by Tony Danza
We’re all watching this, mesmerized, when big Howard, of all people, calls out, “Hey, Mr. Danza, doesn’t Daniel remind you of that Lenny guy with the dead mouse from Of Mice and Men?”
Yeah!
He really does!
Hey, Lenny, don’t let the cat get your mouse!
Daniel lowers his hands and smiles, but I’m the one who’s grinning. They read Steinbeck months ago. That’s a lifetime in kid years. I cannot believe they remember. Is it possible that I’m actually doing something right?
Leave it to Charmaine to bring me back to earth. For the umpteenth time, she strides into class late, and when I ask what’s kept her, she tosses her head and mutters, “I had to talk to somebody.”
It’s her attitude that does it. She won’t look at me. She juts out her chin and slams down her backpack, then drops into her seat as if she’s doing us all a favor. Nakiya and Tammy have seen enough. They lean toward me, fists clenched the way mine are when I’m watching a boxing match. I can feel them thinking, Do it, Mr. Danza!
All right, then. “Charmaine, that’s a pink slip,” I say to the silent approval of the Greek chorus.
For just a moment Charmaine’s mouth falls open in surprise, but then she catches herself and puts back on her tough face. “I was right outside the door. I wasn’t even that late.”
“This isn’t the first time, Charmaine, and I’ve warned you.” I’m trying to be authoritative, but she shuts down and won’t give me anything else.
This is the first pink slip I’ve ever given, and I don’t really know how it works, so I go on with my class and afterward take the slip down to my SLC office. Lynn Dixon informs me, “Charmaine’s dean is Ms. Karpinski. I’ll get it to Ms. K., but watch yourself.” Ms. Karpinski is famous in the school as a teacher and dean who’s as tough as her name. She brooks no nonsense from either students or faculty, and she’s one of the more skeptical about my being at Northeast. The prospect of mixing with her unnerves me, but I tell myself I’m only doing what I’m supposed to.
The next day a student I don’t know brings my pink slip back to me with a note from Ms. Karpinski: “Mr. Danza, please list the consequences for this student’s actions. Are you assigning a detention?”
It’s news to me that I have to decide the punishment, but detention sounds about right. In my day, kids who got in trouble routinely went to detention hall after school; the teacher on duty handled whatever was supposed to happen to kids in detention. Assuming the same deal applies at Northeast, I return the slip with Charmaine’s assignment—my first detention.
The first rule of teaching should be, Never assume. I’m well on my way to a major dressing-down from Ms. Karpinski when Lynn Dixon saves me. “What did you do about Charmaine?” she asks when we meet for SLC.
“Detention!” I say, sounding like a kid who’s just gotten his driver’s license.
“When are you doing it?”
“What do you mean when am I doing it? I sent the pink slip back to Ms. Karpinski.”
Ms. Dixon shakes her head. “Tony, Ms. Karpinski has nothing to do with administering the punishment. That’s your job. Every teacher handles his or her own detentions.”
“You mean if I give a detention, I have to be there? Don’t the kids just go to some detention place?” I’m picturing the portable classroom where I found Al G doing his in-school suspension at the beginning of the year. I’d have been (selfishly) better off giving Charmaine an in-school suspension! Talk about a backward policy.
But the realization that detention penalizes the teacher as much as the student is quickly overshadowed by my relief at not having to deal with Ms. Karpinski. I thank Lynn profusely and track down Charmaine.
We arrange to hold her detention in my classroom before school the next day. She arrives at 7:15 exactly, plunks herself in a seat, and glowers at me through her black-rimmed glasses. She’s a mix of contradictions, this girl, and they all show up in her wardrobe. Those glasses make her look like the smart, serious student she could be, but her ruffled blouse and black jumper suggest a little girl. Her hair is slicked back and held down with pink barrettes, and around the hem of her dress she’s stuck pins with sayings like I ICE CREAM and EYE CARE ABOUT YOU. And finally, there are those mismatched socks. It’s no accident, I think, that Charmaine read Michael Jackson’s “Child of Innocence” for the poetry contest.
I pull a seat around to face her, and after a little small talk I ask, “How long do you think you’re going to be in school?”
She answers with sullen emphasis, “Forever!”
“No, you’re not.” I stretch my arms out wide, hands pointing forward. “Here is your life.” Now I bring my right hand in close to the left. “This is the time you spend in school. In the scheme of your whole life, it’s not really very much, right?” Charmaine gives a shrug. “The catch,” I continue, “is that what you do here in this one little piece of your life can make a really big difference in everything else that happens.” I open my arms again and wave at her with my right hand. “And you don’t want to be over here later in your life, looking back, saying, ‘Why didn’t I make the most of it back when everything was possible?’ ” Then I add, “Like somebody else we know.”
Charmaine plays with one of her pins and tries to hide her smile, but I’m pretty much in her face. “You and I both know that you can be a good student,” I tell her. “What you need to understand is that you can also have fun. It’s not one or the other. You don’t have to choose between learning and being a kid. You have the time and the opportunity now to find your passion. But you’ve got to set your priorities and budget your time. Before you know it, you’ll be on your own. You’ll need the knowledge and skills that your teachers are trying to help you learn. Why can’t you be the one in your family that everyone is proud of and looks up to?”
I’m lecturing now, and she’s not really liking it, but she can’t help but hear me. “Remember what I told you guys way back at the beginning of the year?” I ask her. “Most people don’t aim too high and miss …”
It takes a minute, but grudgingly she finishes the line. “They aim too low and hit.”
“See that? You do pay attention! And I know you know your Michael Jackson. What’s that last line of ‘Child of Innocence’?”
She scrunches up her face as she runs the whole poem through her mind. “Um, ‘To change this world is my deepest desire.’ ”
I give her a second before asking, “Do you agree with that? Is it your deepest desire to change this world?”
“I don’t know.”
I sit back and fold my arms. “You know what, Charmaine? I think you do know. You chose that poem for a reason, and I think that line there is the reason. Why wouldn’t you want to change the world? Why shouldn’t it be you? If you just give yourself the chance, I know you can do it.”
The first bell rings, and the building hums with movement. As Charmaine starts to gather up her backpack, I put out my hand and point to the pin that reads EYE CARE ABOUT YOU. “I really do care about you, you know.”
She smiles and says, “Yes, Mr. Danza.”
OVER THE NEXT few days, the tenor of the class shifts. I nod approvingly as everyone, Charmaine included, arrives more or less on time. They find their seats, and stay in them. Everyone participates. One day after the break between our two periods, Ben-Kyle looks around and exclaims, “Hey, we’re all here!” The kids applaud themselves. This can’t last, I think.
How right I am. By the end of the week, my young boxing pal Matt gets into a wrestling match with a school guard and winds up in handcuffs. And spring fever seems to be kicking the romance between Ileana and Eric Lopez into overdrive. They’re always together now, hand in hand, and cannot take their eyes off each other. The whole class starts mimicking their passionate sighs, and they don’t even notice, much less care. Every once in a while, when the romance flares in class, Nakiya, who proudly wears her own abstinence ring, will lead us in a loud chorus of “Abstinence!” I mov
e the young lovers to opposite ends of the room, but even if he can’t see Ileana, Eric still spends the whole class writing notes to her. The good news is that they tend to be poems—even sonnets. A sample:
I savor it when she smiles all day.
I love it when she uses a soft touch.
My brain never wants her to go away.
Her kisses are a fiery torch.
If angels can sing then man she is one.
She is beautiful as the star above.
I know our love will never be undone.
She’s as delicate as a little dove.
I love my lover’s body with a kiss.
She’s the only one for me on earth.
I dream of one day calling her my miss.
We were destined to be since birth.
I now know I will never kiss another.
I know we will be loving each other.
This would all be pretty sweet except that Eric has unwittingly gotten in the middle of a spat between Ileana and her former best friend Stephanie. The girls’ feud erupts in class when Ileana refuses to read from the same handout as Stephanie. Not realizing what a hornets’ nest I’m stirring up, I give my mini-lecture about our class being like a family and needing to share. Eric pipes up from the back of the class and tries to give his copy to Ileana so the girls won’t have to work together. I tell him to mind his own business, and the next thing I know, Stephanie is in tears.
After class I sit her down and ask what’s going on. These two girls have been best friends for three years. Now Stephanie says, “I hate her. She used to be all colors and always happy and always got along with everybody. Now she’s all dark and mean.”
I have to admit that Ileana is challenging. Some days, just getting her to pick her head up off her desk is a struggle. It’s difficult for me to imagine her wearing bright colors because, this year, black pretty much defines her. She lines her eyes with heavy black makeup and arranges her black hair into extreme styles—cornrows, or a massive Afro, or straightened flat over her eyes. She has a piercing in her lip, and she’s been known to go into moods so dark they threaten to take the whole class down. Ileana’s tough exterior flies in the face of Stephanie, who’s soft and pale and never wears any makeup.
“Let me ask you something,” I say to Stephanie. “Do you think it’s wise to let Ileana control your emotions?”
Stephanie tugs on the end of her sandy brown ponytail. “I didn’t do anything to her. If you ask me for help and I give it to you, you don’t start cursing me for no reason and calling me names.”
Her anger borders on irrational, but I remind myself that these things are life and death to sixteen-year-olds. “Okay, right,” I tell her. “You’ve got to be able to count on your friends. So what are you going to do? Right now, I’m just concerned with Stephanie. I want Stephanie to take care of Stephanie. I want Stephanie to be okay and get her work done and make it happen for Stephanie. Forget about everybody else.”
After ten minutes she’s calmed down enough to go to her next class, but we haven’t solved anything. The next day after lunch she shows up sobbing. “Ileana just spit on me. That’s the highest level of disrespect. I swear to God if I see her, I’m going to kill her.”
I give her a cup of water and tissues and try again. “You can’t be this upset. It’s not good for you!” True, but not helpful. She ignores me. So I try the let’s-think-this-through approach. “What do you think is the best solution here?”
“She’s dead.”
I take a deep breath. “All right, let’s set that aside for one second. Let’s put dead over here.” I motion to the left and struggle to keep a straight face. Clueless though I may be, even I know that smiling while a teenage girl is crying will not get us anywhere good. “Okay,” I say after a pause. “What else?”
“I’m gonna leave school.”
“Oh, we’re not going to do that, cause I can’t let you go. I’m sorry, but I’m not giving you up.” I keep my voice calm and cheerful, as if we’re solving a math problem together. “So dead and getting out of school, over here. What else?”
She shrugs at the chalkboard. “I can’t think of anything else. I can’t forget that she just spit in my face for no reason.”
“Who said you have to forget about it?”
“You want me to ignore her!”
“No, I do not.”
“It doesn’t matter what I do. I talk to her, she gets mad at me. I don’t talk to her, she gets mad at me. She don’t care about anybody but herself.”
“Then why do you care, Stephanie?”
“We were best friends, like family. You don’t do that to your friends.”
I have an idea. “I think you’re judging her the same way you judge yourself, Steph, and you can’t do that. You know why not? Because she’s not like you.”
She takes that onboard, and once again, she calms down enough to go to class, but a few minutes later Eric pays me a call, solo. He’s worried about Ileana. It seems that Ileana also feels betrayed, and maybe this betrayal has roots that stretch back before he even entered the picture. At the beginning of the year, he tells me, Stephanie became friends with another girl in our class, Crystal, and that made Ileana feel left out. By this time my head is spinning. Round and round we go, I think. It’s not easy for me to take any of this seriously, but it’s deadly serious to the kids, and anything that gets in the way of their education is something I have to try to handle.
Poor innocent Eric. I thank him for clueing me in and warn him not to get sucked into the drama. He made the honor roll last marking period, and I want to encourage him. “You’re an honor student now,” I remind him. “You’ve got to take care of yourself.”
There’s only one solution. We’ve got to get the two girls together to talk this out. But for that, I need some professional help, so I arrange for us all to meet in a school counselor’s office. Ms. Morton lays out the ground rules. One girl talks at a time, and the other person listens. Everybody will have her say.
Ileana opens it up. “You said that I spit on you yesterday. I never spit on you. I didn’t even have any water—”
“So water just flew into my face,” Stephanie interrupts her, “and you just happened to be right next to me.”
I stop them. “This is a momentary misunderstanding. Why can’t we move past it?”
That pushes Stephanie to the real issue. “I just want to know why she said in class she won’t talk to me and we’re not friends.”
“All right,” I say. “Ileana?”
“Ever since you been friends with Crystal you’ve been acting different. You always been dissin’ me. You always act different when you’re around other people.”
“What do I do that’s different?”
Ileana rolls her eyes and starts to sputter until Ms. Morton tells her to stop and breathe.
“How ’bout this?” I turn to Ileana. “How about if you say, ‘I’m sorry you thought I did this when you walked by.’ ” I turn to Stephanie. “And how about you say, ‘I’m sorry you took it that way.’ And then we can move on. Because otherwise it’s like beating our heads against the wall, girls. We’re not getting anywhere.”
In the middle of this Rob Caroselli, the dean of students, has joined us. Rob’s a young guy, good looking and a natural peacemaker. “No one’s going to force you girls to be friends,” he tells them now. “You don’t want to be friends, that’s fine. But you are going to coexist, within the school and within your classrooms.”
“But I want to be her friend,” Stephanie says.
“All right.” I jump in before the cycle can start again. “How about we try to focus on the positive, the things you know about each other that you like, the reasons you were friends in the first place. Think of all the things that are great about each other and all the fun you’ve had together. Put aside the things that are bothering you, and give yourselves a cooling-off period. You both say ‘I’m sorry,’ and we see how it works out, okay?”
> The girls glance at the counselor and Mr. Caroselli, who both nod. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we can manage today. “You know,” I tell them, “I’m always around if you need to talk.”
For the first time all week the girls exchange a look. Yeah, they seem to be saying, we know about Mr. Danza and talk.
It’s something. It may be at my expense, but if it brings peace to the classroom, I’m always ready to take the fall.
AS IF THE STUDENTS aren’t giving me enough to worry about, the next day the TV show comes back snapping its jaws. Because the network has not yet scheduled an airdate for Teach, we’ve been prohibited from talking about the project to anyone in the press. The network’s fear is that the media might lose interest in our story if we get too much coverage too early, and this would undermine their efforts to launch the show when they finally decide to broadcast it. But the policy has backfired. A small local newspaper, the Northeast Times, is writing stories that paint our silence as some sort of sinister conspiracy. One in a series of headlines asked, WHY WON’T TONY DANZA TALK? Not surprisingly, this has prompted the network to rethink its position. To punish the upstart paper, the network and production company have invited the city’s big gun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, to send their education reporter to interview me and observe my class.
When Leslie Grief calls with this news, I feel whipsawed. We’re switching overnight from a total blackout to full-on classroom invasion? Unfortunately, Les reminds me, if I resist, the newspaper will conclude I have something to hide. So when the Inquirer reporter arrives the next day with her photographer in tow, I’m all smiles.