The Great Expectations School (12 page)

Ms. Guiterrez opened our pre-observation meeting with some casual questions. “How is my dear, sweet Evley?” He was the silent boy who arrived on the second day of school with Jennifer and moody Joseph.

“Evley's my best-behaved boy. He's very shy, but he's starting to
come out of his shell more and more. His effort is good. He shows good imagination in his writing, although sometimes he gets lost in the middle of a sentence and stops making sense. I'm trying to have as many writing conferences with him as possible to get him to verbalize his ideas orally, to make sure they make sense, before he writes them down. He's a really smart kid,” I answered, hoping a thorough response would not only answer her question, but demonstrate that I was working closely with and understanding my students, something I was not sure Ms. Guiterrez acknowledged.

“My heart breaks for him. We held him over one too many times. Do you have Deloris or Lakiya?”

“Both,” I said.

“Ugh. They are terrible. And the parents are no help.”

I immediately thought of Deloris's father's outgoing voice-mail message:

Wassup girl, this is MC Onyx. Uh, if it's really that imp-o-tant, hit me with a message at the beep.

Ms. Guiterrez scanned my lesson plan. She asked questions about what would happen first, next, and after that. She pressed me to tell her what exact words I would use with the children. Many answers to her questions were in black and white on my prepared sheet, but I answered straightforwardly, and she appeared satisfied. Then we hit a stumbling block. In order to maximize the use of space on my sample graph paper, I had scaled out two blocks on the y-axis for every one kid who liked a specific fruit. “Why did you make it big like that?” Guiterrez asked, like a cross-examiner cornering a witness into incriminating himself. She pointed to the two blocks between zero and one.

“I scaled it out. Otherwise the graph would have been small…”

“One is one, Mr. Brown. Have you actually been teaching it
like this
?”

Silence. I was stuck for words again. Does New York City not teach scales? Maybe scales had been outmoded by some super-progressive curriculum that I hadn't heard about because I was new.

“I have been teaching it like this, using scales. Two spaces for one, four spaces for two, six spaces for three, just as long as it's consistent,” I said, each word coming out more tentatively than the last.

Guiterrez shook her head in bemusement at my evident stupidity. “One is one, Mr. Brown. It is very,
very
simple. One is one. Okay? Fix it and we will meet again tomorrow.”

That night, Jess came over. “I think your hair is falling out,” she said. “You're ridiculously stressed out.” She was right on both counts. If I was writing in my notebook, before long many loose hairs would lie on the page. I didn't want to go bald at twenty-two.

I cringed at the idea of having to meet with Ms. Guiterrez. When my alarm buzzed on Friday morning, I pulled the comforter over my head, and for the first time, called in sick.

On Sunday, I took Jess to the Bronx. We got wings at Mom's Fried Chicken and walked around the perimeter of P.S. 85. “It's so…depressing,” she observed, snapping a telephoto-lens shot of some kids sitting on a stoop. “It really is a modern ghetto. A racial ghetto.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping the stoop kids didn't see the white girl in the J. Crew jacket taking their picture.

“Is there even one white kid at P.S. 85?”

“No.”

“Unbelievable how society turns their backs. It's a cycle of disempowerment.”

I nodded, but had no desire to tease out socioeconomics with her. I wanted to show her my new life, where I came every day, maybe to impress her. Now that we were here, I regretted the whole trip.

“Do you want to go to the movies?” I asked.

“Is there a theater close by?”

“No, downtown.”

“Oh,” she said, shrugging. “I'm down for whatever. This place is so
hopeless-looking.
” She inflected her last sentence to indicate an inclination to stick around and check out the impoverished spectacle.

“MR. BROWN! OH SNAP, IT'S MR. BROWN!” Lito Ruiz, Tayshaun Jackson, and several of their cronies emerged around the corner.

“What's up, Lito, Tayshaun?” I said, giving out three-part handshakes.

“Mr. Brown is da man,” Tayshaun told his pals.

“Why you come around here on the weekend?” Lito asked.

“Just hanging out,” I said. “I'll see you in class on Monday.”

“All right!” Lito nodded, his smile eating his face. “Have a good weekend!”

The kids went their way and Jess and I headed toward the D train. “You're a celebrity,” Jess said.

“Those kids antagonize me nonstop during the week. Lito just broke a kid's glasses and lied about it,” I uttered. “It's a novelty for them to see me on the street. They don't even
like
me.”

“You're wrong,” she said. “You're their hero.”

On Monday morning, I held a special class meeting. “The word is out that the behavior in 4-217 is not good. Ms. Guiterrez is coming in at 10:15 to watch
you,
each and every one of you, to see who's doing a good job, and who needs to be sent back to third grade. [Marge Foley assured me of the efficacy, if not truth, of this threat.] Ms. Guiterrez will be taking notes about
everything,
so if I were you, my behavior would be absolutely perfect, the way it should be. And I'll bet you if everyone behaves, the class will be a lot more fun.”

After my speech, Evley raised his hand and asked to speak to me in the hall. He was exceptionally shy, and this request for a private conference was the first of its kind. I stepped outside with Evley, who looked at me with worried doe eyes. His voice was quiet and high-pitched. “Mr. Brown, you know my private part?”

I nodded, terrified of what was coming next. “Yes.”

“It stings.”

This was out of my job description. My face blushed. “Go to the nurse, now,” I said, pointing in the vague direction of her office. “Just go to the nurse.”

Evley shook his head in panicked refusal.

“Then go to the bathroom. Go, go, go!” I urged. Evley went, returning to the class soon after. He made straight for his desk without a word.

At 8:45, as I directed kids out the door to their SFA rooms, Evley approached me again.

“Everything okay, Evley?” I asked.

“When I'm sitting down it's okay, but when I stand up and walk, it
stings.
” His voice cracked sharply on the last word. He did not wait for a response, joining the sea of students in the corridor.

At 10:15, Ms. Guiterrez did not show up for the observation, and I had to stall. Twelve interminable minutes later, she appeared. I began the lesson precisely as my plans dictated, and often-raucous 4-217 behaved like obedient students. I forgot about Guiterrez in a few minutes because it was a pleasure to teach such attentive kids. I opened the lesson by simply asking what are graphs, how graphs are useful, and to identify and explain each part of a graph. Hands shot up. I usually got zero to three raised hands, and almost always the same bunch of kids. Now everybody wanted to participate, and what's more, they had good answers! Eddie, Lito, and Lakiya wowed me with articulate mathematical definitions of axes, variables, vertical, horizontal, columns, and rows. I thought they had been out to lunch the entire unit. The class made beautiful, if small, bar graphs, adhering to Guiterrez's “one is one” school of scales.

The lesson fired me up to teach. Something had been getting through after all, despite the chronic chatting, fighting, and block-throwing. Ms. Guiterrez left at the lesson's end, giving me a nod that I translated as a pedagogical thumbs-up.

The rest of the day passed smoothly, except for an episode on
the steps where Asante yelled at Deloris, “Shut the fuck up! My father's going to come and cut you like he cut that other guy!” When I took Asante out of the room to investigate the problem and tell her she couldn't say things like that, she started bawling.

“Deloris makes me crazy. She's always bothering me and making fun of me 'cause of my clothes and cause I live in a shelter in Queens. She never stops so I want to get my father on her. Then she'll stop.”

Shelter in Queens? This explained the chronic lateness and absences. And no phone number. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Don't worry about getting your father. I'll make Deloris stop.” I sent Asante inside the classroom and pulled Deloris out, unsure what magic words or threats I could pull out to mediate this cruel conflict.

“Deloris, why —”

“She always bothering me and hitting me!”

“Do not interrupt me. Listen. If you were friends with Asante yesterday, which I know you were, why—”

“I ain't friends with her! She bad and dirty!” Deloris burst out.

“Deloris Barlow!”

“Do not use my last name please.”

“
Deloris Barlow.
No one says those kinds of mean things in my room. You don't have to be friends with Asante, that's fine. But you two will stay away from each other and you'll both be better off!”

Deloris laughed coldly. “What do you know, you just a first-year teacher! You don't know nothing!” She doubled over with a belly laugh. “You a
scrub
! You don't know nothing!”

“Go sit in Mr. Randazzo's office.
Get out of my sight.
”

She skipped down the hall with a smile. The class cheered when I came back into the room without Deloris, a scene reminiscent of Fausto's 9/11 ejection.

When school was dismissed, I told the secretary that I had a student who commuted to school alone from a shelter in Queens. She shook her head sadly. “What a shame. These kids move from place to
place so much that they don't change schools till they settle down. Poor girl. When Mom gets her feet on the ground, she'll change schools.”

I asked if there was anyone I could notify or anything I could do to expedite Asante's transfer to a Queens school. The secretary again shook her head. “Nothing we can do from our end.”

I told Barbara Chatton about how the kids rose to the occasion for the big observation. She seemed pleased and repeated her credo: “It's never as good as you think it is and it's never as bad as you think it is.” She sprang it on me that 4-217 had been a popular topic of discussion among administrators. The word was that my teaching was good, but my management needed work. This wasn't news until Barbara told me that the next day, class 4-217 would be broken up, so that I could spend the day shadowing Janet Claxton, a veteran third-grade teacher with stellar classroom management. “Then you can motivate them into submission,” Barbara said, patting me on the shoulder.

At lineup the next morning, Mr. Randazzo leaned into my ear. “Janet Claxton's a great teacher. Probably one of the strongest in the school.”

“I know, I'm looking forward to being in there with her,” I replied.

“Good,” Randazzo said in a low voice. “Really try to get all you can out of this. I don't want to give up on you.” He slapped me on the back and walked away.

I was suddenly furious. Did I just receive encouragement or a threat?
Give up on me
? Since when was anyone considering giving up on me?

I had a waking nightmare image of Randazzo, Daly, Guiterrez, and Boyd lounging around the principal's office with cigars and cognac. “What about Brown?” Daly asks. “We did give him the shit class of the fourth grade.”

Guiterrez blows a smoke ring and waves her hand dismissively. “His management is poor and his bulletin board is a disgrace.”

Boyd shakes her head ruefully. “It's a shame because he had the teaching gene.”

Randazzo snuffs out his stogie on my Department of Ed file and claps his hands together. “So we give up on him?”

Ms. Claxton was a tall, dark-skinned Jamaican lady in her mid-thirties. Her six-foot stature and authoritative voice scared children. She addressed the class as “ladies and gentlemen,” and when a student misbehaved, she immediately yell-asked if that was the way a lady or gentleman should act. When the group got noisy, Ms. Claxton clapped her hands, twice slow and three times fast. One-two,
one-two-three
! The class repeated the rhythmic claps, and after the last one, you could hear a pin drop. I held my clipboard and marveled.

Ms. Claxton's kids followed directions and did their work, with Thankgod Mutemi the only exception. He was a frowning, angry boy who occasionally pounded his fist on his desk and wandered around the classroom. Janet told me later, “Thankgod is dangerous. Anytime I'm not with him, he instigates a fight. They tell me I'm the only one who can control him, but what good is that?” (Thankgod was expelled a month later.)

Ms. Claxton seemed like the perfect teacher for these kids: intimidating, tough, smart, consistent, and maternal. She gave me hope (and a hand-clapping silence system), although I was not sure how I could ever intimidate the students of 4-217. Scariness appeared to be a crucial ingredient in the recipe for classroom harmony.

The brutal façade took a toll on Ms. Claxton. Two years earlier, she had suffered a stress-related heart attack. She also commuted two hours each way to get to Marion Avenue, something that did not seem to make sense. Any school would be lucky to have a Ms. Claxton. Why did she schlep all the way to hellish P.S. 85?

Ms. Claxton extended a magical offer to me. “Deloris Barlow is incorrigible. I know. If I've had them, they're always my children. Anytime you want her out, just give me a call, and you can send her right up.” I thanked her profusely for everything.

The next morning I received cheers when I arrived in the cafeteria for lineup. “Mr. Brown's here! All right!”

“Yay, Mr. Brown!”

“You're not gonna let them split us up again, right?”

“It was terrible!”

“Please don't let them split up the class. We want to stay with you!”