders. “Home run,” he said in his ear. Denise and Naomi beamed. Silverstein stood, tapping his clipboard. He said, “Well—”

  “Young man,” a nasal trumpet sounded from the back window, “how dare you?” There C stood, his face red, jabbing a finger at Patrick. “How dare you lecture this faculty about what teaching time means?” C strode over to Patrick, an arm’s length away, shaking. Would C strike him? “When you were in kindergarten, some members of this faculty spent what you now refer to as your ‘prep period’ down in the cafeteria, breaking up food fights or doing clerical work in the office.” C’s hands went to his hips. “My first year at Garvey, starting teaching salary was four thousand, three hundred and seventy-six dollars a year. Pregnant women were laid off. Healthcare was non-existent. Principals could demand to review lesson plans.”

  C took a few steps away from Patrick, addressing the Lifers. “Some of us marched in ’68 when the mayor decentralized the schools and we nearly had race riots. Marched in the snow with Al Shanker.” Graying heads dipped in reverence as C invoked the patron saint of public school teachers. C whirled back to Patrick. “So do not lecture us, young man, on what teaching time means, snickering at eight unpaid minutes. We know what teaching time means. We also know that nothing has ever been given to teachers. We fought for it. And we’ll be damned if we’ll give it back,” his voice fell to a husky whisper, “bit by bit.”

  “Two votes,” Patrick told Susan that night. “Two measly votes.”

  “Seventy-five percent is a tall hill to climb, baby,” Susan said, putting her book on her nightstand, rolling onto his side of the bed. She threw an arm across his torso and squeezed.

  “Laura Steiner. I’ll bet she lost her nerve and went with C.”

  “Steiner. Isn’t she the chubby art teacher? The one with the crush on you?” Susan poked him in the ribs.

  “She doesn’t have a crush on me.” He looked at her. “And she’s not that chubby.”

  “Sure,” she said, and bit his shoulder.

  No one could jolly him out of his public school teacher funks like Susan. But not that night. Patrick looked up at Chauncey, asleep except for his tail, thrashing like a spastic metronome. “Two fucking votes,” he muttered.

  “Honey, you did a terrific job. Everybody said so, right?” Susan sat up, patted his chest. “Look how close you came. You’ll get it next time.”

  Patrick slumped into his pillow. “That’s just it. There won’t be a next time.” He closed his eyes. “There is no next time.”

  If Only the Czar

  February ended at last, as February must, even in New York. The sooty slush melted, and March showered heavily, sweeping the flotsam down Broadway. April, opening with a humid, southeasterly breeze, tried to finish the job, hustling the remaining debris uptown.

  It was finally, fully spring. Manhattan heaved its windows open, breathed deeply. Time for spring cleaning, time to take stock.

  No one was readier for stocktaking than the new mayor of New York City. He began by asking the chancellor of public schools a simple question: How many employees do you have in the public school system? After a brief interval, the chancellor gave a simple reply: I can’t tell you. Exactly. He was happy to give an estimate, a ballpark figure, an educated guess if the mayor liked.

  The mayor didn’t like. This being New York, it got personal. The mayor was a native New Yorker, bluff, Italian, a former prosecutor who’d tackled organized crime. The chancellor was a small, tidy Hispanic gentleman, imported from San Francisco. In another city this issue might have been addressed as an accounting problem, a question of antiquated technology. Here, it became a test of manhood and orientation. The Post gleefully quoted the mayor as calling the chancellor a “fussy little man,” referring to his San Francisco roots so often one imagined him preening on the lead float of the Gay Pride parade, bearing enough fruit to make Carmen Miranda envious.

  The chancellor, unaccustomed to this level of political fisticuffs, refused to respond in kind, instead issuing a MacArthur-like pronouncement that he would begin a comprehensive tour of the schools, a personal inventory of the system. He declined to state whether or not he’d be counting employees.

  The chancellor was coming! He was on his way! Rumors had bounced through the white-tiled halls of Marcus Garvey all week—He’s down at the deli, he’s getting a knish—but now he was really almost there!

  Silverstein had called an emergency faculty meeting the week before. “I’ll make this brief,” he began. The chancellor was going to make an “unannounced” visit. Marcus Garvey would be putting its “best foot forward.” Displaying Garvey’s best foot, the
principal clarified, would entail a Herculean cleansing of classrooms, detagging the hallways and papering them with a Potemkin village of hastily assigned interdisciplinary art projects. “Do we have to kiss his ring?” brayed a nasal voice in the back. “No, Jerry, we don’t,” said Silverstein, tapping his clipboard. “Or anything else.”

  “I don’t want to put on a dog-and-pony show for the chancellor,” Patrick whined to Susan the night before the “unannounced” visit. “I want him to see my broken bookshelves, my cracked walls, my missing desks.”

  “If only the czar knew,” moaned Susan, a willowy babushka in a J. Crew nightgown. She plumped her pillow, thumbed forward in Aspects of Modern Social Work. “If only he knew how we suffer.”

  “Well, exactly. I want him to see what we produce, given the circumstances. But I want him to note the circumstances.”

  “Fair enough. But there’s always that other possibility.” She shut her book in her lap.

  “Yes?”

  Susan took his cheeks in hand. “That the czar knows, bubeleh.” She squeezed. “And he doesn’t give a shit.”

  This possibility weighed heavily on Patrick’s mind the next morning when Kupczek rapped on his open door. “Excuse me,” Patrick told his second period, breaking away from their discussion of the final chapter of Huck Finn––waist deep in the Big Muddy. He was graciously excused.

  “He’s downstairs, Mr. Lynch,” Wally panted, “touring the Computer School.” Kupczek, red-faced, was sucking in the thick April air as if he’d taken the stairs two at a time. Patrick could almost see himself in the vice principal’s shiny forehead. “Next he’s going through Visual Arts, then Engineering, then here.” He patted his cuff along his damp brow. “The chancellor has his entourage with him, so we’ll just take him through a brief observation of a few classes. Mr. Holbrook’s first.” George was a nut at the lunch table, but his math classes were crisp, well-paced, precise. “Then yours, if you’ll permit.” Patrick nodded. “I’ve taken the liberty of closing the door to Mr. Sitkowitz’s lab.” Beneath the mustache, his I-am-the-walrus grin. Patrick looked off down the hall; no one had less respect for Sitkowitz than he, but it was creepy being pulled inside one of Kupczek’s jokes. “The chancellor will most likely come through here toward the end of this period. Then back to his palace in Brooklyn.” He raised his eyebrows. “Good luck.”

  Patrick faced his second period class. “It seems we may have a little visit from the chancellor.” Sly glances all around. “We’ll just keep discussing Mr. Twain.” Second period wasn’t buying Lynch’s understatement. Not after a week of subtle reminders and implicit threats: It would be a good thing to take Huck Finn home tonight and actually read chapter thirty-four; a pop quiz on the Fugitive Slave Act isn’t an impossibility. Patrick welcomed—yes, craved—the chance to show the chancellor and his posse room 234 in all its dilapidation. But he wanted his students to shine. Look, Mr. Chancellor-with-your-car-and-driver-blocking-traffic-on-103rd, look at the Afghan girls sitting in folding chairs borrowed for your visit, look at the hole in the back window, look at the clock that’s correct twice a day, look at the outdated textbooks with covers missing, that begin on page seventeen. But, for the love of God listen, Mr. Chancellor, listen to Maria’s emerging Latina feminism as she critiques Aunt Polly’s parenting, listen to Jamar compare Malcolm and Dred Scott and Nigger Jim, listen even to Julio, whose apartment in Washington Heights contains not a single written word, who is semi-literate in three languages, who would kill himself sooner than admit to his classmates that he tried, really tried, to read the first three pages of chapter thirty-four of a novel that could just as well be in Arabic. Listen, Mr. Chancellor, then imagine what we could do. Then go back and do battle with the mayor over things that matter.

  Second period wanted to look good too. Some classes—fourth period, fuggedaboutit—had no pride. But second period, even Abdul, sat up a little straighter when Silverstein flitted through. They didn’t want to be caught caring, but they did. It was important, however, to let them think they were “getting over” on the system. Mr. Lynch could rag on them—study, study, study, there’s a test tomorrow; it’s not magic; come prepared and you’ll see results—till the No. 2 Express ran crosstown. Jamar, Angela, Hegira aside, he was talkin’ to himself. Ah, but take a copy of that same test, crumple it up a little, find a sneaker in the Lost and Found and make some dusty shoe prints on it, leave it under Abdul’s desk for him to find the day before the exam. Now they would spend the evening doing what Patrick had wanted all along. Patrick tried not to smile at their smugness as he handed out the tests; Tom Sawyer himself would have been proud. (One could get too clever with these strategies, Patrick discovered his first year teaching. He’d planted a ten-spot in the text of an ever-sleeping student, then plucked the book off his desk, opened it, and waved the sawbuck in front of the class. “You never know what treasures you’ll find in a book,” he crowed, then watched helplessly as they dismembered a complete class set, pages swirling to the floor like so many autumn leaves.)

  Patrick had only one reason to doubt that second period would rise to the occasion, and he was resting in the back, face pressed against the editing table. It was a delicate thing, getting Josh’s cooperation. Patrick was at enormous disadvantage with the chancellor downstairs, a disadvantage Josh was pleased to exploit. It was too loud, Josh complained, when the jackhammers started up on Columbus Avenue. Patrick closed the windows. The classroom grew clammy. It was one of those spring days in Manhattan where the temperature spikes to the mid 80s, a teasing foretaste of July, lovely weather for lolling on a blanket in Central Park with your honey; it was not great weather to be in a second floor classroom with thirty-six perspiring teenagers above a baking blacktop. Too hot, Josh moaned, flipping his head back and forth on the editing table. Patrick opened the windows. The breeze caught the door, which slammed, rattling in its frame. Patrick propped it open with a wastebasket.

  On your typical April morning, second period would have welcomed the diversion of watching the intrepid Mr. Lynch being jerked around like a well-hooked trout. But an unusual number of them had taken their teacher’s counsel and struggled through Twain’s wry nineteenth-century prose, and they were, damn it, gonna strut their stuff before the chancellor. Angela and Maria rolled their eyes at Josh’s interjections. “Shut up,” muttered the ever-pleasant Jamar. And even Abdul, who was happy to play tag-team with Josh when it struck his fancy, swiveled back and said, “Why you gotta be so stupid all the time?”

  Josh was building, building. Patrick knew it would come, what he was building toward, just a question of timing. Could he nurse him past the chancellor’s visit? The stress of the occasion might be more than Josh could handle. And, after last Wednesday’s failed “tutorial,” all bets were off.

  The afterschool session with Josh had been Wally’s bright idea. This particular brainstorm came out of a command performance for Josh’s mother in the vice principal’s office two weeks before.

  “What you don’t seem to understand, Mr. Lynch,” she’d barked at him from an opposing chair angled at the far side of Wally’s desk, “is that Joshua’s a gifted dyslexic.” Ah, Patrick wanted to say, that would account for the Lynch Is A Foggat he’d found scrawled across his blackboard that morning. Such fine prose so cruelly twisted.

  But he kept his powder dry, flicking a look at Wally, who was drowsing behind his desk, evaluating a hangnail. “Joshua is frustrated,” Dr. Mishkin continued, forcing Patrick back to her pained expression. “We were up all night working on his Huck Finn essay. And, yes, sometimes he expresses his frustration inappropriately.” She cleared her throat. “Which I have discussed with him. But he has special needs. And none of the accommodations in his Ed Plan has been enacted in your classroom.” She unfisted her hands and placed them atop a folder the thickness of the Manhattan Yellow Pages.

  Summoning compassion for a troubled student—even an irritating one—was neve
r difficult for Patrick. And the sight of a parent’s broad face contracting with distress would normally have wrung his heart. Julio’s father in jail again, Mr. Lynch. We gonna be evicted. I know he oughtta be doin’ his homework, but he won’ lissen to me. If you could only help him. Patrick melted at such entreaties, a total softie. But the tortured mother was never a solidly built NYU professor (“Well, adjunct,” said Dorie) and the unseen father a Columbia Sovietologist. (“Though I never hear him on NPR anymore,” said Dorie. “That whole Berlin Wall thing really hit him hard.”) Upper West Side lefties, whose colleagues sent their kids to first-tier prep schools, they prided themselves on being public school holdouts. But they never imagined their son getting the same attention as the other thirty-five students in my second period, thought Patrick.

  Still, he almost felt sorry for her. Was it only a year or two ago she’d watched Josh recite his Torah portion so perfectly, not a single stumble or hesitation? Her son, the tallest and handsomest boy in his Hebrew school class, proud and manly in his navy blue suit, his yarmulke neatly pinned to his wavy hair. Was this the same boy, she must be wondering, with his amber dreadlocks, his pants slipping down his ass, who had embraced this rap culture, this culture that was at once so misogynistic and anti-Semitic that it couldn’t really be interpreted as anything but a repudiation of everything that was her? Yes, Patrick could have felt some compassion. If only she hadn’t insisted on reducing this timeless mother-son drama to an educational issue. She was mad as hell, and she was going to make it his problem. She was going to leave with a piece of his hide.