Emergency Teacher (12 page)

After the parade, Vanessa, Luis, and Pedro walked across City Hall to the Hard Rock Café. We ordered cheesesteaks and Cokes, and then we played trivia. After one hard question, Luis shouted, “Oh, Miss,” raised his hand, and held his breath, like in class. We all laughed, and Vanessa shoved him.

“Why you raise your hand, stupid?! We in a restaurant.” Luis turned bright pink.

Glancing up at the bar, I realized I'd been to this restaurant many times with my
Inquirer
friends. How odd to be back in the same place as such a different person. That felt like a lifetime ago. I hadn't talked to my old friends in ages—I didn't have the time for anything but teaching. From 6:00 AM until 4:30 PM I was at school, and after eating dinner I had to correct papers and plan for the next day. Phone messages collected and went unanswered. My family thought I had disappeared. Pete and I barely had time for each other. I didn't even have time to open my mail on some days. Yet, if God forbid I didn't spend two hours planning the night before, the school day would be true hell. This table of sixth-graders was my world. Even though their lives were such the opposite of mine, I'd never felt so at home with myself. I was interested in every little thing they said. We laughed a lot, and afterward Vanessa gave me a hug. Then it was time to take them back to North Philly.

Each year the
Inquirer
and
Daily News
cover the Puerto Rican Day Parade. Later, I would read back issues and see that in recent years there'd been two stories: the happy feature about the P. R. pride parade downtown, and then a crime story, filed out of North Philly, about a violent event, such as a shooting, car burning, police assault, or murder. This was the paradox of Puerto Rican society in Philadelphia. Second-generation Puerto Ricans orchestrated one image to present to downtown residents. Those living in the neighborhood celebrated in their own way, as I was about to find out.

On the taxi ride home, a block off Broad Street, police had closed Lehigh Avenue in front of our school. They waved us north, up Seventh Street, and we came to a full stop in what looked like miles of traffic. North Philly is laid out in a grid, with a few central, four-lane avenues, like Lehigh and Allegheny, and lots of side streets and alleys that cut across. Usually I stuck to Lehigh and Allegheny Avenues, but on this day we had to inch down back streets and into the parade, with people pushing against our windows on all sides. We watched a man holding a beer stumble and fall against a stoop. A few houses down, several chickens pecked around in a fenced-off garden. We were still two miles from my students' homes and had moved no more than three blocks when the cabbie said, “You're going to have to walk.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

We weren't getting out here. I wanted to explain that this was The Badlands—one thing to experience from a passing car window, another from the ground. I wasn't from this world! I didn't know if I could survive it without the pretense of a classroom and a plastic badge labeling me “teacher.” My watch read 5:30 PM, and the sun was setting. I had not planned to be walking the streets with three sixth-graders during a street party.

“Miss, we're not moving. This is the closest we gonna get,” the cab driver insisted. We could either get out or go back downtown. I stuck a $20 bill in his hand, and we climbed out. Within minutes we were sucked into throngs of people lining the streets, celebrating, blaring salsa, and throwing confetti. My students wavered in and out of sight as people pushed past.

“Luis! Omigod, stay with us!” I shouted. From just five feet away, he couldn't hear me. Lines of cars jammed each alley. Puerto Rican flags were everywhere, sticking out of sunroofs, tied on as dresses, draped around the fronts of car hoods, and even attached to swinging windshield wipers. Women shimmered in glittering evening gowns from atop sunroofs as though they were in a beauty pageant. On the sidelines, old ladies relaxed on lawn chairs. I felt lost in a maze with no idea which direction to walk in. I tried to assess if we—or I—was in any real danger. I gathered Pedro, Vanessa, and Luis to formulate a game plan.

“Chill, Miss,” Luis said.

They looked at me as if I were overreacting. They lived here. Over the deafening roar of the crowds, Luis yelled something to me and pointed to a truck bucking through an open intersection at forty miles an hour. Leaning out the window, cheering at the top of her lungs was my eleven-year-old student Juanita in a low-cut evening gown. My mouth dropped open. Before I could say anything, the crowd swayed, and I grabbed the handrail of a stoop to steady myself.

“Hey, Miss!” Down the block Josh sat in a deck chair in a circle with his mom, his aunt, and several cousins. He tossed a handful of rice at me. I'd never been so grateful to see someone. Sensing, though, that everyone else was having a fun time, I covered up my panic. “Oh, hi!” We did quick introductions with his family. His mom was a smart, well-dressed woman in her thirties. She asked me how Josh was doing in school. We chatted for a while, and a few more of my students passed, all looking surprised to see me. Next to them I felt protected. A rice fight nearby got out of hand, and Josh's mom looked annoyed, but didn't say anything. I heard glass breaking.

“There's gonna be shootings tonight,” Luis said nonchalantly. He looked at me. “We'd better go.”

The sky deepened, reminding me that nightfall wasn't far off. Reluctantly, we said good-bye. At first I was worried about my students. Forget that—I should worry about myself. This was way outside my safety zone. I didn't even know where I was anymore, but I did know that I looked like the only person not from this neighborhood. Soon, my students were leading the way. By 7:30 PM, I had walked at least three miles to three grandmothers' row houses. I peeked inside Vanessa's and saw a pretty living room decorated with mirrors and smiling family photos. There was also a huge television with cable. I told her mom that Vanessa had straight As on every assignment. They invited me to stay until things quieted down, but I was trying to keep up this facade, acting like I was a teacher in charge and knew exactly what I was doing.

“I'll be fine,” I said, waving good-bye.

Hardly. At least I seemed to be on the outskirts of the party. I headed toward the main drag and tried to phone a cab. The dispatcher laughed. “We're not sending anyone up to North Philly tonight,” she said. Pete was off in western Pennsylvania on residency. A man on the corner gave me directions in Spanish to the train fifteen blocks east on Allegheny Avenue, away from the noise. The sun was setting behind an abandoned factory. I wondered what life had been like for immigrants one hundred years ago compared to today. As I walked, I read the prominent names still hanging among the rubble: Pomerantz and Company Office and Products, Pine Tree Silk Mills Company, Keystone Dyeing, Canvas Makers, Delco Metal. If they were all empty, where were the residents supposed to work? Was it possible to have hope when surrounded by despair?

A car bucked past, packed with people and blaring salsa. They must have been heading into what would be an all-night celebration. My overwhelming emotion was no longer fear or pity, but admiration and a strange longing to belong. So much was shared here—my students may not have money, but they grew up with the support of their entire extended family. This neighborhood had traditions and celebrations, and a shared history. Yet the suburbs and all it embodied—college, high-paying jobs, cars—was my vision of success for my students. If I could only get them out of the ghetto, I thought, they'd have a chance. That was a goal that would be a great deal harder for them than it was for me. Was that what I wanted for my students? What they wanted for themselves? Was that what it took for them to “make it”? I felt as though I was finally seeing my own prejudices.

As these thoughts swirled in my head, three Puerto Rican girls pushed a baby carriage down the sidewalk toward me. I thought of Vanessa. I wondered what she thought when she saw girls only a few years older than her with babies. Was this her future, or would she somehow wrench herself from her neighborhood's norms and attend a good high school and a good university—my vision of her future?

Attempting to blend in, I pulled my hair back into a bun. Maybe my Julia de Burgos T-shirt and the P. R. flag that stuck out the back pocket of my jeans would give me a day pass to be walking around here. I braced myself for the encounter. Did I say hello or ignore them? I didn't know the neighborhood rules. They stopped talking when they saw me, and while passing, one said, “Look, even white people come out.” They laughed.

A few minutes later a young guy sitting on a stoop shouted at me “You're not Puerto Rican. What you doing with that flag?”

The flag went in my bag. I flushed with embarrassment and quickened my step toward the distant lights of a dollar store and a Dunkin' Donuts. I felt like I was leaving behind this image I had that my students would easily glide toward college and the suburbs with the help of a caring teacher (me). A train approached. The two-mile ride would take me back to Center City, my world. I stepped off the platform, checked the map, and slumped into my seat. At least I had had clearly defined goals. Suddenly, my anchor felt wrenched out, and I was adrift. What did success mean for my students?

Later on, I would look back at the Puerto Rican Day Parade as one of my most humbling and liberating moments as a new teacher. After being told for so long that I was going to “make a difference,” I realized that my time with them represented just a tiny fraction of the overall experiences and influences that would ultimately determine their outcome; the largest one, by far, being their parents. Of course, this may seem obvious to a regular person, but at the time, the prevailing new-teacher fantasy was something out of Hollywood—from
Dead Poets Society
to
Lean on Me
—that we would make a major, significant difference and change the course of our students' lives. This kind of unrealistic thinking leads to teacher burnout. The parent is always the major factor in a child's life. In fact, my sphere of influence would be no greater than my short time with them in the classroom. The best thing for me to do was to focus my energy on the time that I had with them in school and create the most powerful lessons I could. I couldn't worry as much about trying to influence what happens to them after 3:00 PM. After all, it does take a village to raise a child, and a teacher must see themselves as one person in that village. That was a less romantic notion, but a more practical one, and the right one. When I realized that my role in that village was simply in the classroom, instructing them in English, social studies, and reading, I became a much more focused teacher and a much more effective person in my students' lives. If I could be a good classroom teacher, that was hero's work.

A
fight broke out in the school parking lot between the friends of a pregnant girl and Baby Daddy, as they called the father-to-be. I wasn't there, but I'd heard what happened. A pulsing crowd of students circled the melee and began chanting and whooping. The principal raced out of her office and jumped right in the middle of it to break it up. She was punched in the face and knocked down. I saw her the next day, a beleaguered fifty-something-year-old woman, pushing her eyeglasses up against her face with a bandaged wrist. This scared me, but then I heard even worse news. The third-floor team leader, Mr. Whitehorne, said that the student who hit her was never even expelled or transferred.

“What else do you have to do after you punch the principal?” he joked.

The principal had a theory. She called it the 2 percent factor, and she explained it to the teachers in a speech in the library. “We have eight hundred fifty kids on roll, and the majority come to school, go to class, and cause little or no disruption. There are, however, about two percent, or seventeen students, who cause the majority of our problems. Unfortunately, these students also tend to upset other classes and increase our discipline problems.” Most teachers agreed, but some estimated the number of troubled kids to be closer to 5 percent.

I agreed with this idea. Even though almost all of the students in my classroom were misbehaving, only two students—5 percent of my classes—were causing 95 percent of the chaos. Not kids like Ronny, the Dominican boy who I'd promised to teach how to read, or Rodolfo, Mr. XXX-tra-large football jersey. They were a challenge, but I felt that with sufficient effort I could win them over. I categorized their bad behavior as “mischievous.” My truly disruptive students were much more troubling than that. “Threatening” was a better category.

To put this theory in proper context, I call up the popular book and teacher movie
Lean on Me
. It's based on the true story of Joe Clark, the New Jersey principal who tried to clean up his school by kicking out all the drug pushers and violent offenders—the 2 percent. Once they were gone the teachers were able to take back control of their school, and all the students listened and learned.

In real life Joe Clark was attacked by teachers' unions and politicians, called a racist and elitist, and run out of the school system by lawsuits. But I understood what he wanted to do. On many days I dreamed of doing what Joe Clark did.

I had my “5 percent factor”: Jovani and José R.

“Good morning everyone,” I said with the forced cheer of a teacher who knew she was in the eye of the storm. The day always started out well. “Okay, uh, here's a story. Read it and finish it, please.” I passed it out.

Still without reliable resources, I was making up my own lessons. On this day, I had written out a story and questions. My “story” was about a twelve-year-old named María leaving her fishing village in Puerto Rico to immigrate to Philadelphia with her family. “What will life be like for me there?” she wondered. I wrote the story myself and translated it into Spanish. The assignment was to “finish the story.”

Afterward, I wrote on the board five words I'd picked out of the dictionary. The kids were to define and use them in a sentence.

After that, they were to answer this essay question: “What would you do with $1 million?”

This was my typical day, a loose cobbling together of self-created activities. There was no English or social studies period. The only “classroom objective” was to keep the kids from killing one another—and me.

Before I could even get started, I heard a soft knock at the door. A new student stood in the hall, and from his smirk alone I knew he'd be a handful. He laughed and said, “Hiii, Misss,” in this slurred way that made me wonder if something was wrong with him. He had a shaved head and looked like a collection of balls stuck together—wide eyes set in a beach-ball-shaped head, baggy shirt, and puffy pants. “Hii, Miss. I want to be in your class.” He held a slip of paper in his hand from the main office. Behind me the noise level mounted. I heard several cries of “Hey! It's José R.!”

My heart sank, and my first thought was No way! In only a few short weeks, my attitude about teaching had adjusted. Back in August, I wanted to reach every child, to be like Jaime Escalante and leave no child behind.

Actual teaching was hardening me. Each day was like a struggle that began before the students arrived. First, I had to battle with the other teachers for use of the copying machine, which was locked in Mrs. G.'s office. Some days, Mrs. G. would arrive late and the veterans muscled past me. Then the bell would ring, so I'd have to rush to class with only one copy of the morning's assignment and anywhere from twenty-one to thirty-five students, depending on the day. To avoid the panic attack this caused, I started my day at the copy shop in my neighborhood, sucking up the cost. The copy shop was always overflowing with harried young teachers, and I found comfort in knowing I wasn't the only desperate one.

Desperate was putting it mildly. For a full month I'd plowed on, but it had felt like a full year. I was exhausted and looked worried all the time. My skin was breaking out. I thought I'd detected my first under-eye wrinkle. Several weeks of eating corner-store Cubanos and Dunkin' Donuts was not helping matters. Nor were my clothes. After my back started aching from standing for five-hour stretches in heels, I shelved my vanity and bought ugly-yet-sensible flats. They were comfortable, but made me feel old. One afternoon while sitting in a student desk correcting class work, I thought of my girlfriends working for magazines and Internet start-ups in New York City. They had boyfriends who were earning six figures on Wall Street. They were still so young and glamorous. Their lives were fun, while I stood in a classroom wearing ugly, rubber-soled shoes, shouting at eleven-year-olds. I felt I had aged twenty years in two months.

At night, after grading and planning, I wrote in a journal all I was learning in this new world. Stepping inside the classroom made me realize how many of my education stories in the
Inquirer
had missed the mark. Once, I had written about financial awards bestowed by the state education department on schools for improved attendance. As a teacher, I saw how attendance could fluctuate depending on what time it's taken, whether in-school suspended students were counted absent and whether a school includes excused absences. Teachers could also easily fudge the numbers if they had a reason to, such as a financial incentive.

I had also written a good deal about computers in the classroom, and I had assumed that was a positive expense. The past week Mrs. G. had given all the bilingual education classrooms a $1,200 iMac computer. Mine was wheeled in every morning and sat there for most of the day collecting dust. I tried to use it, but one computer was not helpful with an entire classroom of kids. Most of the other teachers used games to keep the tough-to-control special education students busy. That was a newspaper story I never would have gotten from a school board member or union rep—my typical sources for stories.

Pete occasionally helped me check homework, when he wasn't on seventy-two-hour shifts at the hospital or sleeping. Most days, I was holed up in my apartment alone. We'd begun arguing a lot about stupid things. My friendships at the
Inquirer
felt as distant as my high school friendships. I faced ten more months of this. I remembered the Venezuelan teacher circling the holidays and telling me, “You'll be doing this.” I couldn't deny how desperately I wanted a day off.

Faced with the reality of teaching, all I could think of was that I couldn't handle another difficult student in my classroom.

“Just one moment,” I told him, racing for my class list. He was not on it.

I phoned the main office, and they said José R. was in seventh grade. Why was he with me, they wondered?

“Let's just say, he's not,” I replied. Technically, he was still in the doorway. I scribbled a note to the seventh-grade advisory teacher: “José R. belongs with you!”

Just before I handed it to José R., I thought twice and scratched out the exclamation point. Still, I couldn't believe my luck. Problem solved or at least pushed on to someone else. Good-bye, José R.

My impeccably planned morning went smoothly for a grand total of eight minutes. That was how long it took the kids to “finish the story.” I quickly discovered that half my sixth-graders knew nothing about dictionaries. A few did not know the alphabet. Many of the rest announced they didn't feel like looking up words if the other students didn't have to. We entered into negotiations: Would they do it for a prize? How about a ten-minute break afterward? Some agreed, but others refused to bend. Remembering I wasn't supposed to attach material rewards to learning, I changed my mind and tried to demand they do the work for their own enlightenment. It was too late. Small conversations broke out, like the first thick splatters of raindrops before a downpour. I tried to have a heart-to-heart.

“Please, just get quiet a minute. I'm sorry that the class isn't better prepared. I know it's not your fault. Let's just do the best we can with what we have,” I said. After that mini-lecture, most of the students obliged me and politely answered the essay question “What would you do with $1 million?” Almost every student said they'd buy their mom something, such as a house. Josh wrote:

No sooner had they scratched out a paragraph or two than they started tapping their pencils. This hammering of ten-minute activities, unconnected to any broader learning goal, just wasn't holding their attention.

Then I heard a soft knock at the door ... again. José R. was back, with a goofy grin, and a note from the seventh-grade teacher: “Readmit, I'm looking into this.”

I didn't know the seventh-grade teacher. I only knew she was more senior than I was. I stalled for time.

“Okay, José. Um, go to the main office and explain what happened.”

He disappeared and then reappeared eight minutes later with another readmit note. I had a sinking feeling that no one wanted José R., which meant the new teacher was going to be stuck with him. He must have picked up on my true feelings, because this time José R.'s grin was gone and he was staring at me. Suddenly, I felt deeply ashamed. Did he see the truth—that not even his teachers, who were paid to take him, wanted him? Just three weeks ago I had vowed I would never push a problem student onto another teacher. Looking into his face, I felt the cold calculation of what I'd done. I'd promised myself I'd help all the kids in my class—so what if he was really supposed to be in seventh grade? I was a teacher, and he seemed troubled, needy—yes—but blameless, and here I was secretly trying to keep him out of my class.

“José, I'm glad you're back in our class,” and patted him on the back. “Please take a seat.” A wave of murmurs spread through the room, like the soundtrack of a horror movie. He grinned, and he stayed. How bad could one student be?