Emergency Teacher (4 page)

The teachers and principal took the new trophies and whatever stained-glass windows and historical plaques still remained. In the old building, the blinds were drawn and chains snapped shut. The parking lot emptied but for junked neighborhood cars. The school building at Eighth and Lehigh was condemned and closed.

A year later, neighbors watched a bright blue and yellow banner go up across the front entrance. A cleaning crew came in. The city sealed off the most dangerous sections of the building, closed the auditorium completely, and slapped on a fresh layer of paint. The news spread rapidly: The neighborhood schools were overcrowded and an additional middle school was needed. The school at Eighth and Lehigh was having a “grand reopening.” To meet the specific needs of the community, it would be Philadelphia's first bilingual middle school. It would be called the Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School.

At the time, administrators sang the praises of bilingual education. The city said the school would offer bilingual programs in which Spanish-speaking students learned English, and English-speaking students learned Spanish. Students could apply from all over Philadelphia.

It sounded perfect on paper. But even at a wealthy, well-run school the goals of bilingual education were challenging to meet and required years of teacher training. In a North Philadelphia school already beset by discipline issues and financial constraints, bilingual education was little more than rhetoric. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
's 1989 story about the school described a chaotic and ill-prepared opening year: “[Principal José E. Lebron] didn't know he'd be the principal of the district's first bilingual middle school until July. He had to recruit a staff and oversee setting up a curriculum before school opened in September. And then there was the building. Home to two different schools over more than eighty years, the old Edison High was in need of more than a little repair.”

“I walked in one day and said ‘No way are we going to open in September, '” Lebron was quoted as saying to the
Inquirer
.

By 1989, the school had only a handful of Spanish-speaking teachers. Implementing a bilingual curriculum was unrealistic. Into the early 1990s, research emerged showing that students learned new languages at a faster pace in elementary school, anyway. Principal Lebron transferred to Edison High School and took with him much of the energy of the new project.

Newly immigrated students joined Spanish-speaking cliques of friends and progressed through years of school without learning any English. Cries continued against the school's condition. In 1989 it was eighty-three years old and falling apart. This was the last building to which mothers wanted to send their ten-year-olds. The city couldn't deny it. They agreed the building was too old and coughed up $2.3 million for rehabilitation. There were plans to construct another middle school, they promised. They wouldn't use the structure as an educational institution for long, they promised. It would only be “temporary.”

The school at Eighth and Lehigh would remain open for the next fourteen years. In its final years, I arrived.

A
weather-beaten, gray stone edifice stood on the corner of Eighth and Lehigh in North Philadelphia. The roof had four turrets with menacing gargoyles arched forward. Surrounding the building was a moat of concrete ringed by a black iron gate. Somehow, vandals had sprayed graffiti on the slanted roofs. This could not be a school.

I yanked open the only door that wasn't chained shut and saw a little placard with the words MAIN OFFICE down the hall. Inside, a woman behind the counter shuffled through papers. She glanced up over the glasses perched on her nose.

“Hi, my name is Christina Asquith,” I said. “I'd like to teach here.”

Most schools had their staff in place by July, but the city of Philadelphia still lacked fifteen hundred teachers—more than 10 percent of the teaching staff. The district was desperate to hire anyone, or they'd have thousands of kids without a teacher that September. I was a twenty-five-year-old journalist and had recently finished a two-year internship with
The Philadelphia Inquirer
. I ought to have been looking for a job in journalism, but the other day I had come across an advertisement at the bus stop: “Change a Life. Be a Teacher.” The ad showed a sweet young boy with a yearning look on his face.

Although I'd worked for newspapers since college, I was frustrated with the industry as of late. I wanted to make a difference, particularly by covering urban school systems, but from the distant perch of the newsroom I felt out of touch with the real problems inside the classroom. Teaching was always something I had a passion for, but I didn't want to go back to school for years to get an education degree. As I'd quickly learn, I didn't have to.

Julia de Burgos was one of a handful of so-called Spanish-English bilingual schools in Philadelphia that I would most likely be placed at because I was fluent in Spanish. The woman behind the counter was Mrs. Jimenez, the assistant principal. She was friendly and offered to give me a tour.

“The school used to be called the Northeast Manual Training Center, but they renamed it twice, and now it's called Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School, after the Puerto Rican poet,” she said. She told me she had taught here for a decade, but that the school was almost one hundered years old.

The school felt like a museum filled with history. A dimly lit staircase led up to an antique stained-glass window that filled the archway with the colored light of a church. The school hallways formed a square, with a courtyard in the middle and three sets of staircases leading from the basement to the third floor. Several years had passed since I'd stood in the long, shiny hallways of a school, and I was flooded with memories of my own private school in Northern New Jersey.

Mrs. Jimenez was unfazed when I told her I had never taught before. “Mmmm, yes. Well, we really need teachers,” she replied. Even though the school needed some serious renovation, the pretty murals of Puerto Rico and handmade signs displaying school pride gave the place a sense of spirit.

This would be tough, but if I were going to do this, I didn't want a school that anyone would teach at. I wanted to teach kids that no one else would take. When Mrs. Jimenez offered to write a letter requesting I be assigned here, I happily agreed. She looked slightly surprised.

“Can I really teach without any experience?” I asked Eppy, the recruiter for the Philadelphia School District. Most districts require new teachers to have graduated with a bachelor's degree in education from a four-year college. Additionally, aspiring teachers had to log at least forty hours in the classroom training alongside a real teacher.

Eppy waved my concerns away. “Believe me, we need you more than you need us,” he said.

I had no direct experience in a classroom, but had always dreamed of being a teacher. I took several education classes my first year at Boston University, but I eventually switched to journalism because the classroom seemed too confining at such a young age. I wanted to go out and learn about the world first, and journalism was a vehicle to travel, meet new people, and explore different subjects. Immediately after college I moved to Chile for one year to write for a newspaper. Upon my return I was accepted into the
Inquirer
's two-year internship program where I gravitated to education and wrote of stories about testing, school life, and teachers' programs. For two years I volunteered in the Big Brother/Big Sister program of Philadelphia and for the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Club. I thought I would be better in high school, teaching maybe English, science, or history. I was imagining the famous teacher movies:
Stand and Deliver
,
Dangerous Minds
, and
Lean on Me
.

“The real need is in the middle schools,” he was saying. “I was a middle school teacher.” Eppy was overly friendly, like a salesman. He never stopped grinning and looking relaxed, even as he constantly interrupted our meeting to take phone calls that always seemed to involve an emergency.

We spent about two hours together on that first day, and by the end Eppy convinced me to take middle school. He warned me to hurry with my application forms, though, because it was already July.

“It's not the eleventh hour, Christina. It's quarter to twelve.”

I had a million things to get: a criminal-record check, a doctor's physical, and a form from the FBI saying I had no reported history of child abuse in Pennsylvania. And I needed to enroll in a certification program at a university. After years writing about education, interviewing principals, reading about the troubles of urban schools, and pleading to see a real classroom in action, I was excited that I'd finally be able to uncover how schools really work.

At twenty-five, I was full of determination to change the world and make a difference. A year as an inner-city teacher would be a chance to help children in need. Why were inner-city schools failing? Maybe I'd find the solutions, perhaps even write about it afterward. But I'd worry about that part later. I hadn't been in middle school in more than a decade. I didn't even know any twelve-year-olds. The school district wasn't really going to let me do this ... were they?

While I waited for Eppy to process my application I devoted all of July to training myself to be a teacher. I read
The First Days of School
, by Harry and Rosemary Wong. Rather than comforting me, it opened my eyes to how much I didn't know. What was a lesson plan? How did I decorate a classroom? How did I discipline a child? How would I get parents involved?

I pored over teaching books that explained concepts like name charts, pencil-sharpening procedures, and positive reinforcement. I learned all kinds of new details about preteens that I had long forgotten, such as the most important thing a child wants on the first day is security. Transition frightens them, and teachers should explain every small detail, such as how to pronounce the teacher's name and classroom locations and schedules.

I scribbled down tips for myself: “Don't mark X on the answers that are wrong, just mark C on the answers that are correct.” “Never, ever raise your voice.” “Teach a new vocabulary word each day, and call it, ‘Word of the Day.'” The most important thing was to “plan and plan extra.”

My boyfriend, Pete, helped. He was tall, handsome, outdoorsy, and the only person who supported my dream to teach. He was in his first year of residency at a local hospital, but before medical school, Pete had taught for a year in New York City. He was encouraging and gave me solid advice, such as “never kick a student out of class to be disciplined. That sends the message that you aren't the authority. Handle all your own discipline.” Together, we reviewed his old lesson plans.

“Just remember that you're in charge. The most important thing is discipline,” he said. “You gotta sit them down first, then teach.”

He told me not to smile until Thanksgiving, either. “There are two different types of teachers—the ruler-cracker and loving pushover. Who are you going to be?” He explained that, in his school, the female teacher across the hall from him was soft and fuzzy, and won over the kids with warmth. Her class was always chaotic, but the students covered her desk with gifts at Christmas. They listened because they loved her.

Pete was the opposite, a real “hard-ass” teacher who demanded quiet and didn't let the kids get away with anything. When a fight broke out in the hallway one morning, he'd jumped in and put a red-faced boy in a headlock, pushing the kid's chin into the floor. The rest of the students saw this and knew not to mess with him. He never let the slightest infraction slide. That may sound harsh, he said, but these kids craved borders. My strictness would pay off, and I'd be glad, he promised. For example, he recalled a day in the spring when he conducted a physics experiment. He was able to leave half his class unattended while he and several other students went to another floor to study velocity. His students behaved. Other teachers saw this and marveled at his control. He bragged for ten minutes about it. When he reminisced about teaching, he grew nostalgic.

“This will be the best thing you've ever done,” he said, giving me a hug.

Then he gave me a piece of advice.

“Never enter a showdown you can't win,” he said.

“A showdown?” I asked.

He nodded. That night he demonstrated a judo move in which I was to grab his wrist, wrap it around in a circular orbit, and grip him in a headlock. This could nail someone in three seconds, regardless of weight. I tried it a few times, but it didn't really work when I did it.

“Just in case,” Pete said.

My family was much less supportive.

“Are you crazy?” said Jon, my brother, a twenty-seven-year-old stockbroker who lived in a mini-mansion in the New York suburbs. “Don't you know what happened to Jonathan Levin? Is that what you want to happen to you?” he asked.

Jonathan Levin was the wealthy son of then Time Warner chair Gerald Levin. He had eschewed his family fortune and fame to become a beloved English teacher in an underprivileged school in the Bronx. In 1997, two of his students arrived high on drugs at his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment, robbed him, and shot him to death.

“That's not going to happen,” I said uncertainly.

“Why do you have to do that? Do what your friends are doing,” he said.

Most of my friends were setting off for well-paying jobs with Internet start-ups or glamorous new magazines or in bureaus of the
Wall Street Journal
or
The New York Times
. Why didn't I want to do that, too? I didn't know. I wanted to “make a difference in a child's life,” as the Philadelphia Department of Education recruitment posters promised. I felt like the failing inner-city schools were an injustice that I should stand against, not only with words, but with real action, especially these days, as the economy boomed and people in their twenties were becoming Internet millionaires overnight. In the newspaper the other day, I read that some rich Wall Street guy rang up a $200,000 tab at a restaurant and left the waiter a $40,000 tip. Yet, in the same city there were children who lacked textbooks. Something was wrong with this. Once inside the schools, I would understand the problems and then find solutions. I could take those solutions to politicians and make a change in schools across the nation.

“Go into advertising, real estate, finance,” Jon was saying. “You're crazy. It's the ghetto. It's dangerous.”

I didn't say anything. I couldn't articulate my beliefs, and I couldn't stand up to my brother. He filled the silence.

“Oh, man, wait until Dad hears this one,” he laughed. “Dude, I'm going to earn your annual salary in one day.”

As the summer drew to a close, the Philadelphia schools still needed to recruit hundreds of warm bodies. It offered $1,500 sign-up bonuses. A few hundred more signed on, and a couple hundred additional bodies joined in September and October. Like me, they would be too late for the one-week induction seminar, so they received no training at all. I didn't want to imagine the kind of unqualified, uninterested teacher who would take the job at the last minute just for the sign-up bonus.

By the time school started, more than eleven hundred random people—one in ten teachers—had wandered off the street and been handed classroom keys. They were directed to the most troubled schools, and when September started they stood in front of their classrooms. They had no educational experience, no guidance, no instruction, and scant support. Like me, many had no clue how to teach.