Radical

by Michelle Rhee

  “You should think about changing your profession,” they said. “This classroom is not safe for the children. This environment is not good for them. They are not learning anything.”

  WHEN I WENT HOME for Christmas during my first year as a teacher, my mother took one look at me and said, “You don’t look so good.”

  I had developed a condition—when I scratched myself these huge, crazy red welts appeared. My roommates affectionately referred to it as “the Itch.” My mom saw them and said, “There is something seriously wrong with you! This is not normal.”

  She took me to the doctor.

  “Is there any stress in your life?” he asked. “Usually these symptoms are a sign of extreme anxiety and pressure. You should avoid that to the extent possible.”

  “Are you kidding me? My entire life is stressful,” I answered.

  On the way home from the doctor’s office, my mother said quietly, “Don’t go back. Stay here. You weren’t supposed to be a teacher anyway. You went to an Ivy League school. Cornell, for goodness’ sake! Apply for law school in the fall and just stay with us. You’ll be fine.”

  Sounded good to me. Law school rather than Harlem Park? Why not?

  The way I rationalized it in my head was that my kids were not better off with me in the classroom. I told myself I wasn’t quitting because I couldn’t handle it; I was quitting for the good of the children.

  Besides, word through the first-year TFA corps was that teachers dropped out on a regular basis. Some lasted a few weeks, some a semester, many left after the first year. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. I started warming to the idea.

  “No, lady,” my dad said as I was explaining my change of course. “You are going back. Pack your bags.”

  I tried to protest. But as always, my dad’s word was the last. Shang packed my bags, loaded them into the car, and sent me on my way.

  WELTS AND ALL, I returned to Baltimore an obsessed lady.

  My new strategy was to throw spaghetti against the wall, hoping something would stick. I tried everything. I changed seating configurations. I tried every discipline system in the book. If one system didn’t work, I’d introduce another a few days later. The constant changes weren’t good for the kids, but I was a woman possessed. I was bent on figuring out a way to be successful.

  Eventually I found a seating arrangement that actually worked. Instead of having kids sit at tables, I had them sit in a big U so that I could see what everybody was doing at all times. I could put the troublemakers in the middle, too.

  Harlem Park had some excellent teachers. Their students walked through the halls in quiet, straight lines. Their kids did their homework. They were quiet in class. Bertha Haywood, who had taken Tameka Tagg into her classroom for an afternoon, was perhaps the best teacher in the school. I was reluctant to bother the veteran teachers, but one day I stopped into Ms. Haywood’s classroom after school.

  “Okay,” I said. “I just don’t understand that child. Tameka was wreaking havoc in my class all morning. She spends a few hours in your class, and she’s an angel. She returns to my room, and she’s making the class nuts again. What’s your secret?”

  “No secret,” she said. “The first thing you have to do is establish your authority. You’re the boss. They need to know that. Next, you have to keep things interesting for the kids. A classroom should be exciting for students. Every day I have one surprise planned for class that I know the children will enjoy. It keeps them engaged and motivated. They expect something fresh every day.”

  “Like what?”

  “Take today,” she said. “We made finger puppets. These children had never made finger puppets before. We made them to mimic characters in the book we were reading. They were totally engaged—in making the puppets and acting out the scenes in the book. And now they can take the puppets home with them. It’s something they never would have anticipated.”

  I was in awe. Ms. Haywood had been teaching for thirty years, and yet each night she was up trying to figure out new ways to make her kids excited about her lessons. Amazing.

  That night I went home, sat in front of the TV, and made pizzas out of yellow and red paper: yellow for cheese and red for sauce. Brown paper in the shape of mushrooms and little green squares to look like green peppers. I was doing a lesson on fractions, and I wanted to surprise the kids with paper pizzas they could place into halves and quarters. Roger Schulman, another TFA teacher, came over to watch TV with us.

  “What on God’s green earth are you doing?” he asked.

  I explained.

  “You are insane,” he said. “For one lesson, you are making thirty-six individual pizzas? Each with individually crafted pepperoni and olives? Have you lost your mind?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Every student gets a pizza.”

  I had taken Bertha Haywood’s words to heart. The next day was my first truly calm day in the classroom. The kids were fascinated and delighted with the pizzas. And they started to understand fractions.

  When it came to discipline, I set up a simple rewards system. I had two chalkboards. The larger one I would use for lessons, and on the smaller one I would put the students’ names—not when they were bad, but when they were good. And if they did something good, I would put a star next to their name; if you did something bad, I would erase the star. For the kids I knew were troublemakers, I would have to put their names on the board as soon as they walked in.

  “Oh, thank you for putting your jacket up!” Quickly put their name on the board.

  Now they had something to lose. If there was nothing to take away, then it wouldn’t work, right?

  And then I set up a whole economy, where at the end of the day I gave tickets for the number of stars that the kids got during the day. At the end of the week students could trade their tickets in for candy or stickers or erasers or toys.

  Finally, Rhee’s class was no longer wild. Well, less wild, at least.

  FROM EARLY IN THE school year, Rhoda Jones, the assistant principal, was sure I was going to quit. She saw me struggling to maintain order. She saw that frightened look in my eyes. I guess she marked me down as a lost cause and didn’t bother to offer much help.

  One day when I was at school late, planning, I snuck into the supply closet to look for some construction paper. Teachers were not permitted in there. Rhoda Jones saw the door ajar.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  Busted.

  I apologized and explained I needed the paper for a project I was planning for the kids.

  “Next time, ask,” she said.

  I walked away, downcast.

  “Hold on,” she said, handing me a package of construction paper. “I see you here after school every day working on lesson plans. You are here before I arrive in the morning, too. I can tell you are trying hard, and you have lasted far longer than I had expected, to be honest. But, child, you need help.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “You spend all your time here inside the school building,” she said. “You have to let our children know you are part of the community. You can’t be afraid of going to their houses. Show up at their door. Let their parents know what their kids are doing in your classroom. Make yourself a real part of their lives.”

  The next day Craig Washington refused to stop talking during our math lesson and pinching the girl in front of him.

  “Keep it up,” I said, “and I am going to walk you home after school. Let’s see what your mother has to say about how you behave in our class.”

  He laughed and kept cutting up. I guess he figured it was another one of my empty threats.

  When school let out I found Craig, tapped him on the shoulder, grabbed his hand, and said, “Let’s go, son,” just like I imagined Rhoda Jones would.

  We started walking. Much as he tried to maneuver out of my grasp, I kept his hand in mine. His buddies along the way stopped and watched.

  “Hey,” one said, “there go
es Craig with his teacher. She has to hold his hand. Little boy needs to have his hand held!”

  Craig was pained the entire walk home. I, however, took pleasure in the taunting, hoping it might dissuade Craig from taking actions that would warrant further hand-holding. “I ain’t no little boy!” he argued back to his friends. “I don’t even know who this crazy lady is!”

  It was a long way to Craig’s house. He lived out of the neighborhood. Sweating profusely, I knocked on the door. His mother answered. I explained that her son had been acting out in class and making it hard for me to teach.

  “He’s ruining it for the rest of the students,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Rhee,” she said. “I’ll get on him. Trust me, this won’t happen again. Right, Craig?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Craig replied.

  And it didn’t.

  I visited more homes. In some I met with parents willing to help. Others were too surprised to comment, and a few wouldn’t even open their doors. But I came away from each visit with a better understanding of my students and what they were up against. I adjusted my teaching accordingly.

  Once word started to get around that Ms. Rhee was out in the neighborhood, and that I was often the first one in the parking lot and the last car out, even the drug dealers and the older kids who hung out on the corners and stoops started to take notice. I tended to park on the street, rather than in the teachers’ lot. One evening I left school just before dark and walked to my car. I passed a few men sitting on a stoop.

  “Hey, Ms. Rhee,” one of them said. “Don’t worry. We’re looking out for your car.”

  I smiled and wondered how they knew my name.

  At the end of April, when the monitors from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, came back to my classroom, they said, “These kids are actually learning something. This is not a great classroom yet, but you have definitely turned it around.”

  After the doubts and the welts, I was relieved. I had never failed at anything. For me, quitting was failure. I understood how difficult and depressing teaching could be, but I also caught a glimpse of its rewards.

  DURING THE SUMMER AFTER my first year, I didn’t work another job. Liz, Deepa, and Rose were driving cross-country to California. I chose not to join them. I spent all summer preparing to teach again.

  A few of my aunts were visiting from Korea, so I put them to work cutting out shapes for my students. It was a little sweatshop of Korean ladies. They gabbed and gossiped and made bags of shapes that I could use to teach math.

  At Harlem Park we didn’t have a lot of books, so I went to my dad’s medical office every day and photocopied books. I made lesson plans. I kept Bertha Haywood’s advice in mind and tried to come up with surprise lessons. And then in August, I shoved everything in my car—the photocopies and the bags of shapes—and drove back to Baltimore for my second year.

  I arrived early to set my whole room up. I was big into colors and making the room super exciting. And so I had made all these posters with bright colors, and I set up beanbag chairs so it was the kind of place you would want to come into. It was a place of learning and fun and surprises.

  I had changed, as well. My new students would see a different Ms. Rhee. This time around, Ms. Rhee was not going to play. When I met my students for the first time, I wore my game face. No smiles, no joy; I was all thin lips and flinty glares. I made them line up and walk in and out of class.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not good enough. Try again.”

  They lined up in the hall again and walked into the classroom.

  “Again,” I said. Four times.

  My mistake the first year was trying to be warm and friendly with the students, thinking that my kids needed only love and compassion. What I knew going into my second year is that what my children needed and craved was rigid structure, certainty, and stability, as well.

  OVER THE SUMMER I had taken some time to attend a professional development seminar set up by the educational consultants who had taken over the school. It was about how to teach math to kids. I am not mathematically inclined, so I thought it would be interesting but not very useful. But that professional development wound up changing my life.

  I believe that if you give engaged, motivated people a kernel of crucial information, they’ll take the kernel and grow it into something ten times more valuable. But you’ve got to give them something. That summer math course became my kernel. I learned how to teach Calendar Math, a system that launched a whole array of teaching tools and activities based on the numerical day of the week. The kids took it from there. They soaked it up.

  Every day we did an exercise called Incredible Equations. We would take the number of the date (8 if it was March 8) and the kids would have to come up with different equations that equaled 8. At first, they’d come up with simple ones, like 4 + 4 or 8 + 0, but then some of them would get creative.

  “One hundred minus ninety-two,” they’d say.

  I would respond: “Great! You know what? There is another way to write one hundred, and that is ten times ten.” So I didn’t teach them the concept around multiplication; I just showed them another way to write 100, and they latched on to that. And then I taught them to put a parenthesis around it and subtract 92, which gets you 8. Which is algebra. And so they just picked up on these things very naturally. Then we learned that 10 x 10 x 10 is 10-cubed, and we went on from there.

  Year two was my first successful year in the classroom.

  THAT SECOND YEAR, WHEN I relied on Calendar Math, the teachers in our grade decided to do something a little different. We each wanted to be able to focus on a smaller number of subjects so we could really concentrate on becoming an expert in that arena. I had teamed up with Michele Jacobs, a first-year teacher, who would also teach math while the other two teachers taught language arts. Michele had graduated from Morgan State, where she had played basketball. She stood about six two and cut a commanding figure, so the students didn’t mess with her. For me, she brought a sense of humor and enthusiasm and became a kindred spirit in the belief that all kids could achieve. We hit it off and coordinated all of our lesson planning.

  The following year, my third, Michele and I teamed up again. We decided to go one step further and bring seventy kids together into one classroom. Instead of trading classes back and forth, we were all going to be in the same space with two teachers. We also had two wonderful “interns,” Deonne Medley and Andrea Derrien, who worked alongside us very effectively.

  We ran our entire classroom using a different model. We evaluated each student’s progress academically, since we had some advanced kids and some kids who were really far behind. We tailored lessons for every single student. It was part of the Education Alternatives Inc. model that we were supposed to be implementing. We did everything in small groups. We set up this system and bought seventy Tupperware tubs, one for each student. The kids filled the tubs with their notebooks, pencils, books, and other supplies, then slid them under their chairs. They moved from station to station with their tubs. I would set an egg timer. Ten minutes . . . boom. Once the students heard the egg timer go off, they knew they had thirty seconds to grab their tubs and go to the next station.

  Each station had a table, and the group of tables was arrayed in an oval in the large classroom. Each table had ten chairs. One station was devoted to journal writing. Every Monday, they would respond to the journal prompt. That night, Michele and I would read the drafts and correct every paper, and the next day return it to the student for a rewrite. It was immediate and time-intensive for us—no chance to slack off if we weren’t feeling like correcting seventy papers—but it worked. The children understood and followed the writing process and became good little authors.

  At the listening station, students could hear chapters of books they were reading. Michele would follow at another station where the students would read from their assigned books, and she would instruct them in specific reading skills. At another, I would use flash ca
rds to teach phonics.

  It ran like clockwork. Students who were way behind made quick progress; decent readers got better. Even after just the first semester, every student was reading at a higher level, and by the end of the year, they were far ahead of their peers.

  I had added reading to math in my instructional expertise the summer after my second year. The folks at Teach For America had gotten wind of my success at Harlem Park, and they invited me to be an instructor for new corps members in Texas. While I was in Houston, I met Kevin Huffman, who gave me pointers on reading. He also won my head and heart. We started dating and knew from early on that we would get married. Kevin taught me how to teach reading through a program called Direct Instruction. I photocopied all of his materials, brought them back to Baltimore, and put them to use. I created small, flexible groups. If a student was in one group and started doing really well, he could move up to another group. Things were very fluid. That’s how we did everything; we were able to tailor instruction for each student. Some were learning how to spell rat; some were knocking out meticulous. Some could read picture books, and others could read James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl.

  It worked. We could see improvement immediately.

  EDUCATION ALTERNATIVES INC., THE private education company Mayor Kurt Schmoke had brought in to improve Harlem Park, offered seminars on new teaching tools it had developed. Because I attended some of the seminars and used a few of their methods, which most of the veteran teachers scoffed at, I became a poster child.

  When word got around that I was having success, Education Alternative executives started showing up to observe my classes. They liked what they saw and asked if I would accompany them to speak with teachers at public schools on the East Coast about their model. Why not? We gave presentations in Hartford, Connecticut, where Education Alternatives was trying to contract with the public schools. The presentations went well. Then we traveled to Washington, D.C., for a community meeting with teachers.

  I remember pulling up to Clark Elementary School, a low-slung building on Kansas Avenue in a middle-class, African American neighborhood. The parking lot was jammed. The auditorium was filled, mostly with teachers. The Washington Teachers’ Union had packed the hall. Jimmie Jackson, union president at the time, had primed her teachers to pounce.