Radical (6 page)

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“You spend all your time here inside the school building,” she said. “You have to let our children know you are part of the community. You can't be afraid of going to their houses. Show up at their door. Let their parents know what their kids are doing in your classroom. Make yourself a real part of their lives.”

The next day Craig Washington refused to stop talking during our math lesson and pinching the girl in front of him.

“Keep it up,” I said, “and I am going to walk you home after school. Let's see what your mother has to say about how you behave in our class.”

He laughed and kept cutting up. I guess he figured it was another one of my empty threats.

When school let out I found Craig, tapped him on the shoulder, grabbed his hand, and said, “Let's go, son,” just like I imagined Rhoda Jones would.

We started walking. Much as he tried to maneuver out of my grasp, I kept his hand in mine. His buddies along the way stopped and watched.

“Hey,” one said, “there goes Craig with his teacher. She has to hold his hand. Little boy needs to have his hand held!”

Craig was pained the entire walk home. I, however, took pleasure in the taunting, hoping it might dissuade Craig from taking actions that would warrant further hand-holding. “I ain't no little boy!” he argued back to his friends. “I don't even know who this crazy lady
is
!”

It was a long way to Craig's house. He lived out of the neighborhood. Sweating profusely, I knocked on the door. His mother answered. I explained that her son had been acting out in class and making it hard for me to teach.

“He's ruining it for the rest of the students,” I said.

“Don't worry, Ms. Rhee,” she said. “I'll get on him. Trust me, this won't happen again. Right, Craig?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Craig replied.

And it didn't.

I visited more homes. In some I met with parents willing to help. Others were too surprised to comment, and a few wouldn't even open their doors. But I came away from each visit with a better understanding of my students and what they were up against. I adjusted my teaching accordingly.

Once word started to get around that Ms. Rhee was out in the neighborhood, and that I was often the first one in the parking lot and the last car out, even the drug dealers and the older kids who hung out on the corners and stoops started to take notice. I tended to park on the street, rather than in the teachers' lot. One evening I left school just before dark and walked to my car. I passed a few men sitting on a stoop.

“Hey, Ms. Rhee,” one of them said. “Don't worry. We're looking out for your car.”

I smiled and wondered how they knew my name.

At the end of April, when the monitors from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, came back to my classroom, they said, “These kids are actually learning something. This is not a great classroom yet, but you have definitely turned it around.”

After the doubts and the welts, I was relieved. I had never failed at anything. For me, quitting was failure. I understood how difficult and depressing teaching could be, but I also caught a glimpse of its rewards.

D
URING THE SUMMER AFTER
my first year, I didn't work another job. Liz, Deepa, and Rose were driving cross-country to California. I chose not to join them. I spent all summer preparing to teach again.

A few of my aunts were visiting from Korea, so I put them to work cutting out shapes for my students. It was a little sweatshop of Korean ladies. They gabbed and gossiped and made bags of shapes that I could use to teach math.

At Harlem Park we didn't have a lot of books, so I went to my dad's medical office every day and photocopied books. I made lesson plans. I kept Bertha Haywood's advice in mind and tried to come up with surprise lessons. And then in August, I shoved everything in my car—the photocopies and the bags of shapes—and drove back to Baltimore for my second year.

I arrived early to set my whole room up. I was big into colors and making the room super exciting. And so I had made all these posters with bright colors, and I set up beanbag chairs so it was the kind of place you would want to come into. It was a place of learning and fun and surprises.

I had changed, as well. My new students would see a different Ms. Rhee. This time around, Ms. Rhee was not going to play. When I met my students for the first time, I wore my game face. No smiles, no joy; I was all thin lips and flinty glares. I made them line up and walk in and out of class.

“Nope,” I said. “Not good enough. Try again.”

They lined up in the hall again and walked into the classroom.

“Again,” I said. Four times.

My mistake the first year was trying to be warm and friendly with the students, thinking that my kids needed only love and compassion. What I knew going into my second year is that what my children needed and craved was rigid structure, certainty, and stability, as well.

O
VER THE SUMMER
I had taken some time to attend a professional development seminar set up by the educational consultants who had taken over the school. It was about how to teach math to kids. I am not mathematically inclined, so I thought it would be interesting but not very useful. But that professional development wound up changing my life.

I believe that if you give engaged, motivated people a kernel of crucial information, they'll take the kernel and grow it into something ten times more valuable. But you've got to give them something. That summer math course became my kernel. I learned how to teach Calendar Math, a system that launched a whole array of teaching tools and activities based on the numerical day of the week. The kids took it from there. They soaked it up.

Every day we did an exercise called Incredible Equations. We would take the number of the date (8 if it was March 8) and the kids would have to come up with different equations that equaled 8. At first, they'd come up with simple ones, like 4 + 4 or 8 + 0, but then some of them would get creative.

“One hundred minus ninety-two,” they'd say.

I would respond: “Great! You know what? There is another way to write one hundred, and that is ten times ten.” So I didn't teach them the concept around multiplication; I just showed them another way to write 100, and they latched on to that. And then I taught them to put a parenthesis around it and subtract 92, which gets you 8. Which is algebra. And so they just picked up on these things very naturally. Then we learned that 10 x 10 x 10 is 10-cubed, and we went on from there.

Year two was my first successful year in the classroom.

T
HAT SECOND YEAR, WHEN
I relied on Calendar Math, the teachers in our grade decided to do something a little different. We each wanted to be able to focus on a smaller number of subjects so we could really concentrate on becoming an expert in that arena. I had teamed up with Michele Jacobs, a first-year teacher, who would also teach math while the other two teachers taught language arts. Michele had graduated from Morgan State, where she had played basketball. She stood about six two and cut a commanding figure, so the students didn't mess with her. For me, she brought a sense of humor and enthusiasm and became a kindred spirit in the belief that all kids could achieve. We hit it off and coordinated all of our lesson planning.

The following year, my third, Michele and I teamed up again. We decided to go one step further and bring seventy kids together into one classroom. Instead of trading classes back and forth, we were all going to be in the same space with two teachers. We also had two wonderful “interns,” Deonne Medley and Andrea Derrien, who worked alongside us very effectively.

We ran our entire classroom using a different model. We evaluated each student's progress academically, since we had some advanced kids and some kids who were really far behind. We tailored lessons for every single student. It was part of the Education Alternatives Inc. model that we were supposed to be implementing. We did everything in small groups. We set up this system and bought seventy Tupperware tubs, one for each student. The kids filled the tubs with their notebooks, pencils, books, and other supplies, then slid them under their chairs. They moved from station to station with their tubs. I would set an egg timer. Ten minutes . . . boom. Once the students heard the egg timer go off, they knew they had thirty seconds to grab their tubs and go to the next station.

Each station had a table, and the group of tables was arrayed in an oval in the large classroom. Each table had ten chairs. One station was devoted to journal writing. Every Monday, they would respond to the journal prompt. That night, Michele and I would read the drafts and correct every paper, and the next day return it to the student for a rewrite. It was immediate and time-intensive for us—no chance to slack off if we weren't feeling like correcting seventy papers—but it worked. The children understood and followed the writing process and became good little authors.

At the listening station, students could hear chapters of books they were reading. Michele would follow at another station where the students would read from their assigned books, and she would instruct them in specific reading skills. At another, I would use flash cards to teach phonics.

It ran like clockwork. Students who were way behind made quick progress; decent readers got better. Even after just the first semester, every student was reading at a higher level, and by the end of the year, they were far ahead of their peers.

I had added reading to math in my instructional expertise the summer after my second year. The folks at Teach For America had gotten wind of my success at Harlem Park, and they invited me to be an instructor for new corps members in Texas. While I was in Houston, I met Kevin Huffman, who gave me pointers on reading. He also won my head and heart. We started dating and knew from early on that we would get married. Kevin taught me how to teach reading through a program called Direct Instruction. I photocopied all of his materials, brought them back to Baltimore, and put them to use. I created small, flexible groups. If a student was in one group and started doing really well, he could move up to another group. Things were very fluid. That's how we did everything; we were able to tailor instruction for each student. Some were learning how to spell
rat
; some were knocking out
meticulous
. Some could read picture books, and others could read
James and the Giant Peach
, by Roald Dahl.

It worked. We could see improvement immediately.

E
DUCATION
A
LTERNATIVES
I
NC., THE
private education company Mayor Kurt Schmoke had brought in to improve Harlem Park, offered seminars on new teaching tools it had developed. Because I attended some of the seminars and used a few of their methods, which most of the veteran teachers scoffed at, I became a poster child.

When word got around that I was having success, Education Alternative executives started showing up to observe my classes. They liked what they saw and asked if I would accompany them to speak with teachers at public schools on the East Coast about their model. Why not? We gave presentations in Hartford, Connecticut, where Education Alternatives was trying to contract with the public schools. The presentations went well. Then we traveled to Washington, D.C., for a community meeting with teachers.

I remember pulling up to Clark Elementary School, a low-slung building on Kansas Avenue in a middle-class, African American neighborhood. The parking lot was jammed. The auditorium was filled, mostly with teachers. The Washington Teachers' Union had packed the hall. Jimmie Jackson, union president at the time, had primed her teachers to pounce.

When I got up to describe how I had used the math tools to improve my students' skills, Jackson stood up and accused me of buying into the profiteers' propaganda and ploy to try to take over the schools.

I was a bit shocked. I had seen a fair amount of pushback from some of my colleagues at Harlem Park. But the level of animosity directed at me seemed over-the-top.

I continued to talk about lesson plans and new tools for teaching.

“Whore!” someone yelled from the audience.

“Okay,” I thought—“that's a first.” I finished my presentation and sat down. I was uncomfortable. The rudeness and flat-out verbal violence were shocking, but it didn't seem endemic of the teachers union. I attributed it to rigid bureaucracy—to old-school people who were resistant to change.

W
HEN MY CLASS BEHAVED
well for an entire week, I would often reward a group of students with a trip to another Baltimore neighborhood. Some of my students rarely ventured more than ten blocks from their homes, so this was always a treat. We would go to Chuck E. Cheese's for lunch or spend a Saturday afternoon at National Harbor. Early in my third year, I got the bright idea to take the class on a real trip.

“Who's been on an airplane?” I asked the class.

We were reading a book about the Wright brothers and early air travel at the time. Not one hand went up.

“Really?” I asked. “No one in this class has been on an airplane? Okay! Who
wants
to go on an airplane?”

There was a buzz in the room. “No way!” some said. “We could fall out of the sky!” “I'm too scared!” said others. “YEEEAAAAAAH!” screamed some of the boys.

Eventually, every hand shot up.

Southwest Airlines was just starting up in Baltimore at the time, and they were advertising round-trip flights from Baltimore to Cleveland for forty-nine dollars each way. Cleveland is not far from Toledo. I thought, “Why not raise funds and take the whole class there?”

Our class held raffles and sponsored carnivals and put on bake sales. I convinced Education Alternatives to front a few thousand dollars for the airline tickets. My father's doctor friends agreed to sponsor students. We planned a three-day trip for the third grade. We bought plane tickets, rented hotel rooms, and organized ferry rides. The kids were excited out of their minds. And scared.