I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had (24 page)

Nakiya pokes her head in the door to see what’s up. “Hey, Nick,” I say. “Take a picture of us, will you?”

Brittiny turns out not to be the most willing subject. She folds her arms, hunches, and scowls, but Nakiya’s my go-to girl for all things
technical and celebratory, and she’s a pro with the Polaroid. “Get closer,” she directs us. “Hold up the present, Mr. Danza. Look at me and
smile
, Britt.”

It’s a shy smile, a little crooked, and she’s hugging her elbows as if her stomach hurts, but on balance we both look pretty happy. I know I am. We glue the picture inside the card, and Brittiny still has that smile on as she heads for eighth period, where once again, she squeaks through without fighting.

The next day she comes in beaming for real. “My great-grandma thought it was the best present she got,” she tells me proudly.

This small victory gives me a new tool. I’ll use this card trick again with Alex when his aunt has a birthday and he’s trying to get on her good side. More immediately, though, it gives me a positive base to try something different with Brittiny. I’ve been using
To Kill a Mockingbird
to direct my students to think about their own life lessons. Since the book is written from the point of view of a young child, I started by asking the kids what they remember from second grade. Did they like school? What games did they enjoy? Did they get into trouble? What adults did they like and dislike? As we’ve progressed through the book, I’ve pushed the questions toward their current life. When do they have to compromise? Where do they turn for justice? In class, I usually post these questions on the board as do-nows. Today’s question is still on the board, and I point Brittiny to it now: “What do you think it means to have courage?”

I explain that the students in my class have ten minutes to write their responses. Some write stories, and some write their thoughts, and some write in the form of letters. “There’s no right or wrong way to do it, and no right or wrong answer,” I assure her.

Brittiny bites her lip and hugs her arms. I slide her a piece of paper and a pencil. “I’ll bet you have something to say about courage.” Her smile dims. I tell her, “You don’t have to show me what you write if you don’t want to.”

She takes the pencil and gives the page a hard stare. Then she curls over the desk and begins to write this letter in her perfect, careful print:

She finishes writing, folds the paper twice, and hands it to me. “I have to meet somebody. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says quickly and gathers up her things.

I watch her scurry out the door, allowing her to escape. Then I sit at my desk and look at the paper she’s given me. I take a deep breath, not knowing what to expect but worried about what I will read. When I finish, all I can think is how much easier it was not to know. Now I have to report this to her counselor. I do, and as a result, Brittiny is moved to yet another foster home.

I want to think that she knew I’d have to report this and that that’s what she wanted me to do. But I don’t ask. In fact, even though we continue to spend time together, we never discuss any of this. She doesn’t seem to need to, and I figure, or rationalize, that she just needed me to know what she’s up against. She doesn’t bring it up with me, and I have to admit I’m happy with that arrangement. Call it taking the easy way out or letting well enough alone; I chicken out.

This is all still rolling around my mind several days later when the head of my SLC, Ms. Dixon, asks if I’m going to come back to teach again next year. I tell her honestly, “At my age, I’m not sure I want to care this much about anything.”

Ms. Dixon just smiles and sighs. “That’s what it takes, baby. That’s what it takes.”

Most afternoons on my way home from school now I stop by the gym for a workout. It’s strange lifting weights in a shirt and tie, but the grunting and groaning in the gym sounds like cheers after the moaning and groaning of my students, and the resistance of iron weights is a relief after the heavy lifting of classwork.

One day as I’m doing bench presses, a woman across the room recognizes me from the media coverage about the show and comes over to introduce herself. She’s been a teacher for several years and wants to know what I think of her profession. When I turn it around and ask her what she thinks, she’s ready and willing to tell me.

“I have a hundred and fifty students,” she vents, “five classes a day. Some are trying to get out of gangs, or have brothers who’ve been shot or killed by gangs, or fathers in prison. Some have no one—and are actually homeless.” She gets more agitated. “I try to be there for them, but it’s impossible. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. Paperwork alone! I give a quiz every week. If I spent one minute grading each one, that would be one hundred and fifty minutes, and believe me, you never spend just one minute on anything in school. So what’s left over? Does anybody ever think about that? If I don’t give kids the extra attention, they take it the wrong way. They think I don’t care. But where is all that energy supposed to come from?”

When she pauses for breath, I tell her I understand. I tell her about Alex and Phil and Gwen and Paige and Brittiny. This dilemma has to be a constant in any caring teacher’s life. How much do you get involved? How far do you probe? Can your involvement do more harm than good? What does the child really want, and what is best for him or her?

She nods. “The grunt work is overwhelming, but the hardest part of teaching is definitely the emotional grind.”

“My problem,” I confide, “is that being there not only means paying attention and extending yourself to give or get them the help they need, but it also means putting aside your own personal life to make room for their stuff. I can’t even imagine the toll this must take over a thirty-year career.”

She puts her hands on her hips. “What teacher has time for a life, let alone a salary to support one? And yet, to hear the politicians and parents scream about us, you’d think we were all running off to the Caribbean, destroying our students’ futures, and stealing the public blind.”

We finish commiserating and return to our workouts, but the issues we discussed follow me home. Some veteran teachers, who seem better able to pace themselves, have advised me to set clearer boundaries. Without limits, they say, some students will take everything out of you, and then some. Unfortunately, no matter how much training they receive, few first-year teachers seem to have this boundary thing under control. More than one hundred of the new teachers who went through orientation with me in August quit before we even got to Christmas. There has to be a better solution.

And then it comes to me. Three classes per teacher, instead of five. Teachers would have more time to prepare for their classes and follow through with each student. Their schedules would be less chaotic. Call it my own “Three-Fifths Solution.”

Expensive? Definitely. A pipe dream, sure. But nothing that money and public awareness couldn’t buy if education were truly the national priority that it needs to be.

Instead, the educational priority seems to be test scores. The sun is finally shining after the meanest, snowiest winter in Philadelphia’s history—and Philadelphia has one serious history—but a whole new
storm is looming over the annual Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test.

The statewide PSSA is the standardized test that measures students’ proficiency in reading, writing, math, and science in their junior year. Even though the PSSA is given to only one grade level, the state uses the results to assess each school’s overall Adequate Yearly Progress. Unfortunately, Northeast High did not make its all-important AYP target in 2009, so the pressure to excel in 2010 is intense. Every class will have an important role to play as the school prepares first for the practice test and, a few weeks later, for the real deal.

As if the administration weren’t jumpy enough about test results, one of the teachers sets off a tempest by telling his students, “Maybe we should all just not do well, and then the administration would be fired.” It’s an offhand remark, probably meant as a joke, but when it gets back to Principal Carroll, she is not amused. She orders every teacher in the school to a special meeting in the auditorium.

“It won’t just be the administration that’s fired if your students don’t demonstrate progress,” she warns us. “All our jobs are at risk. If we fail to achieve AYP, Northeast could become a Renaissance School. Anybody here not know what that means?” Everyone knows, but she tells us anyway. “It means we go down as a failed school. It means the superintendent takes over, everyone here gets fired, and the school starts over under a private contractor. They might even turn Northeast into a charter school.”

Fortunately, it turns out that the person who made the offending remark was a first-year teacher. When this gets around, it lowers the temperature a bit; what does a first-year teacher know, after all? He hasn’t invested years—decades—in this often thankless career. He hasn’t been through the union and contract battles, and he has no idea what a truly bad principal even looks like.

But the next day in every teacher’s mailbox sits an anonymous
letter deriding the principal and urging the faculty to speak out against the administration. This time my number one suspect is an older teacher who’s always gassing off in the teachers’ lounge and in the hallways about how many times he’s sued the administration and the district. This guy strikes me as someone with a persecution complex, and I cannot figure out what he’s doing here. He’ll loudly tell anyone that he’d never consider sending his own kids to Northeast, and in fact he homeschooled them. “This principal and the one before her are criminal and worse,” he declares. Whenever I see him, he’s filling the air with plenty of sound and fury, but he never seems to notice that nobody’s listening.

Ms. Carroll calls another meeting, and most of the experienced teachers speak up in support of her. Job security is one of the few benefits a teaching career promises, and they’d like to hang on to theirs. For everyone’s sake, we all agree to make sure our junior class does as well as possible on the PSSAs. Even though the real exam won’t be given until next month, the practice test is a critical dry run, and the whole school will take it as seriously as if it were the real thing. To minimize distractions as much as possible for the eleventh graders taking the test, kids in ninth, tenth, and twelfth grades will have to stay in their homerooms while the exam is administered. My job, since I have no official homeroom, is to proctor a test room.

The morning of the practice test I arrive at school early and go to the office for my room assignment and to pick up the sample test forms. The head of the Math Department, Chuck Carr, is in charge of administering the exam. Mr. Carr is large and sturdy, with white hair combed along a precise part. Ordinarily he trudges through the halls with a look of resignation, but today he seems energized as he sets the teachers up with their testing materials and directs them where to get calculators and anything else the students might need. This is serious business.

Mr. Carr and I have an interesting relationship. At the beginning of the year, he wasn’t too sure about me. Actually, he was sure. He shuffled into my classroom one day early on, sat down, and peered at me through his glasses. “Are you here to be a teacher,” he asked, “or to act the part of a teacher?” When I failed to answer immediately, he continued, “Is this something you choose to do because you want to make a difference and you know you can, or is this just another acting job?”

I’d been sitting at my desk working on a lesson plan. “I’m here to try to make a difference,” I said, “and I know I can’t do that if I’m just acting the part. I’m scared stiff, but I want to do this and I do realize the responsibility I am assuming.”

Then Mr. Carr shot back the tough question, “Will you be back next year?”

I hadn’t been teaching for more than a few days. “I want to see how this year goes before I commit to another,” I stalled. Then I tried to lighten it up. “And heck, you might not want me back.”

Chuck Carr pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with careful deliberation. “What I want you to understand, Mr. Danza, is that teaching is my life’s work and the life’s work for many of us here. Whether you’re here for two weeks, two months, or two years, make sure you keep that in mind.” And with that he gathered up his books and folders and made his way to the door, where he stopped and looked back over his broad shoulder. “I wish you luck, Mr. Danza.”

Well, I’ve made it through eight months, anyway. And today I’m also armed with a bag of Lynn Dixon’s lucky test pencils. “They have a spell on them,” she said as she gave them to me first thing this morning, “and they say ‘Superstar’!”

At first the test seems to go well. Attendance is good, which is the initial hurdle, since kids can’t do well if they’re not in school. The students in my room stay with it, and most complete each of
the sections. Only two boys have some math problems left at the end. When they ask to go back and finish them after completing the English section, I don’t see any problem. I figure, we still have time and every little bit of extra effort will help us meet our AYP.