Emergency Teacher (19 page)

While our principal was responsible for our school's outcome, she had no power of input. She wasn't permitted to hire her own staff. She couldn't fire her staff. If there was a vacancy, she had to sit around and wait for downtown to send teachers. She had few tools available to motivate her people, such as financial rewards (a teacher's salary and status ascended automatically, independent of effort or performance). As long as teachers did not break the law, they were almost impossible to fire or punish. In fact, a teacher needed to be rated unsatisfactory for two years in a row before they could be fired. Most teachers requested a transfer before they were fired, anyway. This was all because the teachers' union held principals in a vise grip.

Here's what the
Philadelphia Inquirer
had to say about school principals in an editorial that ran that school year:

“To read the Philadelphia teachers' contract, you'd think there wasn't a principal in the city who knew how to run a school. It specifies when public-address announcements can be made. It lays out all the rules for faculty meetings, including that teachers be notified two weeks ahead of time. And it dictates an elaborate system for how teacher vacancies must be filled; neither the judgment of the principal nor anyone else at the school plays a part.”

Teachers could basically thumb their noses at their principals, but they were held solely responsible for the success or failure of their schools.

The snow began falling sometime after Thanksgiving and didn't seem to stop until Valentine's Day. A glistening layer of ice coated my car each morning, and—being without a boyfriend—I spent the first twenty minutes of my day digging my wheels out and scraping my windshield. I wrapped my head in the scarf one of my students, Frances, gave me and wore layers of clothing because the heat didn't always work at the school. My car slid up Broad Street, past Lou's Pest Control Cockroach and the Chinese takeout place. I flipped between Howard Stern and National Public Radio. I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts for a breakfast croissant when I had time. I would wait in a long line and then call out my order: the Asian employees, the suited office workers, the police officers, and me in my Julia de Burgos spirit-day T-shirt, with the pen necklace I'd invented in November. Teachers hung silver stars from the ceiling and put evergreen trees with white paper flakes on their desks. Flashing lights dangled across chalkboards. Outside, neighbors zigzagged Christmas tree lights from one row house across the street to another and back. Blocks had Christmas parties. Community centers handed out gifts.

In early December, the principal announced a school-wide reading contest. She called it THE ICE CREAM SCOOP CONTEST! Each class had one month to read and turn in as many book reports as possible. For every five book reports a class turned in, it would receive a cardboard cutout of an ice-cream scoop. The class with the most scoops would win. I recruited Vanessa to be in charge—of course, she liked to read.

During the previous two months, reading also had become a flashpoint of pride in T61. It was the only subject we consistently worked at for forty minutes and that everyone enjoyed. We had read
Bridge to Terabithia
,
Iggie's House
, and were beginning
Where the Red Fern Grows
. When I cracked a book, a spell was cast across the room, and we'd forget we were in Julia de Burgos, where it grew worse by the day. During silent reading, we could hear the whoops and screams of other students echoing throughout the school. Tucked away in room 216 behind a locked door, I grew more relaxed and loosened up standing in front of my kids. I would dramatize scenes and read characters in voices. I could stand in the middle of them, whispering dialogue, and look up to see each and every pair of eyes clinging to me. Mr. Rougeux had lent me his raccoon-skin hat for
Where the Red Fern Grows
, which I put on every time the hounds hunted a raccoon.

The ice-cream-scoop contest could be a feather in my cap—evidence that I truly was beginning to teach. It was something we could all work on together, because the kids could work at different levels. I was very conscious that this was December, and I wanted my learning curve to flatten and my teaching to get under way. The principal promised the winning class a set of reading books, a reading rug, and an ice-cream party. As I set out to prepare my class for victory, I could almost hear our name over the loudspeaker. When I dropped Vanessa off at her house that evening, I told her, “We are going to win those books—I promise.”

Several students took books home, bringing back reports every two days. The principal was due to announce the winner in January. Our tally was posted on the blackboard: a whopping twenty scoops—one hundred book reports. I was already vowing to let the students who turned in the most reports be the first on the new reading rug, in our new reading corner.

I had gone to the bookstore and bought books for Ronny's level, but he seemed embarrassed when I gave them to him. “These baby books,” he said, but he took them anyway, carefully tucking them into his binder so the other students wouldn't see them.

One morning, I rushed inside the school only to feel just as cold as I had been outside. I could see my breath in the hallway. In the main office, I heard the news. Someone had broken into our school ... again. Over the blustery, freezing night, the third floor was ransacked and the windows busted. I ran upstairs to look around. In Ms. Davis's class, the special ed classes, and many other rooms, the decorations had been ripped off the walls and the desks rifled through. Each year the school was broken into several times, most often by student dropouts, who in addition to teachers' Walkmans and candy would also steal their old files—the last remaining record of their failing grades.

All third-floor students and teachers had reported to the auditorium, so the floor was still. I stood alone up there, surveying the destruction. I wasn't sure whether I should feel angry or sad that the students hated our school so much.

Because of the snow, Ms. Rohan and Mrs. G. were absent. My room was like an icebox because the heater was broken, and despite the extreme circumstances the “no jackets in class” rule was being enforced. I brought in my high school and Boston University sweatshirts so that the kids didn't shiver all day. Therefore, we moved into Ms. Rohan's room, where the centrally controlled heater was on full blast.

The “two percent factor” students, like José R. and Jovani, were absent, which caused attendance to dip by 60 percent. I did not miss them. Jovani and José R. were still tearing up my classroom, but because they were always being suspended, they were rarely in class. By the end of the year, José R. had received so many pink slips that he had experienced in-school suspension eighty times. (That's almost half of the one hundred eighty days in the school year.) He was also absent a lot. When José R. wasn't in class, Jovani would often settle down with crayons or play on the computer. Later in the school year I would run into a teacher who had known Jovani from elementary school, and she told me he had been diagnosed EMR, educable mentally retarded. With no paperwork on him, I couldn't move him into special education; not that I would until there was an assigned teacher—which there never was that year. Once he had earned a reputation as one of the 2 percent, no other teacher would take him as a trade. I can't say he learned a thing that year.

Ms. Rohan's room, it turned out, was so hot and swampy I had to open all the windows. It was a miserable day, a day in which all the school's shortcomings bore down on us at once: teachers too apathetic to show up, students so angry they lashed out and destroyed the place, a building so ill maintained we either froze or sweltered. During my planning period, I stared out the window, watching the icicles melt and run down the frosted window pane. I scrapped my lesson plan and made up activities on the spot. I read Harry Potter for forty-five minutes, and I let Vanessa and a few other girls write songs and poetry. The boys played a CD-ROM game I had purchased. Fortunately, I had brought my laptop to motivate the kids who didn't like journal-writing but did like computers. Josh, José M., and Yomari took turns. Normally, I gave them an assignment, but instead I told them to “just journal. Write about your feelings; what made you happy or sad lately. Whatever you want to talk about.”

This was what came out.

When report card sheets arrived for me to fill out, my students cheered and whispered wondering anxiously about their grades. I told them they couldn't see them until their parents arrived. In truth, I was stalling because I had no grades. We hadn't done much serious work, and we hadn't even had a quiz yet. I hadn't even started teaching social studies until November.

My grade book was frayed and thinning from scrubbing it with different erasers. Nearly half the names had changed from those heady first days of school, and almost everything I'd scribbled in my grade book had been erased and rewritten. I had never learned how to keep a grade book; my system just evolved through trial and error. Next to the subjects and student names were a mess of stars, letters, zeroes, dates, X's, and checks. I'd wondered how I would decode what I had marked. The seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Pautret, advised that I should simply make my best educated guess about grades.

Mostly, I graded the students on effort, not ability. The “level-one” students received A's or B's and the “level twos,” like Rodolfo, got C's. It was the rest I worried about, specifically, tiny Jovani, who presented me with the greatest grading dilemma. Aside from the house he drew during those halcyon first days, neither he nor José R. had done any work. The question was, could they do the work, or had it been too difficult for them? I didn't know how to assess them. I could hardly imagine passing students who had done no work in three months. Failing them wasn't fair, either. So I gave them C's. As I slowly penciled in 75 percent it dawned on me that if I did this again next term and then the next, I would be passing them onto seventh grade. I suddenly realized how kids floated through the system.

I had other troubles. First and foremost, the report cards were wrong. When Mrs. Liss had dropped them off, the subjects listed were Spanish, ESOL reading, and social studies. However, I'd been actually “teaching” English, reading, and social studies. I almost cried for fear that all these months I had been teaching the wrong subjects. I looked for my mentor, the seventh-grade bilingual science teacher whom I rarely saw. I raced down the empty corridor, past candy wrappers and Mr. Jackson's room, where I heard him shouting at his students again. I arrived at my mentor's room and explained it all to her. She studied the sheets quizzically for a minute and then shrugged.

“Mark W for the Spanish and combine everything else.” W meant “withdraw.”

“But they didn't withdraw from Spanish. It was never offered to them,” I said. “What are my kids going to think when they get a grade for social studies and no grade for English? I've been telling them since September how important their English grade would be.”