by Ed Boland
“Col-lab-o-rate,” he read the card slowly.
“You know, it’s like pooling resources,” I said.
“Like swimming?”
“Swimming?”
“You said pool.”
“No, not like swimming; it’s a different kind of pool. I should have said ‘work together.’”
It was hard for me to get out of my overeducated head and break things down for him. This kind of patience didn’t come naturally to me. The next day, Ricardo scraped by on the quiz with a 6 out of 10. I rated myself a 4 out of 10 in helping him. Lesson learned: Stern lectures are fast and easy; teaching material to a struggling kid is long and hard. And this was only one small quiz. Would there be enough support along the way to help this boy get to high school graduation?
My time at the middle school culminated in a “publishing party.” Over the course of a month, every kid had read several books around a theme (playing to type, almost invariably sports figures for boys and distressed animals or bold heroines for girls) and then wrote a book report about their favorite one. Ms. Wells and I went through several rounds of revisions with each of the students. It was so easy to see what was wrong in their writing, but so terribly hard to explain how to fix it. Simply correcting them wasn’t enough.
The day of the party arrived. Outside “experts” (parents, friends of teachers, other faculty members) were brought in to read the final reports and hear short presentations from the authors. The visiting adults wrote thoughtful evaluations and so did the other students. Lindsay told me, “The trick is that even the most unmotivated kid cares if she has to present her work to outsiders. Everybody works harder for an audience. I should know.” She winked at me.
Ricardo had struggled to fill a full page about a picture book on Jackie Robinson, but his effort was obvious. Drita, a star student who arrived only a few years before from Macedonia, presented a five-page essay on a hefty Helen Keller biography, complete with footnotes. As I panned the room, watching the students present in serious and scholarly tones, I got chills. I promised myself then that I would do all I could to make my classroom look and feel just like this when I was at the helm in the fall.
On my last day at Yorkville Heights, I pulled open the window and looked down at the kids as they rushed onto the street at dismissal time. Like a toss of confetti, they spread in every direction in a burst of brightly colored coats and backpacks. After a few minutes they were all gone, and the sidewalk returned to its drab, gum-mottled gray. As I’d been during my visit to Nora’s classroom, I was inspired as well as intimidated by the experience. Nora and Lindsay made it look so easy; but I knew it was anything but. I hoped I had the stuff they did.
Saying good-bye to Ms. Wells, I choked up. “I admire everything that you’re doing here. I’ve learned so much. I hope I can put it into practice. Thank you.”
She gave me a hug. “You clearly have the knack for teaching. You’re going to be a star, I just know it.”
On a gray morning the next week, my fellow student teacher Gabe Marwell and I stood on the Park Avenue sidewalk peering up at a skyscraper, incredulous that there was a high school inside. The Eugene Debs High School for Business Careers was a sagging bundle of contradictions. It was located on Park Avenue, but nothing about it called to mind that opulent address. Hidden in the lower floors of an ugly skyscraper that housed some Fortune 500 companies higher up, it drew its students from the poorest outer-borough neighborhoods. Although the school was named for America’s leading socialist, its purported mission was to foster young captains of capitalism. It appeared to be a school, yet it looked, functioned, and smelled like a penitentiary, bursting with more than three thousand students.
A little Internet research had given me some insight into the place before I started. A full-blown riot the year before had led the police to establish a “mini-precinct” inside the school. Tabloid articles warned of “dangerous overcrowding” and a dropout rate hovering around 50 percent. As if all that wasn’t damning enough, a chirpy online “review” from a recent graduate declared: “this is a grate school. awsome buziness programs!!!”
Gabe and I had become friendly in grad school. Like me, he was a forty-something career changer who had given up corporate accounting to give teaching a go. He was exactly what the system needed. He not only had a superb command of history, but he was a black man in a school system that had far too few role models for its young men of color to identify with.
For all its badass reputation, the school was eerily quiet when we entered. The security guard barely looked up from his New York Post before waving us past the metal detector and bag scanner. What a grim place. Every surface was covered in a color that defied a name, somewhere between shit brown and dyspeptic orange. Escalators covered in chain-link fencing connected its ten floors, thumping ominously in the silence. Lining the walls were posters printed in grayish block letters; even cheery events (“Spirit Week!”) and felicitous messages (“Congratulations Boys Basketball Team!”) looked like Stalinist pronouncements.
We made our way to the main office, where a tired-looking secretary slowly wheeled herself over to us on a creaking desk chair to which she seemed permanently attached. We explained that we were reporting for duty.
She turned her lizardy eyes up at us through a pair of bifocals. “You might have noticed there are no students for you to student-teach today. Why did they send you now? It’s nothing but faculty meetings all day long.” She exhaled for a long time, and then said, “Go see the history department head on the ninth floor.”
We packed into a crowded but silent elevator filled with casually dressed teachers.
“Good morning, gentlemen, and just who are you going to see today, all dressed up so nice like that?” came a disembodied voice with a heavy Long Island accent from the back of the elevator. I was starting to miss the friendly sixth-grade Mod Squad at Yorkville Heights.
“Mr. Frank in Social Studies,” I responded, tugging self-consciously at my tie.
“Oh, well, if you’re gonna go see Humpty Dumpty, you better bring ’im a doughnut. That one, he sure likes his doughnuts.” Some teachers openly laughed; others tried to conceal their widening smiles.
We excused our way out of the elevator; its heavy doors clacked shut behind us. I mumbled to Gabe, “If that’s how the faculty acts, what are the kids going to be like?” He shrugged.
We walked into Mr. Frank’s office. There sat a nearly round, balding, middle-aged white man. He wore an eggshell-white shirt that matched his skin tone exactly. The teachers in the elevator were mean but correct; he had a hint of powdered sugar left over on his cheek. His office was in utter disarray, crammed with overflowing army-green file cabinets.
He had obviously not been expecting company and jumped to his feet. “They told you to come today?” He started flipping quickly through a black plastic binder, seeming eager to get rid of us. “Let’s see. Are you Boland? You will be assigned to, ummm, Mr., ummm, Mr. Cooper. His first class is tomorrow at 7:15 in room 811. We are way, way overenrolled here, so classes go in shifts from 7:00 a.m. to almost 5:00 p.m. It’s a bilingual economics class. And, uh, Marwell, you’ll be with Miss Lewis.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t speak much Spanish,” I confessed.
“Neither does Mr. Cooper. Oh, and let me find you the key to the faculty bathroom.” Gabe and I exchanged wary glances as he dug through mounds of paper looking for the key. “That’s all you really need to know for now.”
The next morning at 6:55 a.m., my hair still wet from the shower, I walked past long lines of students undergoing the degrading daily metal-detector search. Outside the classroom, a few bleary-eyed kids were milling around. They kept trying the door and then halfheartedly kicking it. They eyed me suspiciously. I introduced myself to a few of them in Spanish with a smile and a handshake. Conversation was tough with the limits of my Sesame Street Spanish, but I learned that most of them had been up since 5:00 a.m. and had spent more than an hour on the subwa
y to get there.
In the distance, I heard some faint shouting. It became louder and angrier as it got closer. This wasn’t just some boisterous kids. It sounded violent.
Jesus, really? Already? Even trouble starts early here.
I walked briskly down the hall to the security station. Empty. The shouting grew closer. I’d be damned if I was going to break up a fight in my first hour there, but I thought I should at least see what was going on.
I rounded the hall, trailed by a few curious kids. Near the elevators stood two grown men, screaming at the top of their lungs, their faces inches from each other. In unison, they stopped and looked at me. I looked at the floor. The kids laughed.
A mustached, fiftyish black man with the sad eyes of Richard Pryor walked toward me. He wore a cheap suit and carried a beat-up brown plastic briefcase. He disdainfully threw one last comment over his shoulder: “You are very unprofessional, Dr. Cortona.”
His far-taller opponent had a perfectly coiffed head of salt-and-pepper hair and a slightly less cheap suit. Still panting, he shot back in a heavy accent that was half Italian, half Count Chocula, “And I don’t-a respect you, Meester Cooo-per.”
“Are you the new student teacher?” Mr. Cooper asked as he approached me.
“Yes. Ed Boland.” I squeezed out a smile.
“I’m, ahh, sorry you had to witness that. We were having a…professional disagreement.” He looked down, shamefaced. This was the “master teacher” I was supposed to be learning from?
“I see” was all I could offer as we walked toward his classroom with the entire class in tow, tittering and commenting in Spanish behind us. He unlocked the classroom door and pushed it open with his shoulder.
Mr. Cooper announced that since it was the first day of a new quarter and many of the students were new, they must fill out a small yellow index card with their name, phone number, and address. Then he said the students could talk quietly for the remaining fifty minutes of the period. A Spanish translator who had trailed in a little late delivered a couple of rapid-fire sentences to the students about the index cards and then retired to the back of the room to pay a stack of bills. Cooper sat down at his desk, opened his briefcase, and unsuccessfully tried concealing the Daily News sports section behind it. He repeated the same routine for every one of his five periods that day. He said hardly a word to me.
A free day could be forgiven under many circumstances, but it didn’t take much to figure out that eight months into the school year, there had been many such days. These kids didn’t know jack about economics. In the next class, European History, I asked a thin, quiet girl with her head on her desk if I could glance at her notebook. It dutifully noted the date and topic of every class, but was filled with just a few simple phrases: “Reasons for WWI: bad economy, alliances. Results of WWI: punish Germany.”
I wandered the room. An unclaimed report titled “Puerto Rico” sat curled in a wire bin in the corner. An odd topic for a European history class, I thought. I flipped through three typed pages of garbled sentence fragments surrounded by fat margins; the final page was nothing but a tourist map of the island pasted from the Internet, featuring a smiling sun sporting a straw hat, shades, and a cocktail. This level of work wouldn’t even cut it in elementary school in the suburbs. Here it earned the kid a B. Mr. Cooper’s sole comment was “Nice job.”
I scanned the room, noting its ready cliques and clear racial fissures. Black kids to the left, Latinos to the right, a trio of Asians near the radiator. There was not a single white student in any of Mr. Cooper’s classes. (As a matter of fact, the only white student in the entire ninth grade of eight hundred students was the son of some fairly prominent Eastern European UN diplomats who were probably clueless about the school’s violent reputation.)
As I watched class after class come and go, it didn’t seem that high school had changed that much since I was sixteen, but a closer inspection showed just how different things were: Three baby-faced sophomore boys conversed in a cluster of desks ahead of me. I shamelessly eavesdropped and they didn’t hold back.
The smallest boy was very agitated. “Man, those phone sex lines are a whole lot of bullshit. I’m looking for free tail and they full of hookers. They think I’m gonna pay two bucks a minute to find a two-hundred-dollar ho?” His indignity was so convincing I practically found myself nodding in assent. I had to remind myself not to be amused. The closest transgression my friends and I had committed in ninth-grade Catholic school was when we were overheard by a priest as we tried to translate “blow job” into Latin.
On the other side of the room, a ring of Dominican girls were getting rowdy. They all wore necklaces that spelled out their names in cursive gold letters: Mariselleta, Jalisane, and Regaline. They were a striking bunch, particularly in profile, with gelled jet-black ringlets pressed against their temples. Their ringleader had her back to me, but I could hear her holding court. She turned her head a quarter and I realized it was a boy. He snapped, he quipped, he tossed his sassy head. A Latino Liberace was flaming about the room, and nobody seemed to give a shit. I sat awestruck. In my day, even a hint of girliness would get you bullied. To say Javan was unapologetically gay was an understatement. Here, if anything, he was bullying the straight boys, leading withering group assessments of boys’ physiques. “Yes, girl, he do have booty, but, let’s see, is he packin’ up front? Don’t think so!”
The rich characters and sensory overload made for a surreal experience, a stark contrast to any other first day of work I’d ever had. At the colleges and nonprofits where I had worked, I was always greeted by smiling professionals saying things like “You are going to love it here…Nice tie…Lunch is on us today.” Most of my days at Project Advance were spent at the headquarters in a brownstone on the Upper West Side quietly tapping out e-mails or attending meetings with well-mannered overachievers. I didn’t quite know whom to be more surprised by, the students who were so unabashed in their naughty ways or the ineffectual adults who were supposed to be educating them. Good-bye, fountains, statues, and quads. Hello, metal detectors, brown-bag lunches, and nearly brawling coworkers.
I pedaled my bike home through midtown traffic eager to share every last mad detail with Sam. In preparation for casting his upcoming movie, he was at our kitchen table, sorting through a mountain of headshots from smiling actors, when I got home. I was so wound up I didn’t even take off my coat for the first hour as I told him story after story. After a while, he reached across the table and put his hand on top of mine. “Well, baby, it sounds like a real shit show, but if anyone is up to the challenge, you are. But maybe you should think about teaching in middle school.” Pumped full of adrenaline from the day’s events, I could barely sleep that night.
The next day during European History class, Mr. Cooper took attendance for a full ten minutes, bumbling over and butchering every last Asian and Latino name, save Chin and Perez. “Today, we start World War II,” he announced in a voice that sounded deceptively like that of a teacher.
He was immediately interrupted: “Hey mister, I heard Hitler was a faggot.”
The avalanche started.
“Yeah. I heard he was a Jew.”
“One ball in his sack, that’s all that bad boy had was one motherfuckin’ ball. My uncle told me,” said Javan, the Latino Liberace.
“Eww, gross,” squealed a pair of girls in unison.
“Silence!” Mr. Cooper bellowed to no avail and a wave of chuckles. “Copy these notes.” He alluded to the blackboard full of seemingly unrelated facts about the war (the terms “inflation economy” and “Kalashnikov rifle” were close to each other). Soon the room was thick with sighs of boredom. I remembered the same mindless transcription of notes from my own high school Social Studies class. It seemed almost calculated to make the kids hate history, and it made me angry.
Fifteen minutes later, in the middle of a lecture and apropos of nothing, Cooper held up the B&H Photo catalog, a monster compendium of cameras and photography
supplies, as if it were a bible. “Did you know there are cameras in here that cost four thousand dollars?” he asked the class, with the first hint of enthusiasm he’d shown all day. He cited their shutter speeds and telescopic ranges. A chubby girl in oversize glasses rolled her eyes at me. “Oh mister, please, not that thing again.” She turned to me. “This is supposed to be a social studies class.”
Could all the teachers here be this bad? I thought to myself as I rode the escalator down to the teachers’ lounge. I was happy to find Gabe there. In hushed tones, he described his mentor-teacher, the earth mother Ms. Lewis, as burned out and boring, but his experience hardly seemed like the educational malpractice Mr. Cooper was committing five times daily. I tried to explain how dire it was.
“Come on, Ed. You don’t need to exaggerate. You’re quite entertaining enough,” he chided me.
“Oh yeah, Mr. CPA, don’t believe me? I dare you to observe Cooper’s econ class later this week with me.”
“Deal.”
That Friday, I introduced Gabe to Mr. Cooper before the start of class. I fibbed and said Gabe was eager to observe Econ since he was probably going to be teaching it the next year. Before class, we stood around making small talk.
“Can I ask you guys a personal question?” Mr. Cooper asked.
“Please do,” Gabe chirped. I cringed. During a little chat the day before, Cooper had asked me if the rumor that I was a “real homosexual” was true. I’d confirmed it with a smile.
What did he want to know now? “I heard you guys are both taking serious pay cuts to go into teaching,” he said.
Gabe said yes. I nodded.
“Why would you ever do that?” Cooper continued, incredulous. I couldn’t believe he was serious.
Gabe fielded this one: “I think every kid is entitled to have good teachers, particularly disadvantaged kids like these. I would like to be one of those teachers someday.”
