by Donna Foote
The literacy coaches from UCLA had spotted Taylor’s talents right away. They told her she had the makings of a great teacher, and they took her along to a conference of English teachers out near Disneyland. She had never been to a conference like that before, so she had no basis for comparison. But it made her not want to be an English teacher. The conference was packed with old ladies who taught English, and every time they stood up and read in their English-teacher voices, Taylor winced. Oh my God! Is that me? That can’t be me!
But she was an English teacher, and a pretty good one at that. She had the numbers to prove it. At the end of the first semester in late January, she made her kids retake the Gates-MacGinitie test she had given them in the beginning of the year. Her average student had started ninth grade reading at a fifth-grade level. She was hoping that in the six months they had been in her classroom, they would have advanced two whole grades. The day before the test, she gave her kids a pep talk; they needed to come in the next day with their game faces on. That night she was so nervous she could hardly sleep. The results came back twelve days later. They had done it! Her kids had made what TFA considered “significant gains” by advancing between one and a half and two years in reading.
She was so proud of them—and they basked in the glory. A few weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Taylor got to feel the love. The Locke campus exploded in a profusion of red and pink—some girls hauled giant teddy bears to class; others paraded around campus clutching balloons and flowers and candy. The kids showered Taylor with cards and gifts, and they watched to see if she had any other admirers. They were always curious about her love life; every male teacher who walked into the room was assumed to be a suitor. One girl gave Taylor a valentine written on lined notebook paper, with hearts drawn around the name Miss Rifkin and an arrow pointing down to the name Mr. Brown. Mackey taught in one of the trailers nearby, and it was true that Taylor had been spending a lot of time with both him and his roommate, Hrag. Taylor’s college romance had recently ended. Days after the breakup, she and Hrag met for dinner. The following weekend, she invited Mackey and Hrag to join her on a trip home to Santa Barbara. Mackey begged off because of work. Hrag took her up on the offer. Together, they met up with a few of her friends and camped high on the cliffs north of the city, overlooking the ocean. They clicked.
Hrag and Taylor realized they had a lot in common. Both were struggling to find a balance between their professional and private lives. Both believed in the TFA mission, but neither, it turned out, wanted to be martyrs to the cause. And that’s how they were feeling—like they were sacrificing their youth on the altar of social justice. They wanted to have fun—to enjoy life. Hrag felt like he had really aged. It struck him one day early in the second semester when he saw his reflection in a store window on his way to work: he was sitting in his little red Ford with a thermos of tea in one hand and a banana in the other. He burst out laughing at his own image: What a nerd! If my college buddies could see me now, I’d never hear the end of it.
Taylor’s father had advised her early on not to bring work home—he insisted it was important that she maintain a divide between work and leisure. Hrag had figured that bit out on his own. He, too, needed a total disconnect, but it was hard to avoid the carryover. Once, when he accidentally brought home the PAID stamp he used for marking work completed, he totally freaked out. He couldn’t bear to look at the thing, so he ended up hiding it until it was time to go to school again. Another time, he didn’t realize he had the stamp in his pocket until he was in the school parking lot and ready to take off. Rather than carry it home, he trudged all the way back up three flights of stairs and stashed it in the classroom. When he left at the end of the day, he didn’t want to have to think about Locke again until he walked back in the next morning. He and Jinsue no longer spent hours on the phone planning lessons. Now Morris gave them the general outline of how the week should unfold, and they worked it out together at school. That left Hrag’s nights free. He took up guitar again and got back to reading. And he went out nearly every night. Even so, school wasn’t that easy to shake off. It was always on his mind. And that really bugged him.
The other thing that bugged him was that there was so little appreciation shown for all the work he did. It seemed that nobody ever had anything positive to say. His graduate school coach had recently been in to observe his classroom and all but told him his lesson sucked. The thing was, it hadn’t sucked. It was pretty good. Hrag was teaching genetics, and he had the kids doing a celebrity mating game using Punnett squares. He had posted pictures of celebrities—Will Ferrell, J.Lo, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, Ashlee Simpson—all around the room. The kids had to pick two of them and then cross their genotypes to figure out what percentage of their offspring would end up with certain traits, like hair and eye color, based on their genetic coding. Kobe Bryant got a lot of action, and the kids insisted on mating Hrag with a celebrity, too. It was a really engaging lesson but admittedly noisy; Hrag ended up kicking three kids out of class. Still, all thirty-four of his students seemed to have fun, and he knew that everyone had understood what was going on. Except the LMU guy. He wanted to know why Hrag would plan a crazy lesson like that, and he gave him a lot of crap for throwing the kids out without a note or a referral. Hrag and he got into it, and the guy left the room all red-faced.
Samir didn’t exactly do a jig, either, when he watched Hrag teach the next day. With Samir, it was all business, all the time. He sat through the lesson absolutely stone-faced, then left a letter in Hrag’s box telling him what a great job he had done. But Hrag was far from reassured.
He had no idea what the administrators at Locke thought of his classroom performance because no one ever came in to observe him. Jauregui had popped in maybe twice, and that was in the beginning of the first semester. In the six months since, not a single administrator had been in his classroom. That worried him, because the longer he went without constructive criticism, the less he welcomed it. At this point, he didn’t need anyone else coming into his room giving him flak.
And the kids! Sometimes they made him feel worst of all. He loved them, even the ones who drove him crazy. But every last bone in their bodies was programmed to defy, and it wore Hrag down. They knew he understood Spanish, and often they would purposely go at one another, hurling Spanish insults across the room, just trying to provoke him. Before he became a teacher, if someone got in his face, he’d push right back. Now he had to be cool and calm and rational, even when what he really wanted to do was strangle a kid. He felt so powerless. Being so young didn’t help things. After Hrag wrote a note about José to the dean, José accused him of being a snitch. “We don’t do that!” he told Hrag.
Hrag couldn’t believe his ears. “Who do you think I am?” he asked. “Your homeboy? Get back in your seat before I send you down to the dean again!” He felt like a wuss. He was the authority. But only in name. There were no consequences he could put into play. He could kick a kid out of class, but the kid was always back the next day, ready to spit in his face again.
The students never showed any gratitude, though Hrag knew perfectly well that he had never understood how hard his teachers worked, either. Still, he put on some kick-ass lessons—really good, hands-on stuff that he himself would have loved in high school. As the year went on, he expanded on the curriculum outline that Morris had given him. Hrag took the lessons and made them his own, adding some slick PowerPoint presentations, dropping exercises he felt were too babyish for him to deliver convincingly. Whenever he was about to introduce a new topic with a really cool project, he telegraphed it by saying: “I am about to blow your minds.” The kids loved the expression. And they always sat up straighter in their chairs for the “experience.”
One of the most “mind-blowing” lessons he did all year was “Who My Baby Daddy?” Morris had given him the idea, and it had been bequeathed to her by another Locke biology teacher who was long gone. Now it was a Locke classic. Hrag took the lesson’s basic outline and
created a special PowerPoint for it. The idea was that the students had to figure out who, among five class members, was the father of the singer Ashanti’s baby. The kids were given the phenotypes and genotypes for the mother, child, and five suspected dads. Using Punnett squares, they had to cross traits until they found the combination that matched the baby’s.
The first photo of Ashanti was entitled “The Mother,” and the caption read “Who my baby daddy?” The next picture was of an adorable African American baby, with a caption that read: “WAAAAA!” For the suspects, Hrag took pictures of five boys from each of his classes, altered the eyes and hair with Photoshop, and listed their alibis in captions below. Father #1:“Man, I’m with the sister” Father #2:“I never seen that girl in my life” Father #3: “I didn’t get her pregnant but my homey here would like to!” Father #4: “She’s just trying to use me for my money” and Father #5: “She took advantage of me!” The kids had a blast.
Morris had never seen Hrag teach. She didn’t need to. She could tell by the way the kids talked about him, and the way he talked about them, that he was a good teacher. He was on a sharp learning curve; it certainly didn’t seem like this was his first year on the job. The way he jumped in and contributed to the curriculum impressed her. And she especially liked the way he got frustrated and as a result was constantly trying new things. In the beginning, classroom management was tough for him, and she could see that he took things way too personally. She reminded him that the kids were pretty much the same way every day; it was usually the teacher who was doing the changing, and the kids naturally fed off the instructor’s mood shifts. It’s true, he thought. The students in his fifth period were probably acting out because they could sense his own apprehension about being able to teach them.
Hrag wasn’t at the very first meeting of the new School of Math and Science because he wasn’t sure he was invited. Morris needed only one biology teacher, and he and Jinsue were a team—they had agreed that neither would join the new school without the other. It took a personal invitation from Morris and an agreement on Jinsue’s part to teach chemistry before Hrag would consider it. Even then, he was skeptical. He thought the small schools at Locke had ended up being divisive; the school as a whole had broken up into warring factions of teacher cliques—the veterans, the SE folks, the TFAers, the PE teachers, and so on. After meeting with the School of Math and Science team, he changed his mind overnight. Probably the only way to save the school was to deconstruct it, he concluded. With enough good small schools, Locke as a whole would have to improve—and could eventually even be great. Hrag threw himself into the school planning, agreeing to write the biology proposal; Taylor proofread it. He really liked being a part of developing something new, and it was the first venue he’d found where he could have a say in things beyond his own classroom. The people on the crew were really smart. Even if they didn’t all end up staying, maybe they could build something to leave behind.
Until then Hrag had felt uncomfortable around Morris and the SE crowd. They were older and had a long history together. But as he got to know them better over beers and a round of parties, he realized they were people, too—people who sometimes drank too much, used profane language, and did things they regretted the next morning. He felt that he was on their level now, and that was transforming. It made him happier. But he was scared, too, because he could feel himself getting drawn in—to Locke, to teaching, to the camaraderie, to the idea that he was serving the greater good. He knew it would be hard to let go of this, and if he didn’t, he might end up being an educator. He wasn’t sure why he was so afraid of it; he didn’t know what picture he had for himself and his future.
So when he wasn’t stressing or destressing about school, he was driving himself nuts thinking about what to do after TFA. One thing he knew for sure: he didn’t want to be one of those TFAers who stayed for a third year because they couldn’t think of anything else to do. He had to find something he could be passionate about—besides teaching in a low-performing school in the inner city. So he bought himself an LSAT prep book, thinking that law school might be the answer, and when he failed to work up any enthusiasm for becoming an attorney, he considered writing a screenplay. He spent a lot of time on the TFA website, too, looking at the job postings and opportunities open to TFA alums.
And he hung out with Taylor. They were both experiencing these emotional thunderstorms that left them on the edge, constantly freaking out. One day she would need bucking up; the next day it would be his turn. They had similar personalities. They both had a sarcastic sense of humor, and neither was afraid of confrontation. They worked hard (he thought she worked harder than he did), and they played hard. There weren’t many TFAers that Hrag could convince to stay out with him till 4 a.m. on a school night, but Taylor was one of them. They saw each other every day at school, and pretty soon they were spending most of their free time together as well. They planned all kinds of weekend adventures—like a spur-of-the-moment jaunt to San Francisco, and a fifty-mile bicycle trip after a night of partying and no sleep at all. Taylor was a tremendous help to Hrag—she got him through the day. And she was happy to do it. They were best friends.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
¡Sí Se Puede!
There were no Friday-night lights at Locke. In fact, there was hardly any football, period. The Locke Saints played only two at-home games all season—and one of those was the homecoming game. It was just too dangerous. Though the campus was relatively safe, the neighborhood wasn’t. There were at least four very active gangs within a half-mile radius of Locke, and too often the violence jumped the fence.
It wasn’t unusual to find weapons stashed on campus by gangbanging dropouts. In the spring of 2006, well into football’s spring training season, somebody found a rusty old nine-millimeter Browning tucked under a backpack on the field where the football players were working out. It looked like a piece of junk; the problem was, it was loaded.
A few weeks earlier, a former student had made his way onto the campus after school let out, gotten into an argument with some kid, and ended up pulling out a gun. There were plenty of students around at the time, and they scattered. A few big guys bolted up the stairs into Rachelle’s room, slamming the door shut behind them. She was busy working at her computer and asked them to leave; they begged her to let them stay. “There’s a guy with a gun!” they cried. “Call the office!”
They were scared, really shaken up. Once they had calmed down, she got the story. The two kids involved knew each other, argued, and things quickly escalated. One kid slapped the other, and the next thing anyone knew, there was a gun. The kid staring into the muzzle raised his arms in surrender. The would-be shooter lowered the weapon and booked it out of there, sprinting across the crowded quad and scaling the fence onto the street. The students ran, too. Dropping their backpacks, they headed for the main building.
Rachelle gave the kids a snack, and after five minutes or so decided it was probably safe for them to leave. She thought she’d go down to check things out first. Then she came to her senses. I don’t need to see this firsthand. I can’t protect them from a bullet. Thinking about it later, she realized that the kids had known exactly what kind of gun it was; they could identify it even from a distance. It also dawned on her that those three tenth-graders had obviously seen people get shot before. How crazy is that?
Soon afterward, there was a gang homicide right on the other side of the fence that enclosed the ninth-grade classroom trailers, just yards away from where the fifteen-year-old student Deliesh Allen had been killed the year before. This time, the shooter was a fifteen-to-eighteen-year-old black male wearing a green sweatshirt and riding a bike. About eight shots went off, and when the cops arrived minutes later, they found a young male dressed in a white T-shirt, facedown between a car and the curb. There was a splotch of blood on the back of his shirt where he had been hit. The officer at the scene could tell that he had died right away because he hadn’t bled out—when death comes more
slowly, the victims lie in a pool of blood. The shooting occurred right in the middle of the ninth-graders’ lunch period, and the gunman had headed north, along the eastern perimeter of the school, to escape. One of the cops radioed the campus police station and asked that the ninth-grade house be put on lockdown. But the lunch hour was crazy that day; Dr. Wells must have been off-site, and the security detail handling the lunch period didn’t make it happen. At least the cops were able to get additional police units assigned to dismissal, because when the kids got out of school a few hours later, the body was still there, awaiting the arrival of the coroner.
Violence aside, if you asked Coach Crawford, he would just as soon play all the football games away. Home games were distracting. There was too much going on in the streets and stands for the Locke Saints to really focus on the game. So he preferred to bus his players—and as many fans as they could muster—off campus and out of the neighborhood for the football season.
There was a period when Locke had been a football powerhouse in the city’s 3A division. But over the years, the program had declined as more and more of the neighborhood’s best athletes opted to be bused out of the neighborhood to better schools. By the time Crawford took over as head coach in 2003, the Locke Saints were considered perennial losers. But that was changing. When Dr. Wells came in, he replaced the old hand-me-down football uniforms from UCLA with brand-new ones. Kids started coming out for the team, and when walking around campus, the players took to tucking their helmets proudly under their arms. In 2005, there were fifty-five varsity players, up from thirty in 2003, and the boys finished third in their conference—the best Locke had done since 1999.
With the exception of a couple of Hispanics, football was the domain of the African Americans at Locke, and far too many of them played it thinking that it would get them out of the ghetto and into the NFL. Crawford discouraged that idea, urging his players instead to get the grades they needed to go to college—a much surer path to success. Not every kid who joined the team had stars in his eyes. Some suited up because they wanted to be a part of something—besides a gang. They may not have been particularly athletic, but Crawford didn’t turn anyone away. Kids were getting jumped in at younger and younger ages. After fourteen years of coaching, Crawford had no illusions. The gangs were the real competition his players faced.
