The Great Expectations School (3 page)

When the meeting broke, I was directed to the aluminum annex in the parking lot. Inside the “minischool,” which houses kindergarten and first-grade classes, the environment was colorful and air-conditioned. Lively bulletin board displays lined the walls. Behind the windows of their classroom doors, teachers gestured exuberantly to rapt audiences of children. I couldn't restrain an excited grin.

I knocked on Mr. Rose's door in the middle of a lesson. “Hi, I'm Dan Brown from the Teaching Fellows.”

Mr. Rose was a tall black man with a deep voice. With a genuine smile, he shook my hand firmly and said, “Terrific. Mr. Brown, welcome.”

Mr. Brown.
Get used to it, I thought.

During “independent work,” a complete-the-sentence work-sheet on pronouns, I sat with two scowling boys, Theo and Jihard, who refused to write their names. “Jihard, if I were telling you about how much I like Theo's pen, I'd say I like
blank
pen. I like…” I waved at Theo and the pen.

Jihard frowned and mumbled, “His pen.”

“Yes! Excellent! In that sentence ‘his' and ‘Theo's' would mean the same thing. ‘His' is a pronoun for ‘Theo.' Because it's ‘his' pen and it's ‘Theo's' pen! And Theo, if I were telling you about how much I like… what's that girl in the black T-shirt's name?”

“Yollymar.”

Jihard interrupted, “That ain't Yollymar! Thas Daniella. She the line leader.”

“If I asked you where Daniella bought that black T-shirt, but I didn't know her name, what would I ask?” Theo looked at me blankly and stood up. “Theo, sit down. Fill in the blank for me: Where did… get that shirt?”

“How I'm supposed to know?” Theo grumbled.

“Where did
she
get that shirt,” Jihard stated.

“Yes! ‘She' and ‘Daniella' mean the same thing. ‘She' is a pronoun for ‘Daniella!' Jihard, you're a pronoun superstar. Theo, you get an assist.” I gave them both five, and they got to work on their sheets. Jihard handed back a perfect paper, and Theo got two correct out of twelve, an improvement over his previously blank page.

When the time came for me to leave Mr. Rose's class, Mafatu and Yollymar presented me with crayon pictures and roly-poly Cory Jones gave me a pencil drawing of the two of us holding hands.

I walked away from P.S. 85 full of excitement and relief. I had witnessed no violence, sexual harassment, or ultra-jaded zombie teachers as I had anticipated from my preconceived image of an inner-city school. If confused Theo and moody Jihard were the “problem kids,” the place didn't seem so bad. At least that's what I thought then.

*    *    *

Along with over seven hundred other Fellows, I was automatically enrolled in Mercy College, a graduate school contracted by the Department of Education to run the Fellows' coursework. Sarah Gerson, a third-grade teacher in Harlem, was my adjunct professor and “Fellow Advisor” for five hours each afternoon.

In the beginning, I kept a low profile at Fellow Advisor sessions, avoiding the group-hug atmosphere cultivated by Sarah and half of the group. I was also the youngest of the twenty-eight new teachers in the room. (The average age of a Teaching Fellow in 2003 was thirty-one.) We drew up unit plans, lesson plans, behavior plans, lists of rules, lists of routines, lists of ideal classroom materials, and lists of “higher-order thinking” questions. We wrote letters to ourselves, statements of our goals, statements of our strengths, and statements of our weaknesses. I distilled my goals into a sentence fragment: “Teach and model accountable character and citizenship while maintaining high expectations for helping students to become stronger problem solvers and self-motivated learners.” (The high expectations bit was inspired by my P.S. 85 visit.) We walked on rhetorical eggshells for two hours once, talking about the n-word. There were many mentions of dedication, immersion, passion, and commitment.

We were packing up our satchels after another jargon-heavy discussion about poverty when Sarah offhandedly articulated my un-ease: “I hope these discussions give you something good to think about, but they're really nothing compared to being in the real situation. What we're doing right now is like reading a book about sailing. On September eighth, you'll be out there, probably in a defective vessel, alone in stormy waters.”

After my structured observation at P.S. 85, I left letters for Mrs. Boyd and Ms. Chatton requesting an interview but received no response. Meanwhile, I had been assigned to spend my mornings as a seventh-grade apprentice teacher of summer school at M.S. 399, rumored to be the lowest-scoring middle school in New York City. The apathetic
students terrorized their milquetoasty math teacher Mr. Akimo (“Fuck this nigger!”) and shrugged at their imminent failure (“Seventh grade was out in the hall, man”). After a week, I submitted a grievance to the Fellows office, and over Independence Day weekend I received a miraculous e-mail informing me that I had been switched to familiar P.S. 85.

Heading up the P.S. 85 stairwell to the office to receive my classroom assignment on the morning of July 7, I came face-to-face with Mr. Rose. “Mr. Brown!” he called warmly, shaking my hand. He already had one Fellow in his room but said I should work with him too. In the office, he asked the secretary if I was needed anywhere specific. The baffled woman, apparently having no authority over Fellow room placements, shrugged.

Mr. Rose followed a tightly regimented program for the summer school half day. He did a half-hour read-aloud from
Help! I'm Trapped in the First Day of Summer Camp
by Todd Strasser, whose catalog includes
Help! I'm Trapped in the First Day of School, Help! I'm Trapped in the President's Body, Help! I'm Trapped in a Professional Wrestler's Body, Help! I'm Trapped in Santa's Body,
and
Help! I'm Trapped in a Vampire's Body.
Then the class moved on to Guided Reading, during which the teacher works intensively with one group while the other students do “focused activities,” or busywork. Mr. Rose made three small groups, and the days glided by on cruise control.

One day during Guided Reading, I noticed that Jimmarie looked particularly sad. Jimmarie Moreno-Bonilla was a pretty Puerto Rican girl who carried herself with a quiet grace. She rarely raised her hand, but she watched intently during my
Help! I'm Trapped in…
performances. (Mr. Rose had happily relinquished the read-aloud responsibilities to me after my hyperanimated first recital.)

I asked Jimmarie if she wanted to talk about what was bothering her. We moved to the back of the room and she started sniffling. She told me that her father was a bad man and she wasn't supposed
to see him, but he came over last night and started yelling and broke the phone. Now she couldn't talk to her grandma in Puerto Rico the way she did every other Sunday night. Also her grandma's planned Christmas visit to New York had been canceled because the ticket was too expensive.

Jimmarie used to live with her grandma in a house in Puerto Rico. She had her own white room that she could decorate however she wanted. Then her mother moved her to the Bronx, to Florida, back to the Bronx, back to Miami, then back to the Bronx. P.S. 85 had been her sixth school in three years. All she wanted was to return to Puerto Rico.

“My grandma is my heart,” Jimmarie said quietly, mostly to herself, in her perpetually hoarse voice. “From the floor to the moon, that's how much I love her.”

“Jimmarie, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard someone say about a grandma. You're a writer!”

“No, I'm no good at writing,” Jimmarie said quickly, immediately associating
writing
with the overwhelming and mundane assignments from her struggles in school.

“Let's do it together. We'll make a book about your grandma. We can call it
From the Floor to the Moon.
Do you want to work with me to make a book for her?” Jimmarie's face warmed for the first time into a smile and I felt my insides turn over.

In the following weeks, Jimmarie and I made time each day to talk out ideas for pages and pictures. She had great difficulty writing down ideas that she could articulate orally. Usually, she would stop writing after the first few words. I brought in my mini-cassette recorder and recorded conversations with her, out of which we selected and transcribed the highlights. After we had compiled a list of notes for each page, I gave Jimmarie crayons to draw corresponding pictures. I also shot a roll of photos for the book. Jimmarie said she felt like a star.

I scanned her drawings into my computer and printed them out
with her text on the page, leaving space on some pages for photographs. I bound three copies: one for Jimmarie, one for her grandmother, and one for me.

I think about my grandma so many times every day. I used to live with her in Puerto Rico, but now I live in New York City in the Bronx, so I miss her a lot. It's important for me to think about my grandma.

She always makes my favorite foods when we are together. She knows I love hot dogs and French fries and salad, but no salad dressing!

My grandma is a beautiful dancer. I love to watch her dance with my grandpa in her house.She will play a CD and they will dance, dance, dance.

She would dance with me too, but I really love it when she sings with me. She sings like a music star. We have the same voice.

My grandma always has the prettiest clothes and the prettiest shoes. My favorite is her red suit with black shoes. Her favorite color is red, so sometimes I think of red things when I think about her. And I think about her glasses and soft, black hair.

She also has the prettiest name. It is Migdalia Luz. I love my grandpa's name too. It is Juan Bonilla Rodriguez Nieve Cocseción Alberto Castro Martinez. I call him Poppy.

I have four imaginary cousins. Their names are Kimberly, Delma, Nachely, and Angelee. My grandma is their grandma too.

My grandma is my mom's mommy.My mom is the best mom in the world for me. You can tell my grandma was a good mommy to her.

My grandma was going to come visit my family and me in December, but the ticket costs a lot. I can still talk to her on some Sundays and write letters to her. When I talk to her, I get happy happy happy!

From the floor to the moon, I love you grandma!

I gave Jimmarie her two copies along with a hardcover of Sandra Cisneros's
The House on Mango Street,
thinking that she could identify with the author's inner-city Latina heritage, and we read the first two vignettes together. While we sat by her desk looking at her new books, Jimmarie gave me a tight hug, pressing her forehead into my shoulder, and whispered, “Thank you, Mr. Brown.”

*    *    *

As summer training neared its finish (the Fellows' last day was August 1, preceding a two-week break), I was agonizing over having no placement for the fall. Would I be teaching kindergarten math enrichment or a fifth-grade homeroom next month? Would I end up as a roving substitute? Many other Fellows were in the same powerless boat.

In the summer of 2003, the public school system in New York City was in a state of change. Even the name of the Board of Education was altered to the Department of Education, with its headquarters moving from 111 Livingston Street to 65 Court Street in Brooklyn. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had made education reform his keystone municipal issue, and newly appointed chancellor Joel I. Klein was his man for the task.

In addition to implementing overhauls in curriculum and testing (largely inspired by the No Child Left Behind Act), Bloomberg and Klein revamped zoning lines. The old system of thirty-two districts was scrapped and consolidated into ten larger regions. District 9, which previously covered the South Bronx and was also the setting for Jonathan Kozol's required Fellow reading
Amazing Grace,
and District 10, which contained the Mid- to North Bronx, became Region One. To me, this meant that my
Mummy Returns
pal Susan Atero from the placement fair disappeared and my signed District 10 commitment form became worthless.

The sweeping administrative changes led to communication breakdowns. Teacher vacancies were out there, but no one knew where. The placement fairs had been such a shooting gallery that deep into summer training almost a third of the new Teaching Fellows still did not know where they would be teaching in September. Two Fellows in Sarah Gerson's advisory group got suddenly “excessed” by schools that had overhired during placement fairs. Fellow Advisors, who had virtually no contact with the Region One office, encouraged us to cold-call schools.

The Fellows also learned that the $4,750 Americorps education grants were suspended indefinitely, so despite the promise of total
subsidization made during the application and orientation phases, ninety-five dollars would be deducted from each semimonthly paycheck to cover Mercy College classes. Sarah Gerson's room became a sea of bewildered head-shaking, like a bus tour group whose driver hasn't shown. That day was the first time I heard public education in New York described as “organized irresponsibility.”

On Tuesday, July 29, Mr. Rose's class received an unannounced visit from Ms. Sonia Guiterrez, P.S. 85's no-nonsense assistant principal with wild, frizzy orange locks who
always
dressed in tight black suits. She stormed the corridors in a perpetual power walk, often shouting commands in open classroom doors in the half moment she passed by. I had just begun leading the daily math period when Guiterrez entered. She sat in the back and observed with an inscrutable expression, leaving immediately at the lesson's end.

Two days later, on my last day at summer school, the principal, Mrs. Boyd, entered the room like Ms. Guiterrez, just after I'd commenced the math lesson. She took notes for the entire forty minutes and left the room. Several minutes later, I was summoned to the principal's office, where Mrs. Boyd held my résumé.

“Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown. Tell me about yourself. You went to NYU film school, I see. Is that Tisch?”