First Class

by Alison Stewart

  “Transgression. Who can tell her what it means?” There are a few mumbles. Stuart offers, “If you are on your cell phone in school, that’s a transgression.”

  A little bit later, when one student who has been looking bored and sullen all class blurts out the perfect answer to a question, Stuart congratulates him. Scoffing is heard in the corner. The young man throws his hands up and says, “Don’t hate!” A girl who is seriously overweight and slightly unkempt grows agitated when she refuses to believe a certain fact is true. “NO!” she yells. Her reaction is a little bit startling, but Mr. Stuart seems accustomed to her lack of control.

  About thirty minutes into the class another student asks if he can have the handout of the reading assignment they are currently discussing. Through it all, Matthew Stuart smiles, keeps his cool, ignores what deserves ignoring, and plows on. He constantly asks the kids, “What do you think? What do you think?” When one kid has a very basic question, Stuart points to a student he knows is well prepared and motions. “Help her. Tell her what the answer is.”

  Occasionally a student gets up and walks over to show another student something on a phone. In one case, a new tattoo is being displayed. Stuart watches, makes eye contact with the girl but keeps going. She heads back to her seat. It’s a double period, which requires a marathon mentality. He knows he has to maintain the momentum to keep the students involved, or at least not be disruptive to those that do want to listen.

  “What I have … is that students are great with ideas. You give them a new idea, and they just get all wide-eyed about it. Like, they love that. They think that’s the coolest.” That’s what he loves about his classes. The challenging part for him comes from a failure in the system. “What I was told, and accepted on an intellectual level, but just still couldn’t, like, grasp, when I got here is just how terribly—how far behind on basic reading skills some kids are. I taught twelfth grade here. How is it that some students get to the twelfth grade without blending their sounds yet— not being able to blend t and h into a ‘th’ sound for ‘thunder’ or ‘this’? And, that’s an actual student this year. That’s hard because, what does a twelfth-grade education mean for you as an individual?”

  It leads to acting out from time to time. In class, a hulking student with shiny, raisin-sized rocks in his ears gets up and moves around the room, time and time again. He can answer some of the questions but gives a look like it is an imposition to do so. “He has a grown man’s body and a grown man’s thought process, without the academic skills behind it,” Stuart says. “And there is a difference between being a smart person and being able to succeed, like, with As in school. ’Cause he’s very bright …”

  But what will become of him?

  Stuart doesn’t dumb down his class lectures, but he does have to break them down into small, digestible parts. Sometimes that doesn’t work. He tried The Red Badge of Courage, but his students did not take to it and he got blank stares in class. Macbeth’? A big hit. “They liked the murder, and they really liked Lady Macbeth’s personality. They loved her. They loved her.”

  Teaching wasn’t on Stuart’s radar as a kid growing up in Ohio. “In elementary school it was the range of firefighter and plane pilot. But I started thinking about it more seriously in my sophomore year of college, like, around 2006, and started working as a Sunday school teacher to test the waters. Never did anything with education but applied to Teach for America in my senior year. I was accepted and was excited to come to DC for that. Since then, I’ve gone on just to make sure I got the full licensure, so I’m keeping up with that.”

  Stuart was part of the Teach for America wave of 2007. He has now been at Dunbar for three years. It was his first and only professional teaching job. He graduated from Michigan State in May 2009, came to DC in June, and was teaching by August. He was a few months shy of his twenty-third birthday. After an intense and fast-paced crash course at the Teach for America boot camp, he was assigned to Dunbar one week before school started.

  After weeks of preparing for his first class, he got an unwelcome surprise right off the bat. “So, I started planning my units. Actually found out the first day that I wasn’t teaching the class they told me I was. I was told [I would be teaching] Read 180, sort of the remedial freshman/sophomore. But then it was twelfth-grade English.” It is a world of difference teaching fourteen-year-olds with learning disabilities when compared to teaching seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds who may or may not have been just pushed through the system. “It’s a big jump. And, that was with the Friends of Bedford—that’s when they were in charge of the scheduling it.”

  He still has tough feelings about it. “I’ve never been lied to about my class since then.” Caught off guard, he had his first introduction into the rough waters of being a public school teacher in DC. He was aware that he was walking into a school that was in the beginning steps of restructuring mandated by No Child Left Behind. “Aware, but only aware. That doesn’t mean understanding. It doesn’t mean understanding causes or being able to evaluate it. I knew that a lot of the staff had disappeared from the year before. I knew that there was a management group and they were telling us the ways that they would support us. If a student curses in your class, they will be like, ‘Here’s the protocol.’ It’s mostly discipline. Mostly discipline, and they promised us working Promethean boards, which eventually came. And it makes a big difference. Technology and discipline—those were the promises.”

  Stuart tells a familiar story. Kids with troubled home lives. School budgets cut drastically. The number of electives for students has been slashed to the point that one of his seniors that day said she was done with school after second period—she had nothing else to do. A student pops his head in, midclass, to ask for a pencil. As for supplies, Stuart does what he can. He judiciously hands out pencils and pens to students who come to class without a writing instrument.

  For the most part, the students show Stuart a good deal of respect. “You stay, is the biggest thing. The first year, as much as anything, is just getting tested out, and the students want to know what your reputation is. I mean, since tenth grade, they’ve known that I was the twelfth-grade teacher,” he says, putting it in plain terms. He was not one of the Teach for America candidates who split when the two years were up. “So, I mean, I come to work every day. There’s always a lesson. And, I’ve been here for a while. If you care, that’s all they need.”

  In passing, Stuart mentions how impressed he’s been by two other educators on staff: the veteran girls’ track coach Marvin Parker and the newly promoted head football coach, Jerron Joe. Coach Parker was recruited from a private Christian school and Coach Joe had been the assistant football coach and knew Dunbar well.

  The Football Star

  “Way to stay on top of it!”

  “Depth! Depth! Depth!”

  “Huddle up!”

  The Dunbar High School football team is working hard on a sweaty August evening. It is 91 degrees at 5:00 PM, and squads of young men push to perform on the Cardozo High School football field. It’s ironic that the Dunbar team is practicing on Cardozo’s turf. Cardozo was once Central High School, the all-white high school built the same year as the original Dunbar. Central got a full athletic field; Dunbar did not. The team is practicing at Cardozo because the Dunbar field is all torn up; the city is going to build Dunbar a new state-of-the-art field once Dunbar II is demolished. Cardozo is also undergoing a modernization like Dunbar—finally, equality of facilities almost one hundred years later.

  “I can’t believe it is almost time for school,” says Jerron Joe before he jogs back onto the field and returns to his team. It is the first practice of the season, so Coach Joe is paying attention to his players’ tempo and watching their alignment. Some of the players are just naturally gifted. One kid catches the ball so effortlessly you might suspect there is a magnet in the ball and one on his hand. A wiry receiver can jump so high it seems like a special effect. During one drill a young-looking rec
eiver misses the ball over and over again. The last time the kid gets closer but still doesn’t catch it. Coach Joe shouts out, “Good. That’s good. You listened. You did the right thing.”

  Not long ago, Jerron Joe was in the same position. He graduated from Dunbar in 2004 and returned to his alma mater. At twenty-five, he became the youngest coach in the history of the legendary Crimson Tide football program.

  Joe looks quite a bit different than when he was a student. Gone are the braids, his hair now short. A trim goatee is still in place. He is compact and strong with a youthful look. Even though he looks young, his first question to his players is one from an old soul: “I ask, ‘What are you going to do when the ball goes flat?’ I use the terminology that ‘the ball always will go flat. Whether you are Dan Marino, Peyton Manning, or Michael Jordan, your career will be over. But what I want to get across to my players is that with education you always have something to fall back on.”

  Jerron knows that with so many Dunbar players in the NFL, like his high school friend Vernon Davis, his players have stars in their eyes just as he did. He believes his returning to the school after a tremendous high school football career proves his point. “Because they know that, with me being a coach, that I’d love to be playing professional football right now. Unfortunately, the ball went flat in my college days.”

  Jerron was both a scholar and an athlete in school. He was a starting cornerback who broke a record. “My junior and senior year, I made all the honors. After my junior year, the Washington Post voted me the best undersized player in the league because I was five nine, 160. My junior year I led my entire league in interceptions. Going into my senior year, I was recruited heavily by the Ivy League schools, Georgetown, because I had excellent grades as well. I actually finished the top male at the top of my senior class. I had a 3.8. It was ten girls that beat me out. I finished eleventh.” He received a full scholarship to the HBCU North Carolina Central University (NCCU) where he graduated with a degree in physical education in 2008. At NCCU he simply didn’t have the sports career he hoped for and doesn’t make excuses. “I would like to think, because of injury, my career in college wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be.”

  But just the fact that Joe made it to college is another lesson for his students. When he was their age, he was essentially on his own. “When I was younger, I lived with my mom, my two brothers, and my stepfather. So, basically, middle class. I led the good life. My mom did what she could to take care of me and my brothers. She did an excellent job.”

  His mother, who also graduated from Dunbar, had been a police officer but became seriously ill and couldn’t provide for her family any longer. “She got sick. I moved from a four-bedroom—separate living room, dining room, kitchen, two-sided basement, big front yard, backyard, three bathrooms—to moving into a housing project before I got to high school because she got sick. So, my story is always good because I had family members from here who didn’t do so well. I had family members that did. But, it’s all about decision making.”

  Joe could have gone one way, but he chose another, with the guidance of his mother and another police officer, a man who coached high school sports and became a mentor to him. Joe had someone there who had his back, and he had the seeds his mother planted. “The things that she instilled into me as a child up to the age of twelve, thirteen, whatever it was when I moved out, I didn’t let that—I didn’t let society take over me. I tell these kids all the time, ‘Don’t be a product of your environment.’ ” He is grateful to his mom for what she could do, and she was there at the school the day his big promotion was announced.

  Joe is tough on his own players in the same way but realizes they are coming from some challenging circumstances. He knows what the deal is when you are a young African American man in DC and was reminded of it one day after practice. “Two young white cops pulled me over. I had a Ford Mustang. It’s nice. And I was dropping one of my kids off. And I’m young. And we’re crossing paths. I’m at a stop sign. They’re at a stop sign. And then we drove past each other. I’m looking through my rearview mirror—they’re about to pull me over. This was very recently—the first thing that he said was, ‘What are you doing around here?’ ”

  Joe gets a little irritated recalling the story. “I don’t have the right to? Did you see my tags that say DC? So he says, ‘License and registration.’

  “I say, ‘Can I ask, why are y’all pulling me over?’

  “ ‘Your headlights.’

  “ ‘Y’all pulled me over from the front—and my headlights was working.’

  “I got out the car and checked them after they left. Basically, I was in a high drug trafficking area with a nice car. They said, ‘Well, do you have any drugs or weapons we need to worry about?’ I said, ‘No. I’m actually an educator.’

  “ ‘OK.’

  “So, at this point, I’m getting frustrated. They go, run my tags, come back.

  “ ‘Are you sure you don’t have … ?’

  “ ‘Didn’t I tell you guys I’m an educator? Matter of fact, I’m also the head coach over at Dunbar.’ The officers response: ‘Oh, well, you need to get these boys right so the Redskins can win.’ ”

  Shades of Jo-Jo Stewart and Leon Ransom in 1944.

  Coach Joe knows what his students are up against but urges them to somehow push past it. Joe, who is not that old and doesn’t even look his age, is as serious as can be when he says, “You know how they say that babies are raising babies? Nobody wants to take on the responsibility of being the parent and holding their child accountable. I tell my kids all the time that football teaches you life lessons: teamwork, time management, working through adversity. There are so many life lessons you’ll learn through football. That’s the same thing with class.”

  Joe’s decision to come back to Dunbar recalls the day when M Street/Dunbar graduates returned to their alma mater to try to make things better. Returning to a place you know so well creates a level of familiarity or a bond that can take a new teacher a few years to develop. Joe believes the ball going flat in college was meant to be.

  “I didn’t always know I wanted to teach, but I did know that I wanted to be a mentor.”

  The Girls’ Track Coach

  A tall girl with impossibly long and strong legs leads the way through a maze of cement halls that are sorely in need of a paint job. As she heads down the stairs and through a set of red metal doors, it is hard to keep up because her stride is brisk and each step covers a significant amount of ground. She’s not that talkative or expressive, but when she reaches Coach Parker’s office and sees him, a big smile breaks out.

  In the basement of Dunbar High School, something special has been happening. Coach Marvin Parker has pictures plastered everywhere of his championship team. Since Parker arrived in 2005, the Dunbar girls’ track team has been on an upward trajectory. They are city champions. From day one, he told the girls he expected nothing less. “We are going to leave a legacy. We are going to build a tradition for women at this school.”

  A former military man who had been stationed around the world from Germany to Jersey, Parker settled into life as a husband and father while working as an accountant. In his spare time he coached track at a Christian private school near his home in Maryland. One day at a meet he was approached about taking over for Dunbar’s retiring coach.

  “Before I decided, I spent a season watching and observing. I was coming from a private school. I have structure and discipline. It was easy.” He lets out big chuckle when describing what he noticed about the Crimson Tide’s lady runners. “It was like, Wow! Some of these little girls need a swift kick!”

  But then he leans back in his chair and nods his head, in the way he probably did seven years ago when he signed on.

  “I think I can take this challenge. That’s my competitive spirit in me.” And he was eager to work with some athletes who he could tell were gifted. “I was impressed that there were a lot of talented kids here who were undisciplined.�
�

  Parker’s drill includes early morning practices before school, starting before sunrise. At night his runners were instructed to do a series of exercises including push-ups and sit-ups. They were told to do research and then write papers on athletes who had excelled in their particular race. And taking a page from the 1928 Dunbar handbook he even sent home a worksheet explaining the need for a balanced diet, telling the parents to “stop giving these girls biscuits and gravy.” Parker’s delivery is a hilarious meld of Martin Lawrence meets a handsome preacher. And that describes his look too.

  “I was told, there is no way you are going to get inner-city girls to practice at five o’clock in the morning. It is not gonna happen. Yeah it is! Because I am going to eliminate all their excuses.” The excuses included: “I have no way to get to school,” “We aren’t going to win anyway,” and “My mom won’t let me.” One by one, Coach Parker knocked them down. He would pick up girls himself at their homes—as early as 3:30 AM some days—to get them to practice. After the first summer of training, the girls won their first, second, and third meets.

  “The parents couldn’t wait to get them out of the house. ‘Come get ’em!’ ” he shouts imitating someone’s Madea-esque mom. “I had great parent participation for the few who had parents. Some are in group homes.” Parker has runners who are in foster care. One girl was virtually homeless. Another suffered from abuse. Within his team, he created an alternate family for his runners. He would take them to IHOP and show them inspirational movies such as Remember the Titans.

  In describing the team spirit, Parker makes a fist, though not in an aggressive way. His fist symbolized unity: the strength of five fingers together is greater than each finger on its own. “You can’t get between the fingers. What happens in the family stays in the family. What happens in the track office stays in the track office. I will encourage you. Use words like family. Love, togetherness, camaraderie. Using words like that. That’s what that is.”