Adequate Yearly Progress

by Roxanna Elden

  She only knew why it bothered her.

  * * *

  Even twelve years earlier, during her first year of teaching, Maybelline had been more organized than the other teachers. She calculated, corrected, and left each night with a clean desk. When she controlled the details, everything worked just as it was supposed to.

  It was when the kids entered the room that chaos took over. They were so messy and unruly. They talked loudly and talked back and didn’t follow directions and didn’t care.

  All except a few.

  Andres Medina had been one of those students, that first year, who plugged away, never quite getting it. He was one of only a few students who accepted Maybelline’s offer of help during lunch, showing up so consistently she suspected he had no one to eat with in the cafeteria. Under her direction, his skills began to improve, bit by bit. And Maybelline was pleased. She was eager to prove to her students—and to her new bosses—that hard work and attention to detail paid off.

  Unfortunately for Andres, he had also developed some teacher’s-pet tendencies. During class, he raised his hand to answer every question. When Maybelline dropped something, he jumped out of his seat to hand it to her, and when his classmates threw balls of paper at the wastebasket, it was Andres who scooped up the shots they missed. He stayed afterward, too, picking up textbooks his classmates had dropped on the floor or left open on desks.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Maybelline said, but she was too overwhelmed to turn down help with any real conviction.

  The other students in Andres’s class were terrible. One of them, Sandro Velez, had the power to silence other students with his eyes. Sandro wore bandannas around his wrist or hanging from his back pocket, and once, when Maybelline called on him to solve an easy algebra problem, he answered, “T don’t equal shit.” Then he looked around to see if anyone had a problem with this. No one seemed to.

  Sandro and his friends talked through Maybelline’s lessons as if they were sitting in front of a muted television. Other groups of students saw this and started their own conversations, until Maybelline was straining her voice every day, feeling as though she were speaking underwater. Only Andres continued to answer her questions—this even as Sandro and his friends made girls laugh with muttered insults or threw pencil erasers at Andres when he bent to open his tattered backpack.

  The two boys were the same size, somewhere in the medium-to-husky range, and both were Latino. But the similarities stopped there. Sandro was muscular in the way that men who’d been in prison were muscular. He had all the signs of experience with the juvenile justice system: the homemade tattoos, the determination to get around rules, the admiration of trouble-loving girls. Andres, on the other hand, was droopy and lumpy. His arms flopped at his sides, and he smelled vaguely of mildewed clothing. One got the feeling he rarely had home-cooked meals but instead fed himself from a shelf of junk food in an empty house. He had probably always clung to his teachers for reassurance.

  After a while, to Maybelline’s great relief, Sandro began skipping class. The absences were occasional at first, then stretched for days at a time. Finally, he seemed to disappear altogether, leaving the class to build up a shaky dynamic in his absence. Andres continued to wave his hand in the air for questions, but the insults relented. There were even moments of order and tranquility during which Maybelline felt like she was actually teaching algebra.

  It was a particularly quiet day in mid-October when Sandro showed up again. Most students had textbooks on their desks, and Maybelline was explaining the quadratic formula when she saw Sandro open the door. He stood, surveying the class in silence. Maybelline kept talking as if, by not acknowledging his presence, she might keep it from becoming real.

  This is how it happened that Andres, who was looking at his work, didn’t see Sandro slip into the chair next to him.

  The silence didn’t last long. As soon as he’d arranged himself in the chair, Sandro turned to a friend and began whispering urgently.

  Maybelline raised her voice to be heard over his, almost by reflex.

  Sandro gave Maybelline what he probably thought was a charming grin. “Don’t worry, miss, I’m gonna leave right now. Just gotta talk to my homeboy over here about some, uh, math problems.”

  Andres, with the increased confidence that he had built up during Sandro’s absence, turned to his right with a sharp, “Shhh! ”

  His eyes met Sandro’s as he turned.

  At this point in the story, Maybelline’s memory always switched to the type of grainy picture found on old VHS videotapes.

  Sandro stared at Andres without blinking for what seemed like several minutes.

  Andres looked down at his textbook.

  A voice somewhere in the room said, “Oooh, he told you to shut up!”

  There was laughter.

  “He was like, ‘Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh’!” the voice called out again.

  Students turned to one another with a chorus of exaggerated shushing sounds, the day’s lesson abandoned.

  Stretching his legs out in front of him, Sandro leaned back in his chair, arms behind his head, turning an amused face toward Maybelline. “You know what? I changed my mind. I’m gonna stay.”

  Andres’s eyes remained locked on the book in front of him.

  Maybelline forced her mouth to continue describing the quadratic formula. A voice somewhere in the room said, “Miss, you said that already,” but she could not attach the words to a face or a body. She had a feeling that she was about to see a crushing triumph of evil over good. Could she get Andres out of the room? Could she get another adult into the room? There was an emergency call button next to the door, but to press it was to admit that she didn’t believe Andres could defend himself.

  There was also a wastebasket next to the door. Maybelline grabbed a paper from her desk and brought it to the wastebasket, leaning her arm against the button in a move that felt more conspicuous than she’d hoped.

  Mrs. Rawlins’s irritated voice came through the intercom. “Fight?”

  Maybelline froze. She’d assumed that pressing the button would prompt a security guard to quietly rush to her aid, although later, looking back, this would seem silly.

  “Helloooo? Do you have an emergency? Is there a fight?”

  “Uh, no. Sorry, I pressed the button by accident.” Maybelline hoped Mrs. Rawlins could read the desperation in her voice. She was already starting to notice looks passing among some of her more drama-hungry students. For reasons she had never understood, kids liked watching one another get hurt.

  “Well, be more careful, please. We’re short-staffed on security. We can’t have them running all over the place.” There was a click as the intercom shut off.

  Around Maybelline, the class was already making its ready-to-go sounds. The time students spent packing up had expanded since the start of the year, so that now, even before students shoved through the door and scattered into the hallway at the end of each class, there were several minutes of binders snapping and loud talking and laughter and students standing up and moving around the classroom, and it was during this confusion that Sandro sprang to his feet, yanking Andres sideways from his chair by his backpack.

  “Awww, shiiiiit!” yelled a girl’s voice. “They gonna fight!”

  Andres struggled awkwardly to disentangle himself from the backpack.

  Students crowded around to get a better look. Two of Sandro’s friends closed in, ready to jump on Andres in the unlikely event it became necessary.

  “Am I being too loud for yo bitch ass now?” Sandro yelled into Andres’s ear.

  Andres managed to pull one arm out of his backpack strap. “Sorry, man, I didn’t—”

  He never had a chance to finish. Sandro had a lock in his other hand, and he crashed it into Andres’s eye with a sickening crunch.

  Andres fell immediately to the floor.

  The crowd pressed inward in its excitement. Maybelline lunged for the emergency button, pressing it over and over
, but this time she got no answer at all. Bodies pressed in at the doorway as voices in the hall yelled, “Fight! In that new math teacher’s class!”

  Maybelline propelled herself into the center of the crowd on a wave of adrenaline.

  “Stop!” she begged, grabbing at Sandro’s shirt.

  Andres was in a ball on the floor, curled up and covering his face as Sandro kicked him in the back.

  Suddenly, the crowd near the door thinned, and a deep voice roared, “GET. THE FUCK. UP. OFF HIM.” A thick pink arm reached through the mass of bodies, grabbing Sandro in a choke hold.

  Coach Ray.

  He dragged Sandro into the hallway, where two security guards were just beginning to push their way through the crowd.

  Maybelline turned back to Andres, who lay curled up on the floor, clutching his eye with a bloody hand. The rest of the class filed out, avoiding the red-faced football coach.

  One skinny kid, imitating a character in a then-popular movie, leaned over Andres’s crumpled frame and squealed, “You got knocked the fuck out!”

  Handing Sandro off to the security guards, Coach Ray addressed Maybelline’s next class of students, who were leaning into the doorway to see who was hurt. “Go across the hall to my room and sit down. Now. Oh, and shut up.”

  “I got them,” he said to Maybelline. “Go check on the kid.”

  Andres had struggled to a sitting position by the time Maybelline closed the door. “I’m okay, miss,” he said, and then lay back down. There was urine on his jeans.

  Maybelline called an ambulance from her classroom phone.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, as two paramedics carried Andres away on a stretcher. She couldn’t tell if he heard her. The area around his eye seemed more than just swollen. Something about it seemed rearranged, misshapen.

  School was over by the time the ambulance left and Maybelline crossed the hallway to Coach Ray’s room. The walls were bare except for a few football posters and some health-class textbooks stacked against an empty bulletin board. Chalk writing on the board announced that the day’s lesson was Health and Fitness.

  “Thanks for everything,” said Maybelline. She tried to step back into the hallway before her tears spilled.

  “That’s all right, Ms. Galang. You ain’t the first teacher at this school to have a fight in your class. Or the last.” He offered her a Chick-fil-A napkin from his desk drawer.

  Maybelline pressed the napkin to her eyes. She was surprised the coach knew her name. They had never interacted before.

  “Ask anyone in this place. We got some crazy kids here, and security ain’t worth a thing. But if anything happens, just remember, you got me across the hall.”

  When Maybelline returned to her classroom, Andres’s backpack was still lying on the floor. She put it in her classroom closet, as if keeping it safe might in some way transfer to its owner.

  Andres never returned to Brae Hill Valley High School. He never transferred to another school, either, as far as Maybelline knew. The contact numbers she got from the office led to disconnected lines. After two months of showing up at lunch and staying after class, Andres Medina had disappeared as tracelessly as a soap bubble.

  Coach Ray, on the other hand, appeared often. In the weeks following the fight, he made a habit of stopping by the classroom. He warned students that he’d handle any complaints from Ms. Galang personally. There were football players in most of her classes, and Coach Ray marched them to her desk, advising them that if they wanted to see him happy in practice, Ms. Galang had better be happy at the end of the day. Then, one day, he asked her to dinner.

  The whole thing would have been a short fling, a few months of uncommunicative dating based more on gratitude than anything resembling love—if not for the mishap that led to Maybelline’s pregnancy, and eventually to Allyson.

  Never, in the years that followed, would Maybelline turn her back to her students. Never would she misplace a paper, or fall behind and have to accept makeup work. She would leave no room for error or chaos. Even her classroom closet was flawless, filled with neat stacks of workbooks and labeled boxes. All except for the farthest corner, on the lowest shelf, where Andres Medina’s backpack sat in a disorderly lump.

  FORTIFY BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE™

  MY PLAN IS to be a vetinarian and one day have my own vetinary clinick.

  Lena sighed. Papers in which students shared their career plans were always the worst. They wanted to be veterinarians, CSI technicians, psychologists, and a host of other advanced-degree-requiring professions they’d seen on TV, all of which, in displays of tragic situational irony, were likely to be misspelled. Layers of fatigue settled upon her each time she corrected a concoction of letters such as nowindays or oftenly, or fixed punctuation that seemed randomly sprinkled across the page. Yet there was always one paper that made her finally decide to pack up for the day, her comment-making capacity depleted. This paper felt like it might be the insurmountable one.

  Except she couldn’t leave. Report-card day loomed, and the ever-present piles on her desk now threatened to engulf her. If she didn’t finish at least one stack of essays today, there was no way she’d have her grades done on time. She clicked open her grading pen, positioning it over the paper.

  My plan is to be a vetinarian…

  To make matters worse, it was one of those earnest three-page efforts that called for some encouragement to balance out her corrections.

  … my own vetinary clinick.

  And she wasn’t just supposed to correct the spelling errors, either. She was supposed to write something meaningful on this paper, something that could conceivably begin to bridge the chasm between its author and a person who might, one day, actually own a veterinary clinic. Then she was supposed to do the same thing for the next paper, and the next, and the one after that, despite her waning concentration. And despite the weather. Texas’s oppressive summer heat had finally faded, giving way to the type of breezy mid-October day that made her colleagues tell lame jokes about whether she’d brought the cold down with her from Philly. Fresh air drifted through the open window, hinting at the exciting possibilities that lay outside. It was one more reminder that grading these assignments threatened to cut into Lena’s own more pressing assignment for the night: cooking dinner for Nex Level.

  My plan is to be a…

  VetERinarian, she wrote, circling the first misspelled word.

  “Hey, Ms. Wright.” It was Daren Grant, the consultant, sipping from his water bottle and preparing to pee the clear pee of the righteous.

  “Hey.” Lena hoped her tone communicated just how little enthusiasm Daren Grant’s presence inspired. He had visited her classroom for the first time that morning. Afterward, he’d sent a follow-up e-mail that ended with the phrase, Make it a great day!

  “Just dropping off a quick worksheet to help you fortify background knowledge for students.” Daren Grant had the informal tone of someone who nonetheless was about to issue a formal directive. “If you could just have them write down the background information they’re missing—and of course provide meaningful feedback, ha-ha—then it will be really easy for me to confirm that you’re fortifying background knowledge.” He held up his iPad to show her what looked like a digital checklist.

  “You want me to ask students to write everything they don’t know? On one page?” Also, more important, was Daren Grant asking her to grade a whole extra stack of worksheets, right before report-card day, so he could mark one box on a checklist?

  “Our strategy is to have teachers use what students don’t know as a starting point, and then perform actions that will make students know those things.”

  “Isn’t that”—Lena was confused—“pretty much the definition of teaching?”

  “Exactly! Love that attitude. Just go ahead and make copies of this when you get a chance.” With that, he handed her the paper and breezed into the hallway.

  The last of Lena’s grading motivation whooshed out like air from an unti
ed balloon. She promised herself she’d grade at home if she had time, and it was with this thought that she stuffed the whole pile of papers into her bag, hoisted them onto her shoulder, flung them into her car, drove them home, lugged them up to her second-floor apartment, and dropped them just inside the front door, where she promptly forgot about them.

  It was time to throw down in the kitchen. Ever since Nex had said he might come to her classroom if she cooked him dinner, that line from his poem had been repeating itself in her head. Strong sistas knew how to throw down in the kitchen.

  It made her glad that she’d fortified some of her own lagging background knowledge when she’d first moved to Texas. Cooking, she knew, was something she should have learned as a child, from the type of tough-yet-loving grandmother featured in gospel genre movies. She should have spent Sundays in a kitchen full of aunties and cousins, amid arguments that ended in tearful embraces as everyone realized blood was thicker than water. There were supposed to be children running around and corn bread in the oven, and everyone was supposed to have a good singing voice.

  Actually, Lena did have a good singing voice. She’d played several roles in musicals at the performing arts high school. It was all the rest of it she had missed out on during her siblingless, cousinless, petless childhood. The Wrights did not gather in the kitchen on Sunday mornings. They sat in silence, reading the New York Times.

  The thought that her cooking skills might one day reveal these deficiencies had prompted Lena, shortly after moving to Texas, to buy a book of home-style Southern recipes and practice them on her own. The fried chicken was a lost cause—she could never get the inside fully cooked before the outside burned—but she’d mastered the meat loaf and found a baked mac ’n’ cheese that was hard to mess up. These, combined with store-bought corn bread, had become the one full meal she could make with confidence.