The Great Expectations School (36 page)

Each year, the Lower School staff voted to select a topic of study to build a special school-wide unit from scratch. We picked “Structures” and I signed on as the resident expert on canals. This assignment sent me off on my own inquiry process since I knew virtually nothing about canals. I built from scratch lessons on the science and engineering of canals, world geography, canal math on locks and water levels, and the in-class building of our own canals. We sang “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal” and examined how building the Erie Canal changed New
York City forever. It was beautiful. I improved as a team member and as a teacher.

The boys received both physical education and recess four times a week, with two sessions of art, computers, library, and science lab. Reading, writing, and math coaches join the two classroom teachers for most core subject lessons, putting three teachers with twenty-two students, or sometimes eleven, if a half-group is away at art or science. Every child experiences many opportunities for public speaking and one-on-one support. Weekly assemblies and intergrade “buddy” systems foster school unity. There are no standardized tests, or even grades until middle school.

Of course, a well-endowed independent institution is bound to differ from a massive public system. Strikingly though, many sources of Collegiate's success derive from efforts with no line items in the school budget. For example, administrators in the Collegiate Lower School know every child. Their priorities are clear, because they meet with each set of classroom teachers once a week and often drop in for lessons. This community spirit emanating from the top runs deep. Parents understand and appreciate the administrators' commitment to their children and thus view them as allies, not adversaries.

The students are invested in their academic future, so disruptive behavior is rare. Simply, the kids recognize that school is important. They are surrounded by role models who value scholastic achievement, and their calm, professional school environment implicitly does not tolerate anti-school rebelliousness. Standardized tests are not necessary to ensure diligence from teachers and achievement from students. Rather, comprehensive portfolios of student work, evaluated by teachers, administrators, and parents, demonstrate a more rounded picture of a student's readiness to move forward. The absence of testing pressure affords flexibility in scheduling too. Unlike the public system, Collegiate does not mandate five blocks of in-class reading per week. Instead, they fit in three reading periods to make room for creative, exploratory “specials” like art, science, music, and computers.

Teacher collaboration is built into the schedule. During weekly faculty meetings and students' daily gym periods, lesson planning becomes a cooperative process, rather than a solitary one. In delivering lessons and handling classroom business, two or more teachers are in the room at a time. The dividends of this investment in personalizing education are manifold.

Midway through my first year at Collegiate, I was no longer a shell-shocked rookie and the mistakes I did make did not incite an instant fracas as they had in P.S. 85. Still, I saw every day that the most successful teachers wisely leveraged their experience and relationships to coax the best out of their students. As a new guy, I had a ceiling on how much I could accomplish.

This was never clearer to me than the day I happened to look at a first-grade bulletin board. Each kid had written one sentence about the book
Old Henry
and had drawn a corresponding picture. One of these caught my eye every time I passed by. The picture was chicken scratch and the words read: “HE WAS DFAT AND THAT WAS OK.”

There was something charming to me about how this six-year-old had mangled whatever adjective this was supposed to be. I brought over another young colleague and showed it to her, and she couldn't make sense of it either. It became a running joke where one of us might say during a prep period “I'm feeling dfat,” and the other would immediately assure that it was okay. It's okay to be dfat.

A week later, I mentioned to the veteran first-grade teacher how much that one phrase tickled me. Without a moment's hesitation, she said: “Oh yeah. He was different and that was okay.”

The translation made perfect sense. The teacher, in her eighth year working with first-graders, understood the child's intent immediately. She spoke the language of first-graders.

This exchange stuck with me. I think it crystallized the challenge of being a rookie. I thought of myself as dedicated, enthusiastic, and relatively intelligent, but so many times, I just didn't speak the language. I imagined if I had been assigned to teach that first-grade class, there's no way I would be able to bring those students nearly as
far in their learning as their veteran teacher would. I couldn't even decipher what they were communicating.

Interestingly, when Mayor Bloomberg's appointment of magazine publisher Cathie Black to be New York City public schools chancellor ended calamitously in early 2011, less than four months after she took the job, Black told
Fortune Magazine
: “It was like having to learn Russian in a weekend—and then give speeches in Russian and speak Russian in budget committee and City Council meetings.” Experience and institutional knowledge count in education. Black was too dfat to be OK.

As the year at Collegiate drew towards a close, I knew I had to make a move. I was twenty-five and engaged to Colleen. I enjoyed so much about Collegiate, but after two laps of teaching fourth grade, I didn't see myself surrounded by elementary school kids when I gazed five or ten years down the line.

Literature was what I really loved. Well-told stories had drawn me to film school. I wanted to explore creative and reflective writing with young people who needed outlets for their tangled, evolving worldviews.

I wanted to become a high school English teacher: an ink-stained sharer of the best ideas ever conceived, an agent for sparking adolescents' power of expression. My students would read widely, debate vigorously, write passionately, and in the end, depart my class with the unmatchable, lasting confidence of someone who can genuinely express himself with the written and spoken word. Grandiose visions swam through my head: I'd be a man of letters, Teddy Roosevelt's “man in the arena.”

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

As a naïve college grad enrolling in an alternative certification program, I had drunk the Kool-Aid that intelligence, grit, and a prestigious degree predestined me for success in the classroom; that had been a folly. Now, with better reference points for navigating classrooms and a focus on high school English, I felt ready to go through a legitimate teacher education program and come out the other side, in the parlance of federal legislation, “highly qualified.”

Half of all new teachers leave the profession within five years. I had already contributed to that statistic once; I was determined to arm myself with the skills to stay and thrive. In May 2007, I started a graduate degree program for Teaching of English (Grades 7–12) at Teachers College, Columbia University (TC).

Preparing myself to be a good teacher, and not cannon fodder, was expensive. In the 2010–2011 academic year, TC tuition cost $1,178 per credit, plus books and fees. My program required thirty-eight credits.

Fortunately my parents covered my costs in graduate school. My socioeconomic advantages were reflected in the homogeneity of much of my TC cohort: mid-twenties, upper-middle-class, and white. It's extremely problematic that most top-tier programs preparing people for public service are cost-prohibitive to a majority of would-be applicants.

The dividends for those who attended were many. Teachers College blended well the elements of theory and practice. I took hardcore pedagogy courses in English Methods, Teaching of Reading, Teaching of Writing, and Teaching Shakespeare, as well as a mixed salad of “foundations” courses like The History of Student Activism, and Diversity in the Secondary Classroom. Classes were in the evenings to accommodate teachers' schedules, so most nights I came
home around ten o'clock to my wife. Colleen and I got married the summer I started at TC.

It was time to get back in the New York City public school fracas. My fall student teaching assignment led me to East Harlem's Francis Bacon Middle School, under the wing of mentor-teacher Denise Silva, a hyperkinetic Theatre Arts teacher who loved kids but went berserk when they didn't do what she wanted. When no one volunteered to play her warm-up improv games, she lashed out with harangues of disappointment. When the class was chatty upon entering the room, she screamed her frustration. She called it “tough love.”

I felt awkward playing second fiddle to Denise. On the fourth day of class, a boy called her “sexist” and, neck veins bulging, she got into it with him right there. “
Do you have any idea… “
was an opening she recycled liberally. Later in the hallway, another student, Hector, quietly assured me, “Don't worry, we know
you
not sexist.” I said thanks, but pointed out that neither was Ms. Silva. I knew it was my professional responsibility to back her up—even though she did, in my perception, display a marked preference for her female students.

Even when the kids were hooked on a class activity, forces at Francis Bacon seemed to conspire to prevent coherent lessons. The school stood adjacent to a massive construction site, and the grating industrial groans of heavy machinery never took a coffee break. During one fifty-eight-minute lesson I led on extracting key information from monologues, the construction equipment went mercifully quiet, but we were interrupted by a lengthy public address announcement about something called a “penny harvest,” three loud-ringing phone calls notifying individual students about their guidance counselor appointments, NYU undergraduates entering the room to observe, a woman from the Settlement House somehow affiliated with the guidance department showing up to give out literature about her organization, and a tutor arriving to spirit away five students. The lesson required sustained concentration; achieving it from the whole group was impossible.

Still, there was much to learn by parachuting into a school for fourteen weeks to survey the lay of the land. For example, Francis Bacon held a Fall Field Day, which was a real success as a community building exercise. I thought it was a great idea to have Field Day at the beginning of the year, instead of the very end. I placed second in the faculty egg-and-spoon race.

Also, Denise had a great system called “Notes of Praise” that set clear criteria for students to earn a positive note home. The kids bought into this; those fourteen-year-olds
really
wanted their families to be proud of them. Unfortunately, Denise got overwhelmed within a month and the Notes of Praise fell by the wayside. The kids were resentful when they finally caught on that their earned Notes of Praise were long overdue. I saw firsthand that even when you're overburdened, consistency is crucial.

I was also reminded of the power of out-of-classroom interactions with kids. One morning I was spacing out while riding the First Avenue bus to school when Denise climbed on. She sat next to me and we chatted about class. A stop later, Henry, one of our volatile seventh-graders, boarded the bus. Just the day before, Denise had nailed him with lunch detention and a searing lecture about self-sabotaging his future prospects in life.

I quietly cringed, since Henry was about to see Denise and me riding the bus to school together and would certainly assume we were an item, information that would spread like wildfire among our students. I was stunned when Henry calmly leaned in for a quick, onearm hug from Denise and said with a smile and a charming mock bow “Good morning, my teachers!” Then he shuffled to the back of the bus.

Later in the day, Henry came into our empty classroom during lunchtime. Denise was out of the room, so I was the only one there. Henry was on some kind of gum-scraping detail. I said hello to him, and he came over to me.

“I saw you on the bus today,” Henry said.

“Yes. I was there with Ms. S.,” I replied, not sure where to take the conversation.

“I get on at 96th Street. Two stops on the limited and bam, I'm at school.” The floodgates were open. “I know I need school to get a good education and a good job. You and Ms. S. are my nicest teachers.”

Here was a boy who just wanted to talk. We made a standing lunchtime date.

One day, I shadowed eighth-grader Hector Gago and his peers in class 822. I picked Hector and his class because they already knew me well as their Theatre Arts student teacher, and it would be easy for me to be invisible among them. Since I'd spent so much time with these kids, I was interested to see what their day was like outside of my class.

Hector seemed able to strike an impressive tightrope balance between achieving academically and being a male who fit in with his pals in El Barrio. Navigating the two worlds of “cool” and “smart” was challenging, if not impossible for many kids, but Hector seemed to pull it off. He was the class treasurer, a consistent participant in class discussions, and an animated presence in the hallways between classes. On Back to School Night, his extended family beamed when I told them how well Hector was doing in our class. I wanted to see the trajectory of his day.

I was profoundly let down.