Miseducated

by Brandon P. Fleming

  “What we learning today, Flemmy?” she asked, just as eager as she could be. I was crushed, but the otherwise empty classroom did not matter to her. Shontae hadn’t been the same since I made her give a speech at the UVA symposium that Kelly-Ann had helped arrange. The day before the event, I’d said, “Shontae, you’re giving the opening speech tomorrow.” She immediately said, “Who?” as she sardonically glanced around the room. “No, sir,” she said, “not Shontae.” She was adamant that she was not ready to speak in front of an audience that size when she had never even spoken publicly before. But I knew she could do it. I knew she could channel that ghetto girl persona into Black girl magic. Every Saturday when she walked in popping gum and patting her electric-blue braids, I saw it in her. I saw a tender heart, a brilliant mind, and a courageous voice. A voice that only needed a nudge to show itself to the world. When we arrived at UVA, she’d begged, “Please, Mr. Fleming. Please don’t make me do this” with nervous tears. But I’d wiped away the tears and locked eyes with her. “You’re getting ready to fly,” I’d said.

  That day had turned Shontae into a fierce ball of fire. Whenever I told the kids that another symposium was scheduled, she was quick to ask, “Flemmy, can I speak at the next one, too?” And I usually said, “Of course.” No platform was too big. No classroom was too small. She had found her voice, and she carried it with her like a loaded pistol.

  I was saddened by the empty classroom and angry that the principal hadn’t warned me. But Shontae’s energy lifted me. If I was enough for her, then she was enough for me. So I taught my heart out like the classroom was an arena filled with thousands.

  When I returned to the main office, I asked for a word with the principal. Electives can be a hard sell, she told me, then suggested I make a pitch as part of morning announcements. I had thirty seconds to say something that would make students want to drop their current fourth period class for mine. I was nervous about the pitch. I was even more nervous about the letdown if it failed and kids walked by my empty room, pointing and saying, “There’s the clown who told us to sign up for his leadership club.” Apparently, whatever I said worked, because the next day’s attendance was over capacity.

  Teachers were not happy about kids dropping their classes for mine. Parents emailed to complain about their teenager dropping an honors class to take an elective with a rookie teacher who was not really a teacher. I had not enchanted or bullied kids to sign up, and they knew nothing about me as a teacher. But they were drawn to me as a person. I did not look, sound, or act like a traditional teacher. Every day, I wore suits and bow ties and flamboyant socks. When the fourth period bell rang, I grabbed my squeaky black cart with my laptop and portable speakers, queued up the trendiest hip-hop songs, and turned the volume up. I bopped down the hallway, twisting and turning and dancing with my cart as students gaped like, What is this crazy man doing? They laughed, but I kept at it. Pretty soon, the kids started tossing compliments like “Loving the socks, Mr. Fleming!” Before long, random students joined in and we danced through the halls together like a Second Line.

  Eventually, some of the roughest kids in school picked up on my style. They came to school with scavenged bow ties, unearthed in a drawer or borrowed, and stopped by the main office to show me before they went to class. They’d peek around the corner at me, grinning from ear to ear and pointing at their ties with excitement. Most of these were clip-ons, but it was a good start. This grew into a campus trend that we called Wall Street Wednesdays, where hundreds of kids wore their most dapper dress clothes and a pair of flamboyant socks. A renaissance was under way.

  We were reforming the culture of the school. Style was important to young people, and it enabled me to connect with students who might otherwise have kept their distance. They looked at me and saw a piece of themselves, reinforcing my belief that nothing fosters education like human connectivity. When they saw our interests converge through style and music, the cultural connection drew us closer together. It’s the absence of art and culture that makes school feel like school—and sometimes like prison. When the Renaissance was born in Florence, Italy, there’s a reason that artists were in the vanguard. Art is what fills the outlines of life with color. The way we dress is art. The way we talk is art. The way we teach is art. But monotony comes to suck the marrow out of school. It drains learning of personality and locks us into a grayscale version of existence. I could not live like that. During school hours, I wore properly accessorized suits. But the way I dressed for football games made an even more immediate connection with the kids.

  Our school was playing its most hated rival, and tension was high in the fourth quarter. The stadium was packed from the top of the bleachers to the fence bordering the field. The Friday-night lights bounced off the gridiron as the players collided and the cheerleaders chanted. But our team was suffering a miserable defeat and our fans could not be rallied. On the opposite side of the field, rival students danced and taunted, waving their middle fingers like school banners.

  Some kids came to watch the game, some came to socialize, and some came for the brawls that often followed any competition with this school. Whether the event was on a field or a court didn’t matter: a phalanx of security guards and armed police officers were assembled to keep the lid on.

  Most of the faculty and staff wore school logo apparel. Selections at the school store were stale, and I never wanted to do what the stuffy teachers did. So I wore my street clothes: Timberlands, straight leg jeans, and an American Eagle hoodie draped over my head. My look earned their respect. Most of them wanted nothing to do with teachers, but I did not have a teacher’s vibe. I was their ally. That’s not necessarily what the school wanted me to be. When Black men are hired in schools, they are often tapped to be the authoritarian stereotype of school enforcer. The guy who would have held the paddle a generation earlier. My approach was different: I understood that we must love our students before we can teach them.

  I left a few minutes early to beat the parking lot crunch, and as I headed for the exit gate I heard, “Yooo, what’s good, Mr. Fleming!” It was Montrez and his friends, kids who couldn’t get into my class because it was at capacity. But fourth period was their lunch block, so they would pick up their food and sit in the back of my classroom anyway. When administration saw too many kids doing this, they decided to put an end to it.

  “I see you with the fresh Timbs on,” he said. He reached out his hand to give me dap. We locked hands and brought it in for a hug and a fist-pat on the back. His crew chimed in with compliments to my outfit. I smiled and said, “You already know I come with it” as we all laughed and showed love.

  I looked into their hazy red eyes and knew they were high. The skunky smell when we hugged confirmed it. Before walking away, I wrapped my arms around them again. “I love y’all boys,” I said. They responded, “Aye, we luh you, too, Mr. Fleming.” I told the boys to keep their heads up and to stay safe. I feared that trouble might follow them. But I had no idea that it was looking for me instead.

  When I arrived at my car, I reached for my keys in the usual pocket. They weren’t there. I patted my body and looked around to see if I had dropped them. Then I realized that I had left my keys and wallet in the bleachers. I pivoted and hurried back through the gate when an officer yelled, “Hey! Stop!” I figured he was talking to one of the kids, so I kept trucking toward the bleachers. Suddenly, a hand grabbed my arm and spun me around.

  “Yo, what you grabbing me for?” I asked.

  “Because I said stop,” he barked. “The game is almost over, we are not allowing any more students in.”

  “I’m not a student,” I said. “I’m a staff member.” The officer looked me up and down and accused me of lying.

  “Give me a second and I’ll show you,” I said as I turned, heading for the bleachers to retrieve my school ID. I took three steps and then two hands grabbed me and slammed me against the nearby fence. “I told you not to move!” he said, mushing the side of my face
against the wire.

  “Get off me,” I said. “I’m on the staff, I’m trying to show you.” I tried to turn my body to see if I could find another staff member to corroborate. But the officer perceived it as resistance. He released my hands that he held behind my back. He latched on to both of my arms. He slammed me to the ground and pressed his knee into my back.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled. “I’m a teacher!”

  “Shut up!” he yelled back. “Stop resisting.”

  “I’m not resisting,” I said in a rage. “I’m trying to show you—”

  “I said shut up!” He jammed his knee harder into my spine.

  The commotion drew a crowd. I could not see what was happening, but I heard Montrez and his friends running toward us yelling, “Ayo, get off of Mr. Fleming!”

  “Montrez!” I yelled. “Stay back! Please, stay back!”

  More of my students rushed to the scene yelling, “Get off of Mr. Fleming!” But the officer did not let up.

  Finally, a white female teacher rushed up and said, “Get off of him right now. He is one of our staff members.”

  His weight lifted off me. I lay there for a second. I was not hurt; I was ashamed. I had no reason to be, but I was. There were times in my life when I might have deserved to be braced against a fence or thrown to the ground with my hands pinned behind my back. But I wasn’t that person anymore. Then I realized that it did not matter. None of it mattered: not the Harlem Renaissance Festival, not the education symposiums, not the scholars program or any fact about my work. All that mattered was that I was a Black man in a hoodie. That was what he saw.

  I had a following among the students, but I could not say the same about the school’s administrators. Some of this was my fault: this was my first real job, and I had not yet matured into an understanding of workplace diplomacy. Not only did I openly disagree with senior faculty and adminstrators when I thought they were wrong, but I also was not really teaching the “leadership” class they had asked me to teach. They told me to use my own curriculum; I asked myself, What does every leader need to know? and the answer was simple: every leader needs to know about debate and the Harlem Renaissance.

  In addition to my fourth period class, the principal asked me to lead an after-school program for boys who were at risk of failing. This, unfortunately, involved a curriculum that I considered to be ineffective. This was no different from the boring shit these kids had already been told, and I hated it. So I pulled out my scholars program curriculum and started teaching them debate instead.

  We started a revolution in that school. I had to stop kids who were not registered in my class from skipping their fourth period to sit in mine. I was one of the youngest staff members, and other teachers weren’t necessarily happy about my popularity. I was called into the office to respond to baseless rumors and lies. I was accused of upsetting seasoned teachers who felt like I was out of my lane. Word spread that I was not even licensed to teach. My age, my experience, and my credentials were called into question. In the halls, I felt like a moving target. I felt peaceful and at home only in my classroom—one hour out of the entire day.

  Everything came crashing down midway through spring semester. I was summoned to the principal’s office, which was no surprise. It was contract renewal season and we plodded through a standard performance review. We talked about the highs and the lows and all of the boundaries that I pushed. The whole time, I thought about how tiresome it was when people acted like I was some radical kid with no clue as to what I was doing. Every suggestion I made was greeted with wide-eyed incredulity. True, I didn’t have a license or decades of teaching experience. But I had results. Most of the teachers and administrators at the school had never walked in the shoes of the students they were struggling to reach. I had. I was once those kids, and I knew how to reach them. If I could reinvent myself as an academic, I could teach others to do the same. I turned my own journey into a curriculum for building scholars. But my clout with the kids did not translate into respect from the faculty and administrators. She broke the news to me at the end.

  “Thank you for your hard work,” she said, “but we won’t be renewing your contract next year.” The words sliced me like a box cutter. What was I going to do? I had tried all of the other schools in Lynchburg, both public and private, and none would hire me. How was I going to find work? How was I going to pay rent? How was I going to feed my brother?

  I went back to my daily routine after the meeting, but everything was different. I couldn’t summon a smile when kids dropped by the main office. I stopped leaping onto tables and chairs during class, knowing that it would all end soon. Students asked, “Aye, Mr. Fleming, you straight?” I said yes. But I wasn’t. I did not know how to tell them the truth. They asked about the next school year. They wanted a part two to the course and they had fresh ideas for maintaining our cultural revolution in the school. The light in their eyes was so bright and their energy lifted me. But only for a moment. We had come so far from the first day of school, when Shontae and I were alone in the classroom. Now we dressed up and danced through the halls on Wall Street Wednesdays. They wanted the movement to continue, and I reassured them that it could. What I did not say was that they’d be on the ramparts without me.

  One day I was sitting in the office as usual, checking in visitors, counting down the minutes until my fourth period class. The school year would be over in a month. The phone rang and the secretary picked up. I overheard her answer some questions, then she said, “Yes, sir. I will transfer you to her right away.” She pressed mute on the phone and shrieked so loud that everyone in earshot snapped to attention.

  “Oh my God!” she said. “I can’t believe it!”

  “What is it?” we all asked.

  She was nearly hyperventilating. She started fanning herself and said, “It’s Ron Clark!”

  She ran into the principal’s office, bursting through the door and yelling, “Ron Clark is on the phone!” Everyone had been waiting for his call. The principal had contacted his agent to book him for the school’s next professional development conference. The secretary returned to her desk and transferred the call. Everyone in the front office stopped what they were doing and nearly put their ears to the door, waiting for confirmation that Ron Clark was really coming to our school.

  Something wasn’t right. I had tried to book Ron Clark before. He would not have called himself to confirm. It would have been his agent. He had to be calling for some other reason. I kept minding my business at my desk, away from the commotion. I pretended not to care, but I was certainly curious. The principal emerged from her office when I wasn’t looking, and when there was no gossip, I figured she had gotten bad news or no news at all.

  The minute I arrived the next morning, the secretary said, “Pssst” and wiggled a finger to summon me. When I reached her, she beckoned me closer with a secretive air. I leaned in.

  “Ron Clark called yesterday,” she said.

  I was here when that happened, I reminded her. We all figured he was responding to the principal’s speaking invitation, right?

  “No,” she said. “That’s not what he called for.”

  She looked at me and smiled like she was handing me a secret gift. “He did not call for us. He called for you.” I was so stunned that I froze in place and could not speak. All I could think was, Wait, what? How? Why?

  It was the letter. The one I assumed was buried under a mountain of fan mail. It turned out that he’d actually read it but he was already booked for the day of my conference. The letter put me on his radar and he started following my work, especially the growth of the scholars program in Lynchburg. He called the school to inquire about me. He wanted me to move to Atlanta and teach at his world-renowned academy. I was so overwhelmed that I locked myself in the bathroom for a few moments. I wanted to be alone to process this. I clutched the sink as tears fell from my face like water breaking through a dam. This was going to change my life forever. I looked up
at my blurry likeness in the mirror. I looked deep into my own fuzzy eyes and thought, He came for me. Just like Samuel came for David.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DREAMS COME TRUE

  Two years before the 2010 opening of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Ron Clark and Kim Bearden dreamed up a real-life Hogwarts for middle school students in Atlanta. The Ron Clark Academy is more than a child’s dream come true. It is a teacher’s dream, too. Thousands have applied to join the faculty. And tens of thousands of pilgrims, most on a quest to improve their own teaching, have traveled far to visit what looks like a medieval castle dropped down in the middle of the hood.

  The turrets, iron gates, and dragons looming over the main entrance took my breath away. I had only been here once before, when Mr. Clark first invited me to join the faculty, and now I was going on a trip with all my new colleagues. I stood outside the lobby doors, suitcase in hand. Most of the others were inside, everyone with luggage, waiting for stragglers. We were heading to our summer planning retreat at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where we’d plan the coming year.

  “Come on in!” Mrs. Mosley said, holding open the door. She’d answered the phone when I’d called the school over a year ago, eager to have Mr. Clark speak at the first educational symposium I planned as an undergraduate. Who would ever have thought I’d be standing here as one of his teachers?