by Dan Brown
“Your expectations go so low that you start praising the shit out of your kids who can just get through something, not ’cause they're really producing anything of any quality. The math teachers have it a little easier, because just by nature math is a little more black and white. You either get it or you don't, and the kids like that. But a lot of them just throw dice in the hall and eat the free lunch.” This reminded me of my week of seventh-grade summer school at M.S. 399, when one of the seemingly brightest boys in the class told me candidly, “Seventh grade was out in the hall, man.”
Seth went on about gang colors and receiving writing assignments from Crips with gang-mark slashes on every “c” and cross-outs through every “b” or “p,” since the latter is an upside-down version of the former. The writer would not want anyone looking at the paper—from any angle—to mistake him for exhibiting sympathy for the letter “b,” representing his rival gang, the Bloods.
Seth's stories were a little comforting in that I wasn't alone in my desperation, but his comment about lowering expectations made me worry. I absolutely had lowered my expectations from the first day of school when I delivered my “We Are a Team” speech. Now my priority seemed to be eking through the day without anyone bleeding. I didn't even think about great expectations anymore.
Was Sonandia really an exceptional student, or had I attributed so many wonderful qualities to her because I needed something to hold on to? Would other teachers in other schools share my enthusiasm about her? My Sunday-night sleeplessness was worse than usual.
On Monday, February 9, I turned twenty-three. In celebration, I received a new student, Christian Salerno. I also got a note from Ms. Guiterrez about collecting my planbook tomorrow morning, and my name appeared at the top of the list of classes Mrs. Boyd's team would inspect on Friday's upcoming Learning Walk. All interior and exterior bulletin boards needed to be changed for the benefit of Friday's visitors. I received eight handmade birthday cards from my kids, most of them including drawings of flowers and lists of school subjects. Then I taught all day and went to Professional Development.
Mrs. Boyd adjourned our monthly whole-school faculty meeting in the auditorium with the hollow encouragement, “Failure is not an option.” Filing out in the aisle, Ethel May Brick, P.S. 85’s longest-tenured teacher, tapped me on the shoulder. “I heard it's your birthday. Happy birthday!” Her voice always quivered in a jolly grandma kind of way.
“Thank you,” I said.
“It's so nice, just so nice, that young and intelligent people like you come to work at a school like this.” Her face saddened. “It's a shame you can't stay.”
“Why can't I stay?”
“Oh come on, Dan. This school is a hell. And right now it's the worst it's ever been. This neighborhood is collapsing. I know the area looks bad, but it's really much worse than it seems. You wouldn't believe how drug-infested it is. Do you know the projects next to the firehouse?”
I knew that building well. In front of it was where the September shooting happened and where guidance counselor Mr. Schwesig gashed his head by walking into a Dumpster. “There was a bust there last year, and the police found more drugs moving in and out of that building than any other building in New York City. We didn't know till the bust.”
Ms. Brick clearly wanted to chat, and I had one burning question about the children of P.S. 85. “What do you think about the full-moon phenomenon?” I asked.
She answered without hesitation, “Full moons make people crazy. Before I started working here in 1965, I thought it was a silly superstition. But every month of every year, the tension builds on the full moon. It's especially bad when it's waxing like last Thursday and Friday. Now it's waning. When it's waxing there are more fights, more noise, more aggression. I mark the full moons on my calendar with red circles.”
The authority in her tone took me aback. “My class was terrible last Thursday and Friday,” I said.
“The whole school was in shambles,” she replied. “Really, ask any emergency room nurse about full moons. But it's especially bad right now because of Valentine's Day coming up. We're in the winter doldrums, and that's bad. And the fourth-graders are coming off the big ELA Test and that's really bad. But Valentine's Day is always horrible here. Remember that most of these kids are being raised by single women who have been left by men.Valentine's Day has a lot of anger here, and you can feel it. The only worse time of year is Mother's Day. Then everyone's mad at the mothers.”
She did not explain the last part.
I met wild resistance when returning to regular lessons after the rigidly structured cram sessions for the Test. The class was becoming more and more academically polarized and the addition of Christian Salerno was no help. I seated him in well-behaved group two, and his nudnik ways quickly awakened the sleeping beast of Gladys Ferraro's mouth.
Gladys was my Student of the Month in October, but the award had had the opposite of my hoped-for effect. She griped loudly and constantly about her peers “bothering her,” but she was given to touching other people's belongings, putting her on a collision course with everybody.
Christian and Gladys F. were instantly at each other's throats. I banished Christian to group six, where, before I realized it, he fell under Lakiya's back-of-the-room influence.
Pat Cartwright was absent on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Her class was deemed too rowdy for a sub, so they were split up every day under the direction of Mrs. Hafner. I was sure Hafner still hated me, evidenced by her nonresponses to my “Good mornings,” as well as her red-cheeked clam-up in the Teacher Center when I walked in on her emphatically extolling Abba's Mamma Mia. She sent me Sayquan (Dequan's brother) and Asonai, two renowned nightmare children. To temper the blow, I also got Kimberly and Mary, two “contained” students.
Asonai and Lakiya had fistfought at lunch the previous week, and their enmity was still in full force. The two slung insults across the room all day. Sayquan asked to go to the bathroom early in the day, and I let him. He returned a half hour later and got upset when I refused his next dozen requests to leave the classroom.
As I walked around during the independent problem-solving part of our adding-fractions-with-unlike-denominators lesson, a flurry of thoughts rushed through me:
1. Destiny is adding the denominators, the same mistake that she made yesterday, even though I conferenced with her for a long time. I'll quietly point it out to her now while I'm circulating, then make sure she's getting it when we do the whole-class review.
2. I should check on Marvin Winslow. Is he calm? No! Pat him on the shoulder. Okay, his head is down.
3. Why is Athena's head down? She loves math. Wait, she's crying! Did something serious just happen? I should talk to her in the doorway.
4. Three kids are holding up their pencils for sharpening. They'll have to wait.
5. How long should I wait to call the class back to order? Three, six minutes? I have twenty-two minutes until my prep. A fifteen-minute review is probably sufficient, but I don't want a lag before or after the review. I'll give them five more minutes.
6. Where's Eddie? He went to the bathroom fifteen minutes ago.
7. Cwasey and Dennis are talking. Have to stop that.
8. Lakiya's not doing her work, but now Jennifer's following her! Need to talk to Jennifer privately about it later.
9. Here's Ms. Devereaux collecting donations for Ms. O'Reardon, whose house was robbed. Five dollars feels sufficient.
10. Damn, I forgot to fill in the backup attendance sheet again. Can't do it now, must remember at lunchtime.
11. Asonai is looking around the room ominously. Give her more drawing paper.
12. My mouth is dry beyond belief.
During my Thursday prep, I mounted my new exterior bulletin board and brought Sonandia and Gladys V. in the hall with me for moral support. They performed cheers and an original song called “Go! Go, Mr. Brown!” I cracked up and became immediately aware that I had not laughed in school in m
onths. P.S. 85 and laughter felt like two familiar but cordoned realms where an intersection was a marvelous and novel occurrence, like swimming and nighttime.
On Friday morning, the Learning Walk paid 4-217 a visit in mid-lesson. Mrs. Boyd and her four helpers inspected my walls for “Clear Expectations,” as I sweated through a discussion about Lincoln's quote, “A house divided cannot stand.” In fifteen minutes they were gone, and my breath came easier.
At dismissal, gateway to the nine-day midwinter break, Marvin Winslow made a comment about Lito Ruiz's dead mother. Lito slugged Marvin, and wailing Marvin ran down the stairs and out the door. Sayquan and Asonai got keyed up from the excitement and took off in pursuit of the crying boy.
Back in empty 217 after the wild finish, I was organizing clipped bundles of math packets and Lincoln-quote-response second drafts to take home and mark when Elizabeth Camaraza walked in. She listlessly dropped her bag on Seresa's desk. “I can't ever come back here,” she said, suppressing tears. She told me about Ms. Guiterrez's refusal to go to bat for her to keep her new seating arrangement, Mrs. Boyd's blistering bulletin board criticism in front of the students, and the catastrophic new RFR situation.
I had never heard of RFR, so Elizabeth explained it to me. An administrator had greenlighted the $60,000 purchase of a new third-grade literacy curriculum called Reading for Results, based on the idea that this program would supplant Success for All. However, Region One signed on for Balanced Literacy as the new curriculum, rendering RFR useless before it was ever used. In order to justify the $60,000 expenditure, or simply to disguise its wastefulness from any potential auditors, P.S. 85’s third-grade teachers were mandated to attend weeks of RFR “online module classes,” complete with sessions after school and at 7 a.m. Everyone knew the program would never enter a real classroom, and it made the teachers irate with festering disgust.
“I used to empty bedpans on the midnight shift with two babies at home and no husband, and this is worse than that,” Elizabeth said.
“Yoo-hoo, Mr. Brown!” Mrs. Boyd summoned me from the hall. I answered the call and Elizabeth made a move to leave, but I quickly asked her to stay for a minute.
Mrs. Boyd stared at my exterior bulletin board, eyeing it with a perplexed expression, like someone trying to count jellybeans in a jar. “You've shown improvement, Mr. Brown, but not enough. What I caught of your lesson this morning was superb, but you already know what I think of your ability to communicate. Your classroom environment is bare-bones. The elements are there: the minimal elements. Look at this bulletin board. There's no…” She paused, looking for the right word. Not finding it, she moved on. “If you want to stimulate students to learn, stimulation must flow out of every aspect of their experience in school. Do you agree?”
“Yes.”
“You say that, but I don't think you understand what it requires of you.”
“You want my room to look nicer,” I interpreted in monotone.
Mrs. Boyd seemed to take offense at my accusing her of something so superficial. “I want you to put a little more of yourself into this job.” She walked away.
“Venomous wench,” I heard Camaraza mutter from inside the room. “You know she screams into her pillow every night. Let's go, I'll drive you downtown.”
Schools were closed the next week, but without any therapeutic Hygienists shows scheduled, I couldn't seem to break out of my mental funk. I looked at the calendar in my room and wished I could fast-forward through time, zipping directly to June.
On one particularly stir-crazy evening, I grabbed one of the new stuffed animals my mom had bought for 4-217 and made a surreally weird four-minute camcorder movie, Courage Bear. Featuring only the title character and me, with narration by the bear, the flick follows us as happy roommates (with a highly self-pleasing inclusion of Babs Streisand's version of “Someone to Watch Over Me”) until the opening of an unwelcome piece of mail sends me into a rage, during which I launch Courage Bear out the third-story window. Landing on the icy pavement below, C.B. transforms into a creature of the night, drifting ethereally above the dingy Lower East Side snowscape. He ultimately returns to the cold, wet pavement outside our former home. Unheeded by slow-motion passersby, altered Courage Bear mutters his final incantation:
I am that bear in the shadow
I am the bear in the cold
I am the one in the rough gray ice
If you pass me…SAY HELLOOOOOOO!
When I came back to school on Monday, February 23, my lessons were ready, but I did not feel sufficiently recharged to take on the tidal wave of 4-217. First thing in the morning, I got word that Pat Cartwright would be out all week, meaning I would still have four of her kids to babysit.
Where was Pat? Back in December, she made comments about quitting, saying that Fausto was driving her over the edge, but they seemed like dark jokes. She was raising a three-year-old son on her own and I knew the boy had been sick several times in the fall. I hoped Ms. Cartwright was all right, but my hoping was useless. Now I had to deal with Sayquan and Asonai, two bonus “challenges.”
Meanwhile, despite the barrage of crises and cruelty in 4-217, my skills of anticipation and preemption were becoming more and more well-honed. For every time Bernard fought, there were four or five instances when I rushed in to extinguish the fire when it was still just a spark. But, I remembered, it's not how you fall that matters; it's how you land. If I could barely keep them from hurting each other, what would happen when there were no teachers around to check them?
On the way to pick up my paycheck, Ms. Guiterrez waylaid me to say that she wanted to see my planbook first thing tomorrow morning. This would be her second perusal of it this month, despite a satisfactory review last time. Disgusted, I went home and fell into bed, unconscious by 7 p.m. My alarm sounded at 3:30 a.m., and I reformatted the whole book with elaborate form-sheets I made on my computer. I came to school carrying a thick dossier of standards, benchmarks, aims, objectives, Bloom's taxonomy implementations, multistep procedures, and other like information. I hoped this comprehensive showing would get the watchdogs off my back. By now, the consistently glowering inspections really ticked me off. I knew I was making progress. Timid Evley, who had broken the ice with me with his mysterious private-part problem, was beating his fear of public speaking. Lito Ruiz was writing creative narratives. Almost all of them could explain multiplication and division inside out. The administration did not see those things. They saw my unattractive board displays, the disconcerted flailing in November, and my young age.
Ms. Guiterrez was nowhere to be found before school, so I retired to my room, the fancy folder tucked under my arm.
At 10:45, a lovely surprise came my way. Julianne Nemet, a social worker from the Montefiore Health Clinic (our privatized nurse's office), showed up to do the last in her series of three monthly lessons on “Friendship and Acceptance.” Her first lesson about anger management was taught to every class in the school; the students responded to hand signs and chants of “Baby sleeping! Tai chi!” as a signal to shift from kerfuffle to tranquility.
This time, Julianne wrote “RESPECT” in block letters on the board. She had not done much more when Mrs. Boyd burst into the room… with Dilla Zane! “Keep going. Ignore us,” Mrs. Boyd ordered to Julianne.
Dilla Zane (her first and last names were always said together) was the Region One, Network Five Instructional Superintendent: Mrs. Boyd's direct boss. Her reputation for white-glove-caliber inspections for compliance to city regulations was well-known in the halls of P.S. 85. She came to schools at 7 a.m. and entered empty classrooms with a camera to photograph the bulletin boards for standard-adherence scrutiny. She pulled random notebooks out of student desks and scoured them for proper formatting and content. Dilla Zane zapped people, and the word around the campfire said Mrs. Boyd was in her crosshairs.
The duo descended on me in the back of the room. Dilla Zane riffled through my lesson plans. “Very thorough,” she commented. I had picked the
right day to tidy up my paperwork. “Show me a portfolio.”
I picked out Sonandia's, and Mrs. Boyd frowned. “Not Sonandia's. She's your best student.”
“You can look at any one you like,” I said.
“How about your worst student? Show us that one,” Mrs. Boyd said. I didn't like being put on the spot to name my “worst” student to my principal. Dilla Zane reached into the crate and picked out a random red folder.
Deloris Barlow's. She had been discharged from my class two months ago and barely did any work when she was in it. I started to explain, “That girl actually—”
“Just let Dilla look,” Mrs. Boyd said with quiet hostility. Dilla Zane closed the folder after five seconds and did not pick out another.
“Mr. Brown is one of our new, very intelligent first-year teachers,” Mrs. Boyd said. “He graduated from the prestigious NYU film school and is going to be starting a new after-school film club for advanced students.”
Dilla Zane looked to me. “Yes,” I said.
“What is the most challenging aspect about being a teacher, Mr. Brown?” Dilla Zane asked.
I was ready. “For me, it's the constant classroom upkeep. I'm getting better, but it's like another full-time job. I've had some issues with management and that's taken the front burner over keeping my displays as current as they should be.”
“You can see he has quite a long way to go,” Mrs. Boyd chimed.
“What changes do you think could best help you overcome your obstacles?”
This was the real question I had been hoping for. “More allotted time for collaboration and coplanning. We need more sharing of successful practices among teachers. I think the culture of the school could foster that more. We could be more of a team,” I said.
