The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  As usual, I was eager to keep my conversation with Gretchen short, so I hastily scheduled a time for her to observe me. But as I was closing my planner, I had the sinking realization that I had invited her to see my by far most disruptive class. But it was too late; the die had been cast.

  Over the next week, I planned with great care and came up with a lesson I called “Cracking the Code of Egyptian Hieroglyphics.” It involved a short textbook reading, projected photos of an obelisk, and a simple translation handout. Over coffee one morning, I ran my lesson plan by Monica and she blessed it as pedagogically sound. “It’s creative and engaging. Accessible, but with high-level content. And it’s smart to have something so visual given their literacy levels.” I then shared my fears about my classroom management.

  With a titter, she reassured me: “Don’t sweat it. The kids aren’t going to act out. Especially not in front of Gretchen. They’re terrified of her.” I felt a world of relief, and as I walked out of her room I said to myself, Monica is the true Buddha spouting wisdom, forget that withholding sphinx Gretchen. For the first time in weeks, I slept well that weekend before the big day.

  The day of the observation arrived. The kids burst into the room, amped up after lunch as always. I had plenty to be nervous about anyway, but a third cup of coffee had really set me on edge. I turned the projector on and the lights off. Gretchen slipped in the back, at first unnoticed by the kids in the dark, and began furiously scribbling notes.

  “Hey, what’s that freaky Ms. Dufour doin’ here?” someone wondered out loud.

  “She here to see if he can teach,” another voice clarified.

  I projected my first slide: a hieroglyph of a duck. It inspired a quick, lone quack in the darkness and a laugh in response. I reprimanded on cue. Others joined in and soon there was a flock. The “vice principal effect” that Monica had promised did not materialize. A group of boys in the back row playfully slapped one another’s heads. The frenzy fed off itself. My escalating threats fell on deaf ears. Soon the kids were all but swinging from the lights. The Tic Tac tucked in my cheek was melting fast, and I could smell my own acrid breath. Knowing I had to get through the lesson, I pushed on.

  Even during the escalating mayhem, Byron was dutifully taking notes, as if he were a scholar at the British Library. There was nothing to be learned; what was he writing down?

  Suddenly, the lights went back on. I looked to the back of the room, expecting to find some kid pulling a prank. Instead, I saw Gretchen charging toward me. Through clenched teeth, she asked in a low voice, “Don’t you see how they are behaving? The disruption? The profanity? I am formally canceling this observation and doing an intervention.” She was practically twitching with rage. I looked down and spied a crumpled lunch bag on the floor. I wanted to crouch down and breathe into it to stave off hyperventilation.

  Then she turned to the students. “The way you are conducting yourselves is a disgrace.” She squinted down at a Post-it. “Braithwaite, Palacios, Epperson, Vasquez, Sanders, Woods. Go immediately to the office, call your parents, and tell them to get in first thing tomorrow to see me. Am I being absolutely clear?”

  The rogue students filed out, shoving desks out of their way and cursing under their breath. They were followed by Gretchen, who left with a memorable parting shot, growled under her breath: “I used to teach juvenile delinquents in Vermont who had huffed half their brains out on glue. They acted better than this. In my twenty years in education, I’ve never had to cancel an observation. This is the worst one I have ever conducted.”

  After she was gone, the room settled into an eerie quiet.

  In a bizarre twist, I was suddenly presented with my dream classroom scenario. The monsters had been removed and I had a roomful of kids eager to learn. Among them were the dutiful and respiratorially challenged Norman, earnest Bradley, middle-class Lucas, and ever-loyal Nee-cole. And of course Byron, who was still tracking me with his stoic expression, interrupted only by the robotic pulse of his eyelashes. I stood there numb.

  I had been pretty good, or at least decent—and certainly passable—at just about everything I had ever tried in my life: I could look back on rave reviews for a tiny soliloquy I gave in the first-grade play, a promotion to head altar boy, glowing performance reviews at various jobs, a powerful volleyball serve, and a much-praised ability to whip up with ease gumbo, or porchetta, or Thai curry. Before this, I had powered my way largely unscathed through a terrible gay starter marriage, the worst days of the AIDS epidemic, and the nasty diva-driven politics of Lincoln Center, but here suddenly I was depressed and ashamed, undone by a bunch of thuggy teenagers.

  Sure, I was god-awful at math, spelling, crafts, and any kind of choreographed dancing, but not the “worst ever.” “Bad” or “terrible” would have been enough to send me reeling, but “worst ever” had never seemed in the realm of the possible. Until now.

  I knew I needed to rally. I turned back to the work sheet. In a blur, I asked someone to try to decipher the hieroglyphics. Naturally, Byron raised his hand.

  His voice was deep and serious for a fourteen-year-old: “There are both pictographs and ideographs here. And I am reading it from right to left.” He paused. “So, I think that line says, ‘The man is a scribe.’”

  I tried to focus on his answer, which was of course right on the money, but I could only register a heaving sense of shame. I stared at the jumble of symbols on the board in front of me: falcons, asps, ankhs. Now they only reminded me of Gretchen and her lousy tattoos. I slowly turned to the board, reasonably sure Byron had the translation right, but I could read only one message no matter how I looked at it: “Worst ever.”

  Still in a daze from my botched evaluation, I careened into the faculty room and plopped down in “the chair.”

  No one knew where the upholstered leather, midcentury modern chair had come from, but it clearly had a story. Chairs like this didn’t just magically appear in the teachers’ lounge. It sure hadn’t come from the Department of Education, whose standard-issue furniture looked like it could give you tetanus just from sitting on it. But whatever its origins, it had been placed next to the copy machine and become the place of refuge for teachers in distress. Often the rookies and sometimes even the veterans would stagger into the room, looking shell-shocked and lost, and plop down in that cozy chair.

  Invariably, one of the more compassionate and experienced folks on staff would perform a little visual triage on the troubled soul, put down the New York Times or look up from their computer screen and say, “Everything all right?”

  I must have appeared in a really bad way that day, because I got a full-court press of love and support. First, the middle school reading teacher and faculty spirit bunny Rebecca immediately came over and silently gave me a hug and patted my head. Then my rock Monica sat on the armrest and quietly shared the story of a tough former NYC cop who taught at Union Street the year before. He, too, had turned to teaching in middle age and everyone assumed he would have no problem with classroom discipline, given his experience. But his background turned out to be his Achilles’ heel. The kids didn’t care in the slightest that he had been a cop, and he had no capacity for disrespect of any kind. Late in the year, a boy spit on him and he resigned. I was relieved to hear it and, at the same time, ashamed at how comforting I found the story of someone else’s humiliation.

  The last period of the day ended and more teachers straggled into the lounge. Spontaneously, a group ritual of solidarity unfolded as we consulted the great unwritten cosmology of reasons for classes gone wrong. The collective wisdom sounded like this:

  “Well, naturally. It was first period. Of course they didn’t get it. They’re basically still asleep. There is research that shows teenagers literally can’t think until 10:30 a.m. It’s a fact.”

  “Obviously, it was last period, they’d lost their focus. Don’t sweat it.”

  “The kids are always off the chain before lunch. They’re starving, and pent up.”


  “After lunch, forget it. They’re in an altered state. They are all jacked up on Coke, gummy bears, and MSG. Then they go to the yard and whale on each other for a half hour. What did you expect?”

  This, in effect, offered an excuse for every failed class period. The other newbies and I drew on this canon liberally and it gave us great comfort. These excuses could be supplemented by seasonal variations:

  “Winter is basically a collective depression. Haven’t you heard of seasonal affective disorder? Kids get it too.”

  “It’s spring; the kids are way too hormonal and horny to think.”

  Then things really got absurd: “It’s not the rain that makes them hyper, it’s the relative humidity. Really.” I half expected to see a teacher pull out tarot cards or chicken entrails to explain it all.

  Tired of relying on these excuses and still reeling from my disastrous observation, I decided the key was really all in the lesson plans, and I vowed to use the horrible textbook less and my own materials more. But when I wrote my own lessons, which was a huge time commitment, the results were hit-or-miss. I had the kids create Myspace pages for Frozen Fritz, an intact Copper Age ice mummy found in the Italian Alps in 1991. I had them make their own mini-textbooks on Greece that we would send to a needy school in Africa I’d found online. At first these projects gripped their attention, but as soon as the fun and theatrics ended and real effort was demanded, they lost interest. Whole weekends disappeared in planning, only to be spit back at me in minutes by the kids on Monday morning as “borin’” or “This is mad stoop-id, son!”

  I was trying everything I could to make the ancient world come alive for them. We were studying ancient Rome at the time, and despite my showing some liberal doses of the popular movie Gladiator to pique their interest, the kids were really not feeling it. On the subway home, with a lesson on Roman law to prepare that evening, I read an article about the rapper Lil’ Kim’s recent release from prison. On a whim, I mashed the two together and emerged with: “Would Lil’ Kim have received justice under the Roman system of law?” I shortened a lengthy CNN web article about the trial of the popular rap star whose posse was involved in a shootout in the lobby of a radio station. I replaced all the words they’d have trouble recognizing with simpler ones and made a cheat sheet about Roman justice, introducing terms like “trial by jury” and “edict.” I researched her songs to find a hit without explicit content to warm up the kids (no mean feat).

  On a Friday morning, I played a clip from her big hit “No Time” as the kids strolled in.

  “Mister, stop actin’ like you down with hip-hop! Come on, man. You frontin’,” commented the ever-insightful Fat Clovis.

  “Clovis, if I thought it would get you interested in history, I would rap the entire lesson.”

  “Please, please, please, don’t do that. Anything but that,” he begged me. For once, we could both laugh at the same thing and it felt great.

  I announced the lesson and passed out the materials. The room was strangely quiet while they looked them over, followed by an unprecedented fifteen minutes of silent reading. Without much prompting, they took out pencils and pens and started writing on the work sheets. Something was terribly wrong. What was going on?

  I was so ready for the usual chaos, so prepared for the sudden wrenching reversal, but that moment never came. Almost everyone filled out an answer sheet, even Jesús. There was something resembling a real discussion. To my great joy, Chantay used the term “self-incrimination.” It was glorious.

  I was sure I was the subject of some cruel secret experiment engineered by the chancellor of New York City’s schools. Was the mayor in the hallway looking in? Was it a giant practical joke hatched over lunch? Hey, let’s fuck with Mr. Boland’s head and actually learn something today.

  What had happened? Teacher taught and students learned, that’s what happened. If nothing else good came of that year, at least I had my one delicious day with Lil’ Kim and the kids.

  I was so overjoyed and energized that I sped home recklessly on my bike. I immediately plunged into planning for the next day as I told Sam of my great victory. “It worked, baby. Like a charm,” I said as we sat on the living room floor folding warm laundry into piles. Giddy with my success, I had another idea for a lesson and scoured the website of the Vatican Museum and dug up my old Latin textbook. When the lesson was finished, it seemed just as good as, maybe even better than, the Lil’ Kim one: understanding daily life in Rome through graffiti. My opening example was a doorway in the ancient city of Ephesus covered with graffiti that translated to “Eat at Joe’s” and “Stop pissing here!”

  I tried to conceal my enthusiasm the next day as I explained the lesson. The ever-sassy Jaylisa Ortega (whose parents, I later learned, were named Jay and Lisa) sauntered into the room late, a dramatic entrance surely timed to show off her new tinted sunglasses and pink velour tracksuit. Before she sat down, she scanned the work sheet on her desk and shouted, “Hey, what you doin’, Mr. Boland, trying to make this shit interesting for ghetto kids?” It wasn’t quite the success of Lil’ Kim, but it was solid. For the first time all year, I thought, if the chancellor observed my class today, he would not have me arrested. And that was a sign of progress.

  To celebrate my victory, my coworkers treated me to a raucous, tequila-infused happy hour at our usual dive bar in the East Village. Dancing to a Lil’ Kim song on the jukebox, I waved the work sheets in front of them that showed traces of learning from some of our most difficult kids.

  My phone buzzed with a call from Sam. I could barely hear him over the din of the crowd. “Meet me on the corner of Houston and First in a half hour.” I weaved my way to the spot, and there he was with a bunch of floppy orange deli tulips and a wide smile.

  “Tonight, we are going to a restaurant we can no longer afford,” he announced proudly. He squired me over to Prune, one of our favorite places in the city.

  Over a plate of buttery sweetbreads, he toasted me with a Moscow mule: “It sounds like you are starting to turn it around, baby.” I looked down, almost afraid to acknowledge any progress. There had been so many false victories. He squeezed my hand over the table and whispered as if it were a spell, “You’ll do it, you’ll do it, you’ll do it. If anyone can do it, you will.”

  Chapter 8

  Free Freddy!

  LEARNING-DISABLED. MIDDLE school. Boys. Those three categories, taken together, are the trifecta of all difficult teaching assignments. The prevailing wisdom was, if you could teach them, you could teach anybody. Fittingly, a saintly lame-legged man named Wilson filled that purgatorial post at the Union Street School. Balding, droopy-eyed, and with a waxy look of permanent patience, he bore an uncanny resemblance to a statue of Saint Joseph and was said to work miracles with his troubled charges.

  My brief reprieve with successful lessons on Lil’ Kim and Roman graffiti was short-lived. For no clear reason, the following week things were back to their chaotic status quo. Several people, from Mei the principal to Jim the janitor, told me I should go observe Wilson in action. “Most of your kids with serious behavioral problems have underlying learning issues. If you can figure out how to reach them, everybody else will fall into place,” added Monica.

  In December, I choked down my pride and timidly poked my head into the middle school Special Education room during one of my free periods. It was the decrepit old band room that had been commandeered when there was no more money for a music program. Wilson was quietly orbiting around a small, antsy circle of about ten boys and a bored-looking teaching assistant.

  I recognized several faces from my required weekly stints of supervising the reflection room: I saw Eric, the boy who had pleasured himself—to completion—in the back row of a language arts class. A pair of skinny twins who had brawled against each other in a legendary hallway fight; they inspired the oft-repeated teachers’ lounge joke, “Who won? Who can tell?”

  But the most famous of all was Calvin, a tiny twelve-year-old Chinese American boy
with severe autism and an unfortunate penchant for playing with his asshole—scratch-and-sniff style—in public. He also had an encyclopedic command of the New York City transit system, having committed the entire subway map, corresponding bus transfers, and maintenance advisories to memory. Given any request, he would look upward for a fraction of a second and then spit out an itinerary in an eerie, robotic-sounding formula. He was much sought after by teachers before field trips.

  If this job was good for one thing, it was reversing racial stereotypes. Anyone who ever bought into the “Asians as model minority” myth should visit Union Street. Gloria Lin could throw blood vessel–bursting fits with the best of them. She once stormed out of my classroom with this memorable exit line: “I hate you. I hate this fuckin’ place. I stink at school and I’m glad I do.” Tze Han, a recent emigrant from Fujian Province, was a member of a notorious neighborhood Triad gang, said to be involved in human trafficking and other organized crime. He often came to school escorted by a truant officer. At least he came to school. Angus Zhao lived in the apartment directly opposite my classroom; it was so close I could literally see what herbs his mother was growing on her kitchen windowsill. He never came to school, not for a single day of ninth grade.

  As predicted, everything I observed in Wilson’s classroom was organized, positive, and focused on learning. There were clearly systems and rules in place, but it didn’t feel overly rigid. I was surprised, however, by one glaring flaw. His “para” (a paraprofessional who serves as a teacher’s assistant in classes with high-needs kids) seemed totally checked out. Sitting in the circle with the kids, he was doing next to nothing. I probed a little further while the kids read silently.