The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  “And what role does your para play here?” I asked, striving to put on my most professional educator voice.

  “I don’t have a para this period,” Wilson responded.

  “Who’s that, then?” I asked, hiding my finger behind a notebook as I pointed toward the young man.

  “Oh, Freddy? Oh, no. He’s not a TA. He’s a student.” He chuckled.

  “Really? That kid’s in middle school? He looks like he could be in his twenties.”

  “Well, yeah, he’s probably close to sixteen by now. Let’s just say he has serious family issues, low skills, and a chronic attendance problem.”

  I observed Wilson for the next hour, noting his every word and gesture. After class, I peppered him with questions, all the while trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. He winced as I tossed out, and then mangled, the Special Ed argot I had learned in one half of a graduate school course dedicated to the subject: dyslexia, ADD/ADHD, “the spectrum,” individualized education plans, processing issues.

  With a wave of his hand, saintly Wilson dismissed all I had said. “Forget all those labels. Forget those techniques. The key is to forge a genuine relationship with the kids. They’ll find a way to learn, a way to behave, but they have to trust you and know that you care about them.”

  “But is that enough? Their problems seem so different, so big. How do you remediate for them all at once?”

  “Build the connection and the respect. Start small, with little victories. Soon, they’ll start to really work for you—and for themselves.” On reflection, Monica and Nora had said much the same thing. I was hoping for specific reading techniques for kids with dyslexia, some easy shortcuts; instead, I walked away with a dose of loving folk wisdom. Another unexpected discovery, but, as usual, so much harder and more time-consuming to put into practice.

  I climbed the stairs back to my room even more befuddled. Plain old teaching was hard enough, but when you added Special Ed students to the mix, matters got really confusing. Even the term itself seemed an impossibly wide catchall, including emotional, behavioral, physical, and developmental disabilities: the introverted girl who had trouble reading; the boy with MS in a wheelchair; a gifted, highly medicated kid incapable of sitting still. All Special Ed.

  I sat down at my desk and pulled out my list of Special Ed students and their diagnoses. As I scanned it, I was reminded of another conundrum. Many kids in the grade with the most obvious disabilities weren’t officially labeled “Special Ed.” Having students evaluated was a long, expensive, bureaucratic process. While parents knew their child would get extra services, they rightly feared the stigma attached to the label. And they didn’t want their child warehoused with kids who had much bigger issues. And, finally, some parents were just too overwhelmed, unfamiliar, or neglectful to go through the process.

  Even more maddening, I knew from personal experience that, as usual, things seemed to be different for the rich. I knew plenty of upper-middle-class families who had kids with learning disabilities, some very serious. One wealthy and superbly educated couple I know had a son, Adam, who attended an exclusive private boys’ school in New York. Despite everyone’s best efforts, he could barely recognize his letters in first grade. The school and the family blitzed the problem in quick succession with evaluation, diagnosis, and services. They hit hard and early. Fast-forward twenty years: He went to Princeton and is now at Yale Law School. I can think of at least five other similar situations with children of well-off families. For them it seemed like a temporary setback, but for most low-income students, a diagnosis was more often than not an educational life sentence of never-ending catch-up. I thought back to Nora’s prison classroom filled with eighteen-year-olds struggling, with quivering lips, to pronounce the word though.

  I marched down the hall to the main office and pulled out the folders of my Special Ed students. Each had state-mandated, specially developed education plans, some as thick as phone books. Some had been diagnosed and given services for eight or nine years. In primary school, they usually had smaller classes with learning specialists, resource rooms, and one-on-one tutoring. At Union Street, most of the high school Special Ed students were in mainstream classes, but had Special Ed teachers who traveled with them from class to class to offer additional support in many but not all of their classes. They had yearly mandatory progress meetings with parents and specialists. And yet, for all that effort, many still struggled to read at a sixth-grade level. Were the services they were getting that inadequate or did their life circumstances play an even greater role than the diagnoses themselves? Why were they so hard to help? It was surely some combination of these factors, but what was really at the root of the problem? In frustration, I slammed the rickety file drawer shut.

  I had turned these questions over and over in my head for months, but that afternoon I came back to a blind spot: What about me? How had I so conveniently forgotten my own early learning problems? Although I was never formally diagnosed, I had surely had signs of a learning disability as a child. Not only was I among the worst readers in my first-grade class at the Sacred Heart School, but I was also so distracted and scattered that I had a hard time finishing my work.

  I thought back to a fall afternoon in 1970, when Sister Concepta called me to her desk rather sternly. I’d never been summoned there before. From the first day of school, I had adored Sister Concepta, and she, me. She was big on manners and respect, and I gave her both in abundance. I also made her laugh, particularly when I kept asking her what a “concepta” was.

  Sister looked at me in a way I wasn’t used to. Exaggerated by the square frame of her black-and-white veil, her gaze was intense and her nose pointy. She was the kind of modern nun who wore a simple veil, but she had been liberated from the starched wimple and other medieval trappings of the older generation. Mind you, she wasn’t as radical as a “pantsuit nun,” those rebels who shed all the traditional trappings except for a small cross on their lapels, but she was at least in the twentieth century.

  “Eddie, I’m worried that you aren’t finishing your assignments,” she said, pulling out a sheaf of barely completed, purple mimeographed work sheets. I loved those sheets for their strong, pleasant gasoline-like vapor. I’d cradle them in my palms and quietly huff them, even before I knew what a buzz was.

  “What are these?” she asked, pointing to the circles I’d drawn around my answers. Each had a network of spouts, portals, and chimneys built into it.

  I told the truth. “Those are the airholes for the right answers. I didn’t want the words to suffocate inside the circles.” I thought she would appreciate my thoughtfulness, but she narrowed her eyes with concern.

  “And what are these squiggles?” She tapped a pencil on another sheet with crude geometric shapes inside the circles.

  “That’s, um, food and some furniture so the words are cozy.” I swallowed hard, and my Adam’s apple pushed on the top of my plaid clip-on tie.

  “That’s nice that you are so concerned about the words, dear, but you have to focus and finish your work.”

  “Okay.” I felt my expression grow pouty and grave. Even then, I knew what I was doing was weird and felt a sudden stirring of shame. I returned to my little, worn wooden desk, so old it had a hole where an inkwell once was.

  Not long after, Sister Concepta called my parents to an after-school conference. After a short while in the hall, I was brought in. Kindly and quietly, she told me we needed to work on my reading. Every day at 10:00 a.m., she would look at me and touch her watch. It was our secret signal for me to go across the hall and work with Sister Kathleen at a little table. Sister Concepta made it sound like an honor or a treat, and I bought it. She was getting me the help I needed. I don’t remember much of what we did at that table, but toward the end of the year, Sister Kathleen said I no longer needed to come visit her.

  I shared more with many of my struggling students than I first realized. I was just lucky enough that the right people intervened when the
y did.

  In January, about a month after my visit to Wilson’s room, Mei pulled me aside during my free period. She was always smiling, so it was hard to know if she would be sharing good news or bad. “Freddy is going to be promoted from the seventh to the ninth grade.”

  “Freddy, from Wilson’s class? Don’t tell me that kid managed to meet grade requirements.”

  “No. I wish.” She snickered. “It’s just that he’s sixteen now and getting ridiculously old to be in middle school. He’s outgrowing those little desks in the Special Education room. He’ll start with you on Monday, if he chooses to grace us with his presence that day. Good luck with him.” Unlike the hard-ass Gretchen, Mei had an inimitable way of presenting bad news and near-impossible challenges with such optimism and humor that it always softened the blow.

  “I can’t wait to have another young scholar join our ranks,” I said, trying to match her good cheer.

  I announced to the second-period class that Freddy would be starting with us the next day.

  “Freddy? Man, that kid is old. He’s too hairy to be a freshman. He’s got hair everywhere,” Fat Clovis blurted out. Ninth-grade boys cherished every wisp of facial hair, every spiky whisker, and they enviously noted any growth on others.

  “Everybody, please make an effort to welcome him,” I said.

  As soon as I turned my back, someone added matter-of-factly, “Yeah. Be nice to that hairy criminal or he will fuck you up.”

  I was quickly learning not to ignore comments like that. Gossip, jokes, and even slander held important clues about what might be going on with students, so right away I launched into a fact-finding mission. Even by tough public school standards, Freddy had been dealt a rank-bad hand: a father who was nowhere in sight; a mother in the Bronx projects with serious diabetes; and an older brother, a gangbanger, who was imprisoned on Rikers Island for running a drug ring. Freddy had joined the family business and been arrested for dealing himself. The family’s housing situation was in serious jeopardy because of laws designed to evict convicted drug dealers from public housing. He was the sole breadwinner in the house.

  Freddy was in court not long before the start of the school year. When a judge offered him a year at Rikers or three years of probation, Freddy said he would take Rikers. In all his years on the bench, the judge had never had anyone take that option before and responded, “Son, do you know what a rhetorical question is?” Freddy shook his head no. The judge declined the kid’s request and gave him probation.

  Given Freddy’s reputation and confirmed criminal record, I was afraid to have him in my class. The last thing I needed was another problem child, and this one sounded epic. My fears, it turned out, were unfounded. This kid, on the rare occasions when he showed up, was a peach. He rarely spoke to me or anybody else. For most of the period, he would just stare forward. He had the tear-shaped, maudlin eyes of a stuffed animal that belied his stormy life. He would politely take my work sheets and hand them back to me an hour later—without so much as his name on them. But, hey, he didn’t cause any problems. Given what he had seen, I suppose that spitballs and back talk to teachers seemed childish to him, not worth his time or energy.

  Could I blame the kid for being so checked out? He had way more serious adult problems than I ever did. By the time he was sixteen, he was a small business owner, breadwinner, and near convict. I felt silly giving him work sheets on the Han dynasty.

  About two weeks into his transfer to high school, Freddy’s cell phone spit out a loud, jarring hip-hop ringtone in my class, and, adding to that already serious offense, he pulled the phone out of his baggy jeans and answered it. I charged toward his desk and launched into my usual diatribe about the ban on phones and the corrosive effects of electronics on one’s education. As I was bellowing, however, I was carefully monitoring his reaction. Given his history, I was not eager to find this kid’s boiling point.

  “Mister, please, let me take this,” he implored. It was the first time I heard him speak a whole, audible sentence.

  “Freddy, I can’t imagine that call is more important than your education,” I said, borrowing that sappy line from some other teacher.

  He paused and said something in rapid-fire Spanish into the receiver.

  “It’s my brother, calling from Rikers. It’s the only call he gets this month. I miss him and really want to talk to him. Please, mister.” He spoke softly.

  This bit of information turned the head of every kid within earshot. They were eager to see what I would do. I pulled Freddy into the hallway. I thought of Wilson’s advice about building trust instead of just following the rules. At the same time, I didn’t want to set a bad example if I let him take the call. My mind was racing. I heard the crash of a desk being overturned in my room. His brother was repeating Freddy’s name on the crackling cell phone he held in his palm.

  I took a gamble. Playing the heavy wasn’t working anyway. Why not try something else? “Look, Freddy. Let’s be clear: I am not giving you permission to talk on your cell phone.” His face dropped. “But I am giving you permission to go into that stairwell for five minutes and do what you need to do.”

  His face surged with surprise. He wasn’t big on emotion, and his glee echoed inside me.

  “Thank you, mister,” he said as he walked to the stairwell.

  I charged back into class and tried to play tough to the crowd. “Freddy is on his way to the principal’s office. Does anyone else have a pressing call they need to take?”

  Ten minutes later, Freddy returned to class and gave me a quick, furtive grin. I had never seen him smile. Another first. I kept on my stone face and nodded to him. At the end of the period, he handed me a work sheet on world religions with actual writing on it. Until that point, I wasn’t really sure he could write at all. True, he had blatantly grafted whole sentences about Zoroastrianism from the textbook onto the questions about Buddhism, but it was something, a beginning. As I tucked his sheet into a manila folder, I smiled, thinking about one of Wilson’s adages: “Start small and build on the little victories.”

  “Nice work, Freddy,” I said. He smiled shyly again as he walked out the door.

  “If this keeps up, I might actually be able to help this kid,” I told Sam at home as he taped Freddy’s assignment on the fridge as a sign of hope. I called my sister Nora and told her the story, thrilled to have a victory to share with her instead of my usual dirge.

  I returned the next day, but Freddy was nowhere to be seen. For weeks afterward, Freddy simply disappeared.

  During our next ninth-grade team meeting the following month, Sita the social worker made a special appearance in my classroom. Her normally friendly tone was grave.

  “Guys, I’m sorry to come in unannounced, but we have a very serious issue. Does anyone know anything about Freddy making calls during school hours? His probation officer came by yesterday and he was furious. It looks like Freddy may have been making calls for his brother’s drug ring on our watch. It’s gotta stop or we are going to be in some deep shit.”

  My eyes slid slowly down toward my notebook and I started to formulate a confession, a lie, some way to dig myself out of another shit heap. I knew they could easily figure out that at least one call had taken place during my class. A few seconds passed and her question turned into a general admonition: “Please, everybody. We don’t need this kind of attention. No more calls for Freddy during class.” She paused, and a wave of resignation seemed to overcome her sense of alarm. “Of course, that is, if the kid ever shows up at school again.”

  She walked out of the room. The rest of the team gathered up books, transparencies for overhead projectors, and piles of homework, and filed out to the teachers’ lounge for lunch. I usually would have joined them, but I stayed behind for a tuna sandwich and some self-pity. The normally chaotic room was silent. I swallowed hard and brushed some crumbs from my shirt. I was no Sister Concepta, and even the wisdom of the saintly Wilson had failed me.

  Chapter 9

/>   My Funny Valentina

  ONE AFTERNOON IN the middle of February, with about ten minutes left in the day, my classroom door swung open and a girl I had never seen before sauntered in. She had the jaunty, hunched swagger of a prizefighter and an attitude to match. “Here,” she said, tossing some papers onto my desk with a blasé flick of the wrist. All attention immediately went to the new girl. Even Nestor and Blanca, the lovebirds whose eyes were always locked and fingers interlaced, took the time to look up and notice her.

  She had a high, sassy ponytail, an oversize nose ring, and, most noticeable, an epic derriere showcased in a pair of acid-washed jeans carried with ostensible pride. Her T-shirt was emblazoned with the flag of one of the smaller Caribbean islands.

  I squinted down at the papers. “Everyone, please welcome Valentina.” New students often just showed up without warning, sent by Margie, the beleaguered main office assistant. Who could blame her? She was more triage nurse than secretary, sorting through a sea of barfing, beat-up, and asthmatic students, enraged parents, and pissed-off teachers bothering her about direct-deposit problems on payday.

  As she made her way to an empty desk, Valentina’s new classmates greeted her with a long string of moos and oinks. If this were a prison movie (and at times, it felt like it was), this would have been the scene where the newcomer is paraded in front of the cellblock, jeered at by the old-timers. But this newbie was giving as good as she got.

  “Step down, all y’all niggas, or I’ll stab you in your neck. Don’t get me tight, bitches.” Her script was spot-on, but the voice was all wrong. She spoke with a high, wet lisp that utterly undermined her street cred. All thirty kids laughed at once. I tried to rein in the chaos, but happily the class ended before it got worse.