Emergency Teacher (15 page)

With no husband, no time to look for one, and school loans to pay, Ms. Rohan had it really rough. She shared an apartment forty-five minutes outside the city. She packed a lunch everyday. And, still, she took a second job as a waitress at Applebee's to make ends meet. She went straight home from school on Fridays to sleep because on Saturdays she bused tables until 2:00 AM. When Ms. Ortiz and I invited her out, she declined. Some Mondays she arrived looking more exhausted than she had on Friday. Nevertheless, when it came to her students, she dug deeply into her own pocket. She bought decorations for her class and music CDs as rewards for good behavior. She bought workbooks for the special ed kids. After we lost our prep periods, she used her free time to grade papers and to plan. I knew she took students' phone calls at home when they had problems, and drove to their row houses to meet with parents. Her devotion was unlimited, and largely unrewarded.

M
r. Rougeux ordered two more pitchers of Budweiser and spit tobacco juice into a can. Mr. Rougeux and Mr. Whitehorne had invited me to their weekly meeting of the Pedagogical Society, which was held at the J Street Bar and involved, as I was happily learning, a lot of drinking.

Mr. Rougeux was Philadelphia's number-one teacher, a twenty-three-year-old who had the top score on the city teaching exam and had been featured in a front-page
Inquirer
article the previous year. The piece was about the city's “efforts to hang on to their best teachers.” He was famous, and we had become friends.

This was nice because I felt lonely. From the moment I arrived at 7:45 AM until I left at 3:30 PM, kids surrounded me, but it wasn't the same as having company. I felt like a theater actress: Despite the packed audience, I was still alone, on stage. Teachers had to keep on guard in front of students. When students were around, for example, the teachers used Mister and Miss and spoke in formal tones. We couldn't talk about our personal lives or gossip about the principal, and lately there was always a story about some way she had angered a teacher. Students weren't allowed in the teachers' lounge, but it was a dreary, dark place where only the secretaries and school police milled. I usually ate lunch at my desk.

Then one day Mr. Rougeux came by to check on me, which no one else had done. He waved through my door window. Soon I was observing his classroom daily and learning from his lessons. He taught sixth grade on the first floor, and I marveled at his skills. Kids in his room behaved. He had already set up a technology lab in the back of his class, getting computers as donations from his alma mater, Villanova University. What's more, he was building an ecology center with a real pool and fish. By spring he even had a duck in there. He had sandy hair and was an amateur boxer. Unlike most young, white teachers in the city, Mr. Rougeux was conservative, practically right-wing. He drove a pickup truck, chewed tobacco, and came from a rural, blue-collar family. His grandfather had been a railroad worker in Altoona and a big union advocate until he was injured and the union turned its back on him. Mr. Rougeux hated the union and didn't mind making his views public. He rolled his eyes every time a union issue came up and never went to any meetings. In fact he seemed to shun the entire school. He was popular with his students, but unpopular with the rest of the staff.

Mr. Whitehorne was Mr. Rougeux's best friend and political opposite. He taught seventh-grade science, and he was also an administrator—the equivalent of Mrs. G., but on the school's third floor. In his late fifties, Mr. Whitehorne had devoted his life to neighborhood activism. He was a Marxist and an intellectual. He had moved into North Philadelphia in the 1960s to foment revolution among the industrial workers. Having joined the Cohn Clothing factory, he pressed hot irons for years while huddling with fellow workers on lunch break, during which he'd lecture on the bourgeoisie and repression. Mr. Whitehorne had become a science teacher at Julia de Burgos in 1988 and had risen to union leader and team leader of the third floor. He was well over six feet tall with a mass of snowy white hair and baggy pants that rode low on his hips. He had a no-bullshit manner and a terrific sense of humor about the job's darker moments. Mr. Whitehorne and Mr. Rougeux argued about most everything, but held a tremendous amount of respect for each other.

Ms. Ortiz also came out on Friday nights, but not just from pedagogical interest. She liked Mr. Rougeux, I suspected. Her eyes clung to him when he vented about the liberal school administration, pausing to spit tobacco from his cheek. She was Puerto Rican, raised in Chicago, and had blond hair, a button nose, and a pearly-white smile. She dressed up for class in miniskirts, black boots, and makeup, so at first I thought she was in her twenties. She was actually in her mid-thirties. She taught seventh- and eighth-grade English and had been at Julia de Burgos for a decade. All the girls loved her. When she found out I knew how to salsa, she would call me in my classroom Friday afternoon. “Hey bitch! Wuz up? Are we going dancing tonight? Let's get me a man!” Sometimes students sitting in the front row could hear her through the phone. “That Ms. Ortiz, again?” I tried not to laugh.

There were awful teachers, too. They didn't join our drinking society, but were common conversation fodder: Mr. H. took his class on a field trip to Hooters; Mr. T. liked to stand up at union meetings and make intelligent speeches littered with legal jargon because he was once a high-powered attorney until he acquired a costly cocaine habit; Mrs. B., the special ed teacher, had yet again finagled herself a paid sabbatical/leave and would be gone all year. Then there were the long-term substitutes who were a rung below emergency certified teachers and were paid by the day. The most colorful was Ms. D. on the third floor, a fussy, cardigan-wearing schoolmarm type, who put an apple on her desk every day until the kids started taking it. A former substitute in the suburbs, she constantly compared our kids to suburban students in a racist way. “They don't act like this in Lower Merion.”

Throughout the year, “Ms. D. stories” became legendary—the highlight of our Pedagogical Society meetings: Ms. D. gave 120 of her 140 eighth-graders an F in science; Ms. D.'s eighth-graders locked her in her classroom for two periods, forcing security to remove a windowpane to unlock the door; the eighth-graders stole Ms. D.'s purse; Ms. D. told Mr. Whitehorne she'd decided on a policy to “teach only the students who want to learn”; some guy stormed into the main office complaining he'd almost been clobbered on the sidewalk by a flying textbook—from guess whose class?

The nun always got a laugh, too. This week, Ms. Ortiz had heard that a student ruined the nun's overview with white-out, and she started crying in front of her class—again.

“She needs to toughen the fuck up,” said Ms. Ortiz, balancing a buffalo wing between painted fingernails. Mr. Whitehorne said she had petitioned her church to teach as part of her “mission.” This made everyone laugh.

“Man, she didn't realize what she was getting herself into,” Mr. Rougeux chimed in. “Not even God would ask this of anyone!”

Then there was Mr. Jackson, the new seventh-grade English substitute on the Bilingual Team, whom Mrs. G. called a “ticking time bomb.” He was black which everyone thought was great at first because he could be a real role model for Hispanic and black boys, many of whom had fathers in jail. He stood over six and a half feet tall, and kept his back straight as a board from his days in the military. He was posted to the Bilingual Team because he thought he spoke Spanish. At meetings, he insisted on communicating in broken, grammatically creative Español, even while we spoke in English. This took forever and made the veterans cringe.

One time I asked him what he was teaching in seventh-grade English, hoping that would help me design my lessons. He sized me up suspiciously.

“Okay,” he said. He picked up some papers off his desk and looked through them. Then he walked to the back end of the room near the windows and took an English textbook off the shelf. He opened it up to chapter one.

“We're learning how to make a sentence,” he read.

“Really?” I was having the same problem he was! I explained to him that chapter one in the English textbooks Mrs. G. had given me was titled “The 4 Types of Sentences,” which was ridiculous. How could I teach them the types of sentences if they hadn't been taught the necessary English to even write a sentence? The bell was going to ring, and I had T62 for two hours in the afternoon, and nothing planned yet. Each day they grew more frustrated and less compliant. My voice became tinny and desperate.

“Well, do most of your students already know how to write sentences?” I asked.

He didn't say anything. I tried to explain myself. “Well, I mean, it says in my book that I'm supposed to teach them the four types of sentences. You know, declarative, exclamatory, etcetera. But, I think it's above their heads, don't you?”

He put the book back and straightened even taller, looking down on me in an arrogant way. “Well, this school doesn't give us anything to teach them.”

I looked around Mr. Jackson's room, which was barren and uninspiring. The walls were bare, and the bulletin boards empty. It was clear that Mr. Jackson had no more of an idea what to teach than I did. Later on, I would find out that Mr. Jackson wasn't teaching them anything at all—it was a “free period.” When I passed his room the following day, I heard him screaming at them, “SIT DOWN! BE QUIET!”

I thought: This was the English teacher I was to send my students to next year?

On most Fridays we stayed at the bar until 6:00 or 7:00 PM, and then I went home and usually fell immediately asleep, unless Ms. Ortiz called me to go to The 8th Floor, a dance club downtown. (Sometimes I found the energy.) Occasionally, though, the Friday-night Society meetings stretched out from 4:00 PM until almost midnight. On those nights the happy hour tables would clear out and the regulars would line the bar by around 8:00 PM. We would order cheeseburgers for dinner and settle in for the night.

If there was only one thing that kept me going those first few months teaching, it was these evenings and these kind teachers. They were my support group. They loaned me lesson plans, taught me discipline tricks, and explained how the school worked. They listened and sympathized. Simply knowing I had friends down the hall was a tremendous source of comfort. When the times got really tough, it was all I had.

R
ogia was a ghost. She looked about twelve, was black, and on school records, had an address, and even grades. No teacher at Julia de Burgos ever actually saw Rogia, though. She was one of the students labeled “educable mentally retarded” (EMR). Of the three special education categories, EMR was the most grave—the most severely dysfunctional.

The first was emotional support (ES). These students were mainstreamed into regular classes and supposedly given extra assistance in the form of personal tutors and special classes during the day in which trained special education teachers helped them with their course work. The second group, learning disabled (LD), was more challenging. They were supposed to have their own classrooms and teachers.

Rogia belonged to one of the vacant special education classrooms, so she spent most of the day roaming the halls, trying to avoid being yelled at. Every day she lingered after school in the hallways, following the janitors from classroom to classroom. Sometimes a janitor let her help wipe down desks. Other days she was screamed at. “She just don't wanna go home,” one janitor would say. I let her sit in my classroom after school, but then a janitor saw this and told me, “She gonna steal your stuff.” After that, Rogia didn't come back after class.

The day I met Rogia I was hurrying down the hallway to Mrs. G.'s office during a prep period, carrying Jovani's paperwork under my arm. A week after I met Jovani's mother, they'd both returned to school to tell me Jovani was leaving for good. “He's transferring to Jones Middle School,” his mother said, her arm wrapped around his bony shoulder. This time she was cold and treated me like the enemy. She wore glittery silver eyeliner and glared at me from halfslit eyes. Jovani skipped down the hall to collect his drawings from our classroom, delighted at having the full attention of his mother, teacher, and Mrs. G., who came by my classroom and spoke demurely to his mother, acting sad that Jovani was leaving. No sooner had they left when she cheered, “Thank God he's someone else's problem! He's out of our hair!”

A few weeks passed, and Jovani reappeared. He showed up in class like a sucker punch to my stomach. “How was Jones Middle School?” I stammered.

“I didn't go there,” he said. No note. No explanation. Class had to begin, and there was no time for a follow-up. I didn't even know if he had reregistered in the office. This time he was much, much worse. He ran around all morning, and Rodolfo had threatened to beat him up. Vanessa was falling asleep from boredom, and Ronny needed my help—not to mention the other twenty-five kids in the class. They had to learn this year; some of them didn't read or write English yet, and they didn't have time to waste. I decided to make a strong push to move Jovani to special education, for the sake of the other students, no matter how much time or paperwork it required.

My students were banging away on keyboards in the music room and looking bored. Vanessa stared glumly into the distance. A few of the younger girls tapped away delightedly. Despite the instruments, this was not music class. This was their English language class, or ESOL. This was the class dumped onto Ms. Rohan after the ESOL teacher transferred to a cushy administrative post. Mrs. G. put the students with the music teacher, although she continued to refer publicly to the class as ESOL. Vanessa saw me and started waving, so I ducked and hurried on.

Mrs. G.'s office was empty of students—a rare, rare occurrence. “I need to talk about Jovani,” I explained to her. “He needs special education, I think.” Before I could finish, a security guard started bellowing down the hall. We ignored her at first. Then it became impossible. Mrs. G. stormed out into the hallway: “What is going on here?” That's when I saw Rogia.

She hung halfway off a stair, arms wrapped coyly around the banister, and watched us with big, lingering eyes. Most of the girls at the school meticulously slicked their hair into fancy buns and wore sparkling makeup and gold jewelry. Rogia had on a ratty T-shirt, and her short, choppy hair stuck out in all directions. She looked as though she had slept on the couch, woken up, and walked right out the door for school.

“Rogia, I want you in class—now,” Mrs. G. said.

Tears welled in Rogia's eyes. She looked desperate but didn't budge. “Rogia, get outta my hallways!” the guard yelled. She sniffled a little and started to whimper. The screaming in the hallways descended on her from all directions. “I'll take her to class,” I said. The security guard stalked off.

I followed her down the stairwell, where she leaned on the banister and peered up at me.

“Hi, Rogia,” I said, pronouncing her name Rue-gee-ah. “Can I talk to you a sec? Don't be scared. I'm not going to yell at you.”

Her tear-stained cheeks puffed up as she sniffled. I put my arm around her. “I'm Ms. Asquith. I teach sixth grade. What grade are you in?”

“Seventh,” she said.

“Hon, why aren't you in class where you're supposed to be?” She shrugged.

“Let's go to your class together,” I said. “I'll take you, Okay?”

She leaned into me as we walked together and chatted. I tried to make her smile. Some special education students, I suspected, suffered from problems beyond low IQs and learning disabilities. Many were victims of physical and sexual abuse, or had been abandoned or bounced between foster homes. They came from broken homes to a broken school, where the special ed designation that aimed to help them served, in fact, only to hurt them. Special education for these learning disabled kids was like a scarlet letter, leading to taunts from other students (“Hey, LDs!”)

Rogia's class was at the far end of the top floor. We wound around the stairwell and climbed up to the third floor, which had a mural depicting life on an island. We passed Ms. Soleimanzadeh's room. She was writing on the chalkboard. The door to Rogia's classroom was separated from the hallway by three steps, and the windows had bars across them.

As we walked up, I had her smiling. The door was locked. “Here we go,” I said, rapping at the window.

The door swung open from the inside. About seven kids stood staring at us from different sides of the classroom. There was a pungent mothball smell mixed with another smell—rodent droppings. Dim sunlight filtered through a dirty window. A few desks were turned over. Everything had been put aside and forgotten, as in an attic. The blackboard had no chalk; the bookshelves had nothing to read on them. Someone during a previous year cared enough to tack bulletin boards on the walls, but they were now void of student work.

A man jumped up from his desk as though he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't. He was the long-term substitute. Oversized Coke-bottle glasses framed his beady eyes, and he was wearing a tightly tied backpack. Before we could say anything, someone yelled, “Yo, Rogia be back!” Then I understood why Rogia preferred the empty solitude of the hallway to her seventh-grade room.

A fat boy charged at her, causing her to break away from me. She dodged him, cursing back, sticking out her small chest, and threatening to punch him. The remaining handful of kids picked sides and chanted them on. A boy with long arms covered in a super-size flannel shirt threw down the magazine he was reading and pushed the fat boy. “Don't be talking 'bout my sista,” he shouted. He grabbed the boy's shoulder and threw him to the side, knocking him against a desk. The noise rose to a thunder, and suddenly desks were being overturned and pencils thrown. Rogia stumbled to the radiator near the opposite wall. She stuck her hand into a box of crayons and flung them across the room. I ducked and a spray of crayons hit my back.

The creepy substitute stalked from behind his desk and pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up to his eyes two or three times. He moved toward Rogia and another boy to separate them, but immediately backed away when their waving arms whizzed past his glasses. He turned to me, his face sallow.

“Do you see this?” he said. “They're animals in here. I can't do anything.” He turned to them. “You're animals!”

The mothball smell was nauseating. Something in me snapped and I lunged forward to help. “Stop it, stop it!” My words spilled out, but were muted by the shouting. I tried to pull the boys apart and knocked into a desk. My hair was strewn across my face, and my heart raced madly. Edging backward, something caught my eye: eight long nails jammed through a long wooden board pointed sharply to the ceiling. Two inches of the nails protruded from the board like a barbaric stick. The kids pushed each other back and forth several feet away. One of these children could easily pick it up and beat the other to a bloody pulp. I screamed for them to get away, but no one listened. Any minute now teachers would come running into the classroom and take control of this, I thought. But no teachers came. I shouted for help.

“Hey, Ms. Asquith,” someone said. Juan, a school security guard, was crunched into a desk, his muscular arms stretched out in a lame effort to separate kids jumping around him. I hadn't even noticed him when I walked in. Juan was the school's most hulking, formidable member of security, the kind who charged headlong into the riots that started in the parking lot or cafeteria. His size alone intimidated most students. “Just leave her here. We'll take care of her,” he said.

The screaming and fighting continued, but it was Juan's presence here that hit me the hardest. He wasn't rushing in to break this up. He had been here all along. While I sped around wildly, his steady expression was completely devoid of any sense of urgency. His uniform made him look all the more powerless. He waved his arms around in a vague gesture to break up the fight, but he wasn't alarmed. This was the normal state of affairs here. I realized: The only difference on this day was me.

As I backed away, I caught the eye of a lone figure in the middle seat. He had a word puzzle on his desk and a pencil in his hand. He was maybe fifteen, soon-to-be handsome, with intelligent eyes that followed my every move. He looked trapped, like a man imprisoned. His eyes said, “Get me out of here.” I wanted to pull him out right then and there, and enroll him in my class. He apparently understood the injustice and craziness around him. I looked away. Rogia's face was streaked with tears.

“Rogia!” I shouted. “Come with me.” But she wasn't budging.

“Fuggedaboutit,” Juan said.

“Rogia, I'm in room 216. Two-one-six. If you ever need to see me, come there.”

I stumbled down the stairs. The door swung shut and locked behind me. Across the hallway, Ms. Soleimanzadeh and the other teachers continued their lessons, undisturbed. I felt, of course, like I had to do something. But what? Who did I tell—the principal, Mrs. G.? They already knew. I took the long route back to my room, so I wouldn't have to pass Mrs. G.'s office and see the janitor. I was sure they would laugh at my naivete.

The bell rang, indicating my prep period was over. I hurried, still shaken, back to my room. The students were arriving for my next class. I hugged the first child I saw, who happened to be Jovani.

“What's wrong, Miss?” he asked, in a soft, childlike way. The rest of my class stumbled in, the boys with their baby cheeks and the girls with their sparkly butterfly hairclips. They were so young, so little. Given their sharp tongues, it was so easy to forget that six months ago they were in elementary school.

“Nothing.” I hugged him tighter. Jovani was staying with me.

Dead leaves piled on my car windshield in the parking lot and crunched under my feet as I popped my trunk and unloaded crates of supplies. Late each afternoon I dragged my crates back to the car and went home to work all night, alone. Time slipped by. Winter had arrived.