Radical (4 page)

As I completed my senior year at Cornell and prepared to graduate, I imagine my classmates saw me as an enigma—with good reason.

I had cultivated my radical side. And by the time I had taken more courses in the history of oppression, I had the substance to support my innate rebelliousness. At a rally for gay pride, I was in the crowd when one of the speakers asked if anyone had something to say. I surprised myself by taking the microphone and telling Asian gays to come out of their shells and free themselves from the bonds of their upbringing. It was time, I said, to speak out, for ourselves and other oppressed people.

But I was also a sorority girl, albeit not a very good one. I was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, the nice girls' sorority.

And I was the perfect, subservient, demure Asian waitress at night—because I needed cash.

An enigma to some, perhaps, but I didn't feel a tension within. The radical and the practical never seemed an odd combination to me. They were different parts of my personality. Somehow they would come together—in the classroom.

2

The Heart of Teaching

I
t was a blessing in disguise. I had been called down to an administrative meeting for one of my special-needs students. Usually teachers abhorred these bureaucratic meetings, and I certainly didn't relish them, but I needed a break. Day in and day out, I struggled with my students. It seemed like it didn't matter what I said or did. . . . Nothing worked with my kids. They simply wouldn't listen. I would routinely spend the day alternating between screaming at the children, bribing them, and giving them the silent treatment for their misdeeds. None of it worked.

So when the office called me down for the meeting over the intercom and sent the librarian in to cover my class, in all honesty I almost did a little jig. “A break!” I thought, and I grabbed my folders. As I was getting organized, the librarian walked in. The kids were going nuts as usual, and she raised her eyebrow as she cased the joint. Her mere presence caused the children to calm a bit.

“Unfortunately, I have to go to this special education meeting,” I explained. “I shouldn't be more than an hour. Thank you so much for doing this.”

“No problem,” she answered back, cracking her gum. “Take your time. We'll be just fine.”

“I'm not sure if you've heard or not,” I half whispered, “but my kids are kind of difficult. They can get unruly.”

“Oh, don't worry about that. These children know who I am. And they know I don't play that,” she replied.

“Yeah, right,” I thought. “You don't know my kids.”

I scurried through the door and down the stairwell into the meeting room. After approximately sixty mind-numbing yet strangely joyful minutes, the meeting was over, and I headed back to my room. I walked slowly, steeling myself for reentry. When I got a few feet away from my classroom door, I paused. Oddly, there was no noise coming from the room. No screaming, no yelling, no crashes.

“Did she take them outside?” I wondered.

I walked into the room and was startled to see my entire class hard at work. They were copying down on their paper sentences that the librarian had written on the board. The librarian was sitting at my desk, leafing through a pamphlet, cracking her gum.

“Uh . . . how were they?” I asked, with some trepidation.

“Oh, they were great. Just great. Weren't you, children?” she asked.

“Yes, Ms. Blackwell,” they singsonged in unison.

Ms. Blackwell picked up her purse and headed out the door. She hadn't even crossed through the door when my kids started up again. They were yelling at each other, hitting one another, and throwing things across the room in record time.

“Wait a minute!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Interestingly, the children ceased fire long enough to hear my plea.

“Can someone
please
explain to me why it is that you can behave like that for Ms. Blackwell but you can't do that for me?” I asked.

Anthony, one of my chief mischief makers, stood up. “It's because
she
knows what she's doing,” he said matter-of-factly. And then turned to his neighbor to resume their arm-wrestling match.

T
HE WINTER BEFORE
I graduated from Cornell, while at home during break, I had a rare day off from serving sandwiches at Grumpy's and decided to relax at home. I grabbed a Snapple and a bag of Doritos, switched on the TV in the family room, and became one with the couch.

We had four channels in those days, and my parents must have been watching the Public Broadcasting Service station, so that's what came on as I relaxed. The little screen showed scenes from a school where young people my age were teaching. It turned out to be a documentary on a brand-new outfit called Teach For America. That it even caught my eye was pure luck.

One of the first scenes showed a principal taking a young guy out into the hallway.

“You're not very good at this,” she told him. “Maybe you're not cut out for teaching. I'm afraid I have to fire you.”

But what really got my attention was the next scene: It showed a young Korean guy teaching science to a class of mostly African American students. He was conducting an experiment where he poured water into a tube half filled with sand and rocks. The rocks settled to the bottom first, demonstrating how heavier material settled.

“He's really good,” I thought to myself. “Here's this nerdy Korean guy rocking it in the classroom. I figured he'd be the one getting fired.”

Back at Cornell, I started to see posters for TFA information sessions. They showed a young African American guy teaching kids. It asked: “How Can I Afford Not To Make This Work?”

That touched my twenty-one-year-old soul. It took me back to my days volunteering in Mary Weiss's classroom. It spoke to my father's constant advice that we give back to the community. Perhaps I could put my newfound social consciousness to the test in the classroom. I loved being around children. I decided to give TFA a shot.

“Oh,” said my friend Jenny Kim. “That's kinda weird, isn't it?” She was being the good Korean girl, heading to med school. Many of the friends I had taken Japanese language classes with were going to Japan to take jobs in the private sector. They had taken that class with that end in mind. Their response to TFA: “Hmm.”

Missy, my college roommate, was the most supportive of the idea. “You should absolutely do it,” she said. A couple of my do-gooder friends were applying to TFA, too. So I signed up for an interview and prepared to compete for a job.

I had to design a lesson that I would teach to the other interviewees and TFA staff, who would listen and grade my skills. I chose to teach a lesson in how to say “Hello” in Japanese, which isn't that simple, since there are two forms of speech: formal and informal. I launched into the lesson by using two of the students interviewing with me as subjects. Even then I had a knack for hooking in the class. I held their attention, made them repeat the phrase in various ways, and came away feeling pretty good.

The second part of the application process didn't go so well. I had a one-on-one interview with a TFA staffer named Regina Sullivan. I left the interview thinking she didn't like me. We just didn't hit it off.

“I'm not going to get that job,” I told my roommate.

I started reviewing my graduate school options when . . . to my surprise, the acceptance letter arrived from TFA.

Inza was surprised, too.

“Are you crazy?” she asked. “We didn't send you to an Ivy League college so you could become a teacher! This is absolutely unacceptable. There is no way that we will allow you to do this!”

I couldn't believe it. I looked toward my dad plaintively. He had always been my champion, and he was much more civic-minded than my mother. My mother and I both held our breath as we waited for him to weigh in. He thought for a few minutes with a pensive look on his face. Finally, he spoke.

“This would be a good thing for you to do. Give it a try,” Shang said.

“Yuh-Bo!”
my mother shrieked, hurling “honey” in Korean as an epithet. They left the room, and I could hear them going at it. Shang returned.

“She's going,” my father declared. And that was that. My father had spoken, and his word was the last.

The problem was, I was ambivalent, too. I am not much of a planner. I never knew what I wanted to do from one stage in life to another. I always admired people who, from when they were very little, knew they wanted to be a doctor or a writer or a teacher. That has never been me. When I was in high school I didn't know where I wanted to go to college. When I was in college I didn't know what I wanted to do after graduation. But I knew that I liked working with children, I believed that public education was important, and I figured this would buy me some time. I accepted the job.

A
FTER A QUICK BREAK
at home in Toledo for two weeks, I boarded a plane from Detroit to Los Angeles, where I would spend the rest of the summer training to be a teacher—kind of.

I remember getting off the plane and seeing people with TFA signs. We were funneled onto buses. I got into one of the front seats and stared straight ahead. Behind me the bus was packed with white kids flirting and yammering. I rolled my eyes and thought, “Good Lord, this is like summer camp.”

We arrived at California State University's campus at Northridge, where TFA held its summer institute. At the dorm I lugged my bag into a two-bedroom “pod” with a common room. No one was there, but one bed had bags and stuff on it. It looked to me, based on the pictures on her desk, like it belonged to a preppy white kid, so I moved my things into the other bedroom. My eventual roommate, Deepa Purohit, turned out to have come from Cleveland, and we even had a few friends in common. The white girl was Liz Peterson, a true California girl from Long Beach. She roomed with Rosemary Ricci, who was from outside of Philadelphia. Within a few days together, I had thrown my juvenile biases aside, the four of us grew very close, and Liz Peterson became one of my best friends.

We were in TFA's third cohort, and the program was still evolving. It was neither efficient nor particularly effective. We woke up every day at 5 a.m., boarded buses, and rode for hours through traffic to Pasadena. We did practice teaching for a half day and then returned to Northridge for more training and seminars. I'm not sure I learned much that summer, and I didn't feel prepared for what was to come. If you put five hundred recent college graduates back in dorms for the summer, what you get is indeed summer camp. It was a scene. Sure, it was grueling, and we did get exposed to the classroom, but we mostly had a lot of fun.

At the end of the institute, we started to get our teaching assignments. Liz, Rose, Deepa, and I were all detailed to Baltimore, so we headed east and found a house together. One by one each TFA corps member was offered a position in a school and prepared for beginning the school year with their class. I waited. And waited. Baltimore was not a city where I especially wanted to wind up. Still, I was a bit disappointed and worried when everyone got a job but me. Even two days before school started, I had yet to be hired. I figured it was mostly because I was Korean. Korean-black dynamics have always been a bit strained. If you are the African American principal in hard-core Baltimore, you are not thinking, “Yeah, that Korean girl is the one I want to hire. Let me take her!”

The day before orientation for the school year, a woman from the central office called and said, “Well, you still haven't been placed as a teacher. But you have to go someplace, since we are paying you. So go to this address: 1401 West Lafayette Avenue. The school is Harlem Park. They will be waiting for you.”

They weren't.

I
WILL NEVER FORGET
pulling up in front of Harlem Park. The school was in the middle of a very downtrodden, dangerous neighborhood. It looked large and impenetrable from the outside. Bars on dingy windows. Trash blowing up against chain-link fences. I was terrified. I found my way to the office and told them I was reporting there until I was assigned to a teaching position. They had no idea who I was or why I was there, so I sat for an hour in the ninety-degree heat in the waiting area. I must have looked pretty pathetic and bedraggled when a teacher walked in the office and took pity on me.

“Well hello there,” she said. “What brings you to Harlem Park?”

It was Everlyn Strother, a Harlem Park veteran and one of the school's best teachers. I said I was waiting to be assigned to a school and that the central office had sent me here.

“C'mon, c'mon, come with me to my room. Follow me, baby,” she said.

Her room was a model of organization and preparation. She sat me down and started moving around books, setting up workstations, and making sure posters were secured to the walls. As she did her thing, she asked me about my training and what I hoped to accomplish. And why I was so scared.

“Look, baby, you gotta know what you're getting into here,” she said. “You can't look as scared as you do now. You have to be confident. I remember being in your shoes when I first started teaching. I was just as scared. Be patient. Hang in there. Remember, they're children. And come to me if you need help.”

Hmmm. Just like my grandmother said, “Little kids. How hard can that be?”

The principal finally swept through and motioned me to her office. I tried explaining the situation to her, that I wouldn't be there long—only until the central office found a school for me. After my long-winded speech she looked a little exasperated.

“Second or fifth?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” I responded.

“I have two openings. Second grade or fifth grade. Which one do you want?”

I quickly had to switch gears.

“This summer I student-taught in a second-grade classroom in Los Angeles,” I said. “I was pretty effective with the students and thought they responded well to me, so I think second grade is probably better.”

“Fine,” she said, looking wholly unimpressed and uninterested in my rationale. “Second it is.”

The truth was, of course, I was worried and figured second graders were a lot smaller and younger than fifth graders, so I stood a better chance.

Harlem Park was a huge school and had four second-grade classes. They assigned students to different classes according to their academics and behavior, a practice called tracking. It was a rite of passage that the new teachers were assigned to the students on the lowest track. Therefore, I was assigned second grade, track four: the students with both the lowest achievement and the highest discipline problems. They had been together since kindergarten. And there were thirty-six of them in the class.