Emergency Teacher (23 page)

Mrs. G. had warned against this. “If anything ever happened, you'll be sued. They'll take your house.” I knew Jovani would disappear en route to any other detention room. The school's discipline policy was effective only on paper.

I tried to call his mother on my cell phone, as I had a dozen times before. I had one phone number for him: his aunt's. Whenever I'd called her before she'd promised his mom would call back, but she never did. This time, no one answered. I had run out of consequences for Jovani.

After twenty minutes of silence and then a lecture, I swung my teacher bag over my shoulder and marched out the door. “Let's go.”

“I'll walk home, Miss,” Jovani informed me.

“No, I'll take you.” I stomped along. I didn't have to pretend; I was furious, frustrated, and most of all, desperate. He skipped beside me down the long hallway, showing no sign of fear.

“I'm going to come inside and talk to your mother,” I said. This time he would feel bad. I'd seen the way his mom disciplined him with a stare. Across the parking lot, Jovani yanked open the car door and climbed in the front seat. “Oh, no!” I shouted from the driver's side. The front seat of the teacher's car was a major treat for students. “In the back.”

Still expressionless, Jovani got out and hopped in the backseat. “I can walk, Miss. I live close,” he whined. He was nervous. As we got in, I flipped open my grade book. Under Jovani's name, I had written “Third and Indiana.” I wasn't sure where it was, but I figured I could navigate. “Seatbelt,” I ordered, and he turned his entire body to grab it.

We cruised up Seventh Street for about a half-mile or so to Allegheny. We passed garages with big puffs of smoke coming out the top. Philadelphia had hundreds of cars stolen each year (including mine, last year), and here was chop-shop central. Toward the top of Seventh Street I remembered to lock the door. Certain areas in North Philly made me more nervous than others: a corner with too many guys lingering, a strip of abandoned houses. The second-tolast block on Seventh made me nervous, but locked in my car and driving quickly, I assumed I was safe.

I made a right on Allegheny, passed under a railroad bridge, and made another right, onto Third. Jovani giggled louder.

“Miss,” he teased from the backseat. “Miss, I don't live down here. You goin' the wrong way, Miss ....”

The maze of streets in North Philly was easy to get lost in. I pulled over to double-check the address I had scribbled down, but then I realized I couldn't remember how I'd gotten that address. Who had given it to me? I pulled back onto Third Street. There was no sign of Indiana. I passed Cramp Elementary and pulled up beside a police car.

“Excuse me,” I said, rolling down my window. “Can you tell me how to get to Third and Indiana Street?”

Later, I learned Third and Indiana was a notorious drug corner. How I must have looked—a white woman, with a Puerto Rican kid in the back, sweetly asking a police officer for directions to Third and Indiana. She stared at me like I was crazy.

“Oh, whatta you, a teacher?” she asked, then gave me what sounded like simple directions.

“But, uh, I wouldn't go down there,” she said.

“I'll be okay,” I answered.

“Just be careful down there.”

Her directions led me into the worst neighborhood I'd visited yet. Cars, garbage bags along with loose trash, and cinder blocks were all dumped in the vacant lots that stood alongside almost every row house, many of which were empty and abandoned. Guys started walking up to the car and peering inside.

“This a dangerous neighborhood, Miss,” Jovani said. He had stopped laughing.

“Jovani, where is your house?” I strained to make my voice sound calm. Then his giggles returned. Finally, Third and Indiana, but as I neared it an unsettling thought hit me. I didn't have an address, only a corner. This was not the place to start knocking on doors. I didn't even want to slow down. “Jovani, which is your house?”

He bopped up and down in his seat. “You say you know where it is.”

It was getting darker. I turned off Indiana and began to double back. Jovani was bent over in the backseat. “You lost, Miss.”

Where the hell was this house? I struggled to sound calm, but I couldn't get the fear out of my voice. “Jovani, this neighborhood is not safe for me. I'm getting scared. Tell me where your house is.”

I checked the rearview mirror. He gazed out the window, lost in thought. Then he looked up at my reflection and smirked again. “Miss, I told you you don't know where it is. I told you.”

I was back at Third and Indiana. The entire block was watching me now. Jovani was slouched so far down in his seat I doubted people could see him. “Jovani!” He had long missed the buses so I couldn't take him back to school, but I couldn't just drop him off at a corner, either. My voice had dropped to a whisper. “Tell me where your house is.”

“I wanna walk. Now youuu losssttt!” He giggled.

I raced back to the school in silence. Jovani watched me raptly from the backseat. Three minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot. I locked eyes with him in the rearview mirror. “Good-bye,” I said.

He looked shocked, and jumped out. As he walked back in the direction we came from, I prayed he would get home safely. If something happened this time, I'd be responsible. What if he told another teacher about this? I would be fired. That evil little monster. I wanted to kill Jovani. What had I done? I worried all night and slunk into school the next day. I held my breath until I finally saw Jovani, unharmed, bounding into the classroom, beaming proudly over his victory. “Hiii, Miss,” he taunted. He tried to get me to meet his eyes so he could gloat. I refused. All day he whispered to the others, getting all the mileage he could from it. It worked. Jovani had trounced me. He was untouchable.

One morning, as my class trickled in during morning announcements, I caught two unfamiliar faces in the crowd. They were special education boys.

“Miss, you covered our class,” said the grinning boy in front. It was Wilson, the boy I had seen at the fire, and his friend Francisco. He stood in my doorway with a closemouthed grin that put me on guard.

“Miss! Miss, our new substitute is not coming back. We want to be in your class,” said Wilson.

Other students were rushing past me, singing good morning. I heard them dropping their notebooks on their desks and chatting away.

“Please. Miss. We don't got no teacher,” Wilson begged.

My first thought was to say no. Any teacher would say I'd be crazy to invite a special education student into my room; most jockeyed to send them elsewhere. I remembered how I'd taken in José R. that early October day. I had paid for that moment of weakness. Plus, a teacher couldn't just take in a stray student. Students belonged to someone. These students didn't. Something in Wilson's eyes made me pause. I had substituted for his class perhaps five or six times. He always did his work and insisted I correct it.

He needed a chance, and Mrs. G. was not in her office that day, so I didn't have to clear it with her. How could I turn him away? Wilson dropped to his knees and prayed at my feet.

“Pllleeeeeaaasse, Miss! Do you still have the map game?” Behind him, Francisco hopped around excitedly. “Why can't we stay, if you want us here, and we don't got no other teacher?” Wilson said.

“I would love to have you two here, but I can't just accept students without the rest of the school knowing,” I said. “You need a note.”

They disappeared. Five minutes later, as I was taking roll, they reappeared with a crumpled note and an indiscernible signature, probably a “good riddance” from a substitute. They settled into seats.

The students were working on structuring book reports. I was learning to give them a brief lesson each day, then set them off to work independently. I posted our goal for the project in large block letters on the board, and was specific about what they were expected to accomplish. My own report went up as a model. If they were confused, they'd get up and study the board. I was learning how they learned. When they had clearly defined, short-term goals, and understood specifically how to get there, they got there. I was the CEO and did little more than direct. By the end of the period, they were tired—not me.

“When you're finished, we'll laminate them and hang them in the hallway,” I said.

I wandered into the hallway, ostensibly to check on something, but I wanted to see if my presence in the classroom was necessary. They continued working. I thought back to Pete's teacher-success story about leaving his students alone in the classroom during a science experiment. This day would be my success story.

Later in the day, a teacher came by to drop off some paperwork. He stopped dead as soon as he saw Wilson and Francisco. “What are they doing here? You cannot sit those two boys together. They're special ed, and they don't know how to behave.”

Everyone craned their necks to glare at Wilson and Francisco, who lowered their heads and peeked up at me. Just when they were starting to fit in, they were forced outside again. All the kids made fun of the special education students. Now a teacher added to the denigration in front of the entire class.

The next morning they returned. “Please, Miss,” Wilson said, giving me a charming but desperate toothy grin. “Please let us stay in your class.” It happened day after day. All he wanted was to belong to a real classroom. I sat him in the second row, next to Big Bird. Francisco sat in back. Francisco was well behaved but less motivated to work. Wilson took off like a bottle rocket. He was like Pedro—clever, cheeky, and best guided with interesting activities, not pink slips.

I had made a mental note to go and talk to the special education teacher, Mrs. Q., but every free period was taken up with preparations for our field trip to the aquarium. I finally did call. She wasn't in her office. Then I forgot. A week after they both joined us, the phone rang in my classroom. Wilson was hard at work practicing past tense. Francisco was absent.

“Ms. Asquith? You got Wilson?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was planning on coming and talking to you about him today.”

“Well, he's been marked as absent. He needs to come upstairs.”

“Oh, okay. I'll send him up. But he's expressed an interest in staying here, and since he doesn't have a teacher and it would be all right with me, we should talk about it.”

“Wilson is special ed. He needs special ed services,” she said.

“Well, I've already got special education students in here, and they don't receive any special services.” Without thinking I added, “And it's not like he's receiving anything at the moment.”

I didn't mean that as a slight—it was an honest assessment. Why should she mind? Clearly she was overburdened and understaffed.

“Well, if he were going to be in a regular ed class, he would have to have written documentation from his parents and IEP adjustments and XYPs ....” She went on and on, detailing all the red tape. The phone dangled at my ear, as I watched Wilson scrawling answers in a notebook. I understood her point: the school ought to keep track of its students. Yet it hadn't done so all year. Why the insistence on starting now, when it could only harm the student? Why not err on the side of the student? She was fighting to put him back where he was supposed to fit. If she failed, she would have to deal with paperwork. Wilson had been deprived of an education for months. He had gone all year without a teacher, a classroom, or a lesson. That was permissible, but incorrect paperwork could never be forgiven.

Wilson noticed my unhappy stare and sensed he was the cause of it. He shrank behind his notepad.

“I'll come up and talk to you about it,” I said to her.

A moment later I told Wilson: “Hon, you've got to go upstairs.”

His face fell. The other children watched as he grudgingly picked up his notebook and trudged out. He paused outside, then shut the door softly so as not to disrupt the others. I turned back to my class, minus one.