Educating Esmé (9 page)

I turned around and re-entered his office. I said, “Here!” and scratched out the word
madame
on the printout so hard, right under his nose, until the pen scratched through the paper and I could feel it grinding into his blotter. I was really mad. Then I walked back to my classroom and had a tantrum, throwing some erasers and chalk and crying. I changed my mind about not saying what I think. If you let people walk over you while you're young, you should get used to wearing feet marks across your face for the rest of
your life. So I packed my school bag and started downstairs.

“Where are you going?” I was intercepted by Ms. Federman.

“I'm going to tell Mr. Turner that I am going to grow a dick so he can suck it!” I explained gleefully.

“I figured,” she sighed. “Stop in my room first.” It seemed Mr. Turner called her in and told her what happened, asked her opinion. I like Ms. Federman, but I still felt Mr. Turner was unprofessional to do that. A principal is not supposed to talk about problematic teachers with other teachers.

I felt sheepish, crying in Ms. Federman's room. I knew I must seem stubborn and smug. “Compromise is fine for people who aren't as right as me.” I tried to laugh, but it was forced, because in reality I am stubborn and smug.

Ms. Federman didn't laugh. She is also stubborn and smug. And expert. She has a slightly South-side affect, a kind of nasal Alabama twang that is funny on a middle-aged Jewish woman. She takes these wonderful intimidating deep breaths, like a bull preparing to charge, when one of her students is about to get
back twice the amount of trouble he gave to her. She has antagonized some first-year teachers, too, suggesting to Mrs. Rae that she might go to jail if she didn't follow the state mandate of saying the “Pledge of Allegiance” every morning. At the same time, she asks the new teachers for ideas, and uses them. She shares. She does what she has to, to continue her twenty-some years of teaching.

God! Twenty years of teaching. I can't imagine.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked me.

“I can't change who I am just because someone tells me to!” I started to rail. “If he could give me a real reason . . .”

“Oh,
that
,” she scoffed. “I know why you do
that.
Nobody would hang on to that ‘Madame' shtick unless they were really crazy. Like you said, you can't change that. I meant, why are you teaching?”

“Lack of foresight?”

She smiled but didn't laugh at my half-joke.

“What would happen to the kids if you left?”

“They'd be taught by somebody else.”

“It wouldn't be you.”

“And yet, the earth would somehow continue to revolve around the sun.”

“Every school has its problems.”

“Yeah, well, I want to trade my problems in for a different set. Look, Ms. Federman, I don't mean to be rude, but this is ridiculous. I can't win here.”

“You've already won. You're right in what you're doing with the kids. What else do you want to win?” She looked at me with a sad smile, the smile of a single-parent teaching veteran who has eaten more shit than fits in all the septic systems in Chicago. Maybe Ms. Federman just wants me around for entertainment value, to say the things she can't say, since she's got that beautiful daughter who depends on her. Not everybody's in a position to flip the bird to administration. “Compromise isn't always something you do for somebody else. Save your job for yourself. If you want to leave, wait for the big fight.”

“I don't want to fight anymore.”

“Ha! You call that a fight? You wait until you've been teaching in the city awhile. See if you can stay here after you come up against
the
fight. The fight that
will prove Mr. Turner's just the captain of a sinking ship. The fight that's bigger than two people in a room. It's a fight that you can't win even though you're right, because you can't win it all by yourself.”

I tried to pout, but I grew too curious. “What's the fight about?” I had to know.

She just shook her head, smiling.

She got me. The plea for selfishness. But even more, the mysterious Bigger Fight. I am American, after all. I saw
The Empire Strikes Back
. What sort of Jedi would I be if I don't really face the Dark Side? Mr. Turner may be Vader, but is there an enemy that remains to be revealed, like that bossy old wrinkled guy who told Vader what to do?

Somehow, Ms. Federman talked me out of quitting. In some ways, I wished she hadn't.

I was really miserable, but then I thought,
Hey, I'll be union representative! Then he'll leave me alone!
I asked our current representative, who is about a year away from retiring, if she wanted to be relieved. She said
no, but I ended up telling her what happened. She thought it was all a big power play because I'm a rookie. She said next time just tell him I spoke to her. I asked, “Is it being defiant if I say, ‘Please don't tell me to do extra things, ask me, and I can only do what I know is realistic for me to be able to do'?” She said no, it isn't, and to use the word
grievance
if he keeps hassling me with extra responsibilities or tries to close the door. I felt better. I didn't see Mr. Turner all that Thursday.

Then Friday I got called out of the computer lab, where I was helping to supervise my class. Mr. Turner was in the hall. He said, “I want the milk project information back.” I was delighted.

We went to my classroom, where I had filed the milk project garbage, and we were alone. I didn't bother to turn on the lights, because I knew where to look. I got the papers and turned around, almost slamming into Mr. Turner. He was standing right behind me. He looked all tense and pinched and he had his fists clenched, consciously or unconsciously, God knows. Once again I felt intimidated, I realized, as the hairs on my neck began to prickle.

“Cordell, did you call the union?”

“No,” I snapped, “but thanks for asking.”

That last remark made absolutely no sense, I realize. I must have said it to conceal my real question: “So what if I did?”

Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, but I am really getting depressed and annoyed. Other teachers are getting mad at me.

“Don't make him angry—you know he'll just take it out on us.”

“Stop being so confrontational, you're bringing down morale.”

“You should have been born a man. You've got balls of steel.”

I don't understand my life right now.

I make the kids do so much math, an hour and a half straight every day. Is it because I was so bad at it, I want them to be good? They were having trouble multiplying double digits. It is tricky, how you're supposed to move stuff around as you bring it down to
add. So we got out huge pieces of butcher paper and wrote problems on them, and I masking-taped them to the floor. Then I put on “Mu-Cha-Cha” from
Bells Are Ringing
. (They already know how to cha-cha. I taught them a while ago.) I started dancing on the butcher paper, making my feet do the math. Forward, multiply the ones. Back, bring it down. Side, the ones column by the tens. Back, down and over. Side, multiply the tens by the ones. Back, extra step, and over. On and on. Soon, all the kids were dancing on problems. Then we did some multiplication at our desks. “Pretend your pencils are your feet,” I instructed as the music played.

Much improved.

Got a nice letter from Tobias. “Thank you for teaching us the distributive cha-cha. It really help me. P.S. The cha-cha and distributive math are sort of fun.”

My boyfriend, Jim, has so many conspiracy theories. I think he gives people too much credit. I so rarely meet
a single person who is very well organized, or with any direction. What are the chances of meeting a whole group?

But then, when I'm sitting at these teacher's meetings, I think maybe Jim is right. All these people conspiring to make children's days as boring and meaningless as possible. All the meetings are variations on a theme: How can we all be the same and get the children to do likewise? On any given agenda: lines and keeping children in them, the proliferation of talking and how to stop it, textbooks and state goals, are all the children learning what everyone else is learning?

Today, Mr. Turner explained that progress is being made in regard to receiving funds from the Jordan Foundation, run by Michael Jordan's mother, so from now on teachers are to always uphold highest in their teaching the “Jordan Rules,” and the standards of excellence should be in accordance with the standards set by the Jordans.

After the meeting, I approached Mr. Turner, and asked him if the Michael Jordan approach to pedagogy was in any way congruous with Mickey Mantle's
approach to pedagogy. He became very angry and said he didn't care what my philosophy was, just try to do what he asks for a change.

I am very excited. Tomorrow I get to teach the children how to slam dunk!

The children did good visual and oral reports about different vertebrates. Melanie did her report about the rat. In the center she had glued on specimens, clearly labeled
RAT POO DROPPINGS
. Her presentation, though not particularly scholarly, was definitely pragmatic. “Take care to tuck in the sides of your blankets, or they'll climb up on to your bed, it's really awful.”

I read them “The Pudding Like the Night on the Sea” from
The Stories Julian Tells
, in which a father threatens his sons with a whipping and a beating, only to have them whip cream and beat eggs to make a pudding for their mother. I used different voices for the different characters. They loved it. They laughed so hard, some of them were wheezing to catch their breath. I laughed, too. It felt so good. I thought:
This is
what it's all been for, this moment of having my own classroom, laughing together.

I am really liking how we are doing reading now. I spent a fortune on multiple copies of children's books, about eight per title. The kids are arranged in groups, and each child is assigned a role: The “discussion director” makes up questions about the book, the “literary luminary” reads aloud notable parts, the “language lover” defines what she determines to be the hardest words in the section, the “practical predictor” predicts what will happen next, and finally the “process checker” sums it up, keeps track of everyone's participation, and decides how many pages they must read that night. They keep notebooks documenting their work.

Within twenty minutes, each group has a reading meeting with each person doing his or her job. They take turns with a “talking stone” from a collection of beautiful minerals I have; only the person in the group holding the stone may speak. So far nobody has
thrown a stone at anyone else. In fact, the children strive to be efficient so their group can have first pick from the minerals the next day.

They are given a test date, and it is their responsibility to have the book completed by that day. Each group is responsible for a presentation—a diorama, time line, rap, dramatic scene, whatever—that relates to the book but doesn't give away the ending. Each child takes an individual comprehension test for the book. The groups present their projects the following day. The day after that, we rotate the books. It downplays ability grouping and helps with self-esteem.

I also bought whole classroom sets of books, like
The Twenty-One Balloons
by William Pène Du Bois. I will read the first chapter aloud, and then they will complete it over the vacation break. Their caretakers sign permission slips before I let any student borrow anything from me. I plan on reading one whole book aloud while the children follow along with their own copies, so they can see words as they are spoken. Probably
The Wish Giver
by Bill Brittain. We still have daily read-alouds and Free Reading Time, too. I believe exposure to print is the key to reading achievement. So
far, it has also been the key to reading enthusiasm. We are having a good time and reading by the pile!

We are working on a felt quilt, with each patch featuring a state flower. All the kids have to be able to locate all fifty states to pass the fifth grade, says me. The patches are going very nicely. I taught those who didn't already know how to thread needles and sew. The boys resisted, but I pointed out there might not always be a woman around to mend their socks. They rescinded. Ashworth's stitches are so even. I told his mom he was great at sewing. She said it must be in the blood: His grandfather was a tailor.

Vanessa, Donna, Melanie, and Latoya composed a “quilted poem.” They explained that each put in one line, and then in the last line they brought all the pieces together. It's called “Quilting”:

Quilting makes us feel like old women in rocking

    chairs,

Old men telling stories to their grandsons.

It feels so good to sew,

You go in and out and in and out,

You feel like the world's going around in circles.

B. B. and his little sister Leesha slept over at my apartment while their mom got a restraining order for the man of the house, who shot her once in the arm. She had been hesitating because she wanted the kids to be somewhere else when he found out, or he might take it out on them. I worried about keeping them overnight, if she'd lie and say I did something sick to get money from me.
I could ruin my whole career by doing this
, I thought. But then I thought,
How can I not do it? What if something happens to them tonight? How will I live with myself?
So I told B. B.'s mom okay. I didn't tell the administration, because I knew they'd get all noodle-kneed about possible litigations.