Relentless Pursuit (32 page)

The other thing that bugged him was that there was so little appreciation shown for all the work he did. It seemed that nobody ever had anything positive to say. His graduate school coach had recently been in to observe his classroom and all but told him his lesson sucked. The thing was, it hadn't sucked. It was pretty good. Hrag was teaching genetics, and he had the kids doing a celebrity mating game using Punnett squares. He had posted pictures of celebrities—Will Ferrell, J.Lo, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, Ashlee Simpson—all around the room. The kids had to pick two of them and then cross their genotypes to figure out what percentage of their offspring would end up with certain traits, like hair and eye color, based on their genetic coding. Kobe Bryant got a lot of action, and the kids insisted on mating Hrag with a celebrity, too. It was a really engaging lesson but admittedly noisy; Hrag ended up kicking three kids out of class. Still, all thirty-four of his students seemed to have fun, and he knew that everyone had understood what was going on. Except the LMU guy. He wanted to know why Hrag would plan a crazy lesson like that, and he gave him a lot of crap for throwing the kids out without a note or a referral. Hrag and he got into it, and the guy left the room all red-faced.

Samir didn't exactly do a jig, either, when he watched Hrag teach the next day. With Samir, it was all business, all the time. He sat through the lesson absolutely stone-faced, then left a letter in Hrag's box telling him what a great job he had done. But Hrag was far from reassured.

He had no idea what the administrators at Locke thought of his classroom performance because no one ever came in to observe him. Jauregui had popped in maybe twice, and that was in the beginning of the first semester. In the six months since, not a single administrator had been in his classroom. That worried him, because the longer he went without constructive criticism, the less he welcomed it. At this point, he didn't need anyone else coming into his room giving him flak.

And the kids! Sometimes they made him feel worst of all. He loved them, even the ones who drove him crazy. But every last bone in their bodies was programmed to defy, and it wore Hrag down. They knew he understood Spanish, and often they would purposely go at one another, hurling Spanish insults across the room, just trying to provoke him. Before he became a teacher, if someone got in his face, he'd push right back. Now he had to be cool and calm and rational, even when what he really wanted to do was strangle a kid. He felt so powerless. Being so young didn't help things. After Hrag wrote a note about José to the dean, José accused him of being a snitch. “We don't do that!” he told Hrag.

Hrag couldn't believe his ears. “Who do you think I am?” he asked. “Your homeboy? Get back in your seat before I send you down to the dean again!” He felt like a wuss. He was the authority. But only in name. There were no consequences he could put into play. He could kick a kid out of class, but the kid was always back the next day, ready to spit in his face again.

The students never showed any gratitude, though Hrag knew perfectly well that he had never understood how hard his teachers worked, either. Still, he put on some kick-ass lessons—really good, hands-on stuff that he himself would have loved in high school. As the year went on, he expanded on the curriculum outline that Morris had given him. Hrag took the lessons and made them his own, adding some slick PowerPoint presentations, dropping exercises he felt were too babyish for him to deliver convincingly. Whenever he was about to introduce a new topic with a really cool project, he telegraphed it by saying: “I am about to blow your minds.” The kids loved the expression. And they always sat up straighter in their chairs for the “experience.”

One of the most “mind-blowing” lessons he did all year was “Who My Baby Daddy?” Morris had given him the idea, and it had been bequeathed to her by another Locke biology teacher who was long gone. Now it was a Locke classic. Hrag took the lesson's basic outline and created a special PowerPoint for it. The idea was that the students had to figure out who, among five class members, was the father of the singer Ashanti's baby. The kids were given the phenotypes and genotypes for the mother, child, and five suspected dads. Using Punnett squares, they had to cross traits until they found the combination that matched the baby's.

The first photo of Ashanti was entitled “The Mother,” and the caption read “Who my baby daddy?” The next picture was of an adorable African American baby, with a caption that read: “WAAAAA!” For the suspects, Hrag took pictures of five boys from each of his classes, altered the eyes and hair with Photoshop, and listed their alibis in captions below. Father #1:“Man, I'm with the sister” Father #2:“I never seen that girl in my life” Father #3: “I didn't get her pregnant but my homey here would like to!” Father #4: “She's just trying to use me for my money” and Father #5: “She took advantage of me!” The kids had a blast.

Morris had never seen Hrag teach. She didn't need to. She could tell by the way the kids talked about him, and the way he talked about them, that he was a good teacher. He was on a sharp learning curve; it certainly didn't seem like this was his first year on the job. The way he jumped in and contributed to the curriculum impressed her. And she especially liked the way he got frustrated and as a result was constantly trying new things. In the beginning, classroom management was tough for him, and she could see that he took things way too personally. She reminded him that the kids were pretty much the same way every day; it was usually the teacher who was doing the changing, and the kids naturally fed off the instructor's mood shifts.
It's true,
he thought. The students in his fifth period were probably acting out because they could sense his own apprehension about being able to teach them.

Hrag wasn't at the very first meeting of the new School of Math and Science because he wasn't sure he was invited. Morris needed only one biology teacher, and he and Jinsue were a team—they had agreed that neither would join the new school without the other. It took a personal invitation from Morris and an agreement on Jinsue's part to teach chemistry before Hrag would consider it. Even then, he was skeptical. He thought the small schools at Locke had ended up being divisive; the school as a whole had broken up into warring factions of teacher cliques—the veterans, the SE folks, the TFAers, the PE teachers, and so on. After meeting with the School of Math and Science team, he changed his mind overnight. Probably the only way to save the school was to deconstruct it, he concluded. With enough good small schools, Locke as a whole would have to improve—and could eventually even be great. Hrag threw himself into the school planning, agreeing to write the biology proposal; Taylor proofread it. He really liked being a part of developing something new, and it was the first venue he'd found where he could have a say in things beyond his own classroom. The people on the crew were really smart. Even if they didn't all end up staying, maybe they could build something to leave behind.

Until then Hrag had felt uncomfortable around Morris and the SE crowd. They were older and had a long history together. But as he got to know them better over beers and a round of parties, he realized they were people, too—people who sometimes drank too much, used profane language, and did things they regretted the next morning. He felt that he was on their level now, and that was transforming. It made him happier. But he was scared, too, because he could feel himself getting drawn in—to Locke, to teaching, to the camaraderie, to the idea that he was serving the greater good. He knew it would be hard to let go of this, and if he didn't, he might end up being an educator. He wasn't sure why he was so afraid of it; he didn't know what picture he had for himself and his future.

So when he wasn't stressing or destressing about school, he was driving himself nuts thinking about what to do after TFA. One thing he knew for sure: he didn't want to be one of those TFAers who stayed for a third year because they couldn't think of anything else to do. He had to find something he could be passionate about—besides teaching in a low-performing school in the inner city. So he bought himself an LSAT prep book, thinking that law school might be the answer, and when he failed to work up any enthusiasm for becoming an attorney, he considered writing a screenplay. He spent a lot of time on the TFA website, too, looking at the job postings and opportunities open to TFA alums.

And he hung out with Taylor. They were both experiencing these emotional thunderstorms that left them on the edge, constantly freaking out. One day she would need bucking up; the next day it would be his turn. They had similar personalities. They both had a sarcastic sense of humor, and neither was afraid of confrontation. They worked hard (he thought she worked harder than he did), and they played hard. There weren't many TFAers that Hrag could convince to stay out with him till 4 a.m. on a school night, but Taylor was one of them. They saw each other every day at school, and pretty soon they were spending most of their free time together as well. They planned all kinds of weekend adventures—like a spur-of-the-moment jaunt to San Francisco, and a fifty-mile bicycle trip after a night of partying and no sleep at all. Taylor was a tremendous help to Hrag—she got him through the day. And she was happy to do it. They were best friends.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

¡Sí Se Puede!

There were no Friday-night lights at Locke. In fact, there was hardly any football, period. The Locke Saints played only two at-home games all season—and one of those was the homecoming game. It was just too dangerous. Though the campus was relatively safe, the neighborhood wasn't. There were at least four very active gangs within a half-mile radius of Locke, and too often the violence jumped the fence.

It wasn't unusual to find weapons stashed on campus by gangbanging dropouts. In the spring of 2006, well into football's spring training season, somebody found a rusty old nine-millimeter Browning tucked under a backpack on the field where the football players were working out. It looked like a piece of junk; the problem was, it was loaded.

A few weeks earlier, a former student had made his way onto the campus after school let out, gotten into an argument with some kid, and ended up pulling out a gun. There were plenty of students around at the time, and they scattered. A few big guys bolted up the stairs into Rachelle's room, slamming the door shut behind them. She was busy working at her computer and asked them to leave; they begged her to let them stay. “There's a guy with a gun!” they cried. “Call the office!”

They were scared, really shaken up. Once they had calmed down, she got the story. The two kids involved knew each other, argued, and things quickly escalated. One kid slapped the other, and the next thing anyone knew, there was a gun. The kid staring into the muzzle raised his arms in surrender. The would-be shooter lowered the weapon and booked it out of there, sprinting across the crowded quad and scaling the fence onto the street. The students ran, too. Dropping their backpacks, they headed for the main building.

Rachelle gave the kids a snack, and after five minutes or so decided it was probably safe for them to leave. She thought she'd go down to check things out first. Then she came to her senses.
I don't need to see this firsthand. I can't protect them from a bullet.
Thinking about it later, she realized that the kids had known exactly what kind of gun it was; they could identify it even from a distance. It also dawned on her that those three tenth-graders had obviously seen people get shot before.
How crazy is that?

Soon afterward, there was a gang homicide right on the other side of the fence that enclosed the ninth-grade classroom trailers, just yards away from where the fifteen-year-old student Deliesh Allen had been killed the year before. This time, the shooter was a fifteen-to-eighteen-year-old black male wearing a green sweatshirt and riding a bike. About eight shots went off, and when the cops arrived minutes later, they found a young male dressed in a white T-shirt, facedown between a car and the curb. There was a splotch of blood on the back of his shirt where he had been hit. The officer at the scene could tell that he had died right away because he hadn't bled out—when death comes more slowly, the victims lie in a pool of blood. The shooting occurred right in the middle of the ninth-graders' lunch period, and the gunman had headed north, along the eastern perimeter of the school, to escape. One of the cops radioed the campus police station and asked that the ninth-grade house be put on lockdown. But the lunch hour was crazy that day; Dr. Wells must have been off-site, and the security detail handling the lunch period didn't make it happen. At least the cops were able to get additional police units assigned to dismissal, because when the kids got out of school a few hours later, the body was still there, awaiting the arrival of the coroner.

Violence aside, if you asked Coach Crawford, he would just as soon play all the football games away. Home games were distracting. There was too much going on in the streets and stands for the Locke Saints to really focus on the game. So he preferred to bus his players—and as many fans as they could muster—off campus and out of the neighborhood for the football season.

There was a period when Locke had been a football powerhouse in the city's 3A division. But over the years, the program had declined as more and more of the neighborhood's best athletes opted to be bused out of the neighborhood to better schools. By the time Crawford took over as head coach in 2003, the Locke Saints were considered perennial losers. But that was changing. When Dr. Wells came in, he replaced the old hand-me-down football uniforms from UCLA with brand-new ones. Kids started coming out for the team, and when walking around campus, the players took to tucking their helmets proudly under their arms. In 2005, there were fifty-five varsity players, up from thirty in 2003, and the boys finished third in their conference—the best Locke had done since 1999.

With the exception of a couple of Hispanics, football was the domain of the African Americans at Locke, and far too many of them played it thinking that it would get them out of the ghetto and into the NFL. Crawford discouraged that idea, urging his players instead to get the grades they needed to go to college—a much surer path to success. Not every kid who joined the team had stars in his eyes. Some suited up because they wanted to be a part of something—besides a gang. They may not have been particularly athletic, but Crawford didn't turn anyone away. Kids were getting jumped in at younger and younger ages. After fourteen years of coaching, Crawford had no illusions. The gangs were the real competition his players faced.

While Crawford was trying to breathe new life into the boys' football team, the girls' soccer team was thriving. At Locke, sports mirrored the demographics and the changing culture. Football recalled Locke's storied past, when African Americans were the majority; soccer represented its future, as Hispanics continued to gain ascendancy. The boys' varsity soccer team was okay; the girls' varsity team was great. With Rachelle as head coach, the girls' JV squad ended up dominating, too. She may not have felt totally comfortable teaching special ed, but she was a natural soccer coach. She loved the game and recognized how much it had given her. She believed it could do the same for her girls.

At first, the girls were skeptical. Where did this white girl come off trying to coach them—Latinas who had been playing soccer since before they could even speak? But Rachelle had the skills, and whatever initial qualms the girls may have had, they were quickly replaced by a kind of reverence. The JV girls hung around Rachelle like she was a movie star. They stopped by room 214 before classes, between classes, after classes—often just to chat, sometimes to get help with their schoolwork, too.

Locke atheletes had to maintain at least a 2.0 GPA, and some coaches were grandfathering in a no-fails requirement. Dennis Stein, the boys' soccer coach, offered an academic lunch club during the season, and his kids had to subscribe to his priority list: family first, school second, then soccer. If soccer took precedence over academics, the kid couldn't play. So sports was an effective way to keep students engaged in school.

Playing soccer had worked for Rachelle as a student. Now coaching soccer began to work for her as a teacher, too. She had spent the first half of the year feeling very isolated. That began to change in early February, when the Locke coaches invited her join them on a trip to Las Vegas for a huge coaching clinic at the Flamingo Hotel. Rachelle didn't know what to expect when she said yes. At Locke, there was tension between some of the young, hard-driving teachers who were hell-bent on academic achievement and the athletic coaches, whose players got out of school one period early for practices and games. Folks like Chad Soleo and Josh Hartford argued that the kids at Locke needed more, not less, time in the classroom, and SE had introduced a seven-period day to make that happen. The coaches resented the encroachment on team time, insisting that sports were a proven way to get kids hooked on school. The conflict engendered yet another divide at Locke: the jocks versus the nerds.

Rachelle traveled to and from Las Vegas with Locke's basketball coach, Stephen Minix. Minix, a twenty-eight-year-old six-footer whose family lived in Washington, had been at Locke for four years, making him practically an old-timer. At first Rachelle was hesitant to ride with Minix. Los Angeles to Las Vegas was a six-hour car ride, and she didn't want to be stuck with a total stranger. But they had a mutual friend who helped out with the softball team, and she agreed to accompany them. Rachelle sat in the backseat and listened to the two of them chattering away up front.
He's so nice,
she thought.

Traveling as a member of the athletics department was an eye-opener. Many of her companions on the trip defied all of her preconceived notions. The coaches were smart, dedicated professionals who loved their students as much as she did. Unlike some of the TFAers who were in and out of teaching, these coaches were in it for good; it was what they wanted to do with their lives.

And they knew how to have fun. On the third night, they all got kicked out of the hotel. Somehow, in typical Locke fashion, the reservations had been screwed up and their rooms were booked. The problem was, every hotel in the city was full. So they ended up cruising around the hooker hotels begging for lodging. In the end, they found one room and all piled in for the night. They had a blast. Rachelle found herself bonding with them. They were so
normal.

They regaled her with Locke stories, and she began to see a side of teaching that seemed to be missing from the Teach For America approach. They didn't talk about significant gains and tracking data; they were more interested in the whole child. Minix, who was the son of a biracial couple, told of how sometimes he would shut the door, forget about “teaching,” and just open the floor up to questions. He found that the kids were desperate to find an adult to talk to, someone who actually listened to them and could identify with them. If you happened to be that adult, the kids gave 100 percent back. That approach resonated with Rachelle, and she began to spend more and more time with Stephen and his colleagues.

She was on the field on February 24 for the last game of the girls' varsity soccer season—all the coaches were. Many of the Locke jocks, encouraged by their coaches, came out to cheer the girls on. It was a Friday afternoon, generally a kick-back time at Locke anyway, so Rachelle told the students in her last class that if they got all their work done quickly, they could all make posters and go down to the field to watch the game. It also happened to be Mexican Flag Day, and many kids had come to school wearing sombreros and clutching the green, white, and red Mexican flag. When Rachelle's students arrived at the field, the stands were already filling up; black and brown, boys and girls, even the Hispanic rockers in their tight black jeans and studded jackets were there to watch the show. It was magical. The great divides at Locke disappeared. For this one special game, everyone there was a Locke Saint. Looking back on it, Rachelle considered it the most exciting girls' soccer game she had ever seen.

They were playing Cleveland High School, a good team from the San Fernando Valley. Cleveland was much more ethnically diverse than Locke; 60 percent of its students were Hispanic, while the rest were a mix of white, Asian, and black. The school ranked relatively high academically, and some on the Locke side detected a whiff of superiority in the air when Cleveland arrived and took the field. “That Valley team came in and thought they'd kick the ball around for a few minutes,” recalls Dennis Stein. “They didn't know anything about us. We had been completely overlooked.” But as Stein observed: “The one thing our kids know how to do is fight.”

And fight they did. The girls played their hearts out. The Saints kept Cleveland scoreless, and when the ref blew the whistle to end the game, Locke was scoreless, too.

The game went into overtime, and the stands were transformed into a churning sea of green, white, and red. Chants burst from the bleachers; drums sounded. The fans were in a frenzy, and still neither side scored.

Now it was double overtime. With a minute of play left, Locke scored, ending the game 1–0. With the ball safely in the net, fans—black and brown—poured out of the bleachers and onto the field. They were laughing, hollering, dancing. One black football player draped himself in the Mexican flag and ran around the field, a scene etched forever in Locke's collective memory. The players wept, and so did many of the coaches and teachers. “It was our little World Cup,” recalls Zeus Cubias, who had started the girls' soccer team in 1998. “It was our Brazil, our England.” The field was filled with revelers long after the Cleveland buses pulled away. Someone blasted a Latin American
punta
from a boom box, and the kids danced in delirious delight to the ancestral rhythm.

         

The soccer game was just a curtain-raiser to an extraordinary display of Hispanic pride and passion at Locke a month later. A battle over immigration policy had been heating up for months all across the country as legislators debated the fate of some twelve million illegal immigrants believed to be living in the United States. The issue was particularly pointed in Los Angeles, home to the largest immigrant population in the country. On March 25, more than half a million Angelenos descended on city hall in one of the largest protests in L.A. history. La Gran Marcha was followed the next Monday by a student walkout that left many of Los Angeles's inner-city high schools virtually empty. Unlike the weekend march, the student protest appeared to be hastily organized via MySpace pages and text messages. When word of the walkouts spread, many LAUSD high school campuses went on lockdown to ensure that students stayed in their seats. Locke was one of them.

Roberto, a senior at Locke, had attended La Gran Marcha downtown that Saturday. It filled him with pride to see so many of his people join in the show of unity: they were good people, hardworking people, whom the government was trying to mess with. The news had said there were 500,000 protesters. That was completely incorrect. Roberto thought there were one million, maybe even two million people at the height of the demonstration. Hispanics were everywhere, as far as the eye could see, and they were all hollering
“¡Sí se puede!”
(“We can do it!”), the motto of the United Farm Workers coined by César Chávez in the seventies. Roberto had never seen anything like it, and it filled his heart with pride.