The Great Expectations School

by Dan Brown

  I called Bernard's home to give a positive report about Bernard's behavioral progress following our parent-teacher conference. Mr. McCants thanked me for the news.

  “Just one thing I need to ask you about, Mr. Brown. This boy Marvin. Bernard says that Marvin is instigating with him and trying to steal his things. I'm trying to teach Bernard not to fight, but he has to defend himself if this boy Marvin is really trying to hurt him. Have you seen any of this?”

  “Yes. Marvin has… a lot of problems.”

  “It sounds like he does. I feel bad for that boy, but Bernard has got to defend himself when it comes to it.”

  I could not promise Mr. McCants that his son would be safe from thieves and instigators in my classroom. Every time I sent Marvin away, he always came floating back to 217. No one wanted anything to do with him, so he was my responsibility. This was not the first time a 4-217 parent had voiced a grievance about Marvin's behavior. What would Paul O'Neill do?

  “I think if you wrote a letter to the school,” I said, “that could probably be an effective way to separate Bernard and Marvin. The school is very sensitive to parents who make their concerns known.”

  Bernard came in the next morning with the letter, which I forwarded to Mrs. Boyd. Within an hour, she called me to the hall, leaving Fran Baker to supervise 4-217.

  “Mr. Brown, I have to wonder what exactly you're doing to manage your kids, specifically this Marvin, when I receive a letter like this from a parent!” She showed me Mr. McCants's page.

  “Marvin Winslow's misbehavior is not my fault. He has severe, severe problems, and I have tried every avenue of discipline known to me to control him, but he continues to return to my room and continues to terrorize his classmates, mostly at lunch when I'm not there. And his mother assaulted Ms. Devereaux.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mr. Brown. Nobody has assaulted Ms. Devereaux. It could be very detrimental to you and the school if you throw around loose words like that.”

  I plowed forward. “Bernard's father voiced a legitimate complaint to me, so I encouraged him to voice it directly to you.”

  Mrs. Boyd was shocked. “This letter was your idea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Brown. I cannot believe you would do something so unprofessional. Do you have any idea what it means to be professional? When you tell”—she consulted the letter—“Bernard McCants's father to start writing letters, you are saying to him, ‘We can't take care of our own.’ You undermine the entire school. You're going over Mr. Randazzo's head, which is rude and… unprofessional. Do you think Mr. Randazzo does nothing? Is that what you are implying in your actions?”

  “No. Mr. Randazzo has been doing this for over thirty years, and I'm a rookie. What I am saying is that many people more experienced than me, including Ms. Guiterrez and Dr. Kirkpatrick, agree that Marvin should not be in a regular classroom. But he still is, intimidating and beating on kids and ruining the fourth grade.”

  Mrs. Boyd delivered an oral treatise on professionalism and stormed away, warning me not to encourage parents to write letters. Marvin spent a couple weeks in a second-grade class before a bloody punch-up with an eight-year-old spurred his inevitable return. Meanwhile, Bernard had a great two weeks.

  The February English Language Arts Test might have been the be-all and end-all of life as we know it, but the May Math Test was not far behind. I officially put away my neglected math pacing calendar and cleared the schedule for a drab recipe of one part Balanced Literacy and four parts Test prep.

  Like every other fourth-grade class in P.S. 85, we had a lot of catching up to do, particularly in probability, logic, time, geometry, and measurement. These conceptual surveys and mandatory Test-taking skill reviews were easy on me for their minimal preparation, but the monotony (despite my continuous insistence that this was fun and important) took a toll on everybody. One day without warning, I brushed my teeth in class and passed out toothbrushes and toothpaste, compliments of my family dentist in New Jersey. We discussed and wrote about dental hygiene, making for a snazzy bulletin board display. Then back to business. Including sporadic Mr. Lizard and claw-dancing time, I had approximately two days to cover measurement in mass, weight, length, volume, area, perimeter, diameter, radius, and conversions for English and metric systems. Two days for logic and probability questions. Two days for geometry with polygons, vertices, angles (acute, obtuse, right), and parallel and perpendicular lines.

  After the frantic pre–ELA Test cram, all complaints about the futility of these crash courses were exhausted, and now the disgusted teachers and bored students just knew to deal with it, to limp to the finish line. My Paul O'Neill thinking failed me here for a way to spin this vortex into a positive experience.

  At the monthly assembly, Mr. Randazzo called Maimouna Lugaru to receive the 4-217 Student of the Month award. Every month as the names were read, I watched Maimouna with her eyes shut tight, praying in her auditorium seat that she would be a winner. When her name really was called, she made no noticeable reaction, dead-fishing me on a handshake and sauntering blankly to the front of the room.

  After the Students of the Month were promised that their personalized certificates would be printed up and distributed in the future, Mr. Randazzo read the morning lineup scores for April. “I'm just going to read just the top five this month. For fourth grade, fifth place goes to 4-208!”

  Ms. Fiore did not move. A tall boy retrieved the certificate from the podium.

  “Fourth place, 4-220!”

  Kelsie, my SFA poet buddy, accepted on behalf of Ms. Mulvehill's room.

  “And third place, I can't believe it, goes to 4-217!”

  “YES!” I screamed, plowing forward to grab the certificate myself. I pumped one fist and gnashed my teeth insanely. “YEAH!” The kids followed my lead, going bonkers in celebration. We spilled into the aisle, cheering and stalling the announcement of the rest of the winners.

  “WE DID IT!”

  May

  Nothing Cannes Stop You Now

  BERNARD WAS ABSENT ON DAY one of the huge Math Test, so I filled in a special absentee Scantron grid for him. He was absent again on days two and three.

  “I think Bernard moved,” Eddie said.

  Behaviorally, Bernard had made the most progress out of anyone in 4-217, but his foothold on the path was tenuous. In the winter, he had thrown punches as a reflex. With the March parent-teacher conference as a landmark, he was now making new and important efforts with self-control. I had helped keep his success streak going with a number of preemptive interventions when I spotted one of his personal warning signs: a certain facial expression or a specific tense movement he made with his hands.

  I thought changing schools so late in the term was the worst thing that could happen to Bernard. Our fragile progress fractured, he would now have to deal with being the new kid, and he would do it with his fists. I wished his parents had mentioned something to me about the move, but I doubt I could have talked them into postponing it for seven weeks.

  Bernard was the sixth student who had been with me in September who would finish the year in another class. I imagined the six—Asante, Verdad, Daniel, Deloris, Fausto, and Bernard—and felt helpless.

  “Can I use Bernard's social studies book?” Cwasey asked. Several of our hardcover textbooks had taken a walk during the year, and we no longer had a complete class set, which meant reviled book-sharing during some lessons.

  Cwasey walked to Bernard's old desk and pulled out the book. As he reached in, Tayshaun tossed a crumpled paper ball at his back. Cwasey turned and shoved Tayshaun's desk, knocking it over.

  “Cwasey!”

  “What I did?”

  “You did not have to knock over Tayshaun's desk!”

  “I didn't do it,” Cwasey protested, his eyes pleading for me to believe him.

  “I'll speak to you at lunch.”

  Cwasey vehemently continued to claim innocence when I pulled him aside in the cafeteria. “I saw you with my eyes, C
wasey,” I said slowly, pointing at my eyeballs. “I know Tayshaun threw the paper at you, so you reacted. Just admit that you knocked over his desk.”

  “I didn't do it,” Cwasey repeated with the same expression.

  I spoke to Cwasey's mother and Mr. Schwesig about arranging some guidance sessions for him, but nothing happened. I quietly moved Cwasey into my mental category of habitual liars, right beside Marvin, Joseph, and Deloris.

  Seresa came skipping over to me, a big smile on her face. “Mr. Brown! If everyone saw Cwasey do something and he still says he didn't do it, that's ludicrous.”

  The administration tapped Fran Baker to “anchor” 4-217 for the eleven days I would be in France. Ms. Rosenberg, little Ms. Strong, and big Mrs. Little (the Test tutors) cleared their schedules to cycle in so that no fewer than two teachers would be in the room at all times. I got a kick out of the fact that four full-time teachers with over seventy collective years of teaching experience were deemed necessary to assume the responsibility that I was privileged to enjoy every day alone.

  In the middle of the week, Mrs. Boyd made another visit to my room with sharp criticism about my bulletin boards and threats about my future at P.S. 85. After thoroughly ripping my professionalism, she changed gears and wanted to chat about movies, offering to introduce me to the monthly book-order lady, who was the mother of an award-winning filmmaker and NYU alumnus.

  To work on the classroom, I canceled the Visual Arts Club for the week, postponing our music video shoot to the end of the month. No Region One Literacy Fair showcase for us. When I stopped by Ms. Fiore's room to give the news, Ivana asked Corrina, “What are we going to do to have fun now?”

  Elizabeth Camaraza stayed with me for the eleventh-hour 217 makeover. She single-handedly designed and mounted a gorgeous “Pocahontas and the Strangers: Responses to Literature” bulletin board, replete with green-and-gold construction-paper cornhusks. “You just needed a woman's touch,” she said.

  On Friday, May 7, I delivered to Mrs. Baker eleven days of lesson plans, which were politely and promptly discarded. The tutors had mountains of materials to keep the kids busy.

  “You have worked like a Trojan, Mr. Brown,” Mrs. Boyd said, looking at the pretty paper agriculture on my wall. “Don't miss your plane home.”

  The Festival de Cannes is a land of cinephile dreams. I spent my days sporting a laminated access pass as an editorial intern for the Hollywood Reporter and my evenings in black tie at red-carpet screenings or swank soirees, usually with Clarissa, a film student from Texas, on my arm. We drank wine and watched Truffaut's The 400 Blows, the movie that had blown my mind as a high school sophomore, on a giant floating movie screen at the Cinéma de la Plage by the indigo Mediterranean's edge. I saw films from fourteen countries, ranging from Bosnia to Chile. On my last day, the Reporter published a story I wrote called “Scarlet Fever” about the diversity of the red-carpet camp-out-spectator culture. Then I caught the first ever screening of Kill Bill with both volumes merged into one continuous film, introduced by Quentin Tarantino himself.

  On my last night in France, the familiar, queasy dread seeped back into my stomach. Did I really have to see Mrs. Boyd or Ms. Guiterrez ever again? I preferred life in the cosmopolitan world of film. Drinking fresh grapefruit juice for breakfast in a courtyard several tables away from Pedro Almodóvar beat my bodega bagel on the D train. I was only gone eleven school days, but the idea of coming back to P.S. 85 gave me horrific goosebumps.

  I left my top-floor suite to check out of the Pierre et Vacances de Verrerie at 6 a.m., and immediately noticed something strange when the elevator's lobby-floor button refused to light. I got out on the second floor and bump-dragged my massive seventy-pound suitcase down the steps, into a dark, ghost-town lobby. Where was the desk person at six on a Monday morning? Where was anybody?

  I walked to the front door to find it bolted from the outside. All other windows and doors that led outdoors were locked too. I had never heard of a large hotel lobby being closed, let alone locked down. I needed an employee to call a cab for me. If I hoofed it with my giant luggage to the bus station, I'd be dangerously close to missing the only bus to Nice that would get me to the airport in time for my EasyJet flight to London. I started to sweat.

  A man pushing a mop appeared. Frazzled, I pounced in his direction. “Monsieur! I need to call a taxi. Do you know the number for a taxi? A taxi!”

  The shrugging man spoke zero English, and I could offer no French. He moved toward the stairwell with his bucket and mop. A flash went through me, familiar from my 4-217 crisis moments: Assess what he can accomplish.No taxi.Get him to let you out, or find out how to let yourself out of the building. Do it calmly and cordially.

  I took a breath and followed the cleaning man, smiling and pantomiming a key turning and opening the front door. He frowned. I gave him a pleading look, fully shifted into my let's-cooperate teacher mode. He capitulated and unlocked the door.

  The bus would leave for Nice in forty-one minutes, and I had clocked the beachside walk from my hotel in suburban CannesBocca to the bus station in the center of Cannes to take forty-five. I steeled myself for a brutal trudge under the sweltering early morning sun.

  Then something amazing happened. A taxi, the first unoccupied one I had seen in my whole stay in this neighborhood, rolled up the block with its vacancy light switched on. I wildly waved down the driver and he stopped, asking something in French and squinting in the sunglare. I nodded, and he asked again, raising his voice and miming speaking into a telephone.

  He's asking if I called a cab, I deciphered.

  “Yes,” I lied, opening the door and hoisting my suitcase onto the seat. “Oui, oui. I called, I called.” Now with both hands free, I mimicked holding two phones to my ears.

  “Get out!”

  “What?”

  “Get out! I am not your taxi. Get out of here.”

  My stomach dropped. The French cabbies had a code of honor about stealing each other's fares. If I had in fact called, he thought one of his buddies was coming for me. I needed to make this man understand my side of things. “Wait! I didn't call a taxi. I tried to call is what I meant. I need to get to the bus station. No one else is coming for me. Please!” I could feel my insides firing up, the rising, now familiar twist of anger and frustration, of discarded hope. I dumbly dragged my luggage off the seat and it plopped to the pavement. “S'il vous plaît! Come on!”

  “Get away! Fuck you, Ashton Kutcher!” the incensed cabbie barked.

  “What?”

  “FUCK YOU!”

  His shouting set a match to my bubbling rage. “I need to get in this cab!” I screamed, whipping my body to bare-knuckle-punch the passenger door. I froze, suddenly aware of myself. I had snapped again.

  “POLICE! POLICE!”

  I grabbed my suitcase and hustled toward the beach. Forty perspiration-drenched minutes later, I staggered onto the bus, heading home and promising myself not to punch things ever again.

  Four-two-seventeen cheered for fifteen seconds when I entered the cafeteria before quickly returning to normal. Several teachers asked to see pictures from the trip. Others shot me looks of thinly veiled antipathy.

  “They were fine,” Mrs. Baker reported. “We kept them busy with busywork. Usual problems with the usual ones. Group two [Gladys Viña, Evley, Sonandia, Gladys Ferraro, and Gloria] was a joy. They were really wonderful.”

  Sonandia looked worried. “Sony, what's up?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “Somebody wrote something about you in the bathroom. On the third floor.”

  “Is that what's bothering you?” I asked. She nodded. “Don't worry about that at all. That doesn't bother me. That means nothing.” Sonandia smiled because I smiled, and that was the end of it.

  The moment the day ended, I jogged upstairs to the third-floor girls’ bathroom to read inside the first stall door in giant magic marker letters, “MR. BROWN HAS SEX WITH MS. BAKER.” I washed it off, feeling strangely legitimized
to be inspiration for graffiti in the Bronx.

  I returned from France to find 4-217 suffused with romantic intrigue. Rumors swirled that Eddie had the hots for Lakiya, and Evley turned beet red every time he and Julissa stood beside each other in line.

  Eric Ruiz was behaving stranger than usual, grinning ceaselessly and clutching a one-dollar bill every time I looked at him. “Eric, put the dollar in your pocket or you're going to make me a hundred cents richer.” He complied, but the next time I glanced his way, his grin was back, with a corner of the greenback just peeking over the edge of his desk. At the end of the day, I found a tightly crumpled sheet of loose-leaf paper on the floor near group two.

  To: glyds V

  Do you like me because of the $1.00

  Yes or No

  And what is your pone number

  Sadly for Eric, the “No” was circled several times before the paper was discarded. But Gladys Viña, a quiet pal of Sonandia's, was not only receiving love letters that day. Next to Eric's rejection note, I found something else.

  Dear Lito,

  I love you. You like me a little bit. Answer my question and write back anything.

  Pick one do you like me

  A lot or a little

  Write back I got another paper.

  Sincerly love,

  Gladys Viña

  I had never seen Lito and Gladys V. even say hello to each other. Not far away from Gladys V.’s confession lay another sheet from the same miniature notepad, marked by Lito's scraggly penmanship.

  Baby I LOVE YOU

  The hotly anticipated book fair was a glorified toy sale. The kids loved it. Jennifer was the only student who bought a book, but ten others walked away with card games, magic sets, and stationery featuring pictures of mammals.