by Ed Boland
A week later, I was leaving school when I saw Mei on the street frantically shouting into a walkie-talkie. Three cops were on the opposite corner. A gang fight had broken out right outside our building but dispersed as soon as the police arrived. Teachers and students alike knew it would just get played out someplace else close, but where? Just as I started biking home, I saw two kids hop a fence into a deserted parking lot behind a CVS pharmacy. I circled around the block and found an entrance to the lot. Without warning, I found myself on the edge of a real live gang fight. True to my gay roots, my only point of reference for such things was the rumble scene in West Side Story, but I was now seasoned enough not to expect the Sondheim/Bernstein/Robbins version.
I was conspicuous to say the least: white, middle-aged, clad in khakis, and wearing a space-age bike helmet atop my beat-up Raleigh Racer. As I rolled onto the scene with all the street cred of Mary Poppins, two groups of fifteen kids each were hurling threats back and forth. A few small skirmishes were being played out on the margins, and then a brutal fight began between two guys in their early twenties. As I was fumbling for my phone in my backpack, some kids recognized me. I heard my name called from somewhere. There was a throb in my temples. I felt strangely embarrassed, as if I’d pulled open the door of a bathroom stall on someone.
As I looked down at my phone to dial 911, I heard a voice I didn’t recognize. “If you’re smart, mister, you’ll stay out of this. It’s none a your fuckin’ business.” I looked up and saw Theo, an obese seventeen-year-old freshman, drug dealer by trade, who had come to school a grand total of two and a half days that year. I ignored him and called 911 and then Mei.
I scanned the crowd and saw Jesús’s brother, a junior at Union Street, and finally Jesús himself. No surprise there. I tried to lock eyes with Jesús to let him know I was wise to him, but he was too busy to notice me.
Searching for more faces of my students, I came across a slightly older man in a denim jacket in the middle of the crowd. He seemed out of place among the kids. As the fight escalated, he jeered and pumped his forearm, shouting, “That’s it, Nelson, show that punk-ass bitch who’s boss. Whale his ass.” I inhaled hard and looked down as it hit me: It was Jesús’s father.
He was as convincing there as he was in my classroom. “Pop that bitch in the face; pop him.” So much for fatherly concern. Whoever Nelson was, he was inspired by the orders. He now had his bloodied opponent on the ground and delivered a coup de grâce with a power kick to the stomach. I’d been fooled and was angry at myself for being taken in so easily before by Mr. Alvarez’s hollow talk and cheap theatrics.
As quickly as the melee started, and without any obvious explanation, it dissolved. The two sides walked off throwing insults over their shoulders. Two older boys helped the bloody and hobbling kid walk away. Several Union Street kids passed by me without so much as a glance. Invisible again. I stayed for a while waiting for the cops, but none came. The next morning I recounted the story to Marquis, a veteran history teacher with experience on both coasts. “Treachery from teenagers, that we can expect, but parents? Come on,” I seethed. “And then the cops; why didn’t they come?”
“There were no weapons. They’re not going to bother with that shit.” Marquis sighed. “And you know what? As crazy as it sounds to us, that father may be trying to teach his son to survive in a hostile environment the only way he knows how. It’s easy for us to say, ‘Violence isn’t the answer,’ because for us it’s not, but that isn’t an option for a lot of kids outside these walls.” I was just looking for someone to share my outrage, but instead I got another dose of uncomfortable, confounding reality.
Until then, I hadn’t given much thought to the landscape outside of school. But a quick and unhappy checklist formed in my head as I walked down the hall: The cops don’t care. The union doesn’t care. The rich neighbors don’t care. The parents don’t care. Who was in this fight with us? I couldn’t help but feel like a sucker.
The following month brought Teacher Appreciation Week. Standing at my mailbox in the teachers’ room at the end of day, I smiled as I read colorful notes covered with cartoon stickers from the usual suspects, mostly good girls like Nee-cole and smart boys like middle-class Lucas and Norman, the wheezing asthmatic I was so very protective of because I feared he would die in my class. He gave me a coffee mug filled with Hershey’s kisses. I knew that the mug (and the note taped to it) was really from his mother, but I appreciated it nonetheless. But there was another note, this one on a ripped piece of notebook paper, with handwriting that was large, cursive, and clear. Having seen so little of it, I didn’t recognize Jesús’s handwriting at first: “Dear Mr. Boland, thank you for never giving up on me. Jesús.”
I stared down at the card. In resignation, in sadness, and with what little anger I could still muster, I said to myself in a low voice that hardly seemed my own, “Dear Jesús, I am trying hard not to give up on you and everyone else here.” Even three months before, I would have seen this note as an ember of hope. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was his conniving father or his manipulative girlfriend who had put him up to this. I tossed it into the wastebasket and started to walk out of the lounge.
I thought I was forgiving. I thought I was understanding. I thought I was mature. But, so quickly into this experience I began to loathe my students, resenting everything about them that was their lot—their poverty, their ignorance, their arrogance. Everything I was hoping, at first, to change. I was supposed to be the adult, but I had to check myself repeatedly as childish resentments and judgments flared up over petty things like Mariah’s body odor, Lu Huang’s single four-inch strand of facial hair, or Nestor’s disgusting bag of chicharrones. And now treating Jesús’s gesture with such contempt.
Hoping it would save me from my own cynicism, I pulled the note out of the trash and crammed it into the bottom of my backpack.
Chapter 7
Lord Byron
“SAM, ARE YOU awake?” I asked into the darkness. The only trace of light in our bedroom came from the cryptic green flashes of the computer modem.
I was hoping to conceal the twinge of fear in my voice, even from Sam, who was curled up next to me. I stroked the silky black hair on his forearm, secretly hoping he would stir and comfort me, but he was out cold. He was in the throes of editing his film and was as stressed and exhausted as I was.
I used to boast to friends that no matter what my troubles, I could always do three things: eat with gusto, get an erection when called for (and even, at times, when it was not), and sleep like a log. As my first year in teaching wore on, each of these constants crashed and burned.
In pretty short order, I lost my appetite and dropped twelve pounds. In the sack, I half-flaccidly and halfheartedly went through the motions of lovemaking with poor Sam, while a tape of horrible classroom scenes looped in my brain. And, like most mornings, here I was two hours before the 6:30 alarm, fighting off alternating fits of self-pity, guilt, and fear.
I had always been the upbeat cheerleader in my pod of friends. From my cheery perch over the years, I had watched a host of friends spiral into depression from terrible breakups, job troubles, or illness. Now it was my turn. Whatever encouraging words or gestures I had extended to them must have seemed as unhelpful and hollow as the ones they were lately offering me. That particular morning, two faces haunted my predawn jag: the brilliant Byron and the rigid vice principal, Gretchen. I was failing them both in very different ways.
From the minute he crossed the threshold of my classroom, it was clear that Byron was a prodigy, even if his intellect was shrouded under serious mumbling and a heavy Jamaican accent. The first week of class, when Byron softly announced where he was from, he was teased by classmates with the predictable jokes about dreadlocks, ganja, and Bob Marley. Byron was the antithesis of all these things. With tightly cropped hair, an air of utter sobriety, and no trace of reggae bounce in his step, he was an old soul at fourteen. He wore the same tattered black hoodie every
day, which only added to his monk-like aura.
One early September afternoon, he wandered into my classroom and without a word started perusing my bookshelf, skipping over the kid stuff and pulling out my graduate school books. He flipped through a half-dozen of them before he spoke a word.
Without making eye contact, he asked, “Why do you think the Indus Valley river civilizations disappeared, Mr. Boland?” and a little bit later: “Why is Sweden so well suited to socialism?” In the course of the first semester, the kid sent me scrambling to the Internet and the teacher’s edition of the textbook on more occasions than I could count. He was exactly the kind of kid I was hoping to help, and this was perhaps in part because I saw much of my young self in him. The bookshelf scene in particular brought me back to sixth grade when I stayed after school to administer a world history test of my own making to my beloved teacher Miss Hilderbrant (which, to my great joy, she failed).
Byron visited me after school often and gradually started to open up to me. His young life was defined by missed opportunity. Uprooted from a good school in Jamaica while in middle school, he immigrated illegally to the States with his single mother and moved to the run-down town of Port Chester (known colloquially as “Poor Chester”) in Westchester County.
There, his mother worked as an assistant in a law firm, where stories of her brilliant son trickled up to the boss’s office. Her boss was a trustee of the Larchmont Academy, a prestigious private school that did a great job with the Project Advance kids who were placed there. Byron applied and was awarded a full scholarship, one that he would never use. Constant relocation is a curse of the poor, and Byron and his mom unexpectedly moved to the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. Maybe the circumstances were too ugly to convey or maybe they thought it was none of my business, but I could never get a straight answer out of him (or his mother) as to why they moved.
While sharing a bag of Skittles with Byron after school one day, I learned about another terrible misstep. “Last spring, I was admitted to Stuyvesant, but I decided to come here to Union Street instead,” he said with pride, thinking I would applaud the decision. Instead, I was horrified.
Stuyvesant High School was probably the most selective public school in the nation, the training ground for Nobel laureates, attorneys general, and titans of business. Typically, about 29,000 kids apply for just under 1,000 spots in the freshman class. In recent years, the school has admitted as few as seven black students (not 7 percent but a total of seven black kids) into its freshman class.
“I’m curious. What made you enroll here?” I asked, concealing my shock that he had squandered yet another golden ticket.
“My mother and I thought Stuyvesant was too big. We knew I would get a lot more attention here, and we liked the international studies aspect.”
I could see how Union Street must have sounded so nurturing, with only ninety students in a grade. Its cheery website pledged to prepare students for the best colleges in the country while immersing them in an international curriculum. The school taught Mandarin, offered trips abroad, and boasted that its faculty members had lived in twenty different countries. Even gym class promised global flair, offering cricket and rugby, instead of the usual basketball and volleyball. Little did Byron and his mother know, it was really another struggling inner-city school with a well-designed website and a fresh coat of paint.
Having come from Project Advance, I felt a special responsibility to help this kid. So about three months into school, I sat him down. “Byron, we need to have an utterly candid discussion.” There was no need to dumb down my vocabulary with this kid. “We are accomplishing next to nothing in my class. A lot is happening, of course, but very little of it involves learning.” He shifted his skinny frame awkwardly in a desk that was covered with obscenities—most of them about me. “From now on, I’m going to give you the New York Times to read every day. When you are done with your classwork, and let’s be honest, it usually takes you about five minutes, make a list of questions from the articles you have read and we can discuss them after school. I can also get you books on any topic that you like. And we need to find you a challenging summer program. I know you must be bored and frustrated. I’m sorry. I wish I had a better handle on classroom discipline for both our sakes.”
Byron picked at some of the newly sprouted fuzz on his chin. He seemed ill at ease and embarrassed for me. He wasn’t used to a teacher confessing gross incompetence to him. What high school freshman was?
“That’s very considerate of you to think of me. Thank you,” he mumbled.
The next month, Byron’s mother, a warm, animated woman with a serious dose of Caribbean rectitude, came for her parent-teacher conference. Big-boned and dressed in office wear, she exchanged pleasantries with me in a way very few parents did. Once we were behind closed doors, I didn’t mince words. “Mrs. Williams, I know this may sound unusual coming from a teacher here, but I am telling you, in confidence, that you should consider having Byron transfer to a different school.”
“Really? But this is so much better than the middle school he attended. That was so chaotic, he would come home with migraines. There seem to be a lot of caring teachers here.”
“There are great teachers here, no doubt, but Byron needs to be around more kids who are just as smart and motivated as he is. I’m afraid he won’t be well prepared for college.” Her mouth turned into a pout, still unconvinced. I locked eyes with her for emphasis. “I used to work for a program for gifted students, so I know what he’s missing. Trust me. I can help you find a better school.”
She looked at me with apprehension while saying, “Okay…well…we’ll think about it.”
“Also, please don’t mention to anyone else here that I suggested this. Schools don’t like to lose high performers like Byron.” This woman was used to nonstop praise about her son in meetings like this. Telling her she was doing a disservice to her son by keeping him here made her uncomfortable.
“I appreciate your concern,” she said, but she seemed happy to leave.
The same November morning that I gave Byron his first New York Times, I spied the vice principal, Gretchen, in the teachers’ lounge. Mei had just announced a change in reporting: All the ninth-grade teachers would now answer to Gretchen.
As she did every morning, Gretchen was logging student offenses from the previous day onto a whiteboard in colored markers: “Jaden, 11th grade, defiance; Naylani, 9th grade, profanity; Malik, 10th grade, texting in class.” In one of her many tributes to the East, she finished by drawing a pair of lotuses on either side of the list of crimes. She turned to me and said sternly, “I need to talk to you.”
At first glance, Gretchen was the hippest-looking person you’d ever seen working in an educational institution. She sported a soft, graying Mohawk, funky rectangular glasses, and dozens of hammered silver bangles that went halfway up her thin arm. Every time she bent one way or another, she revealed another arty tattoo: an ankh here, a labrys there, some kind of mystic eye of god winking at you from her shallow cleavage. Her office was overflowing with exotic Eastern musical instruments that I didn’t know how to pick up, much less play. When she wasn’t citing the Bhagwan, she was quoting the Buddha.
Once I woke up and smelled the incense, however, I realized Gretchen was a study in cognitive dissonance. Despite the Woodstock veneer, she was much closer to a Victorian schoolmarm. Liver-lipped righteousness never looked so cool.
Every week, I left my supervision meetings repeating the “edu-jargon” she spouted, often without explanation. I would walk out of her office pep-talking myself, mumbling the argot she used, hoping it would work its magic. “Yes, Gretchen’s right, I must ‘chunk’ the curriculum and ‘scaffold’ their learning.” While she was probably an excellent teacher herself and had an impressive command of educational theory, she imparted little useful advice or encouragement, at least to me. And even though we were both gay and about the same age, I couldn’t find a shred of common ground with her.
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The rest of the faculty was split down the middle on their feelings about Gretchen. Some admired the seismic jolts of fear she could inspire in some of the toughest students. But most grew tired of her tales of how perfectly everything worked at the school she had cofounded and worked in until the previous year. “Well, at Brooklyn Arts Academy, what we did was…Do you know what worked great at Brooklyn Arts?”
Not long after receiving a scathing evaluation from Gretchen, Patrick, a history teacher in the middle school, was scavenging for a snack in the teachers’ lounge refrigerator and asked us aloud, “If she created such a fucking educational paradise over there at Brooklyn Arts, can somebody tell me why she left so quickly?”
In the teachers’ room that morning, after she finished writing up the final infractions on the discipline board, Gretchen pulled me aside. “We are overdue in scheduling your first formal classroom observation.” I dutifully set down a stack of Economist articles I had photocopied for Byron and pulled out my planner.
Observations were a big deal, especially for new teachers. Receiving tenure depended heavily on the formal observations administrators conducted over the first three years, and if you got tenure, you basically had job security for life. Thanks to the powerful teachers union, the UFT, it was next to impossible to fire a teacher in New York City with tenure. (In 2009 and 2010, despite widespread student failure, only three of the fifty-five thousand teachers with tenure in New York City were fired.) Case in point: A principal walked into a primary school classroom where the teacher was asleep and apparently drunk. She was relegated to one of the famous “rubber rooms,” where teachers in trouble wait, sometimes for years, for an arbitration panel to decide their fate, all the while collecting full salaries. But even the sleeping/drunk teacher later returned to the classroom. And a high school music teacher in Queens, who had confessed to sexually harassing students, collected $1 million in salary (plus benefits and pension) over a period of thirteen years spent sitting in the rubber room while appealing his case. While these are rare and extreme examples, they certainly reflect a terribly broken system.