Radical

by Michelle Rhee

  “Uh . . . how were they?” I asked, with some trepidation.

  “Oh, they were great. Just great. Weren’t you, children?” she asked.

  “Yes, Ms. Blackwell,” they singsonged in unison.

  Ms. Blackwell picked up her purse and headed out the door. She hadn’t even crossed through the door when my kids started up again. They were yelling at each other, hitting one another, and throwing things across the room in record time.

  “Wait a minute!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

  Interestingly, the children ceased fire long enough to hear my plea.

  “Can someone please explain to me why it is that you can behave like that for Ms. Blackwell but you can’t do that for me?” I asked.

  Anthony, one of my chief mischief makers, stood up. “It’s because she knows what she’s doing,” he said matter-of-factly. And then turned to his neighbor to resume their arm-wrestling match.

  THE WINTER BEFORE I graduated from Cornell, while at home during break, I had a rare day off from serving sandwiches at Grumpy’s and decided to relax at home. I grabbed a Snapple and a bag of Doritos, switched on the TV in the family room, and became one with the couch.

  We had four channels in those days, and my parents must have been watching the Public Broadcasting Service station, so that’s what came on as I relaxed. The little screen showed scenes from a school where young people my age were teaching. It turned out to be a documentary on a brand-new outfit called Teach For America. That it even caught my eye was pure luck.

  One of the first scenes showed a principal taking a young guy out into the hallway.

  “You’re not very good at this,” she told him. “Maybe you’re not cut out for teaching. I’m afraid I have to fire you.”

  But what really got my attention was the next scene: It showed a young Korean guy teaching science to a class of mostly African American students. He was conducting an experiment where he poured water into a tube half filled with sand and rocks. The rocks settled to the bottom first, demonstrating how heavier material settled.

  “He’s really good,” I thought to myself. “Here’s this nerdy Korean guy rocking it in the classroom. I figured he’d be the one getting fired.”

  Back at Cornell, I started to see posters for TFA information sessions. They showed a young African American guy teaching kids. It asked: “How Can I Afford Not To Make This Work?”

  That touched my twenty-one-year-old soul. It took me back to my days volunteering in Mary Weiss’s classroom. It spoke to my father’s constant advice that we give back to the community. Perhaps I could put my newfound social consciousness to the test in the classroom. I loved being around children. I decided to give TFA a shot.

  “Oh,” said my friend Jenny Kim. “That’s kinda weird, isn’t it?” She was being the good Korean girl, heading to med school. Many of the friends I had taken Japanese language classes with were going to Japan to take jobs in the private sector. They had taken that class with that end in mind. Their response to TFA: “Hmm.”

  Missy, my college roommate, was the most supportive of the idea. “You should absolutely do it,” she said. A couple of my do-gooder friends were applying to TFA, too. So I signed up for an interview and prepared to compete for a job.

  I had to design a lesson that I would teach to the other interviewees and TFA staff, who would listen and grade my skills. I chose to teach a lesson in how to say “Hello” in Japanese, which isn’t that simple, since there are two forms of speech: formal and informal. I launched into the lesson by using two of the students interviewing with me as subjects. Even then I had a knack for hooking in the class. I held their attention, made them repeat the phrase in various ways, and came away feeling pretty good.

  The second part of the application process didn’t go so well. I had a one-on-one interview with a TFA staffer named Regina Sullivan. I left the interview thinking she didn’t like me. We just didn’t hit it off.

  “I’m not going to get that job,” I told my roommate.

  I started reviewing my graduate school options when . . . to my surprise, the acceptance letter arrived from TFA.

  Inza was surprised, too.

  “Are you crazy?” she asked. “We didn’t send you to an Ivy League college so you could become a teacher! This is absolutely unacceptable. There is no way that we will allow you to do this!”

  I couldn’t believe it. I looked toward my dad plaintively. He had always been my champion, and he was much more civic-minded than my mother. My mother and I both held our breath as we waited for him to weigh in. He thought for a few minutes with a pensive look on his face. Finally, he spoke.

  “This would be a good thing for you to do. Give it a try,” Shang said.

  “Yuh-Bo!” my mother shrieked, hurling “honey” in Korean as an epithet. They left the room, and I could hear them going at it. Shang returned.

  “She’s going,” my father declared. And that was that. My father had spoken, and his word was the last.

  The problem was, I was ambivalent, too. I am not much of a planner. I never knew what I wanted to do from one stage in life to another. I always admired people who, from when they were very little, knew they wanted to be a doctor or a writer or a teacher. That has never been me. When I was in high school I didn’t know where I wanted to go to college. When I was in college I didn’t know what I wanted to do after graduation. But I knew that I liked working with children, I believed that public education was important, and I figured this would buy me some time. I accepted the job.

  AFTER A QUICK BREAK at home in Toledo for two weeks, I boarded a plane from Detroit to Los Angeles, where I would spend the rest of the summer training to be a teacher—kind of.

  I remember getting off the plane and seeing people with TFA signs. We were funneled onto buses. I got into one of the front seats and stared straight ahead. Behind me the bus was packed with white kids flirting and yammering. I rolled my eyes and thought, “Good Lord, this is like summer camp.”

  We arrived at California State University’s campus at Northridge, where TFA held its summer institute. At the dorm I lugged my bag into a two-bedroom “pod” with a common room. No one was there, but one bed had bags and stuff on it. It looked to me, based on the pictures on her desk, like it belonged to a preppy white kid, so I moved my things into the other bedroom. My eventual roommate, Deepa Purohit, turned out to have come from Cleveland, and we even had a few friends in common. The white girl was Liz Peterson, a true California girl from Long Beach. She roomed with Rosemary Ricci, who was from outside of Philadelphia. Within a few days together, I had thrown my juvenile biases aside, the four of us grew very close, and Liz Peterson became one of my best friends.

  We were in TFA’s third cohort, and the program was still evolving. It was neither efficient nor particularly effective. We woke up every day at 5 a.m., boarded buses, and rode for hours through traffic to Pasadena. We did practice teaching for a half day and then returned to Northridge for more training and seminars. I’m not sure I learned much that summer, and I didn’t feel prepared for what was to come. If you put five hundred recent college graduates back in dorms for the summer, what you get is indeed summer camp. It was a scene. Sure, it was grueling, and we did get exposed to the classroom, but we mostly had a lot of fun.

  At the end of the institute, we started to get our teaching assignments. Liz, Rose, Deepa, and I were all detailed to Baltimore, so we headed east and found a house together. One by one each TFA corps member was offered a position in a school and prepared for beginning the school year with their class. I waited. And waited. Baltimore was not a city where I especially wanted to wind up. Still, I was a bit disappointed and worried when everyone got a job but me. Even two days before school started, I had yet to be hired. I figured it was mostly because I was Korean. Korean-black dynamics have always been a bit strained. If you are the African American principal in hard-core Baltimore, you are not thinking, “Yeah, that Korean girl is the one I want to hire. Let me take he
r!”

  The day before orientation for the school year, a woman from the central office called and said, “Well, you still haven’t been placed as a teacher. But you have to go someplace, since we are paying you. So go to this address: 1401 West Lafayette Avenue. The school is Harlem Park. They will be waiting for you.”

  They weren’t.

  I WILL NEVER FORGET pulling up in front of Harlem Park. The school was in the middle of a very downtrodden, dangerous neighborhood. It looked large and impenetrable from the outside. Bars on dingy windows. Trash blowing up against chain-link fences. I was terrified. I found my way to the office and told them I was reporting there until I was assigned to a teaching position. They had no idea who I was or why I was there, so I sat for an hour in the ninety-degree heat in the waiting area. I must have looked pretty pathetic and bedraggled when a teacher walked in the office and took pity on me.

  “Well hello there,” she said. “What brings you to Harlem Park?”

  It was Everlyn Strother, a Harlem Park veteran and one of the school’s best teachers. I said I was waiting to be assigned to a school and that the central office had sent me here.

  “C’mon, c’mon, come with me to my room. Follow me, baby,” she said.

  Her room was a model of organization and preparation. She sat me down and started moving around books, setting up workstations, and making sure posters were secured to the walls. As she did her thing, she asked me about my training and what I hoped to accomplish. And why I was so scared.

  “Look, baby, you gotta know what you’re getting into here,” she said. “You can’t look as scared as you do now. You have to be confident. I remember being in your shoes when I first started teaching. I was just as scared. Be patient. Hang in there. Remember, they’re children. And come to me if you need help.”

  Hmmm. Just like my grandmother said, “Little kids. How hard can that be?”

  The principal finally swept through and motioned me to her office. I tried explaining the situation to her, that I wouldn’t be there long—only until the central office found a school for me. After my long-winded speech she looked a little exasperated.

  “Second or fifth?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?” I responded.

  “I have two openings. Second grade or fifth grade. Which one do you want?”

  I quickly had to switch gears.

  “This summer I student-taught in a second-grade classroom in Los Angeles,” I said. “I was pretty effective with the students and thought they responded well to me, so I think second grade is probably better.”

  “Fine,” she said, looking wholly unimpressed and uninterested in my rationale. “Second it is.”

  The truth was, of course, I was worried and figured second graders were a lot smaller and younger than fifth graders, so I stood a better chance.

  Harlem Park was a huge school and had four second-grade classes. They assigned students to different classes according to their academics and behavior, a practice called tracking. It was a rite of passage that the new teachers were assigned to the students on the lowest track. Therefore, I was assigned second grade, track four: the students with both the lowest achievement and the highest discipline problems. They had been together since kindergarten. And there were thirty-six of them in the class.

  The classroom was worse than dingy. The windows were protected on the outside by black steel grates. The windows were so dirty and yellowed that light barely came through. But at first things went relatively well. I had my kids sitting in nine clusters of four desks each to foster cooperative learning, a popular strategy at the time. Over the course of the first few weeks I came up with fun and engaging lessons, and the children seemed to respond well.

  There was only one problem. All classrooms at Harlem Park were assigned a teacher’s aide. Mine was a gruff woman who clearly had seen her fair share of young teachers pass through. Too intimidated to give her any direction, I pretty much let her do her own thing. Or maybe I should say, she just did her own thing. She’d come and go as she pleased, sit in the back of the room, cut out letters, or do other things she felt were appropriate.

  The other thing she did was yell at the kids. I remember teaching a lesson where I read the book Caps for Sale. As I read the book and chanted the refrain, “Caps! Caps for sale . . . fifty cents a caaaaaap!” the kids started to join me, singing at the top of their lungs. The aide thought the children were being much too loud.

  “Stop that silliness!” she screamed at the children.

  I was shocked and chagrined at the same time, but mostly I was a new teacher who didn’t know how to react. I thought it was great that the children were so engaged. Why squelch a student? That could ruin their enthusiasm for learning! Call me clueless. But I didn’t have to worry about my aide for long.

  Kurt Schmoke—a dynamic, young African American leader—was starting his second term as Baltimore mayor. He devoted himself to reforming his city’s dismal public schools. The summer before I started teaching, Schmoke contracted with Education Alternatives, a consulting company, to take over some of the city’s worst-performing schools. Harlem Park was among them. The company fired the aides from these schools because they didn’t have college degrees. My new aide was an older white guy, very tall, dumpy, tousled hair, brushy mustache, square-framed glasses, and generally unkempt. He looked like he was at least seventy. He did not belong at Harlem Park, in the ghetto, trying to connect with second graders. Not only did he not make my life easier; he made it harder. He became a target for the kids. They threw stuff at him. They made fun of him. I lost absolute control of the class when my first aide left. While I’d initially thought she was a problem, I quickly came to realize that she was the only reason my classroom was under control.

  My once-angelic students, who I worried might have their enthusiasm crushed by a harsh word, were all of a sudden spewing harsh words of their own. “Punk-ass bitch!” they’d call out to one another, as they threw pencils and books at one another. Or worse, “Screw you, Chinese bitch!” they would yell at me. Once they realized that the aide was gone and I had no classroom-management skills, the kids took over.

  It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I remember walking down the steps to the cafeteria one day when one of the kids tripped and fell. Every kid who passed him kicked him, like it was a natural thing. I ran back up the stairs and said, “What are you people doing? This is crazy! Stop it!”

  As I dropped the students off at lunch in the cafeteria one day, two boys started to fight. One kid had the other in a choke hold. The eyes of the kid being held were bulging out. It looked as if his blood vessels were going to pop. He was about to pass out.

  “Stop!” I yelled. I tried to jam my hip between them to get some leverage to pull them apart. I couldn’t imagine the level of violence eight-year-old kids were capable of.

  I was helpless: I had zero respect from the kids and zero ability to strike fear into their hearts. How could I win back something I never had? What could I use as a threat? That I would tell on them to their moms? That they would get bad grades? That I would send them to the principal? They feared none of those things.

  My class was infamous at a school that had experienced its share of violence and misbehavior. The kids would walk down the hallways and rap on doors and push around younger kids.

  “That’s Rhee’s class,” the other teachers would say, with palpable distaste.

  I have gone through some difficult and painful times in my life, but nothing compares to my first year as a teacher. It was the hardest time of my life, period.

  Back at our home on East Baltimore Street, my friends and I commiserated and compared notes on the trials of teaching for the first time. Liz, Deepa, and Rose all had been assigned to tough inner-city schools. But Harlem Park was a special case, the worst case. My friends had more supplies, smaller classes, and better support from the administration and parents. It was a pretty well-established fact within TFA that my assignment was extremely
difficult. Doubts began to creep into our conversations. We started to voice the dark side of young, idealistic college grads faced with the reality of attempting to engage and teach disadvantaged students for six and a half hours a day.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” I remember saying after one particularly rough day of being screamed at. “I am a well-meaning person. I work my butt off. I care about my students and their futures. But it doesn’t matter.”

  AS HARD AS IT was to take the daily frustrations and feelings of helplessness, the hardest thing was coming to the realization that, in fact, I was the problem. This became abundantly clear to me with the transformation of Tameka Tagg.

  Tameka was a teeny little girl; she was also one of the main rabble-rousers in my class. She interrupted lessons and instigated trouble for the entire class. She drove me crazy. After one particularly difficult morning, I gave up and sent her to another classroom. The teacher was Bertha Haywood, a thirty-year veteran and a great teacher. She also had top-tier students. Whenever I peered into her class and saw all of her children paying rapt attention to her, I assumed it was because she had the highest-performing and best-behaved class. As it turns out, that wasn’t the case.

  When I walked down the hall later in the day to pick up Tameka, I stopped and looked through the little window in the door to Bertha’s classroom. And there was Tameka Tagg, sitting with her hands folded, raising her hand to answer questions, smiling and keeping quiet.

  And it struck me at that point: It’s not her—it’s me. It’s not just about kids who come to school hungry, from families who don’t care about education, through streets with a gauntlet of drug dealers. I was creating the kind of environment where they could act up and be crazy, but if they were in a different environment with a different teacher, they could be calm and learn. It was me!

  This point was driven home by mentors from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who came to observe my class as part of our certification program. Two of the faculty pulled me aside after one class.