Relentless Pursuit (20 page)

After reviewing Dave's file, Samir contacted his TFA roommates. He wanted their insights into why Dave was leaving, and how, or if, he might be persuaded to stay. He also wanted to gauge whether they were wobbly, too. After talking to them, Samir was confident that Dan Ehrenfeld, another English teacher at Locke, was solid. But he discovered that Dave's other roommate, Grant, was also thinking about leaving.

Samir felt terrible. TFA's national retention rate over two years was 88 percent. Los Angeles's was higher. There was a lot of pressure from headquarters to raise the national retention rate; there was a lot of pressure from downtown Los Angeles to maintain its impressive record. By mid-December, something like seven CMs from the L.A. region had quit. Dave was the second TFAer to leave Locke alone—earlier Allison Momot, another first-year English teacher, had resigned for medical reasons. Now people were warning him to watch out for Fieldsteel as well.

The rumor was that she might not return after the Christmas break. Samir had not explicitly asked her if she was thinking of leaving the corps, but he did ask her how she was doing, whether she was feeling supported, how he could help her. If he had learned anything from Dave's situation, it was how important constant communication was. He would never again assume that because he hadn't heard from a CM, everything was okay. With fifty CMs to feed and water, he had been too busy to do a weekly check-in. That was going to change.
How am I to know what's going on in their minds? I don't even know if they trust me to be somebody they can confide in.

In his gut, he didn't think Fieldsteel would leave. She was so good, and he didn't think she'd be putting in the effort she was if she wasn't getting some satisfaction, some sense that she was having an impact. But, then again, he had never suspected Dave would bail. He had to be careful. With Buehrle and Momot gone, it was two down, and who knew how many more to go!

Neither Chad nor TFA could change Buehrle's mind. Buehrle told the SE folks he was packing it in, and the word spread like wildfire. Some of his students cried. When the other first-years heard, they were very supportive. Most of the other teachers at Locke were not as sanguine. They saw him as leaving his kids high and dry, and screwing his colleagues to boot. The anti-TFA lobby at Locke took Buehrle's desertion as further evidence of the dangers of hiring TFA teachers.
Typical. They come and they go. They are not committed to this community. They end up doing more harm than good.

But nothing surprised Chad more than Dr. Wells's response, when Chad said, “I've got some bad news. I got the resignation of Buehrle effective December sixteenth.”

Wells didn't skip a beat, recalls Chad. “That's an opportunity,” said Wells. “Because I've observed Buehrle and he's pathetic. This is a chance to get someone else.”

Chad was speechless. He was expecting an administrator-to-administrator conversation about how they had made mistakes in not supporting the kid. Not this! Because
(a) Buehrle is not pathetic, and (b) Where in the world does he think we can get someone good in there to take his place? We already have two permanent subs working in the English department!

Then he wondered:
Could he have Buehrle mixed up with another teacher?

CHAPTER SEVEN

What the Hell Am I Doing?

Taylor was one of the first in the corps to know that Dave Buehrle was planning his Great Escape. She and Dan, Dave's roommate, hung out together. The three of them had gone to dinner one night toward the end of October, and Dave had told them then that he was quitting. Taylor admired Dave. The administration loved him, and he was regarded as one of the better TFA recruits at Locke. He got there early and stayed late. He was still working flat out for Locke, even when he knew he was going to resign! Taylor thought his kids were lucky to have had him, if only for a semester. But boy, his leaving was going to cause a lot of trouble. No one would want to blame it on Chad Soleo, but you had to think that if Chad hadn't given the poor guy four preps, he might not be leaving, and his kids might not be looking at half a year with a long-term sub—or worse, one of the crummy tenured teachers Locke couldn't get rid of.

Taylor worried about how the news would be received. There was a real stigma attached to quitting. It wasn't so much about not having the right stuff, though there was some of that. No, it was more about the kids. They got to you. It was as if they were your own children, so leaving them became unimaginable. How do you quit when these kids are depending on you? When they worry when you're out a day, scared that you won't come back? Taylor could never do it. But she wasn't about to second-guess Dave.

Dave believed they were all chasing something they could never catch. TFA, he said, trumpeted the success of teachers making “significant gains,” and because the CMs are all psycho, and because they have always been told they can do anything they set their minds to, they chase this impossible goal, running themselves ragged to change the world.
But on what distant planet?
The reality, he said, is you can't force kids to make significant gains. There are so many other factors involved, and what are significant gains, anyway? And what is supposed to happen to your own life while you're tilting at windmills? Are you just supposed to put it on hold? Dave and his fiancée couldn't do it; they were miserable. “The TFA lifestyle is not sustainable,” he concluded.

He's right,
Taylor thought,
the lifestyle isn't sustainable.
She felt good about what she was doing, but she was overwhelmed. With the expectations of Locke, TFA, LMU, and even the UCLA literacy coaches at school, there was no time in her day for a social life. Sometimes, she wished she worked just for LAUSD and not for TFA, because LAUSD didn't make so many demands on a teacher. It was hard to bad-mouth TFA when the organization had given her such a wonderful opportunity. But she'd never been worked so hard—or been so emotionally drained. Like all the other CMs, Taylor was used to being good at whatever she tried. Now she thought:
I suck. I am a first-year teacher who doesn't know how to teach. I don't know how to be good at this.

Her meetings with Samir left her feeling lousy. Even so, she would take his notes and put them on the table in her bathroom as a reminder of the things she had to improve upon. Just looking at them made her feel bad. She figured she could work twenty-four hours a day and still not be good enough. TFA was like the parent you could never please. She knew she was falling into an anorexic mind-set. When she wasn't reminding herself to be careful, her mother was. “Taylor, you're not trying to be the best, are you?” she would fret.

One Wednesday in early November, Taylor thought for the first time:
You know, I don't want to be here.
A week later, she drove home in tears. Teaching was challenging enough; now she had to deal with racial and cultural tensions that had been building in her classroom since mid-October.

It all started the morning she found the words “brown pride” scribbled all over her classroom. The tagging enraged her. She felt violated, as if someone had broken into her home.

Gustavo, one of the few Latino kids on the football team, ratted the taggers out. It was two girls—one of whom, Lucia, was a favorite of Taylor's. The other was a tough gangbanger named Estrella. The pair ditched school for two days afterward. When they returned, Taylor was ready for them.

“As far as I'm concerned, you were tagging on my desks!” she charged, over their vehement denials. “You are a couple of liars. I
know
it was you. You are not touching my stuff! Get out! It's your choice. Go to the dean's office or Mr. Sampson's class next door.”

When they returned with the one-hundred-word essay she required for admittance back into her class, Taylor handed them graffiti remover and ordered them to scrub the desks. She stood with one arm on the door. “If you have attitude, I don't need you here. Go. Transfer out!” They cleaned the desks and stayed. Not long after that, Estrella got beaten up in a fight and was out of school for a while with her injuries. When she came back, Taylor simply said, “I'm sorry about what happened. Let's get you caught up.” They'd been friends since then.

But the tensions among her students continued. The day she finally broke down and cried, she'd had to mediate three separate incidents with clear racial and cultural overtones. It was a nightmare. The first occurred when a Latino kid who rarely showed up took the seat normally occupied by Mighty Mikel, a little black kid with a big personality and a propensity for anger. “Nigga, you get the fuck outta my fuckin' seat, motherfucker!” Mikel demanded. Taylor threw Mikel out of the room without even giving him a destination or an assignment. During the next period, an explosive fight erupted between a black girl, one of Taylor's best students, whom she had chosen to be a class tutor, and a Hispanic boy. This time, both were ejected from class. The third incident was the one that made her cry: a girl fight was planned for right after school in the alley of 109th Street. Taylor kept one of the putative street wrestlers, Breana, after school.

“I heard about the fight,” Taylor told her. “I know where it is, and I called the cops. Your friends are big blabbermouths. You are fourteen years old! And you fight! You have to be crazy, Breana! I don't see a good future for you! What can I do to help you?” Taylor was in the girl's face, competing with the incessant knocking on the door and the school-yard chant beyond it: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Breana promised to reform. The fight never went down. The cops followed the kids there and broke it up before it could begin.

These kids had so much anger. Their short fuses freaked Taylor out. Even the girls were explosive—even the ones you didn't think had it in them sometimes erupted. Through her tears, Taylor made some decisions. The next unit she taught would be about race. The other teachers were doing Hemingway and Anne Frank. Not Taylor. She needed to address the serious cultural issues in her classroom.

In her graduate class at LMU, one text theorized that the educational system in the United States was created for the white hegemonic culture and could not accommodate or appreciate the needs of the Hispanic student, who too often dropped out in frustration as a result. LMU—and TFA—were big into multicultural textbooks, and Taylor knew that all kids want to read things that remind them of themselves. She was afraid that her instruction until then had been too white. From now on, her classes were going to confront racial issues head-on.

Her epiphany coincided with a two-day break from the classroom. The first day would be spent in professional development with the other ninth-grade teachers. On the second day she was going on a TFA-sponsored “excellent school” visit to Marlborough, an exclusive all-girls campus in tony Hancock Park. The only thing Taylor knew about the school was what she had gleaned while in the hospital. She had the impression that Marlborough was a feeder school for the UCLA eating-disorder unit.

But now Marlborough was a revelation. Its halls were strewn with backpacks. The concept of leaving a bag in a hallway unattended was mind-boggling to Taylor. But that was just the beginning. The first classroom she visited had no desks. The girls were sitting on sofas arranged in a semicircle and discussing epic metaphors in
The Odyssey.
They didn't use a whiteboard, and wrote in their notebooks as they went. It was like a college class. The instruction was literature-based. Taylor watched in amazement as ninth-grade girls engaged in real discussion.

When she returned to Locke, the kids knew right away that something was up. They were uneasy. She told them that she had gone to visit another school. They immediately assumed she was looking to leave Locke. “You leaving school? You going? You like that school? Were the kids quiet there? Do you like them better?” The questions came so rapidly she couldn't answer them all.

“I'm not going anywhere,” she said. In fact, she was just getting started. She was going to push her students to a higher level. The rest of the world might think they were dumb, but Taylor knew better. They were crazy smart.

She had taken away a lot from her day at Marlborough. For starters, she was going to rearrange the desks in her classroom so that the space was circular and more conducive to discussion. To enhance comprehension, she was going to introduce close readings, which would require that she stop and ask questions about the text as students read aloud. The questions would stimulate conversation and make the students think critically about what they were reading.

Taylor understood that much of what Marlborough was doing assumed prior knowledge and that classroom management was not an issue there. So she was not surprised when her first stab at a meaningful conversation with her Locke ninth-graders went sideways fast. There were some kids she just couldn't shut up, and there was nothing more disheartening than to have a kid raise his hand out of nowhere, only to get drowned out by someone else talking over him. But she could see right away that the kids were more engaged, and she knew the close readings would make them examine the text more critically. As far as classroom management went, she decided to take the advice of one of her LMU profs. She was going to treat them like adults in the hope that they would act like adults. No longer would she send kids to the dean's office, or even to another colleague's room to write an essay as punishment. Now, when a kid misbehaved, she would just say: “If you feel the need to step outside, go on out and come back when you feel better and are ready to learn.”

For the first close read, Taylor picked
Always Running
by Luis Rodríguez, a book about a boy who emigrates from Mexico with his family and settles near Locke High School, where he joins a gang. Praised by TFAers and the mainstream press for its raw depiction of life among Los Angeles's gangs, the book was banned by some school districts, including LAUSD. But Taylor didn't know that. She assumed she couldn't find copies of the book in the school book room because it was so disorganized, so she photocopied each chapter as they went along.

She started the book with a class discussion guided by four statements about immigration. The first was:
Immigration is an easy, painless process.

Challenging hands shot up.

Selena said, “I disagree. Some people cross over and die.”

“I got papers,” Alfredo volunteered.

“Why do you say that?” Taylor asked. “Do you think people will accuse you of being illegal if you don't agree that immigration is easy?”

“I do,” he said.

“It's not that easy, because you could get shot,” Ricardo opined.

“They got rifles that go
pop pop.
You don't jump quickly, you dead.”

When Taylor asked rhetorically if any of them knew someone who had immigrated to the United States, they all laughed.

The next statement:
Americans embrace and accept all who choose to immigrate to the U.S.

“I don't agree,” Mariana said. “That is not true.”

“I disagree,” Alfredo said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger—they were gonna give us a license but he decided no. He's an idiot, since he's an immigrant, too.”

Xavier said Schwarzenegger was from England. Alejandro said no, he was from Japan. And then Ricardo asked Taylor if she embraced immigrants.

“Yes, my family came from Russia,” she replied. “My family was Jewish. They came from nothing.”

“Didn't they kill people? Did they get to meet Hitler?” they wanted to know.

Statement number three:
Growing up in Watts is difficult.

“I agree,” said Eleesha. “People dying young, getting killed.”

“Ah, that happens everywhere,” said Alejandro. “It happens here—not every day.”

“What if you walked in Beverly Hills, would it be the same?” Taylor asked.

“The same thing could happen, but even worse,” said Alfredo. “You have to go on the freeway.”

Taylor taught
Always Running
until she got a visit from her administrator, Mrs. Jauregui, who reluctantly informed her that the book was not district-approved for ninth-graders. It was too racy. Though the kids were really into it, Taylor stopped teaching it as instructed. But she thought,
I can't believe I could get into trouble for teaching a great book while other teachers sleep at their desks.

         

The Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend was hard for Hrag. He had flown out of Los Angeles the Wednesday before, as soon as school was finished, excited to be going home for the first time since June. Thanksgiving had always been his favorite holiday; it was the
whatever
holiday. So relaxing, no pressure; all you had to do was eat deep-fried turkey with all the trimmings plus a side of lamb, Armenian-style, and pass out. Hrag had obliged. He felt like he was home from college. He parked himself in front of the TV. He had assumed that he'd hit the local bars every night, but when he got home he didn't want to go out. He just wanted to see his parents and sister.
And to stop thinking about teaching.
His family was dying to hear all about his experiences in the hood, but he refused to talk about it.