The Great Expectations School (2 page)

New York City Teaching Fellows Staff

Susan Atero, placement fair interviewer
Sarah Gerson, summer advisor
Charles Kendall, Mercy College adjunct teacher
Liesl Nolan, Mercy College supervisor

THE GREAT
EXPECTATIONS
SCHOOL

 

Even if I had known what I was doing when I punched the chalk-board, I still wouldn't have expected my fist to crash through it. Lakiya Ray's face froze in a crazed openmouthed grin, but the rest of the class looked appropriately petrified. My eyes bulged, and I brushed sweat from my temple.

“Mr. Brown, you wiped a little blood on your face.”

“Thank you, Destiny.” I dabbed at the red wisps on my forehead and glared at the back wall's “Iroquois Longhouses” bulletin board, safeguarding my eyes from meeting those of any terrified children.
Especially Sonandia.

I righted Tayshaun's upended desk and sat on it, my cheeks tingling. “None of you deserve to experience fourth grade like this. Class is dismissed.”

I
THOUGHT I HAD UNUSUAL REASONS
for becoming a public school teacher in the Bronx. Nine months before my left hook to the blackboard, while I was in my final semester studying film at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, professors started encouraging outgoing seniors to drive cabs, bus tables, or do anything possible to keep alive our passion for making art once discharged from our bohemian sanctum of university life. The undergrad movie degree might not wow decent-paying employers in the gritty real world.

Several of my film school pals planned to move to Los Angeles and become personal assistants to talent agents. Others decided not to work their first year out of school, intending to subsist on Netflix, ramen, and a word processor. I wanted to live on Manhattan's Lower East Side, which meant four figures in rent. I needed a job.

A weird month as a clerk for the U.S. Census Bureau in the summer of 2000 taught me that office work brought on either loopiness or depression. I couldn't see myself in sales. Apparently the economy was in the drink. What do you do when you're twenty-two?

Twenty-four hundred of New York City's teachers in 2003 were first-year New York City Teaching Fellows, members of a program initiated under ex-chancellor Harold Levy in 2000 to solve the chronic shortage of teachers in many of the city's toughest schools. Using the program model of Teach for America, the Board of Education
agreed to hire college graduates with no academic background in education and quick-certify them with a three-year Transitional B Certificate. The city aimed its extensive subway ad campaign at altruistically minded career-changers. (“Take your next business trip on a yellow bus,” was one slogan.) While teaching, Fellows would be enrolled in subsidized night and summer courses for a master's degree in education.

Encouraged by my career-teacher mom and buoyed by the idea of working with New York City children in schools where there was a desperate need for teachers, I applied. If accepted, I had no idea what, where, or how I was going to teach, but I saw a strange allure in requesting a job that no one else would take.

For my personal statement in the application, I wrote about my baseball fanatic dad. When I was six, he took me to my first ball game, a midsummer Phillies-Astros day game at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. The heat index hit triple digits and Nolan Ryan mowed down the home-team batters, making for an uneventful 2–1 loss for our guys. Crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge on the drive home to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, I decided aloud that I did not like baseball. My father, captain of the 1970 University of Pittsburgh squad, clutched for his breast and started to veer out of our lane. A moment later, he recovered and nodded. “No problem,” he croaked. “That's okay.” Several years later, I asked if I could join Little League and he became my coach.

The story was meant to illustrate my learned life lessons in patience, family solidarity, and unconditional support. Looking back, it's a reach. A few weeks later, though, I received a letter of acceptance.

My film school friends looked at me as though I'd just enlisted for the war. “Maybe this'll give you good material,” my roommate said, eyeing me like a head trauma patient. Indeed, if nothing else, the coming year would at least be interesting.

However, after four years of studying storytelling in academia, I never counted on a neighborhood of concrete in the Bronx to reveal
my world's gutsiest heroes and desperately flawed shortcomers, the craziest violence and strangest surprises, the darkest failures and the most unexpected second chances. What I got was a life-altering tilt-a-whirl ride, all of it more vivid and twisted than anything I could have concocted in fiction.

Along with over half of my fellow Fellows, I was assigned to teach in the Bronx. On the morning of Saturday, May 17, 2003, a placement fair for specific school assignments at a South Bronx high school began fifteen hours after I handed in my NYU dorm key.

Due at the fair at 8 a.m. and psyched up about the idea of leaving college and beginning a new era, I decided to catch a midnight movie and pull an all-nighter in the Odessa Diner by Tompkins Square with some cherry pie and my notebook. Over lukewarm black coffee, I scribbled in my journal about the crooked path that had led me to this new life chapter.

During winter break of my senior year, my reading specialist mom had enlisted me to help direct twenty second-graders in a child-friendly production of
Romeo and Juliet.
I spent two days with the kids, riling pint-sized Tybalt and Mercutio for their emotional sword-crossing, coaching Romeo (who gave up a good nine inches to his romantic costar) to act lovesick, and explaining ruefulness to sweatpants-clad Friar Lawrence.

Mrs. Haenick, the drama-novice classroom teacher, thanked me over and over for saving the show. “You've got this way of talking to them!” she told me backstage, beaming with surprised approbation, as if I had just sawed someone in half.

Something clicked in me during those two days:
I can work with kids… and love it.

By 4:30 a.m., my writing had devolved into exhausted drivel and the diner staff was visibly perturbed at my lingering. Bleary-eyed, I stumbled to the street to seek a bunch of Red Bulls. The ghost-town city creeped me out, and I hailed a cab to Grand Central Terminal. I napped against a pillar near the 4-5-6-S exit until a police officer's
boot nudged me awake. A subway platform bench became my home for the next three hours while I sang entire Beatles albums to myself to stay conscious.

When the fair opened, I wandered the jam-packed corridor for fifteen minutes, wading through several major traffic fluxes initiated by shouts like, “Eighty-six needs six common branches! They're over there! C.I.S. 170 is taking special ed now!” My mystification at this strange, serious game of “placement fair” manifested in a fear that I was behind in the race; these people were portfolio-carrying professionals and I was some kind of kid impostor, a summer-camp white boy from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Then a beacon of clarity appeared. I found a sign that read “District 10 Placements” with a nearly empty sign-in list. Soon I was summoned into an office by kind-faced Susan Atero, who scanned my résumé for fifteen silent seconds.

“
The Mummy Returns…
you worked on that? In Santa Monica, it says?”

“Not that film, the director, Stephen Sommers's, next film. It's called
Van Helsing.
”

“
The Mummy Returns
is my
favorite
movie of all time,” Susan enthused. “I watch it with my sons almost every week. What is the director like?”

“Stephen's very energetic. He lives and breathes movies,” I related, as if he and I were old bowling buddies. The truth was that I had driven out to L.A. for the summer with my cousin, only to find my previously secured internship on the Paramount Pictures studio lot handed over to someone with “a connection.” I spent several demoralizing weeks bouncing between the Culver City public library Internet station and Kinko's, hunting for unpaid positions and faxing my résumé all over town. Eventually, an assistant to the coproducer of
Van Helsing
invited me to hang out several days a week in the production office screening room, photocopying scripts when necessary. Once, for my most auspicious assignment, I arranged a folder of creature concepts for a presentation and, as advised, did not commingle
pictures of Dracula with the Winged Beast from Hell. It all came to a dubious end when I had to leave town prematurely after a traffic ticket busted my budget. I met Stephen Sommers once, and I spent most of our three shared minutes confusing him with details about how a robot snapped my picture going through a red light.

I nodded emphatically at Susan. “
Van Helsing
is going to be spectacular.”

“Hmm.” Promptly, her smiling mien sobered, and my hope that I could ride Hollywood name-dropping to a quick commitment form disappeared. I was suddenly certain that she knew all about the lame pseudo-employment prominently featured on my résumé.

“Daniel. What strengths will you bring to an inner-city school?”

I regretted not preparing seriously for this. I took a deep breath, aware that my pause had bloated into a hesitation. “I care about kids and I think one of my greatest strengths is my ability to communicate. [
Maybe not right this minute, but…
] I'm confident that I can find a common language of mutual respect with my students. I also think that being a younger man is an asset because of the lack of male teachers and male role models in the community. I'm a collaborator and a fast learner, and I can internalize criticism and feedback from anyone: student, colleague, or administrator.” I stopped and another idea sprang to mind. “I'm very excited to become a teacher. I am dedicated to improving myself and doing anything possible to help my students. I'll go the distance.” I winced inside at the final melodramatic declaration.

Ms. Atero gave a generic nod. “What are your weaknesses?”

This question is a trap. The key is to twist some kind of strength into sounding like a weakness, like “I overprepare” or “I'm a perfectionist, so I need to work on how I occasionally bend deadlines because I want anything with my name on it to be as well done as possible.” At the time, my mind was clouded with fatigue and intimidation from Ms. Atero's transformation from congenial conversant to stone-faced interrogator. I swallowed my rank all-nighter saliva. “I don't know. I might be in over my head.”

We stared at each other for a moment. Susan's smile returned like a sunburst. “You're going to see some stuff, but it'll be worth it!” The ominous statement was defused by its joyful dispensation. She said, “I'm going to represent you in District 10 to set up visits to schools that could be a good match for you. You're all set!”

A thrill surged within me as I headed to the school stage to get fingerprinted for my city employee file. Then in my fifth year in New York, I had lived in five different apartments, played pickup basketball at the neighborhood blacktop, knew the subway lines inside out, rocked out at CBGB, bought from street vendors, lingered for hours in the Central Park gazebo beyond Strawberry Fields, and watched the World Trade Center towers fall before my eyes. As I pressed my fingers hard to the inkpad, I felt a swell of pride in going to work for the city I loved.

On June 16, 2003, the incoming Fellows congregated in Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center for opening ceremonies, where the keynote speaker declared the event the largest assemblage of talent at one time ever to fill this room. A middle school student spoke about how her teacher, a third-year Fellow, had changed her life. When the Fellow and her star student reunited onstage, a school band played “Amazing Grace,” and many new teachers cried.

Three days later, I was randomly assigned to Mr. Aaron Rose's first-grade class at P.S. 85 for a “structured observation.” The 2002–2003 school year was in its penultimate week, so Fellows were warned that we might see classes conducted more informally than usual. I was glad to be headed into a functioning inner-city classroom and away from the barrage of motivational lectures that had dominated the week up to that point. (A room-shaking applause line: “The young teachers have the fresh ideas! Does that veteran teacher really have thirty years of experience or just
one
year of experience
thirty times
!”)

I took the D train to 182nd–183rd Street and exited onto the Grand Concourse, a broad throughway with three medians and aggressively
honk-happy traffic. I passed the ancient brick Gospel Love Assembly where a morose queue of about twenty waited for a free meal. On a side street, some teens and a naked toddler pranced near a fire hydrant geyser. Small establishments selling carpet, divorce documents, and groceries lined the dogshit-smeared pavement. I was the only white face crossing the Concourse to 184th Street, where air-brushed murals paid homage to deceased neighbors.

I walked through the monolithic school's main entrance, under the stone threshold marked “Public School 85: The Great Expectations School.”

I waited in the second-floor Teacher Center resource room with a dozen other new Fellows until Principal Kendra Boyd, a tall woman in her late fifties, enthusiastically greeted us. She spoke to the rookies about P.S. 85's mission for three specific aims:
clear expectations, academic rigor,
and
accountable talk.
I figured Mrs. Boyd had to be a brilliant and methodical woman (maybe even an unorthodox genius with that side-ponytail) to run a massive school like this.

Barbara Chatton, the in-house mentor for first-year teachers, also held the floor for a few minutes. Barbara informed us about P.S. 85's strong commitment to supporting new teachers, because they are the future of education and everyone knows how hard it is to be new. I desperately wanted Barbara to be my mentor and Mrs. Boyd to be my principal.