Relentless Pursuit (15 page)

His life had gone from carefree to crazed in a matter of months. During his senior year at BC, Hrag had been able to kick back some. After a Thursday night of partying, he'd wake up at 2 p.m. on Friday, go to his one scheduled class, and then rev up for the weekend's festivities. Now he was rising before dawn and working late into the night. He was getting five hours of sleep—if he slept at all. On top of that, for the first time in his life he had to cook and clean for himself. He felt like he was sixty years old. When he woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror, he thought,
I am my dad.

In addition to teaching five periods of biology every day, he was attending night school from four to ten two evenings a week. All recruits had to be enrolled in a credentialing program as a term of their employment by LAUSD. It helped meet No Child Left Behind requirements, and it helped blunt charges that TFA teachers were ill prepared. But grad school was a joke, every TFAer agreed. Loyola Marymount University had designed a special curriculum for busy TFAers, which got them a credential and a master's in two years—for four thousand dollars! But TFAers went to class after a long day of work, and most zoned out instead of tuning in. While the professors lectured, they were on their laptops, multitasking. They'd be catching up on e-mail, entering grades, and preparing lessons—while keeping one ear half open in case something interesting was said. Most found that very little of what LMU offered was applicable to life in the classroom. So they saw grad school as just another drain on their time and energy, and put it at the bottom of their list of priorities. Hrag had heard that the feeling was mutual. A lot of professors at LMU refused to teach TFAers. They thought they were obnoxious.

What Hrag hadn't realized before he started was that teaching was not a regular job. It enveloped his whole life. It was the first thing he thought of when he woke up, and it was on his mind on the weekends when he walked down to the beach to try to relax. All he ever thought of was school. He wasn't just a teacher—he was a referee, a counselor, a doctor—eighty things bundled into one. And that made him even more nervous. He had this thing in his stomach, this growing tightness. He told himself it was just the stress of the first couple of months, but he wasn't so sure. He read somewhere that after cops, teachers drank the most alcohol. He believed it; the job could drive anyone to drink.

After two years at Locke, he thought, he was going to be scarred. He was scarred already. He knew he would never forget the drunks on street corners he saw at 6 a.m. on the way to work, or tough little José and troubled Cale. He would always remember the kid who sat there shivering and licking his lips throughout class—
is he on drugs or just hungry?
And the gangbangers and the kids who looked like they'd been beaten. And the boy he often drove home from school because he lived so far away. He felt, too, for the kids who came to class every day to “get their learning on” against all odds. Yes, Teach For America was life-changing. He might not end up being an educator—at this point there was NO WAY—but down the line, years from now, he knew he would care about the achievement gap when 95 percent of the world did not.

Hrag lived in the little surfer town of Hermosa Beach with another TFA recruit, Mackey Brown, a guy he had known at BC. Mackey was a super-organized, very disciplined, work-like-crazy math teacher. He
never
stopped. Sometimes Hrag would beg him to slow down and take a break. And Mackey would tell him that working
was
his break. Mackey tried to keep Hrag moving, too. After classes at LMU, Mackey would insist they go to the gym. At 10 p.m., Hrag was dead tired and Mackey was ready to lift weights.

They, like so many roommates, were the Odd Couple. Hrag was constantly complaining; Mackey was unfailingly chirpy. Mackey was orderly; Hrag was kind of spacy, forever losing things. They didn't eat together, and after a while they didn't talk much, either. Mackey loved to hash out the day; Hrag couldn't bear even thinking about it. By the time he got home at night, Hrag didn't know if he could make it through the next day, much less discuss the one he had just survived. Hrag hung out with TFA friends who taught at different schools; he saw enough of the Locke teachers at work. Mackey was always working; he hardly went out at all.

But they carpooled to Locke. The routine never varied. Mackey knocked on Hrag's bedroom door at 5:30 a.m. “Hrag, you need to get up,” he'd say. In response to the silence, Mackey would keep it up, nagging him to get going. Hrag would lie in his bed and think:
Go ahead. Just go ahead. Knock on my door one more time, and I'll rip it off its hinges!
But really, he was grateful. There were mornings when Hrag would simply announce: “I'm not going!” But because Mackey was on the other side of the door waiting, he would eventually get up and get dressed and go to work.

Hrag's old college buddies noticed the changes in him. He set aside several hours every Saturday morning for e-mails and phone calls, desperately wanting to stay connected. They all took note of his newfound maturity—and the fact that he had stopped cracking all those corny jokes for which he was famous. They also said they respected what he was doing, and admired him. That felt good. The glory was there—at twenty-one, Hrag was a teacher in a position of power. By contrast, his friends' lives seemed mundane—they sat at desks, crunched numbers, drove home, watched TV, and went to sleep. Being a TFA teacher was by far the hardest thing he had ever done, but he'd pick this pressure-cooker life of his over anyone else's any day.

Hrag spoke to his parents every day. Their attitude toward TFA was changing. They were proud to have a son getting his master's while teaching full-time in an inner-city school, and at such a young age! They decided to visit him for his twenty-second birthday, on October 16. Hrag figured they came because he had been complaining so much—they must have thought he was on the verge of losing it.

When the Hamalians had first immigrated to the United States, they lived for a short time in Huntington Beach. Manuel worked repairing industrial parts through a mobile franchise company. Few men would take jobs in the inner-city neighborhoods; it was considered too dangerous. But Manuel took whatever business came his way. He ended up working in Watts nearly every day, and he made a lot of friends there. Now things had come full circle. His son's first real job in America was in Watts, too. Neither of them had known what he was in for.

The Hamalians arrived on Friday. That night they took Hrag out to dinner, then went to visit some of his mother's family. It was late when they arrived, but all the cousins had come home to meet the Hamalians. Hrag shook everyone's hand, sat down, and promptly passed out.

His parents came to school on Monday. Hrag wouldn't let them observe his fifth-period class because he was worried that the kids might act out—and he might, too. Hrag was perfectly fine with having his parents know he was having a hard time. But they had never seen him really lose it. And in fifth period he had been losing it—a lot. Just the week before he had slammed a meter stick so hard that he almost broke it. The kids loved it when they got to him. He'd see them snickering, and that would make him even angrier. It would take some kid saying “Mr. H, why are you taking your anger out on us?” to calm him down. Then he felt awful. But even Mackey reached the breaking point sometimes. Hrag was thrilled to hear that he had snapped a clipboard in three.

Manuel and Claire got to see Hrag at his best. His third-period kids were enthusiastic and totally engaged. His parents were impressed. His father, as always, made some very astute observations. Manuel had grown up in a similar community—when he and Claire were married in Beirut, snipers stood atop the church. Locke looked to him like a typical high school; the kids in Hrag's biology class behaved like typical ninth-graders.

“You think these kids are a special case,” Manuel said. “But in ninth grade, I guarantee you that you listened to at most fifty percent of what your teachers said.”

And it was true. Hrag couldn't remember half of what he supposedly learned in high school. Actually, it was worse than that. Hrag recalled that he had cruised through an entire year of ninth-grade science without listening to a single word the teacher said. When it came time for the final at the end of the year, he had freaked out and started crying.

“What's wrong with you?” Manuel had demanded.

“I don't know a thing,” Hrag had confessed.

Manuel had patiently sat him down, opened the book, and helped Hrag learn what he had missed over the course of the year. Hrag ended up getting an A.

Sometimes Hrag assumed that because his kids had been cheated all their lives, they couldn't follow directions or weren't capable of grasping what he was trying to teach. After talking to his father, he changed his mind:
No. They are fourteen. They could give a crap.

But there was a big difference. Most of these kids didn't have a Manuel or a Claire at home holding their feet to the fire, checking on homework, helping them study.

It was good to see his folks. So often in high school Hrag had resented the way his parents had tried to shelter him. He and his sister, Gareen, were kept close to home, close to their Armenian identity and roots. When they were little, there were plenty of cousins around, so it didn't really matter. But as Hrag got older and wanted to spread his wings, he chafed at the restraints Manuel and Claire imposed. Up until his junior year in high school, he was forbidden to go to parties—even the ones right across the street. His parents thought there would be drugs, sex, and alcohol—and, of course, they were right. Now Hrag was grateful for their vigilance and forgiving of their protective excesses. It was gratifying to hear them effuse over his performance in the classroom. Their affirmation made him think that maybe he wasn't such a bad teacher after all.

Hrag realized he had it a lot easier than most of the other TFAers. He, at least, had Vanessa Morris, head of the science department. Morris had taken Hrag and the other new biology teacher, Jinsue Choi, under her wing. Her style of teaching biology was inquiry-based. Because her students' literacy skills were so low, Morris rarely referred to the textbook; instead she used hands-on labs to lead her kids to discovery. She had been at Locke for five years and was part of Chad's extended circle of young activist teachers. Like them, she coaxed pretty darn good results from her students. Seeing her teach was like watching a master magician. She glided from task to task with ease, handling behavioral issues with equanimity and presenting new scientific concepts with childlike delight. The period sped by, and inevitably, by its conclusion, Morris had worked her magic—the kids had been tricked into learning.

She didn't have written-out lesson plans to give Hrag and Jinsue, but every Tuesday morning at seven o'clock she met with them for forty-five minutes to talk through her plans for the week and share the labs that would accompany her lessons. Hrag lapped it all up. At night, he and Jinsue would get on the phone and figure out how to adapt her outlines to their classrooms. Morris was incredibly generous; Hrag often spent his lunch periods in her room picking her brain. But he didn't feel right about always being on the receiving end, and he sensed that Morris didn't like the situation, either. Before long, Hrag and Jinsue, the two tech-savvy neophytes, were sharing their custom-made PowerPoints with their department chair. The collaboration felt good, and the kids seemed to be learning. Hrag's loyalty to Morris—and to Jinsue—was unshakable. Every time he contemplated quitting, he thought of how he would be letting Morris down, and leaving became unthinkable.

Hrag was one of the few TFA science teachers in the L.A. cohort to be supported by a school leader, and probably the only one able to incorporate an inquiry-based system with labs into instruction. Many of the other TFA teachers were at a complete loss. When they left institute in the summer, instead of lesson plans and mentoring, they were given a pat on the back and told: “Go!” Most taught out of the textbook, but the majority of their kids could not read at grade level, and behavior management became a huge problem. Seeing the others' struggles and mindful of how much help he was being given, Hrag saved every one of his lesson plans to pass on to next year's biology teachers. Some nights he even scribbled notes to himself about what had worked and what hadn't. He saw no reason why each new CM should have to reinvent the wheel.

Hrag bitched, but he was really enjoying the kids, and he sensed that the kids were enjoying him, too. He joked around a lot. It kept his students engaged—and kept him from dying of boredom. Every time he got strict and serious, he could tell the kids were tuning him out. Most periods—with the exception of the incorrigible fifth—took his angry outbursts to heart. When he raised his voice in disapproval, the rowdy kids would turn into docile children, frown, and put their heads down. “Let's start over,” he'd suggest. “I got off on a bad note, and so did you.” They would come around, but it would take a few minutes. They became upset, too, if he was absent. They worried that he was quitting, that he wouldn't come back.

They really
did
seem to be learning, probably more than he had in high school. Hrag had learned how to take notes in high school, and that no doubt prepared him for college. But he didn't end up knowing anything about biology, and he thought that his students did. So, on the rare occasion that he allowed himself to think about it, he decided that what he was doing was a good thing, that he was doing a good job, a job he could be proud of, and that it was something that he would look back on as a moment in his life in which he had shined. Then, quickly, he'd go back to worrying.
I feel like a commando. I go into the jungle, but the jungle keeps changing. I don't know who I'm fighting.