Emergency Teacher (24 page)

Wilson's special education class was on the third floor, but his wasn't known as the most notorious—that title went to Rogia's P68 classroom. This group would have scared Jovani. P68 was the level-three student headquarters. If we teachers could have only excised this class altogether, the hallways during class time would have been practically empty. For these kids, setting curtains ablaze and pulling the fire alarm were too basic. They had pushed down the principal, knocked over the music teacher, assaulted Ms. Fernanda with scissors, screamed obscenities at Mr. Whitehorne, and openly committed sex-related acts so vile for twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, it was too upsetting to contemplate. They might not have acted this way had the school administration not locked them upstairs, given them nothing to do, and cycled so many inexperienced and mean-spirited babysitters through there that they had become the animals that we treated them as. This was why I couldn't believe it when I heard that the principal had found a substitute teacher willing to stick it out in there. Mr. M. had been with P68 for a full month.

I had seen him in the teacher's lounge. He was a grandfatherly looking white man who wore a bomber jacket with military pins on each side. When not in class, he sat in the teacher's lounge, listening to Rush Limbaugh on his mini radio. Mr. M. was paid $70 or so a day to substitute. That money wouldn't have been enough for anyone to endure an hour alone with P68. My students told me that his class watched TV all day.

These were the toughest kids to teach, the 2 percent factor, and I wanted to see how he handled them. So I asked him one morning if I could sit in on his classroom and observe, which was not unusual among teachers. All morning as I passed his room I could see him reading magazines at his desk, which was dragged in front of the door. The students sat in circles on top of their desks. I knocked around 11:30 AM. He put down his magazine, jumped up, and announced, “Okay, everyone, get into a circle.” Six kids, five boys and one girl, moved around. Their average age was about fourteen.

“Hello, Ms. Asquith,” Mr. M. said. “We were getting started as you knocked.”

Mr. M. dragged some desks forward. “Hey, you—zip it,” he said to a boy wearing a baseball cap who was talking.

“Hey Mister, when we going on our field trip?” the boy replied.

“We're not going the way you act,” Mr. M. said.

The student shoved the desk he was pulling and shot back “I don't care!”

“Exactly, you don't care,” Mr. M. replied. “That's the problem. You don't care. I mean all of you, second-person plural.”

I sat in the back. I didn't know what Mr. M. was hired to teach, what the official responsibilities of a long-term substitute were, or even what the curriculum for a special education class was. I did know that these six students had been with Mr. M. for 80 percent of the day, and they would be for several more months, and there was not a single textbook in the classroom. There were no notebooks, no schedule posted, no student mailboxes or personal spaces, no decorated bulletin boards, no class rules, no smiley signs or encouraging posters, no student work hanging, and certainly no teaching or learning happening. The only thing scrawled on the chalkboard was “The 3 branches of government, Legislative, Executive, and Judicial.”

“Now,” he began, propped up on a desk in the middle of the students, “How many branches of government are there and what are they?”

Several students glanced at the board where Mr. M. had written, “Executive.”

“Yes,” Mr. M. exclaimed, “That's right, and legislative,” he answered himself. “Okay, and how many senators do we have in that?”

The students shouted out guesses: “Five.” “Fifteen.” “Oh, oh, oh, one thousand?”

Mr. M. waved them all away. “No, no, no!” Finally, someone guessed one hundred.

“Who said that?” Mr. M. asked. “Joe! That's right. Acknowledge yourself.”

Joe just sat there. “Now, what's the third branch?” Mr. M. asked. A couple kids continued guessing. Two students tapped each other on the shoulder. Mr. M., who was leaning back on a desk in the middle of them, stopped and pointed at them.

“Now, would you do me a favor?” he asked, his voice raising. “Would ya listen? It's judicial. Now, this is for a pretzel and a soda: I'm president. If I want a judge there, do I just pick him?”

Two kids yelled out “Yes!”

Mr. M. shook his head. So they shouted out “No!” And Mr. M. said, “Good job! That's right. The answer is no.”

The lesson continued like this, with Mr. M. drilling students who couldn't read, write, or do basic math, on obscure questions on U.S. government. Yet despite the fact that the students clearly had no idea what the answers were or what their teacher was talking about, they earnestly struggled to answer correctly, beaming when they guessed right. For a moment, they looked like a dysfunctional family that couldn't relate, but knew each other and had fallen into a comfortable pattern of mistreating each other. Oddly, the students had affection for him. Mr. M. stopped at one point and said gruffly, “Hey, by the way, I'm very proud of you guys.”

Soon, the students grew bored. One of them snuck behind Mr. M., dancing around and making faces. The kids ignored him, but Mr. M. whipped around. “Your mother will get a call from me. SIT DOWN.”

The kid shrugged. “SIT DOWN!” Mr. M. screamed. He was so loud I winced.

“No!” the student shouted, then slunk to the back of the room and kicked a chair. He sat in the corner, facing the wall.

Mr. M. announced it was time for math.

“Okay, let's try some division,” he said. “How many state senators do we have in Harrisburg?”

The girl shouted, “Twenty-five!”

“Close,” Mr. M. said.

“Fifty!”

“Double that,” Mr. M. said. “Now, let's see, if there's two hundred members in the House, and each represent about 55,000 constituents, that's about the size of Veterans' Stadium. Now, let's do division. How many is that?”

No one even had a pencil or paper out. The students had stopped listening and were randomly calling out numbers. Mr. M. quizzically stared at the desk in front of him. “Now, um ... so ... how many state senators do we have?”

“Hey, you farted,” Douglas yelled out, and everyone laughed.

“Okay, Douglas, I'm going to write you up.” Suddenly, there was a knock on the door, and Douglas jumped up to open it. A boy of about thirteen sauntered in wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and a gold earring shining near his closely cropped buzz cut. He surveyed the room and cocked his head back, staring at me.

Mr. M. glanced over and then very purposefully ignored him. The boy leaned to his friend. “Who she?”

“She here to watch Mr. M.,” he said.

The kid looked at me and then at his friends in a circle. He said loudly, “Oh, what? Is he teaching us something today? Hey, Mister, today we doing work?” he said.

I bit my lip to keep from smiling. And Mr. M. thought his kids were dumb.

Mr. M. yelled, “Get out!” Then again: “GET OUT!” The boy backed up toward the door but looked directly at me and spoke very clearly.

“He never teach us work,” he said, and Mr. M. got up and walked toward him. I thought he might push him out, but the boy stumbled backward. “This is the first time he teaches us anything,” he said, and the door swung shut. Mr. M. returned to his routine. A girl asked, “Mr. M., a woman ever been president?” He distractedly turned to her.

“I think you will see a woman as president in your lifetime,” Mr. M. said. “I think Elizabeth Dole would have made a fantastic president.”

It was time for me to leave. As I walked toward the door, Wilfredo wondered aloud, “I never seen a black president,” and Mr. M. stared at him. For once he had nothing to say about politics.

As I turned to shut the door, I glanced up and saw all of them looking at me. The whole class stopped talking. I thought about how they circled Mr. M. and tried so hard to answer his questions. That wasn't affection—that was desperation. Only about half of these students showed up for the class yearbook photo, in which just one kid smiled, and they were combined with the other teacherless classes, H81 and P78. The rest had empty expressions. Unlike all the other classes, there was no teacher in their class photo.

The principal would then order Mr. Whitehorne to fill out their report cards, so they could receive made-up grades for math, history, English—all the subjects they'd never even received a quiz in. Their eyes clung to me as I was left. There she goes—“nice” Ms. Asquith, with the pretty classroom and classroom projects outside her door and her class rules and holiday parties and field trips; a teacher who loved her students; one of those “real” teachers, who, for some reason, they would never get.

The following morning, someone sprayed a fire extinguisher all over my door. The enlarged photos I hung outside with “Team T61 & T62” got wet and wrinkled. I wondered who it was and if it had anything to do with Mr. M.'s class, but I didn't say anything.

At 8:25 AM, an unfamiliar, older boy walked in and sat down in the back row of T61 class. He stretched out his legs and glared at me.

“Who are you?” I asked. He ignored me.

“He in our class now,” Josh said. I took in the tight black stocking cap on his head.

“Who are you?” I had to ask again.

“Javier,” he answered.

Something about him put me on guard. He had an arrogant swagger. He was older than my other students. He had my ignorance to his advantage. No one told me a thing about him. Not having any information about a student, even his name, forces the teacher to have conversations like the one I had:

“How old are you?” I asked, squatting next to his desk.

“I don't know,” he answered glibly. Josh snickered.

“Well, when were you born?” I asked, and he repeated, “I don't know.”

“You don't know, or you don't want to tell me?”

He just stared at his desk.

“Well, I respect that,” I said. “You don't have to tell me. That's your personal information.”

I got up and walked away.

Of course, I didn't really feel that way. I felt like demanding he tell me or get the hell out of my classroom. He was baiting me into a power struggle. I would be smart to avoid one so early on. This bought a little time to think about how to handle him.

I tracked down Mrs. G.; she didn't know anything about him, either.

“We are not a dumping ground for the rest of the school's problems,” she said, as if I had invited him in. She made some phone calls and found out he came from Ms. Soleimanzadeh's sixth-grade class on the third floor.

“Why was he transferred to me?” I asked.

He was her terror student, disrupting class, threatening her, beating up students, she said. She couldn't handle him anymore.

“So he's in my class?!” I yelled.

“Now you see what we have to deal with here on the bilingual floor?” Mrs. G. asked.

I dashed over to Ms. Soleimanzadeh's room. She was standing behind her cluttered desk looking exhausted, not acting the least bit guilty.

“He's extremely bright, but totally lacking in social skills. My advice is whatever you do, don't get into a confrontation with him,” she said.

She already had five more students than I did, and her room was a disaster. I heard that she had taken her class on a field trip downtown to the Liberty Bell, and even called the TV stations to get some publicity, and when she arrived bedlam broke out. Her students ran all over the place and trashed the trip. Afterward, she took three days off school to recover. She needed help, and we should stick together as teachers. Also, I wanted to feel confident that T61 was tight enough and running smoothly enough that we could absorb one more. There was something fearsome about Javier, but I knew that, if not my class, he would end up with Mr. M., and that could be dangerous.

“Okay,” I told her. I'd take him ....