The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  “Really?” Cooper was still mystified.

  Gabe and I both settled in at the back of the room. At the front, Cooper had scribbled definitions of asset and liability on the board, which most of the awake students were jotting down. He gave them most of the class time to copy down those definitions and some screwy graphs. Then he launched into a short lecture about the material with a sense of conviction I hadn’t yet seen in him. “An asset can appreciate or depreciate in value,” he explained. “For example, a car appreciates in value over time; you can sell it for more than you paid. It’s useful and it’s an investment.”

  Gabe, normally a sedate kind of guy, suddenly looked like he’d just eaten something extraordinarily hot—wide-eyed, panicked, urgent. I shot him my best “You see?!” look. He seemed about to burst.

  After class, in the hallway, he couldn’t contain himself. “That’s so unfair. It’s hard enough for these kids to get this stuff right, even when you explain it clearly. But to steer them so wrong—it’s criminal. My God, a car is the textbook definition of asset depreciation!”

  Descending the escalators at the end of the day, we discussed ways to right the wrong, but it seemed so futile. Who to tell? What to say? We were powerless little cogs in the machine. Not only was Cooper disheartening to watch, but I resented that I was paying tuition to watch his daily fiasco. I planned my escape. After a faculty meeting the next week, I bold-facedly lied to Mr. Cooper and the department chair, Mr. Frank, saying I had a job offer for next year that was contingent on my having student-taught American History, and that I needed to be assigned to a new classroom.

  I started shopping around for a new master teacher. It was slim pickings. After I had observed just about every other teacher in the history department, I settled on my target: Ruth Wasserman, a fiery, petite, redheaded veteran in her fifties. She ran a pretty tight ship, assigned homework, and appeared to know what she was talking about. I repeated my lie about needing to teach American history, but she saw right through it.

  “Not loving Mr. Cooper’s fine pedagogy, eh? I don’t normally take on student teachers, but it sounds like you’re in a bind. You can start on Monday.”

  The first few days, I was overjoyed to be in a place that resembled a real classroom. Ruth knew her stuff and kept the kids under her thumb, even if her teaching methods weren’t particularly inspired. But I soon learned that the unspoken price of admission for being her student teacher was lending a sympathetic ear to her life story. Before and after classes (and sometimes during), she talked about her life, a story worthy of a Lifetime movie: a physically abusive grandmother, service in the Israeli army, unfulfilled aspirations as a printmaker, a no-goodnik ex-husband, and troubles raising her uncommonly brilliant son all alone. She did have it hard and they were fascinating stories, but listening to them soon became exhausting.

  Ruth was prone to crazy mood swings; she was at times June Cleaver, at times Joan Crawford. And like Mr. Cooper, she, too, could spin some world-class tangents. A lecture on Reconstruction somehow led to probably apocryphal stories of her younger days competing on the bodybuilding circuit. “Have I told you all about the time Arnold Schwarzenegger beat out my friend in competition by spiking his body oil with acid? It’s true!” The kids looked befuddled.

  Nor did she let the facts of history get in the way of her ego. “Hey miss, you told us no African Americans signed that thingy for equal rights for women, but the book says Sojourner Truth did,” said a feisty and bright girl named Tanya one morning as she tugged on a big hoop earring.

  Ruth gave a tight, pained smile. “That book is wrong, honey.” Case closed.

  As I was settling in with Ruth, I got an e-mail from Dr. Renzolli, the young adjunct professor responsible for evaluating student teachers, announcing the date of my first formal classroom observation. Sharp and enthusiastic, she was one of the few professors in the department who had actually taught in a tough city high school in recent years. I cleared it with Ruth, and she gave me the unenviable task of teaching several constitutional amendments; the direct election of senators was the most exciting of them. Yikes.

  The day of the observation arrived. With Ruth’s guidance, I had overprepared and overthought everything. I stood behind her desk and started the class in a voice so nervous and unfamiliar I wondered whose it was. In the middle of the lesson I looked up from too many pages of notes and scanned the aisles. The kids had the same dead-eyed look as they did in Mr. Cooper’s class. A wave of nausea broke over me. It was easy to critique him, but so much harder now that I was up there. Only Tanya answered my questions, and her answers weren’t even in the ballpark. By the end of class, Ruth was putting out fires in the back of the room, where boredom was breeding widespread disruption.

  Ruth squinted and smiled at me. “Nice work,” she whispered. Professor Renzolli thought differently. She took me aside in the hallway afterward and gave me a dose of tough love.

  “I know you were trying in there, but you have to realize this isn’t a law school seminar. You have to really break it down for these kids.”

  Too embarrassed to look at her, I scribbled down her comments on top of a We the People textbook I was balancing on one knee.

  “You used the words antipathy and intractable without defining them. You aren’t talking politics with your friends at a dinner party here.”

  “Did I really?” I winced. I wanted to think I was above that kind of novice mistake.

  “Most of those kids are reading at a sixth-grade level. This,” she said, waving a dense handout I had created, “isn’t relevant to them.”

  “I see.” I nodded.

  “You can’t just stand there and talk at them. Engage them.” She exhaled for a long time and then lightened her tone. “But look, these are bush-league errors. I’m sure you’ll do better next time.” Again, it wasn’t easy for me to accept criticism from someone so much younger (and with tattoos), but she was right.

  For the rest of the week I licked my wounds, but I resolved that that first lesson would be my sole misfire. As I stood making photocopies for Ruth on that Friday afternoon, I was surprised to see an unopened digital projector box on a shelf above the copier. I hadn’t seen any teacher use so much as a filmstrip at the school, forget about the Internet.

  I poked my head into Mr. Frank’s office and asked if I could use it. “Oh, that thing? Yeah, all yours. Nobody’s found any use for it.”

  Two weeks later, Professor Renzolli returned for her second observation of me, this time for a lesson on the Gilded Age. As the kids filed into the room, I took the cap off the projector, revealing a gritty Jacob Riis photo of homeless little boys sleeping over a sewer grate, huddled for warmth. All eyes went to the screen and their chatter stopped dead.

  “Who’s those dirty lil’ kids?”

  “Poor babies!”

  “Why don’t they got no shoes?”

  I took a deep breath, summoned some theatrical juice from my high school musical days, and launched in.

  “In 1848, a journalist called the city of Pittsburgh ‘hell with the roof ripped off,’” I said, then hit them with more images of urban squalor in rapid succession.

  “Into that hell walked a poor little boy from Scotland named Andrew Carnegie.” I flashed a picture of child laborers in factories hunched over menacing machines. “He walked out of that hell as the second-richest man in the world.” In quick succession, I clicked through images of his many mansions and castles.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of room 717, I ask you, in what kind of country can such extreme things happen?” The next forty-five minutes went by in a flash. The kids oohed and aahed and asked lots of questions. There wasn’t a hint of trouble.

  Tanya had the last word, and it was on the mark: “So there were a couple of superrich people and a whole lot of superpoor. It’s just like today.”

  “What an excellent observation, Tanya,” I said.

  As he zipped up his backpack, a kid named Kasheef, a chronic classroom slee
per who worked the late shift at Burger King, piped up: “Hey mister. Bring that projector thing again tomorrow. Okay?”

  Professor Renzolli leaped to her feet with a big grin. “That was fantastic! You had them. Every one of them. They even left talking about the lesson. Bravo.”

  Now, that was more like it. I’d been fed a steady diet of professional affirmation for years, and even a brief interruption was disturbing. I had learned my lesson about lessons: Gravitas doesn’t go over big with fifteen-year-olds, but a little razzle-dazzle goes a long way.

  After that day, Ruth let me teach more often. She even asked me to show her how to use the projector. Little by little, I got to know and like many of the kids. I was touched one afternoon when Kasheef asked me in the hall, “Can you come back next year as our real teacher?”

  In no time, the semester was over.

  My hard work and hours of sympathetic listening to Ruth’s problems were rewarded in her final evaluation: “Mr. Boland is one of the brightest future pedagogues I have ever had the pleasure of mentoring in my twenty-five years of teaching.”

  All the while I’d been student teaching, I was also furiously conducting my search for a full-time job for the fall. Based on my student-teaching experience, I avoided the big old-fashioned schools like Eugene Debs (“failure factories,” in education reform parlance) in favor of a new high school model that the city was betting on at the time: the “small schools” movement. The philosophy had been largely conceived by a New York visionary named Deborah Meier, embraced by NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein, and backed by millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation. It sought to break apart the enormous, anonymous public high schools that were so typical in New York and replace them with far smaller ones with no more than one hundred students in a grade. The idea was that the kids would feel part of a tight-knit community, could be held more accountable, wouldn’t slip through the cracks, and would graduate at a higher rate. Each school centered its curriculum and activities around a particular theme: the arts, American studies, food, law, sports, technology, and so on. Having attended small Catholic schools where every nun and priest knew your first name, last name, and confirmation name, I thought this made perfect sense. At Eugene Debs, I’d found it disheartening to watch the kids being treated so callously and anonymously day in and day out. Why, I wondered, did they even bother showing up at all?

  I got offers from many of these schools, but they all had obvious flaws: A small school in Brooklyn devoted to the violin and dance was packed with mostly rowdy girls and a handful of gay boys, none of them showing the slightest interest in the instrument they toted around all day; a media studies academy housed entirely in the basement of a bigger high school was led by a manic principal in stilettos who spoke so fast I thought she must be on coke; and a school in the South Bronx focusing on community service seemed impressive online but turned out to be little more than a cluster of depressing trailers in an old parking lot.

  About a week after I sent my résumé to the Union Street School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I was called for an interview. Union Street was a new combined middle and high school that had to share a building with two other small schools. When I showed up for the interview, the principal, a woman named Mei Vong, greeted me with a warm smile in the main office. She was affable, funny, and vibrant—I liked her at once. As we walked the halls, she showed an obvious devotion to the students, addressing each one by name. She shared her own harrowing story of escaping Vietnam by boat as a child and struggling in American schools. Overwhelmed by the transition to her new setting, she elected to be mute in public throughout most of her time in school. She had excelled in college studying chemistry and then had devoted her life to educating at-risk kids.

  She recited the gospel of reform passionately, and I drank it in: “We’re rethinking every aspect of the high school experience and striving to do it better. These kids are so far behind. We owe them nothing less.” The other teachers I met there spoke as convincingly as she did.

  Because the school had an international studies theme, every teacher was required to have lived abroad. The fact that I had taught English in China for a year gave me a leg up. They were well-educated, young, and worldly; many of them were former Peace Corps volunteers, hippie globe-trotters, or foreign-born. To bond the team and infuse a global ethos, during its first year the entire faculty had spent part of the summer learning German together in Minnesota. They knew their craft and were devoted, but also seemed like the kind of people you would want to grab a beer with. There wasn’t a Mr. Cooper anywhere in sight.

  Next, Mei led me to a history class taught by a young dynamo named Monica who had turned her room into an Italian Renaissance fair. Students in costume talked about da Vinci’s inventions, displayed slides of Michelangelo’s frescoes, and haltingly read short passages from Machiavelli’s The Prince. Almost all the kids were engaged and excited. It couldn’t have been more different from the deadly boring, teacher-centered “chalk and talk” approach at Eugene Debs.

  As if I weren’t dazzled enough, the next visit was to a seventh-grade class conducted by Rebecca Luft, a charismatic and hilarious ex-Mormon English teacher. As odd as it may sound, her secret weapon was that she seemed to teach with love. She was a bottomless font of maternal affection, and her students responded in kind with love and obedience. I had rarely seen a class where the students were that eager to please a teacher. But she didn’t fly on just love alone; Rebecca had a masterful command of literacy and lesson planning. She could instinctively smell when and where trouble was brewing and quell it before it got out of hand. I didn’t want to leave her room.

  Immediately after, it was my turn. I taught a sample lesson I’d prepared to a group of ninth graders. The topic: Was Teddy Roosevelt a Progressive? It involved excerpts from Sinclair’s The Jungle, role-plays, labor union fight songs, and a namesake teddy bear that held the answer to the lesson in an envelope in its tiny paws. The kids loved it, and the teachers who observed me praised the lesson as “spot-on.”

  The Union Street School was part of a bold experiment; it had the special designation of being an “autonomous school.” Inspired by the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of charter schools, a principal was given much greater autonomy in how to run the school in terms of hiring, curriculum choice, and management. In exchange, however, the school would be held to a higher standard on a variety of performance measures. The Gates Foundation gave special funding to the school and others like it so they could afford these innovations.

  I was thrilled to hear the schedule was different from that of most schools. The job would entail teaching just one subject—ninth-grade World History—three times a day in ninety-minute periods. Duties also included a period of advising students, some administrative responsibilities, and a period for preparation. The standard load was five fifty-minute classes and a preparation period and often involved teaching more than one subject. Because there were a number of first-year teachers at Union Street, Mei stressed that there was a great deal of mentoring, support, and training in place.

  I had only two reservations: The thought of a ninety-minute class period for fourteen-year-olds seemed ambitious, even crazy—I knew grad students who couldn’t sit still for that long—but Mei assured me the time allowed for “deep learning” and cited some research studies that supported the practice. Also, I thought a small school would have smaller class sizes, but the “small” part referred only to the overall enrollment in the school, no more than one hundred students per grade. There were about thirty kids in each class here, which was typical in most New York City public schools. I’d just have to learn to live with it.

  Mei called me with an offer the following morning. “You, my friend, will make a great history teacher.” I accepted the job with an immediate and enthusiastic yes. It was everything I wanted—and only a twenty-minute bike ride from my apartment. I’d hit pay dirt.

  As if that weren’t enough good news for the week, I was
invited to be the student speaker for my graduate school graduation ceremony, sewed up my 4.0 GPA, and received an e-mail with high praise for my master’s thesis. Gabe left me a message that he landed a spot teaching American history at a performing arts school in Upper Manhattan. To top it off, Sam got notice of a major chunk of funding for his first feature film.

  That weekend in our apartment, after a celebratory pad thai and a bottle of good red wine, Sam and I did our customary happy dance in the living room like two Peanuts characters.

  It had all fallen into place so perfectly. I was ready to change lives as a teacher, and I’d get my chance in three short months.

  Chapter 3

  Nemesis

  “LU HUANG, DO you agree with Raul that he should be allowed to listen to his iPod and make calls during class?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied sleepily.

  “Why?”

  “Cuz.”

  “Can you give me a more specific reason?”

  “Just cuz.”

  An intense-looking kid named Byron made what sounded like a thoughtful statement, but on account of his extreme mumbling and thick Jamaican accent, I couldn’t remotely understand what he was saying.

  I smiled, pretended to comprehend, and said, “Would anyone else like to add to that?”

  The buzz of a defective fluorescent light overhead was the only response.

  This wasn’t what I had envisioned for my first day of teaching, but the faculty had been given explicit written directions on what to do during our advisory period: “Position your advisees in a circle, have them take turns reading the school’s code of conduct, and then reflect on these ideas as a community in thoughtful dialogue, using some of our approved protocols.” “Advisories” were glorified homerooms. I was assigned a group of about fifteen freshman boys who were supposed to check in with me at the beginning and end of each day and spend the half hour before lunch working together on schoolwork, community service projects, and character building. Strangely evocative of an old-school Catholic approach, they were single-sex by design.