I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had: My Year as a Rookie Teacher at Northeast High

by Tony Danza

  I’m standing alone at the window fifth period, mulling all this over and watching the fall leaves fly by, when my student Gwen slouches in. It’s completely slipped my mind that I asked her to come for a conference, but I try to look smart.

  Gwen doesn’t seem to like me much. In class, for no reason, she shoots me dirty looks that rival Al G’s yawns. The camera has caught those looks, and the show will play them in a montage for laughs. But she’s a good student. Until recently her work was solid. It’s her new tendency to slack off that we need to discuss.

  She slumps behind her desk and glowers, rubbing her chronically sweaty palms on her jeans. Like most girls at fifteen, Gwen has body and appearance issues, and sweaty palms are a particular source of embarrassment for her. In other respects, though, she’s bold. One of the few open lesbians in the school, she’s a member of ALLY, the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance club. Unfortunately, her senior girlfriend just ended their relationship. Gwen is angry, and not just at me.

  “I’m concerned, Gwen,” I tell her. “You’re a good student, but suddenly the work’s not showing it. I don’t think you’re doing the reading.”

  She tucks her hands up under her armpits and says nothing.

  “Is something going on? Something bothering you?” I’m thinking, How do I talk to a girl about girlfriend problems? I guess it’s the same as talking to a guy about girlfriend problems. Gwen mumbles, so low I can barely hear her, “There’s some stuff at home.”

  “Ohhhh.” I’m so relieved I’m afraid she can hear it. Home I can handle. As long as it’s not my own home. “What’s going on?”

  She shrugs. Her father just lost his job and is acting very different. He can’t find work, and has pretty much stopped looking, which pisses off her mother because it means she has to do double shifts as a nurse. So then her parents fight.

  “How’s your relationship with your dad?” I ask, imagining what my daughter would tell her teacher if he asked about her home life right now.

  She shrugs again. “Like I said, he’s different now, kind of a creep.” She tells me they used to be close. “Now, not so much.”

  Wow, that sounds familiar. I take the seat next to Gwen’s and think about what I’m going to say. I don’t know the first thing about Gwen’s father, but I know what it’s like to lose a job and worry that you won’t be able to provide for your family. To worry about what being out of work says about you and what your daughter might think of you. “You know,” I say, “I got fired last year.”

  She rolls her eyes. What could Tony Danza possibly know about what her family is going through?

  “No, really. I got fired and I thought I was finished. Done. Too old to work on TV, who’d want me anymore?”

  She gives me a long, cold stare. “So you came here.”

  “Heh, yeah well, maybe a little bit, but no, that’s not where I’m going. Listen, I …” But where am I going with this? I’ve dragged this kid here and asked her to pour out her troubles. Now what exactly do I have to offer her? I say, “What I mean is, losing your job is major. Especially for a guy. At least to a guy. When I lost my job, it took a toll on my family life, too. I’m not sure my wife knows if she even wants to be married to me anymore, and things are not so great with my daughters, either. You know what they say in the television business when they fire someone?”

  She’s not letting up. The fish eye says, Where is this going?

  “They say, ‘You’re canceled.’ And that’s just how I felt, like I’d been canceled. Erased. And I brought that home. I felt sorry for myself. I lost my temper. I’m pretty sure if you asked them, my wife and daughters would say I acted like a creep, too.”

  Her chin sinks to her chest. I can almost hear her thinking, What does any of this BS have to do with me?

  “Look,” I try again. “I can’t speak for your father, and I’m not defending him. But you need to understand a couple of things, Gwen. First, you can’t let the stress at home interfere with your studies. I know it’s not easy, but this is important. No excuses, not even good ones.” She wipes her hands on her jeans again and won’t make eye contact.

  “Second,” I continue, “I don’t know your father, but remember when we talked in class about walking in someone else’s shoes before you judge them, and the meaning of empathy? Well, I think this situation calls for a little bit of that from you. I’m not excusing your father’s behavior, just like I don’t excuse my own, but this is hard all around, on everyone, not just on you. Try to keep that in mind. You know, when I came home after being fired, I wanted my family to understand how much I hurt. The more I didn’t get that from them the more I needed it and the harder I tried to get it. That’s when it got bad. And don’t forget I have my New York Italian way of discussing things. I can be loud. I have been known to yell. I call it passion, but especially not enamored with my passion is my youngest, Emily. She calls it temper. She’s right.”

  I sneak a peek. Gwen’s tracking now. I continue. “I’m not crazy about my temper, either, and I have tried to work on it, but I grew up in a family that was the opposite of my wife’s. No one in her family ever raised their voice, and I grew up in a family where if people weren’t yelling, they didn’t care.”

  Gwen almost laughs. I wait for her to say something. She doesn’t. “The problem with men,” I blurt out, “is that they are what they do.”

  Gwen lifts her head. “What?” She looks at me.

  “Men feel worthless if they’re not working. At least most of the guys I know do. Women are tougher. They put more stock in relationships and other activities. But for men, the job defines them. So when they lose it, they don’t know who they are. I know about that.”

  I feel an ugly hole in the pit of my stomach, but Gwen is studying me with new eyes. She’s not about to tell me, but I sense her black mood has lifted. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the young can shift emotional gears.

  The door opens, and Joe Connelly pokes his head in, asking, “You having lunch?”

  I start to beg off, but Gwen stops me. “I think we’re good.” She gets up and hugs her backpack to her chest. “Thanks, Mr. Danza.”

  “Keep me posted, and do your reading, Gwen.”

  She gives me a little thumbs-up as she leaves, and when she’s gone, Joe jokes, “Another small step for mankind?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “But I think, maybe.”

  That evening I phone my wife and tell her about Gwen. I apologize for acting like a creep. We agree that it doesn’t make sense for me to fly home for the few days I’ll have off for Thanksgiving. I hate that she agrees so easily.

  The next week Gwen’s work improves, though the hard looks continue. It’s just her, I guess. She does let me know, “Things are getting better at home.” I tell her I’m proud of her.

  Still, the prospect of missing Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, leaves me feeling a little too sorry for myself. I need a change of pace, a break from Philly. Maybe I can’t go home to L.A., but why not go home to New York? Even better, why not take the kids with me? I’ve always admired teachers who take their classes on major field trips, and what could be more major than the greatest city on earth?

  The good news is that the production team likes the idea of a field trip segment. The bad news is that the network wants us to go to Washington, D.C., instead of Manhattan. They have several reasons for this preference, not the least of which is expense. And it’s true that D.C. is the nation’s capital, and none of the kids have ever been, and we can visit the Folger Shakespeare Library there, so even if I did have any say in the decision, I can’t really justify my objection. But I vow to find a way to get the kids to New York later in the year.

  Meanwhile, the school administration approves our Washington trip for November 16, and I hand out permission slips to be signed by every student’s parents. The class is jazzed, but as the trip gets closer, I start sweating. Among many Northeast students the rule seems to be, Rules are made to be broken. And fo
r all the manuals, books, policies, and programs that have been written and announced about school discipline—despite the presence of a Philadelphia police station on campus!—only students who get into physical fights face serious consequences. Behavior codes are clearly posted, and teachers remind students of them every day. Everyone knows the policies on uniforms, hoodies, iPods, running, shouting, and the rest, but no one is consistently and actively enforcing these policies. Even in my own classroom, I have no real framework for disciplining my kids. If they wear hoodies or have their earbuds in, the teacher is supposed to make them take them off, but if the students don’t listen, the teacher is stuck. The only recourse is to make a thing out of it, involve the dean’s office, and probably lose precious class time, and not many teachers are willing to trade their all-important “momentum” for discipline. The kids know this, and some push as far as they can. If they’re like this in class, I don’t want to think what the bus will be like.

  As if to drive the point home, the day before our trip I get an alert from Assistant Principal McCloskey during fifth period that Pepper, my dog biscuit kid, was just assaulted in the hallway. Downstairs, sitting in the school police station, Pepper looks pitiful. His eye is bruised and swollen and his cheek discolored.

  “I was standing in the hallway, just talking to a friend, when this kid came by and punched me in the face,” he explains. He’s close to tears.

  Having absorbed my share of punches, I can see that Pepper’s taken quite a shot. He’s not a bad kid. He can be a slacker and sometimes an instigator, but he’s never mean. And he’s small, so I immediately identify and sympathize with him. “Did you see who did it?” I ask. “Do you know why he hit you?”

  “I don’t know why. It almost knocked me down. I looked up and saw him running away, but I’m not sure who it was.”

  We sit together for a few minutes, just waiting. The station, adjacent to the cafeteria and the teachers’ lounge, is not much of a police facility. There are three or four desks and computers, benches for offending students, a holding room for extreme cases, and a viewing station linked to all the surveillance cameras around the school. Right now there are three guards—two men and a woman—present, two boys being processed at the desks, and another in the holding cell. The phones ring every couple of minutes.

  “Is it always this busy?” I ask the female guard, who appears to be the toughest of the three officers.

  “This is nothing. You should’ve been here half an hour ago.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder at one of the kids at the desk. I know him, so I ask him why he’s here.

  “I got in a fight with him,” he answers, pointing to the holding cell, where another boy is pacing and yelling. Fighting still has some kind of magnetic draw for me, and I’m on the verge of involving myself in this case, too, when Officer Anderson calls Pepper and me over to view some of the surveillance tapes from the time and area of his incident.

  Anderson is a big man, a veteran school guard, and his tone with Pepper is both optimistic and comforting. “Let’s see if we can find your guy.”

  We face the bank of video monitors. “Do you have cameras covering the whole school?” I ask.

  “Just about. Definitely where your student was assaulted.” Officer Anderson runs some tape back and forth, switching from hallway to hallway. He zeroes in on the location, searches the time code for the reported time of the incident.

  Suddenly, we’re there. The hallway fills with bodies during the period change, and there’s Pepper. Just standing, talking. Although we can’t see the actual punch, there’s no evidence that he’s doing anything to invite trouble. Then, a second later, he recoils, and there’s the student running away—down the hallway, into the stairwell. And, on the next monitor, up the stairs he comes, facing right into another camera.

  Officer Anderson knows him. “Mr. Danza, there’s over three thousand kids in this school and about two hundred knuckleheads, and this is one of ’em. I’ll pull his schedule.”

  Pepper and I go back to the bench outside. I tell him it’s good that we know who hit him, but Pepper still looks miserable. Officer Anderson comes back with a photograph and a schedule. “I was right, a real knucklehead.”

  When I look at the picture, I mutter under my breath. So that’s the jerk who punched my kid. I feel like a protective father, and I want to give this bully a beating he’ll remember.

  Officer Anderson calls on his walkie-talkie for Officer Morton, who appears almost immediately. “Bill, go up to 238 and get Elvis Jones and bring him down here. He assaulted another student.” Officer Anderson hands Morton the paperwork and returns to his desk. “Never a dull moment.”

  Officer Morton sends Pepper back to class but asks me to accompany him to get Elvis. It’s not the best idea I’ve heard. My emotions are running high. I remember what it felt like to be small and picked on, what it took in my day to make bullies back down. You can’t fight fighting with fighting now. I know that. But this Elvis creep messed with one of my kids, and my blood is boiling.

  When we get to room 238, Officer Morton knocks on the door. Mr. Florio, the basketball coach, is teaching his English class. Morton explains the situation, and Mr. Florio calls Elvis out of the class. I wait in the hallway, and when Elvis emerges I’m stunned at his size. He easily has fifty pounds and more than a foot of height over Pepper. As we start down the corridor, Officer Morton says nothing, but I can’t hold back. “Why’d you hit that little kid?”

  Elvis acts as if he hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about. “I didn’t hit nobody, and I don’t have to talk to you, you ain’t my teacher.”

  “Why’d you run? Is that what you do, punch kids half your size, then run away?” He doesn’t answer, which just steams me more. “You afraid to pick on somebody your own size?”

  He turns then. “You’re my size.”

  “Why, you want to try me?” I say.

  He looks at Officer Morton, who’s facing straight ahead, saying nothing but walking in lockstep beside him. Elvis turns back to me. “You’re only talking like that because you know I can’t do nothing.”

  The steam keeps building. The days of kids backing down just because you’re a teacher are clearly over. Elvis wants to fight me, and the feeling is so mutual that it’s all I can do to haul myself back from the brink. Fortunately, Officer Morton has a cooler head, and he wears the uniform of authority. As we get to the stairwell, he says, “I’ll take it from here, Mr. Danza.”

  I stop. The stairwell door shuts in my face. Through the glass I see the kid throw a final glare at me over his shoulder. That was close. Almost too close. He still might try to retaliate against me, either personally or through his friends. It’s the code: if pushed, you have to push back. As Coolio says in “Gangsta’s Paradise,” “Me be treated like a punk, you know that’s unheard of.”

  Elvis’s code may be my old code, but it’s wrong. I’m going to have to watch myself.

  “You can’t let them see that they get to you,” David Cohn advises when I tell him about my near altercation.

  “How do I do that? Don’t smile before Christmas?”

  “Show them you’re in charge by acting like their leader. Watch them and listen, and learn from what you see and hear. Show them how you expect them to behave. And don’t ever let them pull you down into the fray.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Sometimes,” he admits. “Have the courage to be calm.”

  “Hah!” I hold my head in mock agony. “I’m the wrong casting for that! I do like that, though, ‘the courage to be calm.’ I only wish I had it.”

  “Give it a try on the trip to D.C. I’ll be there to back you up.”

  “Well, at least Elvis won’t be.”

  CALM IS NOT in the cards. At six o’clock on the morning of November 16, I’m pacing on the corner outside school. It’s freezing cold. The chartered bus is late. We’re supposed to be on the road by six-thirty, and I’m the only one here. The other chaperones sho
w up over the next fifteen minutes. They include Al G’s math teacher, Ms. Green; David Cohn; and Kelly Barton, Northeast’s past principal, retired now, who serves as our production’s liaison to the school district. Kelly’s a big easygoing guy who’s done more than a few field trips in his day. He tells me to stop worrying.

  Fat chance. I’m taking this crew well out of my comfort zone, and I’m scared. “Our production team’s not even here,” I wail. But then they are. And my twenty-six students all magically appear right about when the bus does, at 6:28. Kelly’s right; I need to get a grip.

  Because we’re shooting every minute of this excursion, it’s not as typical a field trip as I’d like. But in a few ways it’s better. The show has provided lunch for everyone on the bus, and the box lunches are quality, with a variety of sandwiches on what is the most important part, a great roll. Well-fed kids tend to be happier kids, and the same goes for teachers. Also, because activity looks better on camera than kids sleeping or staring out the window, I’ve planned some group fun. The road spotter game using an iPhone app morphs into an energetic competition between the kids and the teachers. And I’ve brought my trusty ukulele so we can have a sing-along—special for Howard. I mess with them a little, playing old songs the kids don’t know, then surprise them with Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” I learned it from a video on the Internet especially for the trip, and it’s a hit. Even Fred the bus driver sings a few choruses. By the time we get to the capital, the sun is gleaming, and we’re all pretty chill. Even me.

  When the kids point out the windows, recognizing buildings they’ve seen only in books, their oohs and aahs thrill me. Then Fred gets on the loudspeaker and starts playing tour guide. He charms the kids and really knows Washington, D.C. We don’t have time to stop everywhere, but he drives us as close as possible to the White House and the Washington Monument. I tell Nakiya, who’s sitting next to me, about the time I came to Washington with my Boy Scout troop when I was thirteen and won our race to the top of the monument. “Back then, people were allowed to climb the stairs to the top. It was different then,” I’m sorry to say. “I remember the hit song playing on the radio that day was ‘Can’t Get Used to Losing You’ by Andy Williams.”