by Donna Foote
“How is this going to come to a closing, a resolution?” asked Phillip.
“One of us is gonna have to shoot the other,” came his simple reply. “Whoever shoots first solves the problem.”
Phillip was taken aback. “Is it worth it?”
Darius looked at him and said, “You got to do what you got to do.”
Everyone else in the class just sat there. There was no outrage, no shock, no embarrassment. It was business as usual. Phillip didn’t know what to do with what he had just learned. Who do I go to? He already has a TRO. Do I send work home? Who would pick it up? What should I do?
Phillip had much in common with his students; he, too, was raised in a low-income community by a single mother. But he had never lived in a neighborhood like this. He had never experienced the kind of pressure or fear that Darius knew. He could sympathize, he could imagine, but he could never feel what Darius was feeling. The only answer for Darius’s situation, he decided, was to make the time that he had with him meaningful, to make the moments in Mr. Gedeon’s class the best moments of Darius’s day.
But that did not address the larger problem, and it certainly didn’t allay his own fears about Darius’s safety. Now, when Darius was not in class, Phillip couldn’t help but wonder: Is this the day? Is this the day I’m gonna get the notice he’s either in jail or dead?
One day, way back in September, a note was left on his desk that read: “Hey Mr. G. I Love the way you teach our first period. You help me a lot in class. I really appreciate you helping me. Guess who? Thanks 5:30 p.m.” Phillip tacked the letter to the bulletin board next to his desk. He kept it there to read on days like this, when everything seemed so futile.
The first inkling that teaching at Locke was going to be tougher than he thought came when Phillip got the results of the first benchmark assessments, monthly tests that Dr. Wells required teachers to give to track achievement. Ninety-five percent of his students had failed. At the math department meeting afterward, Phillip realized that the other teachers had equally disappointing results; the kids had all bombed.
When Phillip handed out the scores to his students, they were surprised. He had given them the grades they deserved; they were used to getting the grades they needed. Am I being too hard? Are the questions too difficult? No, he decided. The questions had come directly from the work he had been presenting in class. Then why are my students failing?
Phillip was not in the habit of blaming himself. He decided that the problem was homework. His kids didn’t do it. That was going to change.
First he decided to cut the number of nightly homework problems from an overwhelming twenty to a more manageable handful. Then he decided that the kids themselves would correct the homework in class, instead of handing it in to him for marking. That way there would be immediate feedback—kids wouldn’t have to wait weeks to get their work back, if Phillip even got around to grading it. They would see that there was a meaningful relationship between the nightly homework and the weekly test results. The pace of the class would change, too. The lessons would be slower, more deliberate. Finally, failure to do homework would have consequences: a dreaded Saturday-school detention.
Phillip came up with his plan after reading through the “free writes,” essays critiquing his class that he had solicited from his students. He found out that his emphasis on homework was the exception at Locke, not the rule. Most teachers didn’t give it, or if they did, they didn’t really expect to get it back. So it was tough; he was making a big deal about something that nobody else cared about. Phillip believed that Locke needed a schoolwide policy on homework. Without it, kids could not succeed. Limited resources were not the problem at Locke. The problem was that there was no culture of achievement.
It wasn’t the kids’ fault; it was the responsibility of parents and teachers to instill good work habits in their children. Phillip tried to put himself in his students’ shoes: If I were a student and no one forced me to do homework and I had a teacher giving it to me, and not grading it, why would I do it? I would think: “I have homework and there’s a lot of it, so why do it?” Especially if I were a student who had been passing all the time.
Phillip got positive feedback at the school’s open house in early October. Attendance schoolwide for the event was low. But a whopping twenty-two out of two hundred parents had dropped in on room 301. Phillip used the time to try to create some accountability from parents. The next day, he tried to do the same with his students. He spoke for five minutes and took no questions. The kids needed a reality check.
When he started to speak, the look on the faces before him was I don’t care. But as he continued, he could see that his words were having an effect.
“Let’s talk about reality,” he barked. “What do people think about Locke High School? The reality is the people on the outside—the school board members, the politicians, and the government officials—make decisions every day that affect you. But they don’t care about all your trials and tribulations and who you really are. What they care about is what you show them. All they see is the test scores, the grades, the attitude. They don’t see what we as teachers see on a daily basis. Talking to your parents made me realize that teachers are not the only ones in this struggle. The parents support us and want you to succeed. But you have to realize what people from outside the community think of you. They don’t spend money on this school on a daily basis because you tell them on a daily basis that you are not worth it. Why spend money when you don’t do the work? Why buy computers when you don’t perform even at a basic level?
“You have to understand that every action has one of two consequences: you can either support their beliefs that you are unworthy and that you don’t care so why should they, or you can show them that they are wrong. How? You be the students they think you cannot be. Study. Do your homework. Come to class and do as well as you can. You need to make a choice. Every time you do something, think of the consequences. Are you supporting or disproving their theories about who you are?
“The cards are stacked against you. But that doesn’t give you an excuse not to play the game. That should give you the excuse, the motivation, to work twice as hard.”
There was silence. He had their absolute attention. Now the look on their faces said You’re right.
Seeing that, he launched into a lesson about biconditional and conditional statements.
While Phillip worried that all his kids were failing, one of Hrag’s biggest problems was that too many of his students were passing. He didn’t know how to grade. There was no schoolwide policy, so he just did what almost everyone else in the biology department did. The bottom line was, if you came to Mr. H’s class and did the lab work, you passed. Hrag gave out homework maybe once a week—any more often, he figured, and they wouldn’t do it. The tests he gave counted for only 15 percent of the final grade, though the kids didn’t know that. Surprisingly, the results on the first couple of quizzes were outstanding—the average was 80 percent and the tests were real biology! Since then, though, the scores had dipped into the 60s. He wasn’t sure what to make of the drop. He worried that the kids weren’t conceptualizing the material he was presenting. But he had so little time to think about what he was teaching and how he was doing that he was hard-pressed to make any adjustments.
His life had gone from carefree to crazed in a matter of months. During his senior year at BC, Hrag had been able to kick back some. After a Thursday night of partying, he’d wake up at 2 p.m. on Friday, go to his one scheduled class, and then rev up for the weekend’s festivities. Now he was rising before dawn and working late into the night. He was getting five hours of sleep—if he slept at all. On top of that, for the first time in his life he had to cook and clean for himself. He felt like he was sixty years old. When he woke up in the morning and looked in the mirror, he thought, I am my dad.
In addition to teaching five periods of biology every day, he was attending night school from four to ten two evenings a week. All
recruits had to be enrolled in a credentialing program as a term of their employment by LAUSD. It helped meet No Child Left Behind requirements, and it helped blunt charges that TFA teachers were ill prepared. But grad school was a joke, every TFAer agreed. Loyola Marymount University had designed a special curriculum for busy TFAers, which got them a credential and a master’s in two years—for four thousand dollars! But TFAers went to class after a long day of work, and most zoned out instead of tuning in. While the professors lectured, they were on their laptops, multitasking. They’d be catching up on e-mail, entering grades, and preparing lessons—while keeping one ear half open in case something interesting was said. Most found that very little of what LMU offered was applicable to life in the classroom. So they saw grad school as just another drain on their time and energy, and put it at the bottom of their list of priorities. Hrag had heard that the feeling was mutual. A lot of professors at LMU refused to teach TFAers. They thought they were obnoxious.
What Hrag hadn’t realized before he started was that teaching was not a regular job. It enveloped his whole life. It was the first thing he thought of when he woke up, and it was on his mind on the weekends when he walked down to the beach to try to relax. All he ever thought of was school. He wasn’t just a teacher—he was a referee, a counselor, a doctor—eighty things bundled into one. And that made him even more nervous. He had this thing in his stomach, this growing tightness. He told himself it was just the stress of the first couple of months, but he wasn’t so sure. He read somewhere that after cops, teachers drank the most alcohol. He believed it; the job could drive anyone to drink.
After two years at Locke, he thought, he was going to be scarred. He was scarred already. He knew he would never forget the drunks on street corners he saw at 6 a.m. on the way to work, or tough little José and troubled Cale. He would always remember the kid who sat there shivering and licking his lips throughout class—is he on drugs or just hungry? And the gangbangers and the kids who looked like they’d been beaten. And the boy he often drove home from school because he lived so far away. He felt, too, for the kids who came to class every day to “get their learning on” against all odds. Yes, Teach For America was life-changing. He might not end up being an educator—at this point there was NO WAY—but down the line, years from now, he knew he would care about the achievement gap when 95 percent of the world did not.
Hrag lived in the little surfer town of Hermosa Beach with another TFA recruit, Mackey Brown, a guy he had known at BC. Mackey was a super-organized, very disciplined, work-like-crazy math teacher. He never stopped. Sometimes Hrag would beg him to slow down and take a break. And Mackey would tell him that working was his break. Mackey tried to keep Hrag moving, too. After classes at LMU, Mackey would insist they go to the gym. At 10 p.m., Hrag was dead tired and Mackey was ready to lift weights.
They, like so many roommates, were the Odd Couple. Hrag was constantly complaining; Mackey was unfailingly chirpy. Mackey was orderly; Hrag was kind of spacy, forever losing things. They didn’t eat together, and after a while they didn’t talk much, either. Mackey loved to hash out the day; Hrag couldn’t bear even thinking about it. By the time he got home at night, Hrag didn’t know if he could make it through the next day, much less discuss the one he had just survived. Hrag hung out with TFA friends who taught at different schools; he saw enough of the Locke teachers at work. Mackey was always working; he hardly went out at all.
But they carpooled to Locke. The routine never varied. Mackey knocked on Hrag’s bedroom door at 5:30 a.m. “Hrag, you need to get up,” he’d say. In response to the silence, Mackey would keep it up, nagging him to get going. Hrag would lie in his bed and think: Go ahead. Just go ahead. Knock on my door one more time, and I’ll rip it off its hinges! But really, he was grateful. There were mornings when Hrag would simply announce: “I’m not going!” But because Mackey was on the other side of the door waiting, he would eventually get up and get dressed and go to work.
Hrag’s old college buddies noticed the changes in him. He set aside several hours every Saturday morning for e-mails and phone calls, desperately wanting to stay connected. They all took note of his newfound maturity—and the fact that he had stopped cracking all those corny jokes for which he was famous. They also said they respected what he was doing, and admired him. That felt good. The glory was there—at twenty-one, Hrag was a teacher in a position of power. By contrast, his friends’ lives seemed mundane—they sat at desks, crunched numbers, drove home, watched TV, and went to sleep. Being a TFA teacher was by far the hardest thing he had ever done, but he’d pick this pressure-cooker life of his over anyone else’s any day.
Hrag spoke to his parents every day. Their attitude toward TFA was changing. They were proud to have a son getting his master’s while teaching full-time in an inner-city school, and at such a young age! They decided to visit him for his twenty-second birthday, on October 16. Hrag figured they came because he had been complaining so much—they must have thought he was on the verge of losing it.
When the Hamalians had first immigrated to the United States, they lived for a short time in Huntington Beach. Manuel worked repairing industrial parts through a mobile franchise company. Few men would take jobs in the inner-city neighborhoods; it was considered too dangerous. But Manuel took whatever business came his way. He ended up working in Watts nearly every day, and he made a lot of friends there. Now things had come full circle. His son’s first real job in America was in Watts, too. Neither of them had known what he was in for.
The Hamalians arrived on Friday. That night they took Hrag out to dinner, then went to visit some of his mother’s family. It was late when they arrived, but all the cousins had come home to meet the Hamalians. Hrag shook everyone’s hand, sat down, and promptly passed out.
His parents came to school on Monday. Hrag wouldn’t let them observe his fifth-period class because he was worried that the kids might act out—and he might, too. Hrag was perfectly fine with having his parents know he was having a hard time. But they had never seen him really lose it. And in fifth period he had been losing it—a lot. Just the week before he had slammed a meter stick so hard that he almost broke it. The kids loved it when they got to him. He’d see them snickering, and that would make him even angrier. It would take some kid saying “Mr. H, why are you taking your anger out on us?” to calm him down. Then he felt awful. But even Mackey reached the breaking point sometimes. Hrag was thrilled to hear that he had snapped a clipboard in three.
Manuel and Claire got to see Hrag at his best. His third-period kids were enthusiastic and totally engaged. His parents were impressed. His father, as always, made some very astute observations. Manuel had grown up in a similar community—when he and Claire were married in Beirut, snipers stood atop the church. Locke looked to him like a typical high school; the kids in Hrag’s biology class behaved like typical ninth-graders.
“You think these kids are a special case,” Manuel said. “But in ninth grade, I guarantee you that you listened to at most fifty percent of what your teachers said.”
And it was true. Hrag couldn’t remember half of what he supposedly learned in high school. Actually, it was worse than that. Hrag recalled that he had cruised through an entire year of ninth-grade science without listening to a single word the teacher said. When it came time for the final at the end of the year, he had freaked out and started crying.
“What’s wrong with you?” Manuel had demanded.
“I don’t know a thing,” Hrag had confessed.
Manuel had patiently sat him down, opened the book, and helped Hrag learn what he had missed over the course of the year. Hrag ended up getting an A.
Sometimes Hrag assumed that because his kids had been cheated all their lives, they couldn’t follow directions or weren’t capable of grasping what he was trying to teach. After talking to his father, he changed his mind: No. They are fourteen. They could give a crap.
But there was a big difference. Most of these kids didn’t have a
Manuel or a Claire at home holding their feet to the fire, checking on homework, helping them study.
It was good to see his folks. So often in high school Hrag had resented the way his parents had tried to shelter him. He and his sister, Gareen, were kept close to home, close to their Armenian identity and roots. When they were little, there were plenty of cousins around, so it didn’t really matter. But as Hrag got older and wanted to spread his wings, he chafed at the restraints Manuel and Claire imposed. Up until his junior year in high school, he was forbidden to go to parties—even the ones right across the street. His parents thought there would be drugs, sex, and alcohol—and, of course, they were right. Now Hrag was grateful for their vigilance and forgiving of their protective excesses. It was gratifying to hear them effuse over his performance in the classroom. Their affirmation made him think that maybe he wasn’t such a bad teacher after all.
Hrag realized he had it a lot easier than most of the other TFAers. He, at least, had Vanessa Morris, head of the science department. Morris had taken Hrag and the other new biology teacher, Jinsue Choi, under her wing. Her style of teaching biology was inquiry-based. Because her students’ literacy skills were so low, Morris rarely referred to the textbook; instead she used hands-on labs to lead her kids to discovery. She had been at Locke for five years and was part of Chad’s extended circle of young activist teachers. Like them, she coaxed pretty darn good results from her students. Seeing her teach was like watching a master magician. She glided from task to task with ease, handling behavioral issues with equanimity and presenting new scientific concepts with childlike delight. The period sped by, and inevitably, by its conclusion, Morris had worked her magic—the kids had been tricked into learning.
She didn’t have written-out lesson plans to give Hrag and Jinsue, but every Tuesday morning at seven o’clock she met with them for forty-five minutes to talk through her plans for the week and share the labs that would accompany her lessons. Hrag lapped it all up. At night, he and Jinsue would get on the phone and figure out how to adapt her outlines to their classrooms. Morris was incredibly generous; Hrag often spent his lunch periods in her room picking her brain. But he didn’t feel right about always being on the receiving end, and he sensed that Morris didn’t like the situation, either. Before long, Hrag and Jinsue, the two tech-savvy neophytes, were sharing their custom-made PowerPoints with their department chair. The collaboration felt good, and the kids seemed to be learning. Hrag’s loyalty to Morris—and to Jinsue—was unshakable. Every time he contemplated quitting, he thought of how he would be letting Morris down, and leaving became unthinkable.
