Emergency Teacher (9 page)

The MIA sixth-grade team teacher arrived in the third week. Ms. Rohan was in her early thirties, and after a decade drifting among odd jobs she had gone back to school to pursue a career in teaching. She was Irish Catholic. Bobby pins held back her fiery red hair, and she possessed an easy laugh. She was unmarried, and after a few weeks' teaching, to make ends meet, she began working as a waitress at Applebee's restaurant on the weekends. We met in the doorway between periods, and I wanted to hug her. There was only time to nod introductions, like doctors switching shifts in the emergency room. “Where have you been?” I asked. “Waiting to be processed,” she said, giving me a fed-up look that sealed our friendship. Half my class drained out of Room 216 into Room 217 with the lime paint. Just in time. My list had climbed to thirty-eight students, and seas were stormy.

On paper, my class became T61, and I had them for four periods between 8:20 AM and lunch, which was about 11:30 AM. During this time, I was to teach them English, social studies, and English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) reading. They also had one period with a different teacher, taking an elective such as gym, art, or creative writing. This was my planning period. Ms Rohan had a similar schedule with T62, except she was to teach science, math, and ESOL in Spanish language. After a twenty-minute lunch and another planning period, we switched classes and repeated the same lesson to the other group. On paper, this meant the students received English and Spanish instruction and still kept on task with subject matter.

But little went as indicated on paper, as I had already learned. I was T61 and Ms Rohan T62. The T stood for TV/Communications team, which was one of five theme-based teams the administration had divided students into years ago based on some million-dollar grant aimed at vocational training. Yet there was nothing TV/Communications-oriented about our team, or any of the other teams. The TVs hanging from our ceilings didn't even work. Another administrative categorization: Ms. Rohan and I were also on the Bilingual Team, which encompassed the second floor. The Bilingual Team took all the students who hadn't mastered English or any student whose parents had requested bilingual program placement. This designation as “bilingual” earned our team an extra $1.7 million in federal grant money, referred to as the Portal grant.

Our so-called bilingual education program seemed very complicated, yet the reason none of it worked was simplicity itself: Ms. Rohan didn't speak Spanish. She must have been assigned to Julia de Burgos after the school district realized there were no more Spanish-speaking teachers, and it was almost October. There was a brief discussion about my teaching science and math in Spanish, but I balked. I didn't know how to teach science or math in English, let alone in Spanish, which required a vocabulary of words like cells, membranes, photosynthesis. Ms. Rohan didn't want to teach reading or English. So the bilingual program in practice never got off the ground for sixth-graders.

Ms. Rohan, however, was a caring teacher, and certified, meaning she had recently finished her master's degree and was armed with professional training. When I told her I had only a day of training, she said something along the lines of, “What the hell? Why did I spend $30,000 on a master's degree for a job you just walked off the street into?”

We both shrugged and made a deal: I would help her with the Spanish; she would help me with teaching. This evened us out, but it hardly mattered. We were the blind leading the blind, as neither of us had any books—in English or Spanish. We certainly didn't have English books for Spanish speakers, which was really what we needed.

Ms. Rohan was stunned when she learned we had no books. “What have you been teaching?”

“Um, I bought a grammar book at Barnes and Noble, and I'm using that,” I said, feeling like I was admitting to child abuse. I grew defensive. “I've been asking for books.”

Ms. Rohan looked shocked. She made me realize that this was not normal. It'd be best to share these concerns with our supervisors.

R
odolfo had a thick neck, a buzz cut, and a few light freckles across his button nose. And I hated him. He didn't so much arrive in class one morning as invade it, in his XXX-tra large football jersey and jeans. He was twelve going on skid-row eighteen. He was the tough kid, boisterous and unpredictable, as likely to punch his best friend as risk his life for him. The class reacted. The girls looked slightly terrified. The boys looked thrilled. High fives went all around amid a murmur of, “yeah, Rodolfo.”

As though some unseen twine had been untethered, my students stopped being good one day. The honeymoon was over. I couldn't reel them back in.

The day began badly. That morning, the main office sent up my students' scores from some standardized test they'd taken the prior year. “Oh, look, everybody. Here are your test scores,” I announced. I should have looked at them first. Instead, I read the numbers to myself as I handed them out. They were lower than even I had expected. Many students, including Rodolfo, scored a 1, meaning the bottom 1 percent of all test takers in the state. No one scored higher than 15 percent. A bad feeling sunk in as I went round the room.

Rodolfo snatched his and shouted, “Yeah! One!” thinking it meant first. The other students were shouting, “What this mean?” Caught off guard, I didn't know what to say. Later, at night in bed, I would play this moment over in my mind. Should I have hidden the painful truth from him? Or should I have capitalized on it to encourage him to do better? Or should I break the news to him gently, and then discuss how he could improve? I didn't want to dump failing scores on their impressionable minds. Burned into my own brain were the Ss for “satisfactory” I'd received in elementary school, instead of Es for “excellent.” At that moment, I panicked. So, I ducked the issue. I explained the scoring in a cryptic way that they wouldn't understand. Being eleven, they were accustomed to feeling confused by adults and let it go easily. Then, I steered us onto something else. This did not exactly feel like the right thing to do. Later, I noticed Rodolfo staring at the score. He had a confused, unhappy look on his face.

Then I tried to teach.

A few days earlier, Mrs. G. delivered our English books. I thought we were waiting for new books. In fact, these texts were from the early 1980s, making me think that they had been in a nearby closet the whole month. The first chapter was titled “The Four Types of Sentences.”

This was completely impractical. I tried to teach it, but my students didn't even know how to make a sentence. Shouldn't we at least start with subject and predicate? They didn't even really know English. The night before, I had tried to sketch out a lesson plan tailored to their specific needs, but in reality it looked more like a list of my thoughts, hopes, and possible activities strung together. When I reviewed it in the morning, I barely understood it myself:

What?

I hadn't gotten far. Several students didn't know English, so how was I to teach them about predicates? And the others either didn't get it, or didn't care. Some couldn't form sentences, so trying to explain what a predicate was useless. Often, I would corner myself.

“Someone give me an example of a popular sentence?” I said, chalk in hand, poised at the board.

“What's up?” said Vanessa.

“Okay. That's true. That's a sentence,” I said, trailing off. Where was the subject and predicate in that? I struggled to explain the verb “to be” and confused myself. I'd have to look that one up. Student attention began to wane and I thought, “Who am I kidding? I don't know how to teach.” Many students tried to follow along, but forcing this lesson on them was like mixing oil and water—this lesson didn't go with this class. Rodolfo was about to let his dissatisfaction be known in a loud and disruptive way when the door flew open.

It was the school police officer.

“Get me some boys!” he shouted.

They returned with reading textbooks. Finally. This had to be easier. Why the school policeman was delivering them was a mystery. They hauled out copies of the reading textbook
Vistas.

He, Rodolfo, and Big Bird dropped stacks onto the floor next to my desk with a
thwap!
Rodolfo began tossing them on desks, like Frisbees. Desperately, I scanned the table of contents and found a series of short stories and poems, followed by questions on theme and foreshadowing. Most teachers spend hours preparing their lesson plans. I did, too. But none of my lessons ever worked. I decided to start right away with a short story in
Vistas.

“Read pages seventy and seventy-one, and then answer questions one through five at the end.”

I forgot to write the page numbers on the board, as I knew I should. After two minutes, they lost interest again. Ten minutes later, only a handful of girls were still reading. That was it. Everyone else—most of the class—had given up. Ronny, a seventh-grader who had been held back, flipped through the book searching for lewd graffiti from past students, which he whispered to the class. A chorus of “ewww, Miss!” rose up. Vanessa, who had finished the story, looked up at me expectantly. I felt my authority sliding. The story was too easy for her, but the Spanish-speaking students were at a complete loss.

“Just try your best,” I said to Valerie, who spoke only Spanish, and I quickly swiveled around to the next crisis before she could point out that she didn't understand English, so how would
trying
help?

Rodolfo kept kicking the wire shelf under Ronny's desk until Ronny swung around and pushed Rodolfo's papers onto the floor. For two painful hours, I cajoled, and then tried outwitting, then begging, and finally threatening them in an attempt to get them to pay attention. Any brief respite in arguing allowed me to see myself losing my dignity and becoming that mean, shouting teacher I would have criticized as a reporter. Yet I felt powerless to stop it.

I copied an essay out of some teen magazine on drug testing, hoping that would catch their interest. My “lesson plan” was for them to read it and then discuss it. To be safe, this time I read it aloud. They listened quietly.

“So, what do you think?” I asked at the end.

Two boys raised their hands. For a brief moment, we all listened as Daniel gave solid, logical arguments against drug testing.

“It's a violation of our rights to search our locker,” he said. But then Ronny must have said something to Rodolfo, because he swirled around and shouted, “Shut up man! You a drug dealer!”

“Rodolfo, please raise your hand,” I said.

“It's true, Miss!” he yelled. He slammed down his books and cursed at me.

“You're in detention,” I said.

Ms. Rohan had been sending students to Mrs. G.'s office, but I refused to do that. I promised to handle problems myself because I wanted to show the students that I was the ultimate authority. My ears rang. Then a spitball whizzed through the room. I quickly looked away, knowing that everyone saw me ignore it. I didn't have the energy to confront it. The trouble was that whenever I traced a spitball's origin, it led back to Rodolfo or Ronny or another boy, all of whom denied it angrily. Confrontation sapped time and energy away from the rest of the class, and I personally felt embarrassed to challenge a student and lose. No one ever told me how physically tiring teaching was—and I had run the Boston Marathon. How did the older teachers manage? By 11:30 AM, I had already punished Ronny with lunch detention and Rodolfo with after-school detention. When was lunch?

Relinquishing the drug debate, I pulled out my copy of
Chicken Soup for the Kid's Soul,
an idea borrowed from another teacher. Hoping to calm them, I opened to a story about a boy whose mother was addicted to heroin. The morose tone of the story and the sadness that welled up in my students' expressions reminded me how tough their lives were. Leaning on the desk, tears came as I read, mostly from nerves. I coughed to cover up my choking voice.

At lunch, I dismissed the rows one at a time, specifically instructing Ronny to stay put. Big Bird approached my desk. Behind him were Vanessa and some girls.

“Miss?” Big Bird said, with raised eyebrows.

“Not today, okay?”

He loped out the door with his head down. They wanted to stay and have lunch together. Eating lunch in the classroom with the teacher was, for some reason, a big treat for sixth-graders. But I had no time for the well-behaved kids on this day. I had to discipline Ronny, who was leaning back in a desk wondering aloud why Rodolfo didn't have to stay, too. This was one of the many small ways in which the needs of the well-behaved students were brushed aside for those of the troublesome students. Ronny sat in silence for a few minutes.

Ronny was thirteen and lanky, with long arms, milk-chocolate skin, and a fluid motion. He had grown up in the Dominican Republic and had moved to North Philadelphia only a few years earlier. His father ran a popular rice-andbeans eatery a mile north of the school, and a grocery store where Ronny worked after school each day. Ronny always wore stylish, expensive-looking gold chains. One day I was collecting $2 from everyone for a field trip, and Ronny pulled a wad of twenties from his back pocket and asked me for change, which I didn't have. While Rodolfo burst into anger unpredictably, Ronny was gentle and shy, but mischievous, nonetheless. They'd fight all morning, and then I'd see them joking around at lunch. This must have been their torture-theteacher routine.

“Look Ronny, I know this isn't the best class right now. And that
Vistas
story was boring. But, you know you can't act this way in our class. What kind of class would that be? You have to be on the team.”

His face softened.

“You can do it, you're bright.”

Pete's advice had been: Don't take student misbehavior personally.

I suggested we read the story together. But once the book was open and Ronny stuttered through the first line, I realized the deeper problem. In the next few weeks, I saw that Ronny could read neither English nor Spanish. Ronny had already failed sixth grade once. Each lunch, he crossed the cafeteria to join his seventh-grade friends. When the bell rang, they went on to their seventh-grade classes, and Ronny returned to the same Room 216 as he had the prior year, with, in his eyes, a bunch of little kids. The prior year he had had the emergency certified teacher whom Mr. Marr called Jaime Escalante. How many emergency certified teachers had Ronny been subjected to?

“Miss, I don't want to end up in the store like my dad.”

He told me one night a bunch of guys had broken in and held a gun to his head, and he saw his dad with a gun to his head. Sometimes he had nightmares about it.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“I wanna be a baseball player. Or draw.”

“Oh, Ronny,” I said. “No matter what you do, you have to be able to read.”

He nodded. This was not a motivational issue, I realized. Ronny wanted to know how to read. No one was teaching him.

When we finished reading the story, Ronny had a giant grin on his face. He seemed thrilled that a teacher was finally going to help him. I sent him off to lunch and watched him race down the hall. Watching him go, I felt better at that moment than I had in any other job in my life. The feeling of connecting with a needy child, of giving him hope, of keeping the light on in his eyes, was so powerful it washed away every other frustrating aspect of the profession. Already, I understood my mission, here: Ronny wouldn't graduate from sixth grade without learning how to read. This would be the year Ronny learned to read. And I'd be the teacher to do it.