The Great Expectations School (10 page)

A pained grimace came over Edith Boswell, the fourth-grade gifted Performing Arts Class teacher and a three-decade veteran. With passive fury, she appeared to be finally receiving some long-expected disappointing news. Early in the August Professional Development sessions, I had made Ms. Boswell's facial expressions my secret barometer for the legitimacy and importance of school announcements and initiatives. I heard that years ago she had won some kind of New York State Teacher of the Year award.

Dr. Kirkpatrick bit her lip and continued, “I'll say it directly, and trust me, I don't like saying it. Don't shoot the messenger, you know what I mean? But the school is looking to suppress referrals for administrative reasons. If you think you have a kid that might be special ed material, experiment with all possible alternative teaching methods for six to eight weeks.” She paused. “That's it.”

A bomb had hit the room. Edith Boswell's lips were pursed tighter than I had ever seen them. “What are the administrative reasons?” I asked, my first time speaking in a faculty meeting.

“Well, it's complicated,” Dr. Kirkpatrick began uncomfortably. “A couple years ago, Eighty-five was SURR [School Under Registration Review], and we don't want to go back to that.”

“No, we don't,” Ms. Boswell murmured.

“For the people who are new, when you're a SURR school,
you've got city people coming in all the time, sometimes every day, watching you like hawks. It's very intense oversight. That's why we're still an extended-hours school. The way the city is realigning its education initiatives, one of the criteria for judging schools is the referral percentage. The lower, the better.”

“So, no referrals,” Catherine Fiore, a perpetually grouchy fourth-grade veteran, translated with disgust. Her motto, as she explained to me in an aside during an August meeting, was “I don't play.”

Dr. Kirkpatrick fumbled, “Well, we can't say
no referrals
exactly…”

“Good, because I have a kid that can't read his name,” Fiore shot.

“Me too. I can't teach a kid like that, no matter what alternative strategies you suggest,” added Mulvehill.

“I have one too,” I said, thinking of Daniel. I also thought of Lakiya and Eric, who could read their names but had a poisonous combination of low skills, outbursts of violence, and general disrespect for the class. They would definitely function better in a modified environment.

“These are complete nonreaders, you're sure?” Dr. Kirkpatrick asked, evidently hoping we were exaggerating. We were all sure. Dr. Kirkpatrick took a list of the illiterate students' names and home-rooms, promising to check out each one personally. I walked back to room 217, stunned that schools were punished for recognizing and attempting to seek help for at-risk kids.

Later, Karen Adler and I got lunch at the corner deli—the gunplay in the street caused only a one-day lapse in our new routine—and ate in 217 at group two. I sat at Sonandia's desk. Karen was the lucky final recipient of Reynaldo Luces. She said he had stopped crying and now constantly drew pictures of red hearts, always giving them to her at the day's end.

We griped about the bulletin board work that was due up by Friday. I became alarmed when she said her kids' work was done and
it just needed mounting. I had work from my students, but virtually none of it was pretty or “error-free,” as mounted work was mandated to be.

“Spend all your class time on it, seriously,” Karen said. “Or they'll be all over you.” Then, in a dead ringer for Mrs. Boyd, she bellowed,
“Mr. Brown, your bulletin boards do not reflect enough academic rigor, and we're going to have a nice long chat, you and I, in my inner office.”

Karen had a secret skill for impersonation. She did a perfect Randazzo and Barbara Chatton, and a frighteningly dead-on Guiterrez.

I took Karen's advice about the bulletin boards and scrapped my afternoon map skills lesson. I told the class that this new birthday data table and bar graph would be our most important yet. “Everyone's finished work will be on display and then placed in your
permanent portfolios
!”

The empty red portfolio folders sat in a crate on my desk next to the ancient iron cumulative records canister. Teachers were supposed to insert one meaningful, official New York State standards–bearing piece of math and literacy work in the folder each month. Thus the portfolio charted progress and could also be used in an appeal for promotion for a student with poor Test scores.

The class heard what I said about the tremendous importance of this next piece of work, but the words did not seem to register. Everyone wanted to go to the bathroom. “Forget about teaching after lunch,” Ms. Fiore had advised with aggressively furrowed brows.

I pressed forward. Our Birthday Bar Graph was exactly what every other class was doing for their boards. I made a model data table on the board with my columns—important vocabulary word, kids: columns!—labeled “Month” and “Number of 4-217 Birthdays.” My Bonn-inspired paper passers handed out blank data tables to everyone, and we were all supposed to fill it out together.

“Raise your hand if you were born in January!” I boomed. As-ante's hand went up. “One. Happy unbirthday, Asante!”

“Thank you, Mr. Brown,” Asante said, giggling. Asante was a
hard-nosed kid. The other kids took her amusement as a sign that the activity might not be wack after all. I could feel the group's focus tighten. It felt good.

“Okay, who was born in February? I was! February ninth,” I said, raising my hand. “Does anyone else share February as a birthday month with me?” Three hands went up. “All right, four, counting me!” I charted it on the board. The kids marked their data tables.

“Mr. Brown, how old are you?” Sonandia asked. Several other kids instantly echoed the question.

“Don't worry about it,” I said, setting off a yearlong guessing game that I would have preferred did not exist.

“Okay, we've listed how many 4-217 students have birthdays in each of the twelve months. Do I have any volunteers who would like to impress me and tell me how to make a graph out of this, what is it called, what are these numbers called? Tiffany?”

“Data?”

“Yes! Data! Outstanding. Excellent use of mathematical vocabulary, Tiffany! A point for group four.”

The members of group four pumped their arms in silent exultation.

“Okay, so who wants to tell me what to do first to make a graph out of this data?”

Athena spearheaded the axes-labeling, and I was pleased that Destiny, who had struggled through most of the unit, correctly explained how to draw the first bars for January and February.

Before dismissal, I had a beautiful and accurate bar graph on the board. I collected everyone's work, distributed the homework, lined them up, shepherded the group down the steps, accepted Jennifer's hug, and turned back into the school building, renewed.

Upstairs, I leafed through the afternoon's work and my jaw dropped. Out of twenty-five students, only five papers matched what I had on the board. Eight kids had written nothing, not including Daniel's indecipherable scribbles.

I sought counsel from the faculty coaches in Al Conway and
Marge Foley's sliver-office. Throughout my distressed account, Al nodded as if he could have finished my sentences for me.

“I know exactly what you're going through. When I was a first-year teacher, I was your age and had thirty-eight kids in my class. I had no idea what I was doing. So many times I thought, ‘I'm out of here. I quit.' Maybe I should have, the way my marriage is going right now…” Al trailed off, chuckling nervously. “The important thing is, don't get discouraged. For the bulletin board, you said you got five pieces of good work, right? That's all you need! Display them and you're set. Don't worry about everyone's portfolio all at once. You'll get work out of them, but some are just… uncooperative.”

He leaned closer and turned on his secret-telling voice. “For bulletin boards in the future, it doesn't even have to be a whole-class activity. Just pick a few top kids and bring them up for lunch or set aside some time. Tell them you have a special task for them to do. They'll love it. Or to make it easier on yourself, just write out what you want and have them copy it over in their own handwriting. That's how a
lot
of teachers do it. The bulletin boards are just to show Dilla Zane that things are under control. You have to do them, but don't let them kill you. There are too many other things trying to kill you.” Then he offered to teach my class a sample math lesson and build my math center.

On Thursday, I stayed late to mount the magnificent birthday bar graphs against fadeless teal paper. I typed our procedure in flashy fonts, and used magic markers on sentence strips to delineate the New York State standards employed in this lesson. (M4a: Collect and organize data to answer a question. M4c: Make statements and draw simple conclusions from data. M6g: Read, create, and represent data.) The Birthday Bar Graphs were the main attraction, but I also made a smaller literacy display with some “Writing About Me: Autobiography Introductions” from the previous week.

When I got home, I opened a personal e-mail from Liesl Nolan, the program manager of the Mercy College New Teacher Residency Program. She had paid a random visit to 4-217 the previous day,
checking out the bulletin boards and asking me how everything was going. Liesl had typed, “Dear Daniel, I wanted to thank you for welcoming me into your classroom last Wednesday. Your room looks great! I can only assure you that it will get better. You have great support with Barbara and your Mercy instructor, Charles. Utilize them. I truly admire your passion for doing this work! Thank you!”

On Friday, September 26, I received a surprise. Ten minutes before lineup, Ms. Guiterrez rolled into my classroom. “Mr. Brown, I have to talk to you about your bulletin board. Immediately.” She walked back into the hall. This was her first time in my classroom since her summer complaint about my mom's border paper, not counting the pencil-sharpening incident on the first day of SFA.

I flashed paranoid. But wait a minute, my bulletin board looked sharp. Maybe this was Guiterrez's way of telling me I had a damn good-looking first bulletin board and to congratulate me for surviving my first month in the inner city.

Guiterrez did not look at me when I followed her into the hall. “What is wrong with this, Mr. Brown?”

My bulletin board was a replica of everyone else's on the second floor. “I don't know,” I said, my brief hope that this was some kind of weird compliment dashed.

“Are you sure everything is spelled right?” she asked in the same even, accusatory tone.

I was supremely positive that every word on my board was spelled correctly. A second-place finish in the township bee back in '93 (“tyrannous” did me in) was a major event in my youth, and ever after, spelling was one area in which I excelled.

“What do you think is misspelled?”

“
That
word.” She pointed at the word “announced.” I had written it in magic marker as part of the Activity Procedure. The line read, “Students raise their hand if their birthday falls in the month that the teacher has just announced. The data is then recorded in the data table.”

“
That
word is spelled incorrectly,” she deadpanned.

I squinted and stared at the word. A-N-N-O-U-N-C-E-D. Announced.

“Is it the word ‘announced'?”

“Yes, Mr. Brown.”

I moved my face close to the board. A tiny piece, less than a centimeter, of the end of the “o” did graze against its neighbor, “u.” Did that make the “o” resemble an “a”? Annaunced? No. It still looked like “announced.” I squinted at her in befuddlement. What kind of conversation was this?

“I see no writing on this bulletin board,” Ms. Guiterrez said icily, changing gears.

I did not know how to respond without insulting her intelligence, although I felt certain that my own intelligence had just been insulted several times in quick succession. I gestured meekly at the page-long student pieces displayed under my “
WE WRITE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES!
” banner, just below the bar graphs. “There is this writing.”

“There is no math writing on the bulletin board!” she snapped. Math
writing
? I had data tables and corresponding bar graphs. “Take it all down,” Ms. Guiterrez said. “You must check with me first before you put anything on this board from now on. I am very troubled that you thought this was… acceptable.” She walked away.

I paced around room 217, my blood up. I had never heard of any math writing requirement. And what was all that about “announced”? I didn't want to take my whole bulletin board down.

When I arrived at lineup, beet-red Ms. Linda Devereaux was reading the riot act to Bernard and Hamisi. “I'll take them for the morning, Mr. Brown. WHAT GOES THROUGH YOUR BRAIN THAT MAKES YOU THINK IT'S OKAY TO HIT EACH OTHER IN SCHOOL? DO YOU HEAR ME?” The boys stared at their shoes, looking bored.

Ms. Devereaux was the real P.S. 85 enforcer. A member of the first cohort of Teaching Fellows in 2000, she had had her classroom
teacher position involuntarily revoked in exchange for a job as the school's full-time disciplinarian. She offered her supportive services to all teachers, provided she was not sent frivolous cases. When kids disappeared into her Alternative Education Strategies room, you didn't need to worry about them. I knew Ms. Devereaux would be a crucial ally, especially since detention and out-of-school suspension had recently been abolished by Region One.

However, fifteen minutes after the cafeteria scolding, Hamisi and Bernard reappeared at my door, both smirking. “Ms. Devereaux told us to come back,” Hamisi said. A minute later, Mr. Randazzo showed up holding an orange paper strip. Another new student.

“This young gentleman is Marvin Winslow. He's going to be with you.”

“Wonderful to meet you, Marvin!” I shook his and his mother's hands. My eyes went to the charm around Mrs. Winslow's neck, a $ the size of a cantaloupe. “Welcome to 4-217.”