by Ed Boland
“This is important to me. I need to try it,” I told her calmly.
She narrowed her eyes and exaggerated an exhale. “Oh, go on then, be a teacher, BE A LOSER!”
I glanced across the table at my sister and brother-in-law, the two teachers. By now, we were all used to this kind of outrageous remark, which had tumbled out of her mouth at the most awkward times throughout our lives. Yet, everyone—from closest family to complete strangers—seemed to tolerate and forgive my mother’s transgressions. I’ve never known why. Was it her tone of impunity? The hint of Town & Country glamour she brought to our blue-collar neighborhood? Or was it that she quickly reverted to kindness and compliments after insulting people?
My father, David, known widely as Saint Joseph for his good works and selfless disposition, delivered his predictable but toothless reprimand: “Jesus, Julie! Would you please watch what you say?”
I looked to my sister and brother-in-law to make sure they hadn’t taken it to heart, and then we all broke into laughter. My mother realized her gaffe, smiled sheepishly, and patted the braided bun she was famous for. My sister Nora came over and rubbed my shoulders. “You are welcome to come to this loser’s classroom any time you want to see what you are getting yourself into.”
“What the fuck you doin’ here?”
A young criminal from southern New Jersey growled at me as he leaned his skinny frame down to the desk I was sitting in. His face was far closer to mine than I wanted. Even though my sister Nora was only fifteen feet away writing something on the blackboard and a security guard was sitting in the hall, I was a bit shaken up. A small band of tousled and rowdy-looking teenage boys wearing baggy orange jumpsuits filed into the classroom, their heads jerking with hip-hop swagger.
“Boys, take out your phonics work sheet, the one about the long and short u,” my sister gently commanded.
As soon as she turned around the kid quickly retreated to the other side of the room. Maybe he wasn’t so tough after all. I exhaled. A petite, pale ash blonde in her late thirties, my sister looked wildly out of place in a men’s jail, but she acted like she owned the place.
“Kelvin, don’t even think of sitting near Marco. We all know that is a bad idea.” She spoke firmly but respectfully to her charges.
I scanned the room. I expected prison school to look seriously grim, but in truth it was no more cinder-block, fluorescent-light ugly than most public schools.
“We have an observer today. Mr. Boland. Please welcome him,” she said.
“Looks like her brother,” said the boy who had “greeted” me.
“Yo, is that your brother, miss?”
“It’s her bro, man.”
“Brother, no doubt.”
Either she chose to ignore the astute comments or the hearing aid she wore didn’t pick them up. Our family often joked that being oblivious to what her students said was the secret to her teaching success.
I had come to learn at her feet. If I was going to make a midlife transition to being an urban high school teacher, there was no one better to learn from than Nora. In her fifteen years of teaching, she had seen it all: First, in a parochial school in Maryland, a monsignor had molested one of her students. Next, she taught in a Special Education classroom in a different Maryland high school that served as a catchall for outcasts: kids with muscular dystrophy, pregnant girls, generic delinquents, and a student named Bobbie—a giant boy with Down syndrome who relieved his anxiety on the daily bus ride home by pulsing his considerable behind against the window. (One particularly stressful day, he shattered the back window with it, bringing traffic to a complete halt.) Even that wasn’t enough of a challenge for Nora, so she then applied to teach in this state juvenile penitentiary. During her interview, she had sealed the deal with a line I later parroted for my own job interviews: “The reluctant learner is my specialty.”
And reluctant they were. For most of these boys, this was their fifth or sixth attempt to learn to read. I tried not to cringe as I watched sixteen-year-olds struggle to pronounce the simplest words. They looked both pained and eager, contorting their mouths like tropical fish lunging toward flakes of food.
“Remember, it’s a, like apple, sounds like ahhh. Say it with me: A, apple, ahhh.” She gently coached and coaxed them.
They mocked one another horribly. “Yeah, nigga, didn’t you hear her? Say it with me: D, duh, dumb ass. You a dumb ass, son.”
But overall I was struck by how well-behaved most of them were. Later, at lunch, she told me just how much power she wielded. “They don’t get too out of hand. One word from me to the principal and they are denied use of the canteen, lose visitor privileges, or, worst of all, they’re stripped of their sneakers for a month and put in paper shoes. Nobody wants that.” I listened raptly.
“But don’t worry, they get plenty out of hand sometimes. Yesterday, somebody yelled out, ‘Miss, you got a little chalk in your mustache.’ And last week, one kid asked his buddy out loud, ‘Hey, how old do you think Miss is?’ And the other little punk said, ‘Hard to tell, ’cause she got zits and wrinkles.’” She laughed. “Can you believe the shit they say? I’m glad I can’t hear a lot of it.”
Nora was always and forever the champion of the underdog. She was a textbook good girl as a kid, always bringing home a parade of nearly dead animals, in cardboard boxes, on Frisbees, in her bare hands—only to watch them die on our dining room table soon after. In fifth grade, she babysat for free for some poor kids whose mother worked long hours. She spent college summers volunteering in places like Malawi and India. But make no mistake, my sister was no sappy savior. Nora’s compassion was always clear-eyed and tough. In fact, when she went to Calcutta to work in an orphanage, she joined forces not with Mother Teresa, but rather with the good sister’s secular rival, Dr. Jack, a drunken Englishman who did the same good work but refrained from proselytizing. And as an adult, she and her husband, a surfer she’d talked out of law school and into teaching, raised four amazing children (two of them adopted from neglectful homes) and one terribly behaved dog, Tigger, who ate everything from boxes of Brillo pads to her used tampons.
As Nora made her way from desk to desk, I tried inconspicuously to scan the boys’ faces, imagining their crimes, their futures, and the lousy hands they had been dealt in the first place. Just standing by the copy machine before class, I heard other teachers make reference to an arsonist, a drug kingpin, and a foot fetishist who hid underneath dress racks in department stores waiting to lick the toes of unsuspecting women. I knew they had done horrible things, but they didn’t look particularly fearsome—except for one boy, Mario. The minute he walked in the door he fixed me with a wild-eyed “Who the fuck you lookin’ at?” stare. He had a prison-yard physique, a towering power-fro, and an elaborate neck tattoo. He caught me trying to decipher its interlocking Italianate letters and he fixed me again with a steely look that made me hold my breath. I reprimanded myself silently: Man up. It’s gonna be a lot worse than this when you are teaching on your own in Bed-Stuy.
During silent reading time, Nora and I stood in the doorway. I covered my mouth and said, “Mario’s tattoo is sure eye-catching. Are those his initials? M.O.B.?”
“Oh no, silly, it’s his gang, ‘Money Over Bitches.’ Can you believe that name? I think he is high up in their ‘administration.’” She looked at her watch and sighed, “M.O.B. Well, at least they’re clear about their priorities.”
Toward the end of class, Nora announced, “Boys, it’s time for a read aloud.” I thought it seemed babyish, but they were game. She read a short story about a suburban middle school girl who was ashamed of her ailing Indian grandfather who had come to live with her family. In reading the final paragraphs, she slowed down noticeably. I figured she was getting bored or had detected some trouble at the back of the room, but it soon became clear that the story’s sad ending moved her when the grandfather died. Her voice tightened and her eyes welled up. My brotherly urge to protect her swelled. Is she crazy? She can’
t show vulnerability in front of these kids. They’ll eat her for lunch!
I looked around the room. Most of the boys had their heads down or were staring blankly forward, seeming not to register the story or my sister’s reaction. And then I saw Mario, who’d locked eyes with my sister.
“Yo, miss, that really hit you, huh?” He said it again, more slowly: “Really hit you.” He made a fist, thumped his heart, and softly extended his arm to her in a gentle salute.
The moment touched me deeply. Where I thought she had made the worst mistake, she showed her mastery. She made herself vulnerable, and the toughest kid in the room had responded in kind. It was the last place on earth I would have expected such a tender, human exchange. I was covered with chills.
A buzzer rang and the boys scrambled madly for the door.
I walked through the prison parking lot exhilarated. Nora had shown me the good stuff. Even the toughest kid could be reached. If I could be a quarter as good as she was, it would be tremendously fulfilling. I’d had enough of Project Advance’s safe haven. The front lines of education called. I wanted in.
Chapter 2
Best Practices
FOR TWO YEARS, I had poured my heart into my graduate education courses at City University, all the while working full-time at Project Advance. I got used to late-night study jags in the library and had to give up most weekends writing papers and reading. I was determined to make it work. But now it was time to put away the books, hit the trenches, and plunge into student teaching. To become certified as a teacher, New York State required two placements over five months, one in middle school and one in high school. As excited as I was about gaining the experience, it meant that I had to give up my job (and my income) but still pay tuition for the privilege of working full-time for free. Ouch! I had saved a nest egg for these months and Sam and I had a serious austerity plan in place, but I wondered how others managed to afford to live during this apprentice period.
I was frankly not too enthused about the middle school requirement. Teaching history at that level seemed so basic and literal. Goofy textbooks with cartoon characters acting out the American Revolution made me roll my eyes. And more important, that age of student just wasn’t intriguing to me. As so many of us were at that age, the students were stuck in an awkward phase—no longer baby-fat, grade school cute, but developing acne and body odor on ungainly frames. You could practically watch as they were deciding between the tug of naughty adolescence and childhood innocence. I thought I would prefer the wit and brio of high schoolers.
My first assignment was at Yorkville Heights School, a public middle school right on the border of Harlem and the Upper East Side of Manhattan. On paper, it was an impressive place, boasting solid scores and an enviable placement record at the city’s better high schools, but still serving a diverse and largely poor population. Three-quarters of the students qualified for free lunch, the benchmark of poverty or near poverty.
Even before I set foot in the place, I could see why the school got results. The principal, Evette Russo, stood on East Ninety-Seventh Street in a Hillary-esque pantsuit greeting families, directing buses, and giving the stink-eye to a bunch of thuggy-looking teenagers on the corner. Friendly but all-business, she pegged me even before I stepped foot in the school: “You must be the new student teacher.” Seeing I was no kid, she said, “A career changer, eh? That’s good. And we’re happy to have another man here. The boys need more male role models.” Without taking her eyes off all the bedlam, she pointed back toward a bank of windows. “You’ll be with Lindsay Wells, sixth grade, in room 306. She’s a literacy whiz. You’ll learn everything you need to know from her.”
Room 306, to my naive eye, seemed close to an educational paradise. The room was as neat as a pin, but somehow at the same time was bursting with books, art supplies, mobiles, computer stations, plants, and a hamster whirring on an exercise wheel. Carefully decorated bulletin boards packed with student work alternated with corny inspirational posters that said things like “Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” or “If you expect respect, be the first to show it.”
The room felt bustling and lively, but not in a chaotic way. Some kids were reading quietly, a few were on computers, and others socialized in little clusters. They were remarkably diverse, not only in terms of race and ethnicity but also in terms of development. Many of the girls looked mature enough to have been in eighth or even ninth grade; some were experimenting with makeup and adult jewelry, while others were still happy to be covered in the primary colors of grammar school and kid jewelry they probably got as a favor at a birthday party. Most of the girls towered over the boys, many of whom still looked like adorable, round-faced fourth or fifth graders.
Ms. Wells, who was in her late twenties and had the theatrical good looks of Bettie Page, stood up from her desk. As soon as the clock hit 8:30, she gave a rapid series of syncopated handclaps. Like an echoed birdcall, every student, without hesitation, repeated the clap sequence back to her and then the room fell completely silent. It was cultish, Pavlovian, and deeply impressive. With a reaction like that from the kids, I expected her to be a sour martinet, but she was cheery and sweet. Without saying a word, she gave me a quick and knowing adult-to-adult smile. Many of the kids looked at me and whispered, but she put a stop to that simply by saying, “Eyes on me.” They complied.
I sat down and observed. In the next ninety minutes, she read a short story aloud, gave a mini-lesson on adverbs, collected field-trip fees, fixed a computer, and applied a Band-Aid (the last two seemingly at the same time). In the final minutes of the period, she detected some well-concealed skulduggery involving three boys, some crumpled singles, and a basketball pool. What couldn’t she do? At the end of class, she introduced me to the students, who eyed me warily. Afterward she said, “Don’t worry, they’ll get used to you.”
Over lunch I sat down with the whole sixth-grade team, as diverse in appearance as temperament: Ruthie, the assertive and whip-smart black chick with a confectionary updo of thick braids; Joel, the nebbishy and shy Jewish guy with chunky glasses and a penchant for curriculum; and Lindsay, the long-haired and vivacious white girl, who would have looked at home on a milking stool on a Midwestern farm. From the way they talked to one another, you could tell they had worked together for years. They were welcoming and helpful, but I also got the sense they were a tiny bit fatigued at the ongoing cycle of overeager and clueless student teachers coming through the door.
The next afternoon, while leading the after-school dance club in a rousing reggaeton number, Lindsay tripped on a backpack and rolled her ankle. In the frenzy of the dance, the kids didn’t seem to notice, so I went over to help her. As I pulled her up, she muttered under her breath, “Damn it, I have a show tonight at the Slipper Room.” She winced in pain.
“That strip joint?” I said without thinking.
“It’s burlesque, not stripping,” she replied evenly, without a hint of apology. I tried not to act surprised. It wasn’t easy. Literacy expert by day, burlesque artist by night.
“Of course, I understand. It’s very different.” I was eager to show her I was no square.
After I sent a kid to the nurse’s office for an ice pack, I was helping Ms. Wells elevate the ankle on her desk when she said, “You should come see a show sometime. My stage name is Rocky Bottom.” What were the other teachers up to in their spare time? I wished I had such an exciting double life.
Over the next six weeks, I watched Ms. Wells guide her sixth-grade charges adroitly, keeping them focused on learning even though they were in the throes of early puberty and social treachery. She helped me plan the social studies lessons I was charged with teaching and gave me great feedback: “This graphic would be better presented as a Venn diagram…You’ll never cover all that material in a forty-five-minute period…This website is written at a ninth-grade level.” While I am sure it was occasionally helpful for her to have another adult in the room, I was, on balance, just a whole lot more wor
k for her—one more needy student but older, bigger, and with ten times the number of questions. Over dinner every night, I bored Sam with tales of my Jamestown Colony lesson and the ever-shifting alliances I observed among the girls. The social drama of middle school was unchanged, even from my day.
One afternoon during a vocabulary quiz, I caught Ricardo blatantly copying off the paper of his neighbor Jaquan. I was surprised to see it from such a sweet and timid kid. Ricardo had been held back and was older and taller than his classmates. He was beanpole thin, nothing but elbows, knees, and ears. I confiscated both papers and walked them over to Ms. Wells, explaining the situation, hoping to be praised for my vigilance. I told her I thought we should read Ricardo the riot act after school.
Lindsay narrowed her eyes. “Before we scold him, let’s try to understand his motivation. I suspect Ricardo was cheating because he couldn’t do the work, not because he didn’t want to do the work.” I nodded, a little embarrassed. I had retained more of the disciplinary trappings of my parochial school past than I cared to admit. I reminded myself that Ricardo was learning-disabled and struggled to keep up in almost every subject. “Use this as a teachable moment. Of course, we’ll tell him what he did was wrong, but let’s give him the opportunity to learn it on his own and show us he can do it. Save the lecture for later.” It was such humane and wise advice. I was humbled, particularly since, until recently, I was normally the one giving professional advice to twenty-somethings like Lindsay who worked for me.
At her direction, I helped Ricardo create some vocabulary flash cards after school that day. We went over them until I was practically dizzy, but he kept getting them wrong. Frustrated, I found myself using more complicated words to explain simpler ones.