Radical (5 page)

The classroom was worse than dingy. The windows were protected on the outside by black steel grates. The windows were so dirty and yellowed that light barely came through. But at first things went relatively well. I had my kids sitting in nine clusters of four desks each to foster cooperative learning, a popular strategy at the time. Over the course of the first few weeks I came up with fun and engaging lessons, and the children seemed to respond well.

There was only one problem. All classrooms at Harlem Park were assigned a teacher's aide. Mine was a gruff woman who clearly had seen her fair share of young teachers pass through. Too intimidated to give her any direction, I pretty much let her do her own thing. Or maybe I should say, she just did her own thing. She'd come and go as she pleased, sit in the back of the room, cut out letters, or do other things she felt were appropriate.

The other thing she did was yell at the kids. I remember teaching a lesson where I read the book
Caps for Sale
. As I read the book and chanted the refrain, “Caps! Caps for sale . . . fifty cents a caaaaaap!” the kids started to join me, singing at the top of their lungs. The aide thought the children were being much too loud.

“Stop that silliness!” she screamed at the children.

I was shocked and chagrined at the same time, but mostly I was a new teacher who didn't know how to react. I thought it was great that the children were so engaged. Why squelch a student? That could ruin their enthusiasm for learning! Call me clueless. But I didn't have to worry about my aide for long.

Kurt Schmoke—a dynamic, young African American leader—was starting his second term as Baltimore mayor. He devoted himself to reforming his city's dismal public schools. The summer before I started teaching, Schmoke contracted with Education Alternatives, a consulting company, to take over some of the city's worst-performing schools. Harlem Park was among them. The company fired the aides from these schools because they didn't have college degrees. My new aide was an older white guy, very tall, dumpy, tousled hair, brushy mustache, square-framed glasses, and generally unkempt. He looked like he was at least seventy. He did not belong at Harlem Park, in the ghetto, trying to connect with second graders. Not only did he not make my life easier; he made it harder. He became a target for the kids. They threw stuff at him. They made fun of him. I lost absolute control of the class when my first aide left. While I'd initially thought she was a problem, I quickly came to realize that she was the only reason my classroom was under control.

My once-angelic students, who I worried might have their enthusiasm crushed by a harsh word, were all of a sudden spewing harsh words of their own. “Punk-ass bitch!” they'd call out to one another, as they threw pencils and books at one another. Or worse, “Screw you, Chinese bitch!” they would yell at me. Once they realized that the aide was gone and I had no classroom-management skills, the kids took over.

It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I remember walking down the steps to the cafeteria one day when one of the kids tripped and fell. Every kid who passed him kicked him, like it was a natural thing. I ran back up the stairs and said, “What are you people doing? This is crazy! Stop it!”

As I dropped the students off at lunch in the cafeteria one day, two boys started to fight. One kid had the other in a choke hold. The eyes of the kid being held were bulging out. It looked as if his blood vessels were going to pop. He was about to pass out.

“Stop!” I yelled. I tried to jam my hip between them to get some leverage to pull them apart. I couldn't imagine the level of violence eight-year-old kids were capable of.

I was helpless: I had zero respect from the kids and zero ability to strike fear into their hearts. How could I win back something I never had? What could I use as a threat? That I would tell on them to their moms? That they would get bad grades? That I would send them to the principal? They feared none of those things.

My class was infamous at a school that had experienced its share of violence and misbehavior. The kids would walk down the hallways and rap on doors and push around younger kids.

“That's Rhee's class,” the other teachers would say, with palpable distaste.

I have gone through some difficult and painful times in my life, but nothing compares to my first year as a teacher. It was the hardest time of my life, period.

Back at our home on East Baltimore Street, my friends and I commiserated and compared notes on the trials of teaching for the first time. Liz, Deepa, and Rose all had been assigned to tough inner-city schools. But Harlem Park was a special case, the worst case. My friends had more supplies, smaller classes, and better support from the administration and parents. It was a pretty well-established fact within TFA that my assignment was extremely difficult. Doubts began to creep into our conversations. We started to voice the dark side of young, idealistic college grads faced with the reality of attempting to engage and teach disadvantaged students for six and a half hours a day.

“There's nothing I can do,” I remember saying after one particularly rough day of being screamed at. “I am a well-meaning person. I work my butt off. I care about my students and their futures. But it doesn't matter.”

A
S HARD AS IT
was to take the daily frustrations and feelings of helplessness, the hardest thing was coming to the realization that, in fact, I was the problem. This became abundantly clear to me with the transformation of Tameka Tagg.

Tameka was a teeny little girl; she was also one of the main rabble-rousers in my class. She interrupted lessons and instigated trouble for the entire class. She drove me crazy. After one particularly difficult morning, I gave up and sent her to another classroom. The teacher was Bertha Haywood, a thirty-year veteran and a great teacher. She also had top-tier students. Whenever I peered into her class and saw all of her children paying rapt attention to her, I assumed it was because she had the highest-performing and best-behaved class. As it turns out, that wasn't the case.

When I walked down the hall later in the day to pick up Tameka, I stopped and looked through the little window in the door to Bertha's classroom. And there was Tameka Tagg, sitting with her hands folded, raising her hand to answer questions, smiling and keeping quiet.

And it struck me at that point: It's not her—it's me. It's not just about kids who come to school hungry, from families who don't care about education, through streets with a gauntlet of drug dealers. I was creating the kind of environment where they could act up and be crazy, but if they were in a different environment with a different teacher, they could be calm and learn. It was me!

This point was driven home by mentors from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who came to observe my class as part of our certification program. Two of the faculty pulled me aside after one class.

“You should think about changing your profession,” they said. “This classroom is not safe for the children. This environment is not good for them. They are not learning anything.”

W
HEN
I
WENT HOME
for Christmas during my first year as a teacher, my mother took one look at me and said, “You don't look so good.”

I had developed a condition—when I scratched myself these huge, crazy red welts appeared. My roommates affectionately referred to it as “the Itch.” My mom saw them and said, “There is something seriously wrong with you! This is
not
normal.”

She took me to the doctor.

“Is there any stress in your life?” he asked. “Usually these symptoms are a sign of extreme anxiety and pressure. You should avoid that to the extent possible.”

“Are you kidding me? My entire life is stressful,” I answered.

On the way home from the doctor's office, my mother said quietly, “Don't go back. Stay here. You weren't supposed to be a teacher anyway. You went to an Ivy League school. Cornell, for goodness' sake! Apply for law school in the fall and just stay with us. You'll be fine.”

Sounded good to me. Law school rather than Harlem Park? Why not?

The way I rationalized it in my head was that my kids were not better off with me in the classroom. I told myself I wasn't quitting because I couldn't handle it; I was quitting for the good of the children.

Besides, word through the first-year TFA corps was that teachers dropped out on a regular basis. Some lasted a few weeks, some a semester, many left after the first year. Maybe I just wasn't cut out to be a teacher. I started warming to the idea.

“No, lady,” my dad said as I was explaining my change of course. “You are going back. Pack your bags.”

I tried to protest. But as always, my dad's word was the last. Shang packed my bags, loaded them into the car, and sent me on my way.

W
ELTS AND ALL
, I returned to Baltimore an obsessed lady.

My new strategy was to throw spaghetti against the wall, hoping something would stick. I tried everything. I changed seating configurations. I tried every discipline system in the book. If one system didn't work, I'd introduce another a few days later. The constant changes weren't good for the kids, but I was a woman possessed. I was bent on figuring out a way to be successful.

Eventually I found a seating arrangement that actually worked. Instead of having kids sit at tables, I had them sit in a big U so that I could see what everybody was doing at all times. I could put the troublemakers in the middle, too.

Harlem Park had some excellent teachers. Their students walked through the halls in quiet, straight lines. Their kids did their homework. They were quiet in class. Bertha Haywood, who had taken Tameka Tagg into her classroom for an afternoon, was perhaps the best teacher in the school. I was reluctant to bother the veteran teachers, but one day I stopped into Ms. Haywood's classroom after school.

“Okay,” I said. “I just don't understand that child. Tameka was wreaking havoc in my class all morning. She spends a few hours in your class, and she's an angel. She returns to my room, and she's making the class nuts again. What's your secret?”

“No secret,” she said. “The first thing you have to do is establish your authority. You're the boss. They need to know that. Next, you have to keep things interesting for the kids. A classroom should be exciting for students. Every day I have one surprise planned for class that I know the children will enjoy. It keeps them engaged and motivated. They expect something fresh every day.”

“Like what?”

“Take today,” she said. “We made finger puppets. These children had never made finger puppets before. We made them to mimic characters in the book we were reading. They were totally engaged—in making the puppets and acting out the scenes in the book. And now they can take the puppets home with them. It's something they never would have anticipated.”

I was in awe. Ms. Haywood had been teaching for thirty years, and yet each night she was up trying to figure out new ways to make her kids excited about her lessons. Amazing.

That night I went home, sat in front of the TV, and made pizzas out of yellow and red paper: yellow for cheese and red for sauce. Brown paper in the shape of mushrooms and little green squares to look like green peppers. I was doing a lesson on fractions, and I wanted to surprise the kids with paper pizzas they could place into halves and quarters. Roger Schulman, another TFA teacher, came over to watch TV with us.

“What on God's green earth are you doing?” he asked.

I explained.

“You are insane,” he said. “For one lesson, you are making thirty-six individual pizzas? Each with individually crafted pepperoni and olives? Have you lost your mind?”

“Yup,” I said. “Every student gets a pizza.”

I had taken Bertha Haywood's words to heart. The next day was my first truly calm day in the classroom. The kids were fascinated and delighted with the pizzas. And they started to understand fractions.

When it came to discipline, I set up a simple rewards system. I had two chalkboards. The larger one I would use for lessons, and on the smaller one I would put the students' names—not when they were bad, but when they were good. And if they did something good, I would put a star next to their name; if you did something bad, I would erase the star. For the kids I knew were troublemakers, I would have to put their names on the board as soon as they walked in.

“Oh, thank you for putting your jacket up!” Quickly put their name on the board.

Now they had something to lose. If there was nothing to take away, then it wouldn't work, right?

And then I set up a whole economy, where at the end of the day I gave tickets for the number of stars that the kids got during the day. At the end of the week students could trade their tickets in for candy or stickers or erasers or toys.

Finally, Rhee's class was no longer wild. Well, less wild, at least.

F
ROM EARLY IN THE
school year, Rhoda Jones, the assistant principal, was sure I was going to quit. She saw me struggling to maintain order. She saw that frightened look in my eyes. I guess she marked me down as a lost cause and didn't bother to offer much help.

One day when I was at school late, planning, I snuck into the supply closet to look for some construction paper. Teachers were not permitted in there. Rhoda Jones saw the door ajar.

“What do you think you're doing?” she asked.

Busted.

I apologized and explained I needed the paper for a project I was planning for the kids.

“Next time, ask,” she said.

I walked away, downcast.

“Hold on,” she said, handing me a package of construction paper. “I see you here after school every day working on lesson plans. You are here before I arrive in the morning, too. I can tell you are trying hard, and you have lasted far longer than I had expected, to be honest. But, child, you need help.”