Relentless Pursuit (22 page)

Hrag steered the conversation toward the class stem-cell project that would culminate in a research paper and the fourth annual Locke High School stem-cell debate. It was important that the boy do well on the paper, Hrag counseled. Norman listened intently. His sister was a nurse. School was important. Norman turned to his young charge:

“Bio: PAID!” he declared, slamming the desk with his fist as if stamping a bill. “Math,” he continued, with another pound of the desk.

“PAID! Talking in class: McDONALD'S!”

Hrag struggled not to laugh. The stamp he used on the kids' papers just happened to say PAID.

Norman asked about attendance. Hrag went down his roll and reported that the kid had missed class two times. Norman's face clouded over in anger. Rechecking, Hrag realized he had confused him with another student.

“You're a lucky boy,” said Norman, after Hrag corrected his mistake. “You were about to get cut!”

Whoa!

The exchange ended when Norman declared Hrag the best of all the teachers he had visited that night and urged him to call him anytime. But Norman got Hrag thinking:
What the hell am I doing? By teaching them some biology facts, are they really learning anything they will ever get
PAID
for? When they don't even know how to read?

When Hrag graduated from high school, he might not have been able to give an exact definition of a DNA polymerase, but he could take a concept, analyze it, discuss it, and then write about it. At Locke, he was teaching his kids some facts about biology, so he probably was closing their
knowledge
gap. But the achievement gap?
When somebody doesn't know how to read, or is reading at a third-grade level, that's not a gap, that's a gigantic, stone-wall barrier.
Just thinking about it depressed him. Sometimes he wanted to throw the biology book out the window, close up shop, and show them how to write a sentence.

         

Sometimes Rachelle felt lost at Locke, and she had nowhere to go for help. She was not assigned to a small school, and she didn't feel like a full-fledged member of the biology department. The graduate school courses she was taking at California State University, Dominguez Hills, tended to be too theoretical, and Samir Bolar, though obviously intelligent and perfectly nice, had no experience in special ed. That left the special ed department, which was totally dysfunctional. There had been no coordinator during the first few months of the school year. When one was finally named, her focus was on completing IEPs, not showing Rachelle and the other four new TFA special ed teachers the ropes.

The other new TFAers assigned to special ed were called resource teachers, and their job was to give one-on-one assistance to students who had been mainstreamed into general ed classes. It was difficult; the resource position was new to Locke and the TFA teachers were making it up as they went along. But they bonded over the frustrations and the challenges. By midyear, they were a formidable fighting force at the school. They demanded a special room for their students and ruffled many feathers in the process. When the administration finally found them an old art room, they spent their weekends renovating and painting it. Rachelle liked them and admired their ferocious advocacy on behalf of their kids, but she wasn't part of their team. Among the other first-year TFA special ed teachers, she was pretty much a one-woman band.

So every night Rachelle went home to the apartment she shared with two other TFAers and spent at least an hour and a half puzzling over what to teach the next day. Even on the rare occasion when she felt like she had put together a good lesson plan, she arrived at school feeling apprehensive. As the morning progressed and period four loomed larger, the sense of foreboding grew and deepened. Things there had gone from bad to worse.

Some days—too many days—she just wanted to quit. She would be teaching, or trying to, and the whole time she would be thinking that she didn't want to be there:
Fine. Walk out. Go. It's okay.

But she just couldn't do it. So she found herself living day to day, longing for the weekends and then finding them disappointing, too. She had met some nice people through TFA. Like Hrag. He made her laugh; he always looked miserable, too. But she thought some of the others were geeks. She had hated the cheerleading at the opening ceremony, and now she hated all the earnestness. Everyone was so uptight. With the TFA crowd, all you did was sit around and talk about students and how you were all going to close the achievement gap.

Things weren't much better outside the TFA circle. She didn't feel like she fit into the L.A. scene. When she went to a club in Hollywood with a few friends, they were turned away. She figured it was because they weren't emaciated enough and didn't look like supermodels. She had always had a boyfriend in high school—and one in college, too, until her junior year when she studied abroad in Italy. It would have been nice to have a boyfriend now. But she didn't know how to meet people as a teacher, and besides, she didn't have time for a relationship. She figured this was just going to be that kind of year—an all-work, no-play deal.

So she scheduled trips to break things up. In fact, she had missed a few days of school and was feeling guilty about it. She had taken time off for a trip to New York, and she had returned to Philadelphia for Penn's homecoming weekend. The surprising thing was, when it came time to go, she hadn't really wanted to leave the kids. Of course, she was dying to see her old friends. (She wore a fake engagement ring to Penn to see what kind of reaction she would get.) But once there, she missed her students.

It was weird. She had thought it would be easy to slip back into college life. After all, she had been gone only five months. But so much had changed in that time. She found it strange just to spend a whole weekend going out and hearing people speak proper English. She realized it must have sounded snobby, but it was true: hearing grammatically correct English was shocking. Sometimes even she didn't speak right. After having spent so much time in Watts, she often found herself mimicking the kids' speech patterns and reminding herself that “Do you feel me?” is not a standard way of saying “Do you understand?”

Everyone at Penn knew that she was in TFA. They all wanted to hear her war stories, but they really had no idea. None of them actually wanted to cross the boundary and see for themselves firsthand. It was just:
Tell us more! Tell us more stories about your ghetto kids.

The reality was, she loved her ghetto kids, and she believed that what she was doing was valuable and cool. She didn't know how much they were learning, but she was definitely connecting—especially with her soccer girls. Originally, she had planned just to help out with the girls' JV team, but when she arrived for the first practice, she was introduced to the girls as a coach. She wasn't able to make all the practices or even the games because of graduate school, but when she was there, she worked the girls hard, and they responded.

She may have been their coach, but they called her
guerita,
Spanish for “pretty little white girl.” They didn't seem to have any adults in their lives to talk to; they began to confide in Rachelle. The Latina soccer girls came from very traditional Catholic families. Many of them wouldn't even use tampons because of their religion, but they were very curious about sex. They wanted to know what a real relationship with a boy was like, what was normal, what was appropriate for a boy to say and do. Rachelle counseled them much as she herself had been counseled: “No means no,” she would say. “For real. If you say no, there is no argument, no discussion.” She knew that many of their mothers had been children themselves when they had their first babies, so somebody wasn't saying no.

There was an infant-care facility right across the street to care for the babies of Locke students. The teenaged mothers dropped their babies off before school and usually spent one period a day there learning parenting skills. At any given time, there were up to two dozen Locke babies enrolled in the day-care program. But the total number of young mothers at Locke was much higher, because many girls, especially the Latinas, preferred to leave their babies at home for their own mothers to watch.

Pregnancies often went unnoticed at Locke. Classes were large, and students didn't necessarily know who to go to for help. Guidance counselors had hundreds of kids to manage, and it wasn't up to individual teachers to advise pregnant students of their rights (if they even knew what those rights were). So, often, unless a teacher took a particular interest, a pregnant student did not come to the attention of the administration. That meant many girls were never aware that there were government programs to ensure that their education continued throughout pregnancy, delivery, and recovery. Many just ditched school for however long it took to have the baby and bounce back from childbirth. Others simply dropped out.

Rachelle didn't want the lives of these smart—and yet incredibly unsophisticated—girls to be short-circuited. Playing competitive sports was one healthy activity that might help keep them in school.

Rachelle had started playing when she was five, and she ran off the field the first time she scored a goal. She was a tomboy; she played on a boys' soccer team until seventh grade because the girls' teams were too girly. She played club soccer after that and eventually joined the Surf Soccer Club, one of the best teams in the country. The competition to make the squad was stiff. Rachelle was used to being the best, but she had had to work harder for Surf, and when she did make the team, she didn't get to play much. The coach was incredibly challenging. He didn't even bother to learn a player's name until she had proved herself worthy. You either quit in frustration or you dug in. There were girls on the team who broke. Rachelle dug in.

During one game, her coach pulled her out and said: “You're either stupid or bad.” Rachelle thought:
Well, I know I'm not stupid, so I guess I must be bad.
There were many times when she didn't want to go to practice and a million times when she wanted to quit. But she stuck with it. On one trip to the East Coast, the coach played her for only two minutes and then pulled her, saying: “I can't trust you.” It was so upsetting. She had trained so much and worked so hard. Later in the game, another player got hurt and the coach was forced to put Rachelle back in. It was during that trip that Penn recruited her.

After that, the coach started playing her more. By the time she played her last game before going to college, her team was competing in the nationals. They lost in the finals, but Rachelle ended up scoring the most goals of the tournament. The next year, the team won it all.

Soccer had been good to her. It helped her get into the University of Pennsylvania, and it was the thing that had kept her on the right track in high school, when it would have been easy to screw up. With soccer practice four or five times a week and travel on weekends, she didn't have time to get into trouble. Her dad traveled to every one of her games, and when she played for Penn, he bought a bunch of Southwest Airlines vouchers and flew to every one of those games, too. That was his way of showing that he cared—especially during those tough teenage years when Rachelle was so rebellious. Whenever her parents said turn left, Rachelle automatically turned right. She gave them a hard time. Everything back then was a big FU.

Now she realized how lucky she was to have had two loving, involved parents. Though both had busy careers, Rachelle and her brother were far from latchkey kids; their paternal grandparents picked them up from school each day. She had a great relationship with her parents now. They were very proud of her for joining Teach For America, and impressed with how she was handling the work and the responsibility. One of Rachelle's enduring childhood memories was of her mother working late at night, surrounded by legal briefs. When Rachelle drove home to San Diego for her father's birthday and spent much of her time planning lessons, her mother remarked at how similar Rachelle's prep work was to her own.

Ironically, Rachelle was experiencing as a teacher some of the issues her parents had faced. She was trying to build a relationship with the kids while commanding their respect. It was hard, especially as a female. She had to be careful. She was conscious of how she dressed. (Even so, some at Locke took issue with the holes in her jeans and the tank tops she occasionally wore on student-free days.) Once when she used the Spanish word
“ese,”
meaning homey or buddy, to address one of her favorite students, the kid frowned and corrected her. “It doesn't sound right, you saying
‘ese,'
” he said. And sometimes, when one of the boys would give her a hug, she would think,
Is this too close to the line?

So far, at least, they had never challenged her sexually. In fact, the only snide comments or crass sexual innuendos she had heard came from her colleagues, not her charges. She easily fended off the occasional unwanted advance or inappropriate remark at Locke. She hadn't expected it to be an issue at Teach For America. But over the summer, when she effused over how cute one of her students was, a corps member trilled: “
How
cute, Rachelle?” There was no mistaking the insinuation. Rachelle was insulted.

Because TFAers were not much older than some of their students, physical contact was a tricky issue for all of them. On the last day of summer school during institute, one of Hrag's female students kissed him on the cheek. Without thinking, he kissed her back, and was horrified.
Oh my God! What just happened?

Rachelle sometimes wished that she were a school counselor instead of a special ed teacher. She didn't feel comfortable in the role of enforcer. But she soon understood that moms had the power in most families, particularly the black households, so she didn't hesitate to take advantage of that with a phone call home. The boys begged her not to; they did not want to cross their mothers. But often it was the only thing that worked. So when Dante threw a nasty temper tantrum one day, Rachelle picked up the phone and called his mom. He was going crazy, screaming and throwing his backpack around. The security guard outside Rachelle's door had tried to help, but it somehow became a race thing: “Dante, I know she's white, and you don't trust her because of that, but you have to trust the people who have your best interests in mind,” he said, trying to get Dante to respond to Rachelle. It was another jolting reminder to Rachelle of how many things at Locke got filtered through a colored lens—even issues that had nothing to do with race.