Relentless Pursuit (43 page)

That night was the prom. Chad felt terrible, but as an administrator he was required to be there. It was held at the Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles in one of the lower-level ballrooms. The senior prom at Locke was always over-the-top. Chad would never forget his first one: it seemed that all the kids came dressed in purple coats, with canes and hats with feathers. And Ms. Talley, one of the longtime teachers, was there checking out the girls' gowns. When she spotted the ones who had arrived with slits in their dresses up to their hips, she said: “Nope. We're sewing that shut. Come with me.” Then she took them upstairs, sat down at a sewing machine, and had them wait while she made them decent.

The 2006 prom was tame by comparison. Kids still pulled up in Hummer limos, and there was the occasional purple fur coat with silver gloves (and one kid in a pink tux and hat to match), but most of the boys wore white tuxedos or tasteful suits. The girls were in gorgeous, one-of-a-kind ball gowns, many designed and sewn by family or local seamstresses. Some couples came color-coordinated, with the boy's shirt matching the girl's dress. They looked beautiful. And maybe it was the clothes, or the occasion, but there seemed to be a measure of gravitas about them, a sense that they had stepped up, that they had a place in the world. Seven or eight hotel security men circulated throughout the ballroom, and two of Locke's own campus policemen were there, too, but they had nothing to do except watch as the strobe lights pulsed and the kids danced in time to the incessant rhythms of reggaeton, rap, and hip-hop.

Even a little dustup over the naming of the royal court didn't spoil the fun. There had been a short campaign on campus before the kids cast their ballots for king, queen, and attendants. The problem was, when the results were counted, the winners were all Hispanic.

“We are a diverse school, and that has to be represented in the court,” Wells told the staffers overseeing the counting. One of the senior advisors objected: “They don't see themselves as black and brown. It's the senior class. They voted, and you should honor their vote and let this happen.”

Wells stood firm. He decided that there would be two princes, and one of them would be black—the kid who had come in a close second. When the court was announced, the only ones to complain were the two runners-up for Prom Queen. They wanted queen to be a shared title, too.

It had been a very difficult day, and Chad was in a funk all night. When he arrived, it was as if he and Wells had never had that awful conversation earlier in the day. Wells was asking Chad's advice—almost deferring to him: What do you think about this? And how about that? Chad was thinking,
Dude. How about if I just go home, since you told me today to leave.
He stayed as long as he could stand it. At eleven-fifteen he said the hell with it and left.

On his way out, he passed the bar where all the TFAers and other staff were hanging out. They were having a great time. About thirty-five of them had met for dinner downtown before heading over to the Biltmore en masse. They were dressed up, too: the first-years didn't look much older than the students. When the music got too loud and the female teachers tired of being asked to dance, they had moved the party to the bar. It was another one of those moments when Taylor and Hrag and Rachelle and Phillip were all reminded that there were some things that were common across zip codes and cultures. The senior prom was one of them.

The prom happened to coincide with USC's graduation. While Taylor was up at the bar, she bumped into some Greeks she had known from the year before. They looked like they had just walked out of a J. Crew ad—gorgeous, wealthy white kids. When they asked Taylor why she was at the Biltmore, she told them she was a teacher and that she was chaperoning the Locke prom. They were drunk, and they didn't get it; they couldn't understand what Taylor was doing with these black kids dressed up like Lil' Bow Wow. If Taylor needed any reminding of how happy she was to be teaching at Locke, she got it then.
Under no circumstances would I want to be back at USC. These people are so ignorant. My life is so different now—and so much better. This is the richest experience anyone could have right out of college. I am so fortunate.

         

The days flew by. Once the prom was over, the seniors thought they were finished. But Taylor kept working them. They couldn't read. She couldn't let them out in the world like that; it felt wrong. She didn't let up on her ninth-graders, either. They had started reading
Romeo and Juliet
in April. For Taylor, everything she had been trying to do all year came together then. And there they were, kids who were reading like fifth-graders in September dissecting and interpreting Shakespeare! It was unreal. Her kids from Watts were doing what ninth-graders all over the nation were doing—and doing it well.

She knew from the very first day of
Romeo and Juliet
that the kids were going to get it. She started by having them make a T-chart of all the words in the prologue that had to do with love and hate. “You already know all about foreshadowing and connotations,” she told them. “So you know how to analyze a Shakespeare play! Notice, we have positive-connotation words and negative connotations. The point is, we think
Romeo and Juliet
is all about love—but there is hate in there as well.” Taylor pointed out that the first word Shakespeare used in the play was “two,” and they talked about pairs—how it took two people to love and two people to fight. Who started the fight between the two families? she asked. And could anyone else think of examples where old people start wars their kids have to fight?

Vishon, a really smart African American boy, raised his hand. “The Bloods and the Crips,” he said. “The older folks, they put it in their heads to go out there and kill other people that haven't done anything to you. You go shoot them. If it's a park picnic and they see a Blood, they gonna start fighting.”

They made the connection. And they were hooked. Over the weeks that followed, Taylor read aloud from the play, stopping after every few sentences to check for understanding with text-related questions. She had the kids act out passages. She played scenes from the Leonardo DiCaprio movie. They wrote essays. She even had them create CDs with songs that best described their favorite character in the tragedy. Everything she did from mid-April until the very last day of school was centered around reading and understanding that play. She knew they had internalized the material when they played a game of
Jeopardy!
in preparation for the final. Her kids could identify lines, characters, scenes, themes, symbols, irony, and foreshadowing. They had a blast—they cheered and jeered, arguing over which teams knew more.
Romeo and Juliet
was their favorite thing they had done all year. They knew it, understood it, loved it.

Before the year was out, Taylor called each student to her desk to review reading comprehension scores over the year. Vishon was the second student up. He had started the year reading at 5.7 and ended at 8.7. “Awesome!” she said. “Your overall growth is three years. What could help you improve even more?”

“Just keep reading,” he said. Did he have books at home? He was welcome to take some from the class library. “Congratulations, Vishon. You met our class goals. I am very proud of you.”

Not everything she said to every person amounted to a big wet kiss. She told others they could do better: they needed to buckle down, and she would help them.

Throughout June, she deconstructed her classroom bit by bit. By the last day, the walls were bare. And as the classroom grew increasingly more forlorn, she did, too, in a funny way. Part of her couldn't wait for the year to be over; she and and Hrag were going to go camping on Catalina, and then she was meeting a friend in Europe. But the other part of her was worried that she'd miss the drama too much. One day she saw a young woman her age walking a bike up a hill. The sun was shining, and she looked so carefree, and Taylor thought,
That's where I want to be—I want to be on that bike.
But then she'd be having a good time somewhere and one of her kids' faces would pop into her head, and her mind would get the best of her and she'd start worrying:
My God, I wonder what Marisa is doing.
Even the whole notion of teaching was confounding:
I don't know if I'm good enough and I don't know if I want to stay to get better.

On the last day of class, after the kids had taken their final, she handed each student a glass. Then she passed out Oreos and apple juice. “Listen up, ladies and gentelmen!” she exclaimed. “The reason I gave you glasses is because when somebody does something admirable or congratulatory, you give them a toast. So raise your glasses, please, in a toast to accomplishment!” She reminded them of the two class goals they had set in September: to get 80 percent or higher on tests and quizzes, and to raise reading levels by one and half to two grades. “As a class we met our big goals. So raise your glasses!”

The kids hoisted their cups, and Taylor went around the room until she had clinked every last one.

         

Hrag gave the final test on the second-to-last day of class so that he and the kids could grade their papers together on the last day, before the party. He was in a great mood. The end was approaching.

The day before, he had been pushed to the limit. He'd been in a fender bender—a result of stress, he figured—and after he picked up the car from the auto-body shop, he had gone for a run. The running was something that he had finally fit into his schedule. He had started the school year overweight and out of shape. His sister had been nagging him about it, so he and Taylor got on a program: no more red meat, yogurt for lunch instead of a sandwich, exercise. It was working. He had lost fifteen pounds. But somewhere on his run his house key had fallen from the drawstring of his shorts. He spent the rest of the day trying to recover. Taylor took his scheduled appointment with Samir, and he ran around in circles trying to right his life.

Now, when the kids were all seated, he asked, “You guys ready? Are you gonna cry? I'm gonna explain how to take the test real fast, but first I want to congratulate you all for finishing your year of biology. I'm extremely proud of you and extremely impressed. This was one of my best classes. My e-mail address is up on the board. If you ever get very sad, when it's around 1:52 in the summer, because you are not getting your minds blown away somewhere else, contact me.”

After the kids were done, he gave them ten minutes in which they could ask him any questions they wanted. They had been peppering him with questions about himself all year. Just a few days before, Jordan, a big friendly kid in his crazy fifth period, said: “I think I know your name. It's between Manuel and H-R-A-G.”

Another kid, stumbling over the pronunciation, said: “It's Hrag Hamalian, right?” Hrag told him he was close. So it came as no surprise that the first question they wanted answered after the test was “What is your full name?”

“Hrag Manuel Hamalian,” he responded.

Next up: How old are you?

“Twenty-three,” he said.

“Twenty-three?” they said in surprise.

“Any other questions?”

Jimar, a fifth-period regular, raised his hand. “Can you give me an A?”

“That's it?” said Hrag. “No more questions? If you need to shed a tear for the end of the class, I have plenty of napkins up here!”

And that
was
it. He had spent the whole year hiding his identity, and all they really wanted to know was his name and age.

There were only two half days left, and the kids couldn't stop saying his name. But they had difficulty pronouncing it, until Derrick figured it out. “It's like the Dodge commercial,” he said. “‘Like a rock.'”

Before they left for good, a few kids came up to Hrag.

“I thank you, man,” said Derrick.

Martin chimed in: “You my favorite teacher, Mr. H. You cool.”

“I'm gonna miss you, Mr. H!” said Tiana. “I love you!”

“Well, he love Miss Rifkin,” concluded Jimar.

         

Back in September, a few days before school started, Rachelle had done something that had never been done before at Locke—something other teachers, and even Dr. Wells, mentioned whenever her name was brought up. She had gotten her room assignment, and when she checked it out, room 241 was little bigger than a broom closet—and unbelievably ugly. It was painted the same color as every other room in Locke—a kind of pasty cream, a color that would only ever be seen in an institution.

She couldn't bear the thought of being in that awful little room all day for an entire school year. And she figured that if she felt that way, the kids probably wouldn't enjoy it much, either. So she decided to paint it. She went to the store, picked out a lovely aquamarine paint, and got to work. She didn't have a ladder, so she just stood on a filing cabinet and pushed it from wall to wall until the job was done. Then she decorated the walls.

Everyone who walked into her room was shocked.

“Did you ask anyone?” they asked.

“No,” she replied.

“Well, you can't do that!” they insisted.

“Well, nobody told me I couldn't,” she shot back. Besides, even if someone didn't like the idea of a teacher painting her own room, Rachelle was pretty certain—even back then—that nobody was going to do anything about it.

After the year was over, she knew for sure. The color of room 241 would be aquamarine till the day they tore the building down.

Even before the trip to Catalina, many of Rachelle's classroom management issues had disappeared. Kids were always in her room during lunch, and though she never allowed them in, they thought of her room as a safe haven, a place to go when they were ditching other classes. Franco and Pedro, quiet boys who were great friends, came to her room every day before school to see if she needed any help, or just to hang. If she had forgotten anything in her car, she would give them the keys, and they would rummage around in the clutter for whatever it was she needed. When she wasn't taking care of her kids, she was helping Stephen with his. Whichever players couldn't fit into Stephen's car would hop into hers, and she'd ferry them to their games and practices.