The Great Expectations School (35 page)

“Boys and girls, you will have many, many years of school in your lives. And this was one of them. No matter what happens, you were all in Mr. Brown's fourth-grade class together, and I hope you remember it. Good luck!” I drank my drink and everyone followed suit.

“That tastes good!”

“I'm-a get my mom to buy that!”

“It's healthy, too,” I said, and walked toward my desk to break up the meeting. Half of the class walked with me, shadowing my moves around the class for the rest of the morning.

“Last twenty-five-second challenge of the year. Let's see if we can make it!”

The kids lined up perfectly by the count of fifteen. “I knew 4-217 had the best lineruppers in the school,” I said. “You just kept it a secret all year.”

“Except when we won third place!”

“That's very true, Dennis.”

Marvin Winslow's mother came by to pick him up early. “Marvin had a good year this year,” she said.

You are nuts if you believe that, I thought. Then out loud, I replied, “Next year will be much better in Ms. Beck's class. He'll be able to start getting the help he needs.”

“Oh, we're moving to Manhattan. He ain't coming to
this
school no more. Marvin, hurry up!”

“What?”

“Oh yeah. I'm getting a job. Thank you! Good-bye, Mr. Brown! Come on, Marvin, I'm in a rush!” Marvin slumped out the door and was gone.

In the cafeteria, no one wanted to eat. I sat at the lunch table, surrounded by children. “Who wants to hear a true story?” I asked. Everybody. “I don't know if you remember this, but the first week of school was very tough for me.”

“We had Fausto!” Athena agreed.

“Well, there were a bunch of things. I had to yell a lot more than I ever wanted to. I hate yelling, especially yelling at kids, but I yelled all the time that first week, and there were fights and problems and I was really upset. But at dismissal on Friday of the first week, Jennifer, do you remember what you did?”

Jennifer grinned and blushed, looking at her shoes.

“It was a terrible day, and right when I let everyone go in the parking lot to go home, Jennifer said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Brown,' and she gave me a hug. It meant a lot to me. All the yelling and frustration was worth it if I had at least one student who appreciated what I was trying to do. I know there was more than one, but it didn't feel like it that first week, until Jennifer gave me that hug. Then she did it every day of the year, saying thank you and giving me a hug. It didn't cost her anything, but it saved me.” I looked at Sonandia. “You never know when the smallest thing that you do will change some-one's life.”

When Sonandia walked to the garbage can to chuck her untouched school lunch, I followed her, feeling I needed to say goodbye privately. I patted her shoulder, not knowing what to tell her. “I'm going to miss you, Sony.”

She shrugged. “I'll see you again.”

Soon it was time to line up and dismiss. We walked down the north stairwell, making a longer than usual walk across the width of the parking lot before reaching the awaiting parents. Seresa and Sonandia hugged me as soon as we got outside. Even
Lakiya
joined in the spirit.

“Thank you, Mr. Brown,” they said.

Jennifer hung back, looking unsteady. I stepped toward her. “Thank you, Jennifer, for everything.”

She hugged me and burst into tears. I felt the lump in my gullet start to expand out of control. We walked silently toward the crowd at the gate.

“Tiffany, come here. I want you to take care of him for me.”

Tiffany's mouth dropped open.
“Mr. Lizard?”

“I think he should live with you. The closet is too stuffy for him. Is that okay?” “Yes! Thank you!” Tiffany squeezed Mr. Lizard and giggled with surprise. My entourage and I continued toward the parents, my eyes getting more watery with each step.

Clara's aunt was the first to see me. “Oh boy, you're supposed to be happy!”

I replied quietly, “It's been a long year.”

“Oh no, Mr. Brown! You're going to make
me
cry!”

I looked at my crew for the last time. “Have a great summer, guys.”

“You too, Mr. Brown.” And they dispersed.

I stood by the door, frozen. Out of the milling pack of adults and children, Sonandia came running back, throwing her arms around me. A few seconds later, she was gone, out of sight.

I leaped up the steps three at a time, knowing a second's delay could spell disaster. I reached desolate 217, shut the door, and sat in a chair against the closet wall where no one from outside could see me.

On the first day of the following school term, I was in southern Croatia. Holed up in a villa outside the coastal city of Dubrovnik, overlooking the royal Adriatic Sea, I began recounting on paper my year in the Bronx. While at P.S. 85, I hadn't planned to write about my experience; I was simply focused on surviving it. Now I felt a compulsion to tell the story to
myself
, to relive the myriad failures and successes. The year had changed me. Alone in Europe, I pored over my dog-eared notebook.

After three months abroad, something else propelled me back to America: Colleen MacMillan. She was also a Fellow, a third-grade teacher at P.S. 70, a Bronx institution of 1,700 students. Our first date, dinner and drinks at downtown haunt 7A, was exactly a month before my planned departure for Europe. We laughed, told teaching stories, drank Long Island Iced Teas, and shared a quick kiss as I put her in a taxi at 3 a.m. I stood on the Houston Street sidewalk to watch the cab disappear in traffic. I
needed
to see Colleen again. The month became a whirlwind romance that put all my previous relationships in perspective. When we said goodbye at a Greyhound bus station, a shockwave of emotion overtook me. I was ridiculously in love with her.

I returned in time for Thanksgiving. I kept up with my teacher friends, as well as Sonandia, Seresa, and Jennifer via email. Sonandia thrived at the top of the PAC class and got accepted to a selective middle school academy in the Bronx. Seresa and Jennifer drifted apart, finding their niches with different groups of friends, though both had strong academic years and received solos in Karen's marvelous, reinvented
PAC show. Marvin Winslow did come back to P.S. 85 (enrolled in Ms. Beck's fourth-grade special ed class) on October 18, when his mom decided to stop keeping him at home. The family had never moved to Manhattan, but rather to a shelter in the Bronx. His mother had another baby, and Marvin missed over sixty days of school. When he came, he was relatively well behaved in his small class. Epiphany and Lakiya teamed up to raise hell in Marc Simmons's class. Eddie became an achiever in Evan Krieg's room and formed a friendship with Seresa's crowd. Destiny moved somewhere down the Grand Concourse, not to return to P.S. 85.

Eric Ruiz got moved up to fifth grade in spite of his dual Test failures and my recommendation to keep him back. This was in accordance with a much-rumored directive to promote the 2003–2004 fourth-grade failures and hold back third-graders scoring a “one” on any Test. The Department of Education's goal was to strengthen New York City's 2004–2005 fourth-grade population, whose February ELA scores would, prior to Mayor Michael Bloomberg's first reelection bid in November 2005, supply the definitive “after picture” data for measuring the effectiveness of the mayor's reforms. Needless to say, Bloomberg's political goals were met.

Dilla Zane retired, and P.S. 85 revised its stance on print-rich classroom environments. Under new leadership, the mania over bulletin boards was deemed excessive and unnecessary. Ms. Guiterrez likely would not again confront a teacher over the spelling of “announced,” although she continued to strike fear into the hearts of P.S. 85 rookies.

Weekly art periods were extended to the entire school, but the Visual Arts Club was discontinued.

Barbara Chatton does not mentor anymore. Sarah Gerson, my summer training Fellow Advisor, resigned from the Department of Education.

Besides Tim Shea, who defected for a pharmaceutical sales job, and me, however, all nine of the other Cohort 6 Fellows at P.S. 85 stayed to complete their two-year commitments and Mercy College
master's degrees. Each graduating Fellow received $4,750 in tuition reimbursement from Americorps. As of June 2011, five of my fellow Fellows, including Trish Pierson and Cat Samuels, are still teaching at P.S. 85.

Watchdog advocacy group Inside Schools rated P.S. 85 three stars out of five, noting the school's “indomitable spirit” and observing, “Their work, displayed with great pride and care—hallway bulletin boards are covered in protective plastic—is truly superior.” Kendra Boyd also got high marks for “personifying the strong sense of continuity at the school.” They noted little downside beyond “the usual strains of chronic overcapacity” and one parent's complaint that the administration may be sluggish in responding to problems.

Days before the 2006–2007 school year began, Ms. Boyd retired.

On Black Friday, an envelope arrived from the New York City Department of Education. Enclosed was a “Notice of Overpayment” invoice for $3,315. My never-received termination pay and unused vacation time were deducted from my debt, reducing the amount owed to $1,760. The stated explanation was that I had received extended-time pay when I was entitled only to the base rate. I was actually happy about the paper when I looked it over. Since I
did
work extended time at P.S. 85, clearly the DOE had made a mistake and I could receive my outstanding $1,555. A polite lady in the payroll department explained that since I had broken my contract, I was required to give back my overtime pay.

“I
worked
those hours. I taught a half-hour longer each day than base-rate schools, and I went to all that extra professional development.”

“Trust me, I empathize. I wish these weren't the rules. And you're not the only one this is happening to. You're actually lucky. I know you probably don't feel lucky, but the Department is sending these notices out now to people who left two, three-and-a-half years ago. They're tracking everyone down,” she said.

“This is insane. No one ever mentioned anything about giving back money for time that you were physically there. I've never heard of anything like this.”

“It's the rule. Three-year contract to keep your extended-time earnings.”

“You mean two years,” I said. “The Teaching Fellows contract is for two years.”

“I don't know anything about that, but it's three years for an extended-time school, Teaching Fellow or not. If you leave before that, you owe a year's worth of the overtime. Or else it will be a serious problem for your W–2.”

My mentor, Barbara Chatton, an email enthusiast, did not respond when I wrote to her. I learned that Article 12.II.C of the United Federation of Teachers' contract (lapsed on May 31, 2003) outlined this three-year requirement for Schools Under Registration Review (SURR) and ex-SURR school overtime pay. P.S. 85 had used extended-time salary as a carrot for prospective teachers, banking that no one would comb the thirty-two-article contract for loopholes in which the DOE could take back paychecks. There had been no fine print on the Teaching Fellows commitment form. I buried my anger and sent my pay back to the Department of Education.

A year after I left the Bronx, the United Federation of Teachers agreed to a new contract with the city, raising teachers' salaries and increasing hours, effectively switching every school to an extended-hours schedule.

I knew my future was in the classroom. After leaving P.S. 85 I felt a continual itch: a longing for some kind of a second chance with a kid like Lakiya Ray. Her hug on the last day of school had stuck with me. I couldn't—didn't—want to shake a nascent, giddy epiphany that I
really mattered
when I taught.

But my New York City Department of Education file was unsavory. A return to the classroom had to happen outside the public schools, the place where I most wanted to work.

For several months after my return from Europe, I delivered flowers until, with the help of a Teacher Dance Party screening, I was asked to teach Digital Filmmaking at a summer arts camp in Brooklyn. Several weeks later, the Collegiate School, an all-boys Upper West Side independent school that serves the polar opposite of P.S. 85's
socioeconomic community, hired me as a fourth-grade co-teacher. According to the school's website, yearly tuition for a K–12 Collegiate student in 2011–2012 was $37,500. Elizabeth Camaraza wrote my letter of reference.

Life at Collegiate was different and delightful, yet not without a culture shock. On my first day a fourth-grader, writing about his summer, asked me, “Mr. Brown, how do you spell
Tuscany
?” Soon after, the boys enjoyed the buffet-style school lunch of tilapia, corn chowder soup, organic Greek salad, and strawberry shortcake.

I got the green light to lead a daily read-aloud and selected Neil Gaiman's
Coraline
. I wrote on the board the book's epigraph by G. K. Chesterton:

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

The students were rapt, and vigorously offered predictions and analysis. This was how I should have started my year in the Bronx, I thought. But then I checked myself—for this type of classroom discussion to work, the students had to balance enthusiasm with self-control, a skill that seemed to be well practiced on the Upper West Side. In class 4-217, the same lesson would likely have stirred up bedlam.

Our opening discussion on
Coraline
was the tip of the iceberg. The students had great stamina for read-aloud time and independent work, so we covered material more quickly, avoiding stagnation or boredom. Teachers collaborated constructively, with minimal rivalry—not at all the case with the faction-splintered staff back in the Bronx. We took an overnight trip to Boston and walked the Freedom Trail.