Emergency Teacher (21 page)

B
y springtime, our school was so out of control, it was safer for most kids to stay home. Each morning, I would hustle everyone into the classroom and lock the door. Same thing after lunch. During class time, we would hear the screams and whoops of packs of students roaming the hallways, ripping things off the wall, and beating up other students.

One cold, sunny morning, three girls were stuffing paper into a bottle in Mr. Jackson's “Spanish class.” Mr. Jackson wasn't watching. They torched the paper with a lighter, and dropped the bottle like a Molotov cocktail down a hole in the wall. It landed in the cafeteria storage room.

As the flames crept along, I played Multiplication Bingo with H77, Rogia's special education class. Eight students sat at their desks, but only one knew how to multiply. We switched to Addition Bingo. Rogia had her hand in the air when the fire alarm blared.

“Go ahead, Rogia,” I continued. The fire alarm rang two to three times a day, so we ignored it. Rogia was upset because she'd missed the question.

“Murmur, murmur, murmur ... fire alarm,” came over the intercom, once, then again.

“Rogia, hon, let's just try this one more time,” I said, holding up fingers to count.

The principal's stony voice interrupted me. “This is a real fire. Please evacuate the building.”

Two kids bolted. I shut my windows, picked up my purse, turned off the lights, and lined up my remaining students. The hallways were packed. Everyone was charged up, almost to the point of panic. My students dissolved into the crowd on the stairwell. I pushed my way down to the fire exit, and crossed the street to my designated fire meeting spot, hopping over islands of ice and snow lining the curbs. Hundreds of students milled about, white blowpop sticks jutting from their mouths, hoods pulled over their ears. Within minutes, familiar faces reappeared. Rogia clung to my side. The principal rushed around, yelling orders at everyone, and no one was paying attention. Fire trucks arrived. I looked around for smoke. Was there a shooting, a suicide, a bomb threat?

“Hi, Miss! Miss, there a fire?” A boy with a toothy grin looked up at me.

It was Wilson, a boy I knew from a special education class I'd covered. “I don't know,” I said.

Students encircled us, drifting in and out of conversation. I hopped around to keep warm.

“Miss, you still got that map game you gave us?” Wilson asked wistfully.

I nodded.

“We got a new substitute today, Miss,” he said. I looked past his shoulder to see a brunette woman holding a lesson-plan book. She'd pulled her scarf over her chin, gritting her teeth. Around her, students pointed and laughed. “You got extra room in your class, Miss?” he asked.

Before I could answer, three other boys barreled into him from behind. Their vinyl jackets swooshed against each other.

“Yo, man, is that your new teacher?” asked one of them.

Wilson cracked up. “Yeah, man, we already kicked her out!” he shouted, jabbing his fingers at the lady. “We busted her out of the class on the first day.”

Wilson was swallowed up by a whirlwind of boys. Everyone yelped and swooned, challenging the new substitute. She pretended to ignore it. They crowded around her, shouting, until she turned away. They regrouped around her. I went over to introduce myself.

She spoke a couple of words with a thick Eastern European accent, then stopped responding. She waved me away. I imagined her returning to her neighborhood, telling of her experiences with these inner-city “animals.” She would speak from an isolated day or week, not knowing the months, or years, of neglect and abuse that created their behavior. They hadn't had a teacher all year.

After forty-five minutes we sought refuge in the cafeteria of a nearby elementary school that fed into Julia de Burgos. Four hours later we were speechless from hunger and cabin fever. No one had any news about the fire. Many students laid their heads on the tables. Others leapt up on the tables, danced, then ran out through the hallways. The elementary school teachers glared at us.

One hour slipped past, then another, and another. For a while I'd tried to have a class discussion, but the students lost interest without the books. Gossip trickled in: There was a lot of fire and water damage; we wouldn't be returning until the next day. The cafeteria's backless benches made sitting still uncomfortable. The light was dim and colored, and after a few hours, I felt sleepy and restless.

Vanessa sat next to me. She had been participating less in class lately, and I knew she was bored. Yet she showed up each day, the only student in my class with perfect attendance. She brushed my hair. We chatted, and a couple of boys played GameBoy. Two girls played with my cell phone. Then, finally, we did nothing—sat and thought, holed up for what turned out to be five hours with nothing to eat, drink, or do.

Vanessa began to nod off. As we sat there wasting learning time, I tried to see school through her eyes. Later, I would try to calculate how many days of the year I could describe as “wasted learning days.” Nothing official, just my best guess as to how many days the kids learned nothing useful—days when they would have been better off at home watching TV than exposed to the dangerous influences at Julia de Burgos. There were the useless assemblies; pointless interruptions by Mrs. G.; botched lessons, given my inexperience; the entire botched month of September and most of October, given the absence of any materials or guidance while I learned to teach; Ms. Rohan's ten sick days; five weeks of disruptions from other seventh- and eighth-graders transferred temporarily into our class; and several dozen fire alarms. None of these factors were my students' faults. Then there was the entire month of January, spottily attended because of weather and family trips to Puerto Rico. It was impossible to do anything that month except one-day, time-filler activities. Vanessa and many others, like Pedro and Big Bird, suffered. For them, the reward was dozens upon dozens of days sitting idly, staring bored at the blackboard, wondering why they should bother going to school at all. I would have felt exactly the same way.

My final estimate of wasted learning days: at least 60, or one-third of the required 180 days.

For students like Jovani, who was suspended regularly, the figure was much worse. These students were nearly, if not entirely, illiterate in English and Spanish. This was a year in their life—one of the last years they would have in school. If I didn't teach them these things in sixth grade, they'd be gone in seventh and that would be it. It was their opportunity to learn English, to read, to add double digits, to tell time, explore, question, ponder, decide. And it was being wasted away, hour by hour.

Finally, buses arrived. Teachers were allowed back in the school. The building reeked of sodden ash. I wandered the hallways, looking for damage. Sometime that year, I had started calling Julia de Burgos “my school.” I'd felt a growing attachment, a feeling much like family, but here among the ruins I resisted those ties. My room was fine, but three other classrooms had been almost destroyed. In one class, the windows were broken. In another, water stains had ruined the teacher's bulletin boards with her homemade class rules. I stood alone in the doorway, taking in the stench of smoldering plastic.

Ms. Vinitzsky's room was the worst of all. It had been used for in-house suspensions. The walls dripped with water. Chairs were blackened and upended. She shrugged and said, “I needed a bigger room anyhow.” Other teachers arrived behind me.

The principal called a meeting in the library. She congratulated us wholeheartedly on a “smooth evacuation,” even adding a thumbs-up. I didn't understand until I realized the cluster leader, her boss, was in the audience. She had rushed to our school in case the fire attracted TV news coverage (which it didn't.) The whole incident was treated as an accident—as though lightning or a blown fuse had caused the fire. It was no coincidence that systematically neglected students, feeling bold and angry, could build a firebomb right under a teacher's nose. It was no coincidence that the teacher was Mr. Jackson, whose class had to be disbanded in November because he didn't even have a shred of an idea how to teach them. This was a culmination of seven months of “education.” It might be a harbinger of worse to come. It was. Within six weeks, we had another major arson. No one would be hurt, but we were evacuated again for the day, and there was more damage.

One teacher commented that the kids were lucky. The fire could have been worse. He said that the part of our building behind the auditorium, which had been boarded up and condemned years ago, was filled with garbage, rotting wood, and broken desks. If the fire had reached that section, the whole place could have burned to the ground.

When school began, Mr. Whitehorne, one of our most popular teachers, played “La Bamba” on the guitar at the end of each school week. He played with a flourish of strumming, singing the Spanish words, after meetings in the auditorium, and at the end of most school events. The song rallied us and quickly became our theme.

Around this time, Mr. Whitehorne stopped playing “La Bamba” on his guitar and at some point the principal stopped saying, “Failure is not an option.” This week, she called another library meeting. The topic might as well have been “Julia de Burgos Spins Out of Control!” because that's what we all felt.

“Maintaining meaningful content in your curriculum is the most important tool in discipline,” she said. “I want interesting instructional material. I don't expect to go into any classrooms and see soap operas unless it is in your lesson plan and tied to state standards.”

Cluster officials had caught several teachers showing soap operas during class time, and the principal had been reprimanded. Morale was low. Absenteeism was frequent. We needed more teachers. We were demoralized to the point of paralysis. No one cared anymore, and we hadn't even made it to spring yet.

The arsonists were eventually found and expelled. They were sent to Able Academy and Boone, both schools for delinquent kids. One of the girls, Gina, had been repeatedly suspended for fighting and drugs. The school had inches of paperwork documenting her reign of terror, yet we had never been able to expel her until this catastrophe. In this case, the paperwork was important to protect the teachers from administrators looking for a scapegoat.

The expulsion upset Mr. Whitehorne, not because it was the wrong thing to do, but because he had a long list of students he had tried to transfer to discipline schools throughout the year, only to be stonewalled by administrators.

“When it's a high-profile case, you see how quickly they can move,” Mr. Whitehorne said.

The following Thursday, police were at our school again. On my way back from the sandwich store, I held open the front door for a boy being escorted out in handcuffs. A dozen boys had already been arrested at our school that year, yet it still shocked me. This boy in handcuffs was what the rest of the city heard about. A small minority of bad teachers and that 2 percent of lost students overwhelmed the good we did. Security told me he'd been arrested for having a weapon. I didn't ask if he had used it.

I hadn't had a prep period in weeks, and working around the clock was wearing on me. Teachers were supposed to receive at least one forty-minute period each day to correct grades, do administrative work, and rest. Every prep of mine was filled with a “coverage” for a special education class. That was forty minutes of grueling shouting and scrambling. I was coming to the end of my rope—we all were.