The Great Expectations School

by Dan Brown

  We had conceived Plan X, our intergrade reading buddy plan, at the semester's final Thursday-night Mercy class back in December, when the group discussion snowballed into a galloping gripe session on overwhelming academic and emotional deficiencies in our students.

  Trisha had curbed the negativity by offering, “Almost all of my first-graders get picked up at dismissal by their older siblings in eighty-five. I know a lot of kids have to look after their younger brothers and sisters. These kids are definitely screwed in a lot of ways, but one area where they probably have an accelerated amount of expertise is in taking care of little kids.”

  Now, here in 1M8, Athena Page had her arm around little Dustin, helping him sound out “where.” Evley gave William S. a high-five when he finished his first sentence. Big Jennifer and Little Jennifer giggled as they read a book about turtles. I ran down the hall and grabbed Barbara Chatton to show her the scene.

  Too soon, I had to drag my students, and myself, away from this cooperative, stress-free learning haven. The promise that we would do this every week for the rest of the year finally coaxed the fourth-graders to the door. Trisha gave Hershey's Kisses to all of the participants. Athena tugged on my sleeve and said, “I think I want to be a teacher when I grow up.”

  I asked Trisha under my breath if she had ever solved the case of the horrendous smell.

  “William S. took a dump in his pants and sat in it all day,” she said. “Gotta love first grade.” I glanced at William S. absently smearing his chocolate kiss on his forehead.

  My happy campers and I returned to room 217 to find Ms. Croom reading from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island to an audience of three. The rest of the class was playing with blocks in the back or just marauding around. “It's so much easier with less of them,” she said.

  The Test proved to be the ultimate trump card. By fourth grade, the kids had endured so many threatening speeches that the Test's fearsome reputation well preceded me. Lakiya Ray sat up straight. Dennis's face went solemn at the mere mention of it.

  Following our division assessment, I dropped math from my planner for January. I thought this was an extreme move, but the veteran teachers were dead serious about it. Wilson Tejera taught the bilingual class only English Language Arts from September to January, and then only math from February to May.

  Four-two-seventeen quickly developed a dry daily routine centered on mammoth stacks of Test preparation materials. We practiced identifying and explaining main idea, setting, sequence, note-taking, scanning for details, making inferences, drawing conclusions, main and supporting characters, conflict and resolution, cause and effect, fact and opinion, context clues for vocabulary words, making predictions, parts of speech, and author's purpose. These concepts are important, but I thought framing them so intensely within the context of the multiple-choice Test worked menacingly against enduring comprehension.

  I never revealed to my students any inkling that I thought the weight of the Test was overemphasized. (During a prep period, Adele Hafner actually barked, “These scores go on your permanent record, which will follow you for the rest of your life!”) We practiced, practiced, practiced. I brought out the “Thriller” claw-dance almost every day as a reward for getting through the skills activities.

  Marge told us, “The scores are going to be low. Try not to get too disappointed or take it personally.”

  “They're clueless,” Catherine Fiore seconded. “And don't look at their papers when they take the real Test. It will only make you want to jump out the window.”

  Proctoring the Test was super-serious business. I taped blank newsprint paper over all in-class posters, charts, signs, and anything else containing words. Teachers were not permitted to sit during the Test, but we could not stand still either. We “casually circulate.” No communication with kids was allowed. No one can enter or leave during Testing Conditions. A signal meaning “I need a tissue” is acceptable only as long as no words are spoken. The State would be watching.

  At a common prep meeting, we heard a horror story about a teacher who noticed a student had accidentally skipped a question on her answer sheet and was bubbling in the answers for all the wrong questions. A State Monitor happened by the door as the well-meaning teacher alerted her student to the mistake. Loyal to his oath, the State Monitor invalidated all of the Tests for the entire grade and placed the school on long-term high-surveillance probation. The teacher was outcast and, I think the story went, her pay was docked. At the end of the tale, I hoped everyone would laugh and snap out of what seemed to me like an Orwellian trance, but it didn't happen. Only Karen and I shot each other a quick look.

  After the meeting, Karen asked if she could vent to me.

  “Without venting, we'd all be dead.”

  “Okay. But it's Deloris. I don't know what to do with her. She's single-handedly destroying my Test prep, destroying everything. She cornered Marilee at lunch, told her she's a lesbian, and asked if she could kiss her. Marilee of course had a conniption and couldn't stop crying. Deloris yelled out that Marilee tried to touch her boob, and everyone believed her. I had to basically call Deloris a liar in front of my kids, even though I wasn't there when all of this happened. I'm falling apart.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “She's a wrecking ball. And the worst thing is, as annoying as it is for me to have her in my class, it's nothing compared to how fucked she is for the rest of her life. I don't know if you know about this, but I've heard a rumor that her father…”

  “MC Onyx.”

  “Right. I don't even know if I can bring myself to believe this. Apparently, MC Onyx has… sex with his daughters when they hit puberty. Deloris just found out.”

  Midway through her freshman year as an elementary education student at Muhlenberg College, my sister, Amanda, finally agreed to come to work with me. I had been trying for months to persuade her to hop a bus from Allentown to New York to experience an inner-city classroom, but I think my Fausto stories had scared her.

  The night she stayed in my apartment, the heat went out at 3:30 a.m. I woke up shivering, and staggered into the common room to find Amanda frozen in the fetal position on the pleather futon. When we hit the street at 6:15, the sky was pitch black. The cutting wind chill dipped to -17? F, the coldest New York City weather in ten years.

  P.S. 85 was a ghost town. Fifteen minutes before lineup, two-thirds of the faculty was unaccounted for. Fourteen of my twenty-five students showed up, and I got another five from Pat Cartwright's class. I introduced the kids to “Ms. Brown,” my lovely and talented sister, who would be with us for a one-day-only special engagement.

  Amanda was understandably timid with them at first. Athena asked her, “Why does he call you ‘Ms. Brown’? Shouldn't he call you sista?” Lakiya kept throwing Amanda crazy looks, and the whole day was an abnormal mess anyway with half of the class missing. Together, we ran a made-up activity called “Lost in the Jungle,” involving a Venn diagram and a writing piece.

  Lakiya and Lito started kicking the legs of their desks. Testing the new authority figure in the room, Lakiya shouted out, “Ms. Brown, Lito's bothering me! Lito, you touch too much!”

  Amanda was sharp. “I don't know, you're sitting pretty close together. It looks like you like each other, not like you're bothering each other. Do you have a crush on him?”

  “Eww!” And that was the end of that.

  Midway through “Lost in the Jungle,” Ms. Devereaux appeared at my door, holding an unhappy kid by the wrist. “This one was giving Ms. Fiore a problem,” she fumed.

  I nodded and in my best cop voice, assured, “He won't be a problem in here.” I sternly led the pouting boy to a back-corner desk, quietly thrown by the supreme role reversal. I was glad Amanda saw that.

  Every 4-217 kid wanted to hug Amanda at the day's end. Later, over chocolate-and-banana milkshakes at the Waverly Restaurant in the West Village, she said, “I'm not sure the Bronx is for me.”

  I lived in a converted tenement on
the corner of Rivington and Allen streets in the Lower East Side. The pizzeria on the ground floor had been gutted for renovations over Christmas week. When I got back to my apartment building after dropping Amanda off at Port Authority, trouble awaited.

  Six or seven men in rubber pants stomped around a shallow pool of freezing water, where the pizza place's seating area used to be. They looked at the exposed pipes and wires in the ceiling, shaking their heads in bewilderment and dismay.

  “What's going on?” I asked.

  One worker shook his head sympathetically. “Muchas problemas,” he replied.

  Upstairs in my frigid apartment, the kitchen faucet did not work. The toilet refused to flush. The restaurant renovators had accidentally cut the heat to the whole building. Attempting to fix their blunder, they burst the pipe insulation, causing a minor flood in the pizzeria and, more importantly, exposing the water pipes to the icy air and freezing up the works.

  Greg and I had no running water for the next five days. I showered at night at my friend Kadi's fifth-floor apartment in a walk-up down the street. I used bottled water to brush my teeth and high-tailed it over to Angel Bar on Orchard Street, two blocks away, when I needed a toilet. My clothes were ice cold when I dressed in the dark morning. I was going crazy.

  I forced Marvin Winslow to wear his second pair of glasses. My Christmas bestowal of the Courage Bear earned some extra traction with him, and I used it. He lasted one full day before Julissa again whispered something right before a Test simulation. Crying, he lunged to punch Julissa, but I got between them.

  “Calm the fuck down, four eyes!” Tayshaun contributed. I went nuts on Tayshaun, slamming his name on the Detention List. “I don't care,” he mumbled. Angry, I took the power-struggle bait, exploding on him again.

  Al Conway walked by. “Mr. Brown, everything okay?” he inquired with concern. “We're about to start a simulation.”

  Tayshaun and Marvin doodled all over their sample Tests, occasionally giving me reason to sharply shush them.

  At lunch, I escorted Tayshaun to the detention table. He took out his batch of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and I immediately confiscated them. His face changed completely as I pocketed the deck. “Can I keep them, please?” he asked.

  “No! Prove you can behave like a decent human being, like you did last week, and maybe you'll see them again!”

  Then something unexpected happened. Rock-hard Tayshaun Jackson fell to pieces, wailing in deep, snotty belly-sobs. His sudden breakdown was scary to watch. Maybe I should just give him the cards, I thought. This kid has serious emotional problems.

  I did not give him the cards. I turned and left the room.

  Gym class was a singular phenomenon. On Wednesdays, I took class 4-217 directly from lunch to the upstairs gymnasium for their once-a-week in-school exercise. The schedule lumped my class with Ms. Cartwright's group (Fausto included), a double dose of excitement for Mr. Zweben and Ms. Friedberg, the two whistle-toting gym teachers.

  Gym was hugely popular with my kids, the boys especially, so I occasionally hung around to witness what it was all about. The period generally consisted of twenty minutes of calming everyone down, modeling one athletic move like a volleyball set or soccer pass, and giving lengthy instructions for how to partner up and where to go. The remaining measure of class time inexorably devolved into run-and-tackle free-for-all. Boys from Ms. Cartwright's class usually started the fracas by throwing whatever balls were around that day, and my boys eagerly followed suit. Playtime got whistled short, and it all ended with a disappointed harangue.

  Then they couldn't wait to do it again next week.

  After school, I swung by disconcerted Allie Bowers's kindergarten room. Before dismissal, Quashawn had stolen her crayons and called another five-year-old a “dumb slut.” I asked if she had a prep at 1:25 on Wednesdays, 4-217’s usual gym time. “No, I'm painfully here,” she said.

  “I'm bringing my B-team,” I proclaimed.

  I experimented with the second wave of tutors, including in the crew Gladys Ferraro and Bernard, both of whom had been stirring up trouble lately. I hoped the experience, with the potential to be an ongoing weekly engagement, would be an incentive to behave themselves in 217. It worked for Gladys; Bernard didn't care. “Those little kids are boring,” he whined.

  I also brought Epiphany and Seresa, although if I was serious about A- and B-teams, Seresa belonged with the top group. I decided to keep her with Epiphany since they seemed comfortable together. Gladys V. and Dennis, two mostly polite kids, rounded out the team.

  Allie didn't have a plan as organized as Trish's for the tutors, but we improvised. The partner-reading was adorable, and the kinder-gartners were sad to see us go.

  The intergrade reading-buddy project got me excited. The first-year teachers had a good idea, and we were making it happen. I decided to pay my first voluntary visit to Mrs. Boyd's office, just to let her in on the good news.

  I found Boyd's door closed with muffled adult screaming going on behind it. Outside the office, Paul Bonn wore an I-just-ate-allthe-cookies grin. “Did you see it in time?” he asked.

  “See what in time?”

  “Oh my God, it's the best thing ever. Did you know Boyd got fired from the last school she was a principal at? I think P.S. 25, maybe? I'm not sure. Someone found an old article in some local newsletter about her getting the boot. They copied it and put one in everyone's box!”

  “You're kidding.”

  “They're all pulled out now. She's on the warpath! I didn't get to see it. Solloway did. I don't know who else.”

  “Wow. Who did it? What a huge risk for some humiliation.”

  “I don't know who. Nobody knows. No one can stand her, so everyone's a suspect!”

  * * *

  On January 26, I received a letter notifying me of my acceptance to the Kodak Student Filmmaker Program at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. After viewing a rough cut of my thesis film back in November, one of my NYU professors had encouraged me to submit it. Excited by his praise and mired in the lowest depths of my Sonandia-is-leaving depression, I sent off my application. Now I was in, complete with a screening of my film at the American Pavilion, an internship at the Hollywood Reporter, and full festival accreditation. The program lasted seventeen days in May, so attending would mean missing twelve school days, or eleven if I skipped the very end. A million scenarios flashed through my head, and all of them involved flying to the French Riviera.

  The next day, I approached Wally Klein, P.S. 85’s librarian and union rep, to feel out the possibilities. I had curried big favor with Wally early in the year when he learned about my enthusiasm for movies, and he once cornered me in a one-way conversation about Tyrone Power. He was also the only person at the school who called me “Danny.”

  I asked about the school's policy on leaves of absence. “It's one hundred percent up to the Queen. What do you have in mind?”

  I told Wally everything. He grimaced. “Ooh, that's iffy, Danny. I'm meeting with her this afternoon. I can broach the subject, but I don't know…”

  He did seem to know. I ought to forget about it, I read. “That's all right, I'll just speak to her,” I said.

  His voice got firm. “No. Trust me. I'll go first.” The next afternoon, I received a summons to the principal's office.

  “Sit next to me,” Mrs. Boyd ordered. “What exactly is this, you're in the Cannes Film Festival?” I explained the Student Film-maker Program. “So this is something that you took upon yourself to apply to, even though you knew it directly interfered with your professional responsibilities? It's not my job to allow teachers to go on trips during the school year. You realize that, don't you?”

  “Yes.” I bit down hard. Here comes the guillotine, I thought.

  “I went to the first Sundance Festival in the eighties, back before Park City got all commercialized.” Her lips curled into a microscopic smile. “We went to a screening in a high school gymnasium with folding chairs, and I actually talked to Robert Red
ford for a couple minutes, the Sundance Kid himself.” She seemed to be looking right through me, as if the ghost of Jeremiah Johnson was just beyond my shoulder. “It's funny that you're bringing this to me now. Not too long ago, I made a list of things I want to do before I die. One of the top ten was to go to the Cannes Film Festival.” Now she looked directly at me. “You won't be paid for these days, you understand that. But how could I not let you go to this?”

  I thought I would throw my chair in a volatile mix of surprise and jubilation. I thanked her. Mrs. Boyd went into a story about how she taught animation to students in the seventies and a project they made won a New York City award.

  “Now talk to me about this,” Mrs. Boyd said, taking out my one-page proposal to start an after-school dramatics club. I had copied Trisha Pierson's format from her dance program proposal and submitted mine a week ago, but had not heard anything. I made a brief pitch about extending performing arts beyond the PAC classes, giving students a chance to express themselves through drama and putting on a culminating play.

  Mrs. Boyd was skeptical. “Stacy Shanline tried to do the same thing last year with the third-graders. She wanted to put on Our Town. It went nowhere.” The principal looked straight at me. “You have skills in filmmaking. What do you think about starting a film club? We have lots of remedial intervention programs for struggling kids. This could be something for the more upper-tier students.”

  I was thunderstruck by Mrs. Boyd's brilliant idea. It was true that the school offered no extracurricular opportunities for gifted children. Until now, P.S. 85’s only after-school activity was a thrice-a-week basic skills math review. Trisha's lower-grade dance program launched soon, and if I could start this filmmaking club, maybe we could start a wave.