The Great Expectations School (19 page)

My pulse quickened.
She hadn't known about the transfer.
Or had she? I thought she did. What was going on?

“It's all right, Sony. I'm going to miss you too. But Ms. Adler's a great teacher and I'm going to check in on you all the time.”

Olga, Sonandia's mother, left her post between the two lunch-rooms and relieved Julissa and Gladys V. of back-patting duty. Sonandia continued crying. “I don't want to leave Mr. Brown. Please!” She and her mother spoke in Spanish, and Sonandia cried harder.

Everything happened quickly. I dashed to Mr. Randazzo, who was supervising the fifth-grade cafeteria.

“Dan, what's up? You okay?”

“Mr. Randazzo, I know I'm a new teacher and I've been knocked around a bit. But I'm on my feet now, and the class is really improving…”

“I know. I'm hearing the screaming through the wall less and less.”

“I know that both of us were kept out of the loop in the decision to move Sonandia. Her work has been excellent with me, though, and she's improving…”

“I just told her she was going to Karen in the afternoon.”

“I know. But she doesn't want to move. She's crying her eyes out right now.”

“What?”

“Can we give this some more time? I want some more time. A couple weeks.”

“Let's go see what this is all about.”

Mr. Randazzo and I walked to Sonandia and her mother, making an impromptu summit of the four key players in this crisis. Randazzo said, “Ms. Tavarez, if Sonandia doesn't want to make the switch, going to the new class could actually
hurt
her. She's not going to do her
best work if she's unhappy.” Sonandia nodded in concurrence. “Maybe we should let her stay with Mr. Brown if that's what she wants.”

Ms. Tavarez, put on the spot, pursed her lips. “Okay,” she said.

I wanted to burst into a wild touchdown dance, but I kept a straight face and nodded slightly and gratefully. Sonandia's reaction surprised me. Her tears stopped, but she said nothing and stared blankly ahead. Then she put her head down again. I think she was ticked at all of us for putting her through this.

On the D train home, tears trickled from me for the first time since I became a teacher. What a turnaround! My emotional swell soon gave way to a heartening realization. I no longer needed lofty aphorisms to propel me. My concrete reason to stick with it was gloriously clarified. Every day from here on I owed to Sonandia for standing up for me, for wanting me to be her teacher. She brought me back.

As of Monday, the SFA cycle was over, which meant Fran Baker and my ninety-minute midmorning respite from 4-217 were temporarily gone, and I would miss them terribly. Now I had to plan for three-and-a-half- and four-and-a-half-hour blocks and I wasn't used to it.

My Success for All group had produced some bright moments. On the last day, Kelsie Williams attempted (with moderate success) to recite Robert Frost's “Fire and Ice,” which I had read and photocopied for them. When Mrs. Baker and I made a big fuss over Kelsie's performance, she timidly asked if she could read a poem that she wrote. Of course, Kelsie! She read a Halloween poem that I was sure she had composed as an assignment from her homeroom teacher, but our group showered her with applause, motivating other kids to write their own poems. I told the kids that I would always read and give performance time for any poems they would ever write in school or out, whether I was still their teacher or not. This led to several poets sporadically swinging by 217 throughout the year.

On Tuesday afternoon, a bubbly Ms. Richardson waltzed into my room, ostensibly free of crippling back pain, igniting a sea of
cheers. “I've got a great new position down in East Harlem,” she said, smiling. I was surprised and confused, but it was good to see Ms. Richardson one last time to let her know how much I appreciated her help.

At 3 p.m. on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, P.S. 85 breathed a massive gasp of relief. I booked it to Port Authority to catch a Greyhound home for the holiday weekend. I fell asleep as the bus inched down the traffic-swamped Jersey Turnpike, thankful for a nine-year-old Dominican girl in the Bronx.

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY CAN GET VERY COLD
very fast. Thanksgiving weekend had whizzed by, with my teaching stories being the star attraction at the big family dinner. No one could believe the insanity in P.S. 85. I raked leaves and watched football with my dad, had long talks with my mom, and snuggled with our little ChihuahuaPekingese, Mac. But in a blink, I was back in 4-217.

“If I am planning a trip from California to Idaho, which country's map should I use?” I asked. Several kids consulted their individual maps, but no hands went up. I called on random students, who shrugged blankly. I held up my placemat-sized North America map and pointed crazily at California and Idaho. “What country am I looking at?” Still nothing. “Sonandia, help me out.” Sonandia didn't know. “It's the U.S.A.!” I boomed. “It's our country!”

A few reluctant nods happened around the room. I pointed more. “If I travel from Texas to Louisiana, what
country
am I in? Julissa?” Julissa looked down at her worksheet.

“It's not on your paper. Just look and listen.” I pointed at Dallas and traced my way to New Orleans. “What
country
am I pointing at?

“The U.S.A.!” I exclaimed. “Who knows what U.S.A. stands for?” No reaction. I wrote “
U
nited
S
tates of
A
merica” on the board. “How many states are in the U.S.A.?”

“Fifty!” two dozen kids chimed in unison.

“Correct. Can anyone tell me which one of those fifty states we are in right now?”

Silence. Jennifer and Sonandia slowly raised their hands. I called on Jennifer. “Is it New York?”

“Yes! We are in New York State, and we're also in New York City, which has how many boroughs?”

“Five!”

“And which one are we in?”

“The Bronx!”

“Good. Back to the whole country,
all
of this area is the U.S.A. See? These are the fifty states making up one big country, the United States of America, with one president. So look at my finger. If I drive from here, Florida, to here, Georgia, what country am I in?”

No answer. “The U.S.A.!” I exploded. “This is all the U.S.A.! This is what our country looks like on a map. U.S.A.! If I travel from Florida to Georgia, what
country
am I in?”

“U.S.A.”

“Yes. If I travel from Wyoming to Colorado, what country am I in?”

“U.S.A.”

“From Virginia to North Carolina, what country?”

“U.S.A.”

“Now look
very
closely. If I travel from here, Rosarita, to right here,
Mexico City,
what
country
am I in? Look carefully.”

“U.S.A.,” the class chanted.

I wanted to chalk up the scene to the post-holiday morning sleepies, but I couldn't. How could none of them know these things? I found out that the third-grade social studies curriculum is “World Cultures,” focusing on foreign continents. Second and first grades, depending on the teacher, often gloss over social studies in the interest of a math and literacy fundamental skills blitz. Without substantive discussion about civics at home, these inner-city kids had never learned their country, state, or, as I soon discovered, what planet they lived on.

I believed that knowing one's planet of origin was prerequisite to most other fourth-grade tasks. We had to get back to basics. As a
class, we made a large poster titled “Where Am I?” and mounted it on the door.

On Wednesday, I led my students to the third-floor computer lab for our second-to-last session. First-year Fellow and Menzel underling David de la O cracked the door open. “Ms. Menzel's out today. I'm real sorry.”

My students heard him and looked distressed. “That's fine,” I said. “I'll run the class.”

“I don't know, I don't think Ms. Menzel would like that. This is my lunch period, so I don't know if I can—”

“David, I'm an expert. I'll run the class. It's okay. We're going in.”

He nodded tentatively and I sent my kids in. To cheers, I proclaimed, “We're going on the Internet!” I directed them to a youth search engine, and from there, instructed them to look up some ideas from our Drugs & Alcohol unit.

The kids discovered a bunch of excellent educational sites, complete with full-color gross-out photos of cirrhosis-ravaged livers and emphysema-addled lungs. At the end of the period, Jennifer told me she used to think computers were boring, but now she was going to ask her mom to teach her how to use them.

My attempts to get help for Marvin Winslow met brick walls. The tutors who pulled out six of my students for a daily fifty-minute session would not take him because his skills were too low. Marge Foley sat and read with him for twenty minutes here and there when her erratic schedule allowed. Because of the unwritten rule explained by Dr. Kirkpatrick at the September meeting, I could not refer him for full-time special ed.

In the parking lot, Marvin's mother assured me that every night she told Marvin he was “the little train that could,” and whenever he feels he can't do something, he just needs to try harder. I responded that it was lack of fundamental skills, not lack of effort, that was keeping
Marvin down, fueling his low self-esteem and violent outbursts. I told her to read with him at home. She grimaced.

“I'm trying, but it's hard, Mr. Brown. I got four other kids and no husband, no job, and we're all staying with my mother. You understand?”

Some things were turning around. Although Bernard had begun the year fistfighting every day or two, he showed significant progress. With some stern words from his parents and my positive phone calls home and wild fits of praise for his self-control, he had not fought since the mid-November conferences.

Kids began understanding division and loving it. We learned long division through the traditional “
D
IVIDE
M
ULTIPLY
S
UB-TRACT
B
RING DOWN” method. I showed them the mnemonic DMSB = “Dear Mrs. Sally Barbour” that I learned from my magnificent third-grade teacher, Mrs. Barbour, back in Johnson Elementary. That nugget from my background lodged in their memory banks and prompted a renewed assault of personal questions for me to duck.

At dismissal on December 10, Hamisi told me, “Mr. Brown, the class changed. We were bad and now we're good!”

“Yes, I'm very proud of all of you. It's more fun this way, isn't it?” Everybody smiled, but I was skeptical of Hamisi's assessment. Just a day earlier, I had dealt him a lunch detention for sneaking Fritos and cursing and throwing the bag when I called him on it.

Four-two-seventeen was a giant ocean liner, with changes in course difficult to feel or measure. My energy high from retaining Sonandia, from keeping my head above water, had quickly dissipated in the daily grind. That ordeal had made me feel tempest-tossed, treading waves overboard, thrashing wildly for a life preserver. Now I was rescued from the violent drowning, but I still had a long way to go.

Elizabeth Camaraza was at the end of her rope with her third-graders. “They are
so
petty,” she said. “I need Christmas or pills and neither is coming fast enough.”

Trisha Pierson looked pale and shattered every time I saw her. First grade was no picnic. “Theo will be the death of me,” she said. “I will be a dead person. I won't be alive. I need to get back in a real grad school.”

Cat Samuels projectile-vomited into the second-floor faculty toilet after a full-day coverage job with Evan Krieg's fifth-graders. I went into Krieg's class during my prep to babysit the class crazies, but that wasn't close to enough to salvage her relentlessly chaotic seven hours.

Not counting computer man David de la O, Marnie Beck was the only first-year Fellow who resembled herself from pre–September 8. This was amazing, since she took her lumps as hard as anybody, working special ed down in the sequestered basement. She stoically told me, “Right now, it's all about maintaining. Just maintain till the holidays. Then it's a new year.”

Eddie Rollins won a districtwide art contest. Ava Kreps, a lower-grade art teacher, had pulled Eddie out of 217 almost daily throughout the fall to work on a gigantic holiday-themed collage, which now earned him a day trip to the borough president's office for a photo opportunity and cake. He came to school on the day of the celebration wearing a dirt-splotched dress shirt, with a striped rayon necktie in his hand. He and Mrs. Kreps didn't leave for the borough president's building until 10 a.m., so Eddie sat silently at his desk, embarrassed at his unhip clothes. Three years older than his classmates, he found his physical maturity already a scarlet letter to bear; having to wear this square outfit was more of a punishment than a reward.

When the kids shuffled out of the room for SFA, I stopped Eddie on his way to the door. The tie was now draped around his neck. “Let me help you with that,” I said, tying him a smart Windsor knot.

“Oh my God, that's adorable! I need to get a picture of that!” Marge Foley enthused, spotting us while passing in the hall.

The photo of Eddie and me was enlarged and mounted near the
office, where every fourth-grade class walks on its way to lunch. The next week, I heard Dennis say in the line, “Eddie, you look good with Mr. Brown. He's tying your tie!”

“Mr. Brown's the man,” Eddie replied.

I positively hadn't been “the man” according to Eddie before that picture existed. After its display, his somnambulistic demeanor changed, and he became one of my most engaged, trusted “team-mates.”

December 11 looked like it could be the first Thursday to pass without any major incidents. My newly invented “Twenty-Five-Second Challenge” proved an immensely effective vehicle for expediently moving the kids from their seats to the line. I told them my secret tabulation of successful Twenty-Five-Second Challenges would determine whether we would have a holiday party. For the dismissal line, I ticked down the seconds aloud in slow motion. The girls' line was perfect. Even Lakiya stood shoulders straight, looking dead ahead, amused by the swift uniformity. The boys looked good except for Marvin and Tayshaun, giggling about eight feet off the line.