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

by Tony Danza

  Next Mr. Cooper and his duet partner, whose first name appropriately is Joy, warble through “If I Loved You.” Much to our surprise, they then segue into “My Way”—all five verses. On and on and on they sing. I tell Nicky to go out onstage and give them the hook, but she shakes her head and draws back into the wings. “I can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “I have Mr. Cooper for math,” she whispers. “I can’t risk my grade.” Turns out there are limitations to student MCs, even when they’re as enthusiastic as Nakiya.

  But she has her skills as well. Just as Voltron is about to come on, there’s a glitch with their music, and the audience gets restless as we struggle to fix it. “Go out there with your uke and cover for them,” she suggests.

  Why didn’t I think of that? I go out and play “Umbrella” with Nakiya holding the mike for me so the audience can hear the ukulele. The kids all sing along, and somehow on a sunny day in the middle of the auditorium up springs an umbrella. Bedlam, but in a good way.

  Voltron closes the show, a funny performance with Mr. Connelly moonwalking across the stage. Then the audience votes. Nakiya lines the performers across the stage, raising her hand over each contestant as she asks the audience to applaud for their favorite. Voltron takes first, and Ms. Solomon, our nervous social science soprano, winds up with second place. The crowd goes wild, and I think, This beats the response to any show I’ve played in Hollywood. Seven hundred kids have shown up to see their teachers try to entertain them. Kids like to see their teachers doing something different. Really different.

  As we’re packing up, Mr. Dyson pauses and thanks me. “I’ve been at this school for six years,” he says. “This is the most I’ve ever had to do with the other teachers here. And it was a great show, thanks.”

  A few days later, I find this note in my mailbox:

  Dear Danza,

  I contemplated whether or not to write this note. After all, I don’t have any fancy schmancy letterhead (I’m trying to make it on a teacher’s salary, you know). Then I remembered what my mom always said, “One good/kind act deserves another.” There is a thin line between giving a compliment and “brown nosing.” Make no mistake, I don’t do the latter. I can’t help but admit I had my doubts about you. I thought please, this guy couldn’t be a teacher, he smiles too much … no one can be that joyful with a bunch of cameras around and not lose their cool sometimes. Well, after working with you on the Talent Show, I can say with certainty that Mr. Danza is a nice guy and a teacher. Thanks for all of your support, and the gift certificate wasn’t bad, either. Welcome to Northeast and good luck with your project.

  V. Solomon.

  I return to California for Christmas vacation ready to take on the world.

  Seven

  Field Tripping

  AFTER CHRISTMAS, we take off with a thud. Our new academic focus, the five-paragraph essay, is alien territory for most of the class. They’re intimidated by writing to begin with, and they can’t understand why anyone would need a thesis statement or topic sentence. At times during this unit, we’d all rather be digging ditches, and to add to the stress, Emmanuel and Monte are prepping for statewide debate club tournament finals. Also, a big home basketball game is looming.

  Three days after we come back I give the class a do-now to write a short story using six of these vocabulary words: arrogant, mollified, anguished, complacently, ominously, metaphor, hyperbole, hero, ironic, imagery, formidable. These words were in a story we read before Christmas. I want to see how much they remember and get them thinking before we press ahead.

  Multiple reading levels within a class are a challenge that every teacher faces. Everyone learns differently, and my class of tenth graders includes a few who started the year at a third-grade reading level. Three of my girls have Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs. This means that they have some sort of learning disability or difficulty and are entitled to request help with their work from other teachers and resources in the school. If they’re having trouble with an assignment or a test, they can ask to go to the school’s Resource Center, and I’m required to send them. But I’d rather include them, work with them personally, give them the confidence that they’re as smart and capable as anyone else. The challenge is always to move through the material fast enough to keep the advanced students interested without the others demanding more time. As if to drive the dilemma home, Monte now sits directly in front of my desk, his story already written and his face twitching with impatience. He might as well be screaming, “Come on, already!”

  Charmaine, meanwhile, is a constant challenge. She is often late and disdainful, but every once in a while she’s into it. Not today. Still, I can see she’s written something. I coax her to stand up and read it. She refuses. I insist. Finally she hauls herself to her feet as if I’ve asked her to do my laundry.

  “My arrogant teacher told me to write a story using the words anguished, complacently, ominously, metaphor, hyperbole, hero, ironic, imagery, and formidable, so I mollified him and did the work.”

  “Clever,” I admit. “Unfortunately, that is not a story. I can’t accept it.”

  “So?” she asks.

  “So rewrite it into a story.”

  She folds her arms.

  “Like the Nike ad says”—I’m attempting levity—“ ‘Just do it.’ ” I tap another student to read, and leave Charmaine standing there. Eventually she sits down, turns her paper over, and starts writing.

  A few students later I return to Charmaine, who now reads, “My arrogant teacher told me to write a story, so I mollified him and wrote the darn thing. I was anguished because my first story wasn’t acceptable, so I had to complacently write this one. He ominously stood over me until I started to write, which is really annoying. He is a donkey when he does stuff like that. He will talk about it nonstop if you don’t do what he says. He is not a hero of the school. It was ironic because the word I was thinking he is, is the first word on the list of words you have to use for this story. Use imagery to imagine that. This is not a formidable challenge.”

  I have to give it to her. It’s not flattering, but it’s good. The class applauds, and she nods, satisfied. Welcome to second semester.

  AS IF THE CURRICULUM isn’t enough of a headache, we have less than two weeks to rehearse a student variety show that the kids insisted on naming Extravadanza (I swear I had nothing to do with that bit of witty wordplay). With the money we raise from ticket sales, the school will at last air-condition the library, but the show isn’t only for kids from Northeast. I’ve invited students from two other area high schools to make it an even bigger event and garner a larger audience. They’ll join the cast and share our proceeds, so it’s now a theatrical production involving some two hundred cast members.

  Meanwhile, a massive earthquake has struck Haiti. The news of this natural catastrophe and the suffering of the Haitian people seems to touch my students in a way I haven’t seen before. Thanks to the Internet and the immediacy of Web and televised images, we watch the disaster unfold in real time, and the scenes of collapsed schools, dazed orphans, and homeless families bogged down in rain and mud and heat affect my kids profoundly. They can’t wrap their minds around the scale of the tragedy, and I try to build on their horror to teach a lesson on empathy. “When you do a good deed for others, it always ends up being good for you,” I tell them. “Nobody can force you to lift a finger to help someone else, but when you choose to make that effort, it also makes you feel more connected and less helpless. And let’s be honest; you feel good about yourself.”

  It’s the kids’ idea to piggyback on Extravadanza to raise money for the earthquake victims. Students who aren’t working on the show form a kind of Salvation Army, making signs and donation buckets to collect Haitian relief donations before, during, and after the performance. Even Al G and Matt get in on this act, especially after I tell them I’ll match whatever the group raises. They take that as a dare. We’re gonna cost you a lot of money, Mr. D.


  The night of the performance, the kids onstage sing and dance their hearts out. We do a great show, teachers and students working together in huge musical numbers. It really is an Extravadanza! And the kids offstage work the auditorium and lobby equally hard. When they discover they’ve collected more than four hundred dollars, which totals eight hundred with the matching funds, they’re so excited they do an automatic recount. As I watch the pride with which they count, pack, and deliver their donation in person to the local Red Cross office, I wish everyone who despairs about America’s “inner-city youth” could witness this. Who’s a lost cause now? It gives me hope.

  I want so badly to reward my kids, and taking them to New York seems the perfect way to do it. I keep thinking about my own tenth-grade English teacher, Charles “Chick” Messinger, who directed and produced Malverne High’s annual musical theater productions, in three of which I was a cast member. Unlike most of my high school classes, Mr. Messinger’s was fun. He loved the arts and would tell us about all the great performances he’d seen in “the city,” at the Belasco, the Lyceum, the Majestic, or Lincoln Center. He talked about Manhattan as if it were an emerald city, and to us it was. Despite our proximity, as kids we rarely made the short trip from Brooklyn or Long Island; Broadway was another world. So Mr. Messinger was introducing us to something beyond our imagination, and his love of that world was contagious. He’d seen Gypsy with Ethel Merman so many times, he could tell whenever she made a change in her performance, right down to the slightest new hand gesture. We felt as if Mr. Messinger was just stopping by our school; his real life was on Broadway and in Manhattan. And his excitement hooked me. I once told him that because of him I wanted to be a teacher. He thanked me for the compliment but countered that I should think about acting. So I owe a lot to Mr. Messinger, and now I want more than anything to give my students some of the gift he gave me.

  When I tell the class that I’ve gotten approval for a trip to New York from both the network and the school, there’s an explosion of excitement. We’re going to New York City! They dance around the room high-fiving and hugging each other. You’d think we’d hit the lottery. For some of them, we might as well have.

  “We’ll go up by bus next Wednesday,” I tell them. “That way we can see a Broadway matinee.” They ask what we’re going to see. West Side Story. Blank faces. “West Side Story is like a Shakespeare to Street version of Romeo and Juliet.” Shakespeare to Street is our thing, so they get that, and they all studied Romeo and Juliet last year in ninth grade. “The street, in this case, is on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1950s. Romeo and Juliet are two star-crossed lovers named Tony and Maria. He’s a member of this white gang, the Jets, and she’s Puerto Rican with a brother who belongs to a gang called the Sharks. The Jets and the Sharks are rival gangs, just like the Montagues and Capulets were in Shakespeare’s version.”

  “So do Tony and Maria die like Romeo and Juliet?” Chloe and Katerina ask in unison.

  I wag my finger. “No, no, no. Never give away the ending.”

  In class we do a quick review of Romeo and Juliet, and I make an effort to excite them about seeing the play. None of my students has ever been to a Broadway show. I can hardly wait for them to experience that first thrill of the overture and then the anticipation as the stage comes to life.

  The kids want to know about the dinner I also have planned for us at Patsy’s, my friend Sal’s Italian restaurant. Is the food good there? Is it near the Empire State Building? Where else are we gonna go? Can we see where you live? I have to do some heavy lifting to get them back to that five-paragraph-essay lesson.

  By Monday, everything’s set. Our driver will be Fred, the same friendly guy who showed us the sights in D.C., and our chaperones—initially—are also recast from the first field trip. The adults are almost as eager as the kids, especially when they learn that Patsy’s is a really great restaurant, so great that Frank Sinatra used to hang out there. Word escapes, and pretty soon our chaperone list has expanded to include Joe Connelly, Assistant Principal McCloskey, and Ms. Smotries, a special ed teacher who specializes in dealing with problem kids and who covers for David Cohn when he’s unavailable to observe my classes. We now have enough chaperones to cover two trips.

  And then Ms. Carroll informs me that she’s decided to come. Nothing against Ms. Carroll, but she’s the school principal. When I break this to the kids, they respond with a predictable chorus. NOOOOO! It’s our trip. The principal can’t come. It’s not fair, we won’t have any fun with Ms. Carroll along. She’s the principal!

  You just never know when you’ll get a teachable moment. As a teacher, I’ve learned to look for them because, as a student, I so often failed to see how school could possibly relate to my life—and that disconnect allowed me to rationalize that school didn’t matter. I know that some of my students think the same thing: So what if I’ve read Of Mice and Men? What does it mean to me? One of my jobs as a teacher is to open their eyes to the life lessons contained in the tenth-grade English curriculum. Lessons about friendship and heroism, treating people as you want to be treated, and walking in another man’s shoes before you judge him. The teachable lesson today is one that we will read about, in various stories, all year long.

  I quiet them down. “The following lesson will serve you well your whole life,” I tell them. “I want you to say it along with me now: ‘Make the best of a baaaaad situation.’ Come on, say it with me.”

  We begin to chant. Pretty soon it sounds like a classroom of sheep as they bleat baaaaaad at each other for laughs. It takes their mind off the principal, anyway. Then I go for the lesson. “What’s a baaaad situation?”

  When the principal comes on your trip!

  I hold up my hand. “A baaaad situation is when you don’t like what’s going down but you have limited options. When you run into these kinds of situations—and trust me, they come along often—you should try to make the best of things and even look for a way to turn them to your advantage. I want you all to understand something here: she’s coming, and we can handle it in one of two ways. That’s what I mean by limited options. We can tell her we don’t want her on our trip, and hurt her feelings—I hear she has a great memory. Or, we can write her and say we don’t want to go to New York without her. Maybe then we’ll have a friend in the principal’s office, and you just never know when we might need her help.”

  They toss this back and forth, grumbling and protesting. Fortunately, most of them actually like Ms. Carroll. It’s not personal; it’s just the idea of the principal on their trip that gets them. It takes a while, but eventually they come around. We write the note, and Emmanuel volunteers to play ambassador and deliver it to the office.

  Principal Carroll is no fool; she knows a suck-up when she sees one, but she does smile at the invitation. Later she tells me she’s looking forward to spending this time with my kids. That, however, is before the trip.

  On Wednesday we assemble in the school lobby at nine, and this time we’re by the book. I’ve instructed my kids to excuse themselves from their first-period classes, having notified all their other teachers that they’ll be gone on a field trip the rest of the day. The ratio of students to chaperones is just over three to one, not including the camera crew, and when the kids realize this, some of them say they’re not so sure they can still make the best of this baaaad situation, but I counsel them to just enjoy the adventure, and as soon as the bus arrives they cheer up. Fred the driver greets the kids like they’re his own, and the kids give him fist bumps and hugs as they scramble onboard and find seats. The premium seats are way in back, since the front belongs to the chaperones.

  We luck out on traffic and weather, and reach the city around eleven, giving us time to sightsee before the play. The kids’ noses are glued to the windows as we ride up the West Side Highway and across town on Fifty-seventh Street. Philly’s historic towers are no match for Manhattan’s skyscrapers, and as my students gasp and point, I marvel all over again tha
t so few of them have ever been here. I cannot wait to show them Central Park on this picture-perfect winter day.

  We leave the bus at Sixty-seventh Street and walk into the park from the west side, strolling around the small loop, stopping at the fountain by the pond to snap photos. The kids climb on anything that doesn’t move, and I’m absolutely loving it—for about five minutes. Then the usual suspects start acting up. Al G wanders away from the group. Matt is getting physical with some of the other guys. I take both Matt and Al aside and remind them that we’ve all got to work together here, that I don’t want to waste everybody’s time chasing after the two of them. In truth, I’m a little angry with them both for threatening a day that I badly want to be a highlight of my students’ year. This is my city, and I want to show it off to them. The last thing I need is for these two students to spoil the experience for everyone else—or for me. Yeah, me!

  After the kids burn off a little energy in the park, we take a group picture by the Angel of the Waters fountain, then ride the bus down to Times Square. The kids are climbing the TKTS bleachers and checking out the huge digital billboards when I notice Al G slinking away again. I call after him, but he ignores me.

  Suddenly I realize why his behavior makes me so angry—and anxious. I remember something that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. When I was a little boy, about seven years old, I got lost in the city right near here. My grandmother, a short, roundish woman who hardly spoke any English, had brought me with my brother and my two cousins, Patty and Vivian, to see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. I think now how brave my grandmother was. The streets were jammed, and the Christmas season was in full swing. On the way into the show, Patty tapped me on the shoulder. He’d noticed the Automat across the street. When the show let out, we slipped through the crowd to see this marvelous place, like a cafeteria except that all the food was served from vending machines. Ah, the future. To us, the Automat seemed like the giant toy of tomorrow. But our delight evaporated when we turned around and couldn’t find Grandma. We stood there petrified, the Christmas throng swirling around us, my older cousin trying unsuccessfully to stop me from crying. Finally a kindly NYC cop spotted us. He took us back to the theater, where we found Grandma—beside herself. First she acted about as furious as a person of her stature could be. Then she burst into tears as she hugged me.