The Great Expectations School

by Dan Brown

  Eric bought the most expensive item available, a ten-dollar “Keep-Out Box” filled with activities and secrets. I had never seen perpetually blank-faced Eric in such good spirits. I could barely believe it when he raised his hand in the afternoon to ask if he could visit the library to check out a book. He returned ten minutes later, cradling a weathered hardback reference book titled Automobiles.

  “I didn't know you were into cars,” I said.

  The floodgates opened. “I want to be a mechanic. My cousin works in a garage. He teaches me stuff. He's gonna teach me to build cars. He knows everything in the engines and how to take it apart and make it work again like perfect.” In moments, he was explaining to me the difference between carburetors and alternators. “My dad teaches me about cars, too. But he's on vacation.”

  “That sounds fun.”

  Eric shrugged and stuck out an index finger and flexed his thumb like he was pulling a trigger. “It's not that kind of vacation.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe you can teach me some things about cars in writing. And I can bring in some car stuff for you. Would you like that?” Eric nodded and excitedly went back to inspecting the diagrams in Automobiles.

  Walking down the stairs for dismissal, he mumbled something unintelligible.

  “What?” I asked.

  He mumbled again.

  “Speak louder. I can't understand you.”

  “I said my Keep-Out Box was stolen!” He started sobbing, the first time I had seen him cry since Fausto strangled him back in week one.

  “Stolen! When?”

  “I don't know.”

  I halted the line. “Has anyone seen Eric's Keep-Out Box? Any information will be rewarded!” No one volunteered to speak. The line below me snaked around the lower landing, so I couldn't even see everyone. We were in the worst spot to attempt a quickie investigation. “Eric, when did you realize it was missing?”

  Sensing the hopelessness, Eric bolted forward, hurtling down the steps to the exit.

  The next morning, he looked miserable. He gave no answer when I asked him if he wanted to read about cars in the library with Mr. Klein. “I just want to go to Mr. Schwesig,” he said. I sent him to the guidance counselor where he played Connect Four for a half hour. He put his head down on his desk.

  During my prep period, I visited the book fair, now packing up on its last day. “I'm looking for something that I think is called a Keep-Out Box, or something like that. Do you have it?”

  The PTA mother had not heard of it. She called in some help, and soon all four volunteers were discussing my desire for a Keep-Out Box. “I think we ran out of those,” the boss lady finally determined.

  I returned to 217 and summoned Eric to the hall. “What'd I do?”

  “Nothing, you're not in trouble. We're going to the book fair.” I told him he could pick out anything he wanted to replace the Keep-Out Box. He shrugged and selected a deck of playing cards decorated with fish.

  “Are you sure that's all you want?”

  He shrugged again.

  At a spring PTA meeting, Jodi, Karen Adler's champion student in 4-111 and a leader in my Visual Arts Club, who was attending with her mom, posited the idea of holding a talent show as a fund-raiser for the school. The plan was set in motion for an evening talent and fashion show, with food and door prizes for the year's final PTA gathering. Maimouna and Cwasey were picked to be two of the featured dozen models and dancers, meaning they left room 217 two wonderful periods per week for rehearsal.

  Seeking to put the T back in PTA at least once, Karen and I went to the culminating performance. Aside from fiancées Mulvehill and Bonn, we were the only teachers there.

  “Where's Jodi?” I asked.

  “She's not coming. She's punished for fighting with her sisters,” Karen said.

  The emcee's microphone did not work, so Ms. Llanos, the PTA president, attempted to achieve silence through raising her hand and asking for quiet. The din of chatter in the half-full auditorium did not subside. It was the parents making the noise. Karen and I looked at each other in horror, giving the silent signal in sync with Ms. Llanos. Mrs. Boyd finally took to the stage. “Excuse me, people, but the microphone is not working! We are going to need your cooperation to begin! Excuse me!” Boyd and Llanos exchanged a helpless look, somewhere between shared fury and disappointment. The crowd continued its roaring chatter, oblivious to the distressed organizers. Mrs. Boyd called again fruitlessly for quiet, then left the stage to seek a custodian.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said to Karen and me as she passed.

  Fifty-five minutes after the scheduled start, a newly acquired microphone enabled the show to begin. It was a halfhearted performance of loosely synchronized movements punctuated by spontaneously wild poses that drew personal cheers.

  “ Maybe it's all right that Jodi missed this,” I said.

  “I got the job, muthafucka!”

  “Congrizzats, bitch!”

  “It's official. The hiring committee approved me. I'm in!” Karen shouted into the phone. Karen had secretly responded to a job posting she saw on a bulletin board at City College. She would teach sixth grade at a Riverdale start-up charter middle school specializing in science. Her interviewer and future supervisor, Mr. Kahn, was a funny, intelligent, laid-back character who wanted Karen to infuse her piano-playing expertise into her teaching.

  “No more P.S. 85 for you.”

  “No more P.S. 85 ever. I am peacing out of that hellhole. Are you still thinking about leaving?”

  “I think I have to,” I said. “Unless a miracle happens.”

  After dismissal the next day, I found Karen pacing in her room with her left palm pressed to her forehead, a locomotion that usually exists only in fiction. “Are you taking the train soon?” I asked.

  “I don't know. I need to talk to Boyd.” Karen was flummoxed to an uncharacteristic degree.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just might be a while. I'll tell you all about it later.”

  I went back to my room to sort out a paperwork issue. Teachers are supposed to make two records of attendance every day: an official Scantron sheet and a backup grid. Like many swamped teachers, I had largely abandoned the backup grid in November. Now Ms. Cooper, the payroll secretary, was asking for all of the old backup grids. Our conversation that morning had gone something like this:

  BROWN: I don't have the backup grids.

  COOPER: I need you to give them to me.

  BROWN: I physically don't have them.

  COOPER: (making crazy eyebrow expressions) You have to give me the backups.

  BROWN: I understand, but I don't know what to tell you. All of my originals are accurate. The backups are gone.

  (Silence)

  COOPER: Mr. Randazzo said you have to give me the backups or your paycheck will be withheld.

  BROWN: You'll have them this afternoon.

  With my pen, I invented absences and guessed tardies (Was Eric late on November 14? Sure. Was Destiny absent on November 16? Why not!) for about twenty minutes on a stack of blank grids. When I was almost done, Karen came by. “Boyd just offered PAC to Andrea Cobb and me,” she gasped.

  “What did you say?

  “We said yes!”

  “Are you serious? That's cataclysmic! What about the charter school?”

  “Nothing about the charter school. I'm going to stay. My brain is mush right now!”

  Shockwaves over the Performing Arts Class snub to Fiore and Solloway rocketed through the P.S. 85 halls before lineup the next morning. They ranked in seniority on their grade levels, had attended a much-discussed seminar series at Teachers College, and most of all, had acted all year as if their selection was in the bag. I thought that while Fiore and Solloway may be strong textbook teachers, their surly whininess made them poor collaborators. Picking Andrea, a young and energetic second-grade homeroom teacher, and Karen was a brilliant move by Mrs. Boyd to reinvent PAC with cooperative teachers instead of emb
ittered ones.

  Not everyone saw it that way. Fiore and Solloway claimed they were leaving P.S. 85, only to quietly retract their declarations later in the week. Ms. Boswell and Ms. Berkowitz started giving away their classroom supplies to just about everyone except Karen and Andrea. I had a good view of Fiore and Solloway's public hand-wringing on the blacktop during recess while I jumped double-dutch.

  ELA Test scores came back. Except Eric and Marvin, everyone passed. Lakiya passed by a hair. Her docile temperament in January may have given her the edge. Lito and Christian passed, both by small margins. I called Christian's mother to give her the green light for summer camp and Disney World. No mandatory summer school. I didn't count Clara as one of my ones since she took the Test with Ms. Fiore. Besides the gifted Performing Arts Class, I had the fewest failures in the grade. Neither Ms. Guiterrez nor Mrs. Boyd ever said anything to me about it.

  June

  Teacher Gone Missing

  THE MUCH-HYPED P.S. 85 RETIREMENT CELEBRATION at City Island was set for Wednesday evening, June 2. Mr. Randazzo, Mr. Len Daly (Randazzo's right-hand man), Ms. Corson (an expert in the outmoded Success for All program), the two PAC teachers Ms. Boswell and Ms. Berkowitz, and one other lady I had never seen before were bowing out of their Marion Avenue careers, and the $65 admission send-off party ruled the hallway talk for the preceding weeks. Women bought new dresses. Al Conway put himself on a high-impact diet.

  Al's excitement about the dinner-dance was a little puzzling. I was not planning to go, expecting the affair to be a weird, expensive back-patting soiree for the school's elders, a group with which I was not pining to socialize. A few days before the party, Al cornered me in the Teacher Center. “Dan, you've got to go. This could be our only chance all year to hang out together!”

  I had never figured that Al Conway earnestly wanted to hang out with me. My feelings of aversion about the party flipped into strange excitement. Barbara had told me that at one of these parties a few years ago, Ms. Guiterrez got sauced and bear-hugged Mrs. Boyd, screaming, “I love you!” Give me the spectacle, I thought.

  Every other first-year Fellow except Cat Samuels had the same idea. At 6:15, I rolled into the catering hall with Allie Bowers, Trisha Pierson, and honey-haired second-grade teacher Corinne Abernathy at my side.

  “Mr. Brown, you devil!” Ethel May Brick cooed, checking off our names.

  Seeing your normally casual and haggard colleagues gussied up is a strange sensation. Tonight I was not the struggling rookie in the hell class. We were all adults at the great equalizer, an open bar.

  I felt fantastic and got a drink. Len Daly made a cordial nod in my direction at the bar. “What do ya got?” he asked.

  “Whiskey and ginger.”

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah.”

  Daly nodded, deeming my answer satisfactory.

  I broke the silence. “Hey, congratulations on everything. On all of this.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said, crunching an ice cube from his cashed highball. “Thanks.”

  We stood unspeaking for another ten seconds, sharing a weird moment before he nodded and sauntered toward the crudité.

  Within an hour, the room was loose. I spotted Mr. Randazzo with his arm around a paraprofessional in a maroon velour bodysuit. Janet Claxton, her boyfriend, and I shot the breeze while Camaraza sang her heart out to ELO's “Mr. Blue Sky.” Tim Shea chewed the fat with Ms. Guiterrez, who rolled in wearing a spicy midriff-bearing outfit that showed off the tendrils of a sprawling, symbol-laden tattoo across her shoulder blades.

  After our chicken cordon bleu, the atmosphere morphed into a bar-mitzvah-on-acid booty-dancing scene. Usher's “Yeah” came on the sound system and people went loony. Later, during a salsa number, Mr. Tejera and an ESL teacher performed an expert mambo. I got into the jam myself, twirling Trisha Pierson around the floor while a gallery of PTA volunteers cheered us on. Marge Foley's unexpectedly audacious move-busting scored her invitations to four parties. In the most surreal twist, Mrs. Boyd emerged from a back room in a sombrero and baja, doling out maracas and straw hats while “Hot! Hot! Hot!” blared in the background. I wound up between Melissa Mulvehill and gym teacher Dick Zweben in the Public School 85 conga line.

  In the valet parking queue, a vivacious Ms. Guiterrez ordered Tim Shea to pick out a downtown bar to keep the party going. Tim deferred to me, and I recommended Grass Roots on St. Mark's Place. “Let's do it!” Guiterrez roared. “Ms. Abernathy, you must drive me. Or else I will drive one hundred and fifteen miles per hour!”

  I moved to another cluster on the sidewalk. “Are we going out drinking with Guiterrez?” Elizabeth rhetorically asked me.

  I heard Guiterrez shout in the background, “One hundred and fifteen miles per hour!”

  “Holy shit, have you seen Guiterrez? She's going berserk!” Karen jumped in.

  “We're going to Grass Roots with her. You are absolutely coming,” I said.

  “Hell yeah!”

  Just before I leaped into Trisha's Saturn and out of the giggling crowd by the main entrance, I noticed Mrs. Boyd standing about ten feet from the edge of the group, looking at her shoes, talking to no one.

  The bar was a strange scene. Guiterrez seemed to have gotten drunker on the ride downtown, and unexpected designated driver Corinne Abernathy looked mortified at her boss's loss of composure. Six of us squeezed into a booth.

  “Shea, get me a bay breeze. No, I meant a sea breeze! Bay breeze has pineapple and I hate that. I hate pineapple. Here!” Guiterrez gave Tim a crumpled fistful of singles. “Wait! I forget if it's sea breeze or bay breeze with pineapple!”

  Tim came back a minute later. “Is it a bay breeze or sea breeze?” Guiterrez asked emphatically.

  “No pineapple,” Tim said.

  “The Continental is right there!” Ms. Guiterrez said, pointing at the wall. “That's the only place to see good heavy metal. That's all I like. Limp Bizkit! Metal! Nothing else. I go to the Continental all the time.”

  I smiled wryly and looked at the table, amused with Guiterrez's horror show but possessing no desire to converse with her. The Hygienists had played the Continental in March, and everyone at the table except the assistant principal caught the show. Trisha Pierson even had a love connection.

  One drink was enough. Corinne offered Ms. Guiterrez a ride. “Nah, I live right there on Bleecker,” Guiterrez said, and traipsed away.

  Evan Krieg had recommended Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH for a read-aloud. After the success of Pocahontas and the Strangers, I wanted to proceed with a novel only if each student could have a copy in his hands. The memory was burned in me of Destiny Rivera saying, “I can't believe I read a two-hundred-page book!” Between ransacking Krieg and Solloway's fifth-grade in-class libraries, I gathered enough copies for a class set. The reading level was a bit over their heads, but I opted to go for it anyway. We could walk through the text together at our own pace.

  The book was a smash. As a prize for going the distance, I threw a movie party with popcorn and Don Bluth's animated The Secret of NIMH, and I was delighted when the kids unanimously voiced their preference for the book.

  June is open season for lesson planning. I had never implemented my comic-book-making plan with Tayshaun, but now I introduced a class-wide project of creating comic strips. Across the board, the kids delivered the depth and creativity that I had been desperately seeking to draw out. Athena's The Mean Friends and Gloria's The Romance of Chelsea and Joe might have been their best work of the year. Seresa's The Invisible Boy was my favorite, a plaintive tale about a shy boy (named Evley) who, after several abortive attempts, finally asks a girl her name. I posted them in the back of the room beside the newly founded Eddie Rollins Exhibit: Colors by Lakiya Ray.

  In a reflective end-of-the-year survey, sixteen kids wrote that they wanted to become teachers when they grew up. I felt so good that I played steady quarterback in captains Dennis and Eddie's four-on-four blacktop football game after school.

>   As I threw the ball around with the kids, a fateful piece of paper ran through the office copy machine. My future at P.S. 85 had been decided.

  The P.S. 85 roster for 2004–2005 was distributed. Ms. Guiterrez's promotion from grades 2–3 interim assistant to grades 4–5 assistant principal became official, and four of her current third-grade teachers were moving up with her. I did not have a classroom on the list, nudged out of the fold by Guiterrez's protégés.

  So much for building from the lessons of my embattled first year in the classroom. I had been demoted to a teacher-on-wheels. I looked at the classroom list with a sense of calm, even relief, that my Great Expectations School fate had finally been sealed. I sat down at the Teacher Center computer, typed a three-line letter of resignation, and signed my name.

  When my letter of acceptance to the New York City Teaching Fellows had arrived fifteen months earlier, I had opened and read it with a serenity similar to what I felt now. I knew this piece of paper would change my life, but somehow its smallness, its thinness, tempered the magnitude of its contents’ consequences.

  After placing the letter in Mrs. Boyd's box, I headed to the months-overdue Marvin Winslow IEP (Individualized Education Plan) meeting, although I had little desire to be in a room with Marvin for extra time after his most recent “Fuck this class!” rampage. He had punched Gladys Ferraro again and I strongly suspected him of lifting Julissa's caterpillar-shaped pencil sharpener.

  At a round table in the School Based Support Team office nook behind the gym, I sat across from Mrs. Winslow and Marvin, flanked by three women I had never met. Ms. Guiterrez and Dr. Kirkpatrick, who prepared the report, could not attend. Marvin's glare melted into his now familiar deer-in-headlights face, but when one of the ladies began reciting his file, Mrs. Winslow's face looked identical to her son's in her vulnerability and confusion.

  The psychologist stranger began, “Marvin, your self-esteem is very, very low. You don't feel too good about yourself, do you? No, you don't. You have low skills in all subjects, but particularly in reading because you don't read so well. Your phonemic awareness needs a lot of work. Your teacher, Mr…. Brown? Yes, Mr. Brown agrees that you need a smaller class environment to succeed. So, right now you're not doing so well, but we hope that you can do better with a more intensive classroom setting.”