The Great Expectations School (8 page)

I could tell by Cwasey's face that he didn't get it. Neither did Bernard, Hamisi, or Lito, who had their heads down. Lakiya cackled, “Preach!” She got a kick from mocking my impromptu speeches about decency and community.

I left for my prep disgusted. Barbara Chatton had arranged for me to observe Paul Bonn's fifth-grade class for the period, and Paul told me he could show a range of systems and routines he had in place to keep the order.

At twenty-seven, Paul Bonn stood five foot eight with a dirty blond goatee and untucked golf shirt. The first time I saw him I hadn't taken him for a genius.

Paul was a second-year teacher and not part of the Fellows program. His interview at P.S. 85 was fifteen seconds long. An administrator asked, “Are you scared?” He said he wasn't and was immediately informed of his hired status. Bonn was brought on as a cluster teacher, but in October, class 5-110 got out of hand, despite rookie teacher Ms. Elmer's large and intimidating physical stature. Kids were freely treating the furniture like an obstacle course, dancing, and fighting at will. The administration removed Ms. Elmer and gave her a cluster schedule.

It was a suicide mission. Unassuming, mellow-voiced Paul Bonn went in there, though, and straightened them out.

His first day, Bonn told Mr. Daly to clear the area in the parking lot outside room 110's windows. When the class got noisy in the first hour, Paul pretended to lose his mind and
threw a desk out the window.
The kids were silent for the rest of the day.

The second day, a notorious discipline problem didn't want to do his work. Bonn called the kid's mom, who showed up immediately to hold the boy's hand for the next three hours. The mortified student did not say boo the rest of the year.

The third day, a few kids started laughing in line. Bonn made the whole class copy the dictionary for two hours and write two pages about the importance of lines.

The fourth day was perfect.

Now he was one of the most respected teachers in the school, coordinating the faculty football pool and engaged to Melissa Mulve-hill, a redheaded fourth-grade teacher whom he impressed more than anyone with the monumental turnaround of 5-110.

Paul Bonn rarely raised his voice because his class was a finely tuned machine. Two paper passers swiftly completed their appointed rounds with rehearsed precision. Class security guards, positions assigned to kids with discipline problems in their background, tabulated disruptions to be submitted for later punishments. They policed their own!

Bonn took his kids to the rug to read
The Blind Men and the Elephant,
a second-grade-level book about a gang of sightless geezers who decipher that there's an elephant standing in front of them by using teamwork. The reading was brief, and at the last word the kids immediately returned to their groups, hustling to get out their notebooks. Bonn gave group points on the chalkboard to the first group with all members who had written their name and the date. When Tiquan spoke out of turn, he had to copy a page of the dictionary. The class ran seamlessly. I was wowed.

What could I cull from this observation to bring to 4-217? Bonn had several advantages that I didn't have. Fifth grade was graduation year, so Paul had the NGL (No Graduation List), the most feared P.S. 85 punishment, at his disposal. Also, dictionary-copying fell into the broad reach of
corporal punishment,
a territory where I was reluctant to tread.

Corporal punishment, as I understood it, encompassed touching a child, forcing one to stand, making a student face the corner, and dishing out punitive assignments of no academic value. I slowly learned that P.S. 85 turned a blind eye to all of these practices in the name of avoiding “incidents.” However, Barbara Chatton strongly discouraged me from engaging in them, especially in my first few weeks. I agreed. I did not want to become a teacher who dealt out these kinds of penalties, although my current methods were not exactly clicking.

I thought Paul Bonn's group points were perfect. Since I already had my stars and strikes that applied to all of 4-217, bringing in Bonn's group points would encourage teamwork and discourage academic laggards. (“Deloris is not writing her name and that's costing
group three points right now!”) I planned to keep track of the points in a box on the blackboard and give out candy bars or wildly popular Yu-Gi-Oh fantasy game cards to the winning group on Friday afternoons.

I also borrowed
The Blind Men and the Elephant.

At 10 a.m. on Friday, September 19, our principal, Mrs. Boyd, made a cryptic announcement on the PA. “Fellow eighty-fivers. There has been a… disharmony on Webster Avenue. Please stay in the building until you are further advised. Luckily, we are very safe right now. However, you should all know once again that there is a disharmony currently going on at the Webster Avenue intersection behind the school. Thank you and once again, we are safe.”

A disharmony?

“Somebody been shot,” Cwasey muttered.

A police chase had just ended at 187th Street and Webster Avenue with a massive shootout in the street. The suspect, who had a fake gun, was shot fourteen times by police and died in the crosswalk that I used every day to get to the One Way Deli to buy my lunchtime turkey sandwich. The intersection was sealed off with the coroner's wagon, and a massive bloodstain was visible from four stories above. Several bullets had tagged the doors and windows of the nearby apartment buildings.

The popping-gunshot scene was audible and visible to the classes on the opposite side of the hall from 4-217. The bullets went off adjacent to the minischool, the grades K–1 annex where I had first met Mr. Rose during his pronoun lesson in June. In Allie Bowers's kindergarten class, the kids instinctively knew to duck when the shots rang. Allie made them crawl into the hall, pretending to play a “waiting game” while they sat for thirty minutes.

Despite the bullet-ridden cadaver on the pavement outside the building, I had my best day yet. I ignored the disharmony and within two minutes the kids forgot about it too. We finished reading
The Hundred Dresses,
a beautiful book about a poor immigrant girl, Wanda
Petronski, who tells her cruel peers that she has a hundred dresses of all colors and materials, even though she wears the same ragged frock to school every day. Wanda has to move away suddenly, but through a poignant letter her regretful tormentors discover her elaborate and gorgeous drawings of a hundred dresses. I loved the book, and I think the kids did too. I did not respond when Lakiya said, “This story GAY!” It definitely went over better than
James and the Giant Peach,
which I had abandoned a few days earlier after sensing rampant confusion.

On the way down the steps for dismissal, Sonandia reached out and clasped my hand. When Athena saw this, she looped around to hold my other hand. Jennifer gave me a hug in the parking lot. She did it every day.

I collapsed on my bed at 6 p.m. on Friday, out cold for the next fifteen hours. I spent the weekend in my apartment catching up on back episodes of
Six Feet Under
and eating frozen pizza. I filled my plan book and brooded over the fatal shooting.

Cat Samuels actually saw the victim riddled with the cops' fourteen shots and fall dead to the rainy asphalt. She reacted with blank-faced horror. “If that's not enough to get me out of this hell, I don't know what is,” she told me by the fifth-grade detention table where she served earsplitting lunch duty.

I got headaches in 4-217, but the cafeteria during upper-grade lunch was a migraine pressure chamber. Screams and squeals reverberated as children bounded over tables, wrestled on the refuse-strewn floor, and mashed up their fish patties for projectile fodder. It was a mammoth, virtually unchecked melee.

Cat and I had similar problems in silencing the whole class. As a prep teacher, though, she was at a disadvantage because she taught only one lesson per class per week. If it sputtered or got interrupted, she would leave feeling like a failure. When I had a lesson that tanked or a ridiculous student outburst, I could rebound or change gears immediately with a new activity with the same kids. I might lose the
battle, but I had a shot at winning the war. Fighting isolated and out-manned battles, Cat felt overmatched. When she finished only one out of her first eighteen lessons in those initial two weeks, I couldn't blame her for considering leaving.

On Sunday night, I climbed into bed at 10:30 but never fell completely asleep. Sunday nights are dark times for teachers. Ugly moments from school rushed at me like a cinematic montage. I thought about the barrage of questions about pencil sharpening and the bathroom, the crying, the wild line on the steps, the clockwatching, and the yelling. So much yelling.

I tried to intellectualize my place in the universe, reaching only bleak conclusions. The dearly held idea that one person can change lives now felt like cheap, baseless dogma. It was an easy aphorism, like “love conquers all”; one that worked in movies and instantly disintegrated in the giant, indifferent city. I thought, My kids are so needy, and I can never compensate for what they're missing in their lives. I can barely teach them math. I should do more, but I am failing at the basics.

No! Snap out of this void of negativity! I willed myself into a cold shower and slapped myself in the face. “It is always darkest before the dawn,” I said aloud, creeping myself out. Was this job making me a self-talker?

My morning route to school took me into the subway at Allen and Houston streets to board the uptown F or V trains. At Herald Square, I transferred across the platform where the D train, my uptown express ride to the Bronx, originated. On lucky days, I would pull into the station on the F to find the open-door D waiting to leave. When the platform was empty, the wait was longer and the omen was ill.

On Monday, September 22, my F pulled into Herald Square but kept its doors shut long enough for the awaiting D train to close up and get moving while I haplessly watched. “The D train is an ass-hole,” a woman in a business suit grumbled.

While I waited on the empty platform for the next D to show
up, I saw Karen Adler. Karen and I were introduced at the August Professional Development at P.S. 85, but we had never had a real conversation. She also taught fourth grade and was a second-year Fellow, although this was her first year as a classroom teacher. We struck up a tired-eyed chat, starting with how the D train is an asshole.

Karen graduated with an English degree from Vassar in 2002 and went straight into the Fellows. Her first year at P.S. 85 was as an in-school floating substitute (or “cover teacher”) with an irregular schedule that was so terrible that she cried every morning before getting on the train. She commuted from Brooklyn, making a ninety-minute trek each way.

We were in the same boat as beleaguered fourth-grade teachers, but Karen's extra year of experience gave her a strong reference point to start the year. She was phenomenally organized and devoted to her students, but also she possessed an amazing, deeply ironic sense of humor about the job. I stopped eating lunch alone.

I visited my students' previous teachers for advice. Before the year started, some had offered quick tips like, “Eddie is very slow with math.” Now that I had gotten familiar with my characters, I was hoping for more concrete ideas on how to help or simply control them.

Carol Slocumb looked the part of an old-guard Catholic schoolmarm, ruling her impeccably organized third-grade class with scowls and systems. I was surprised to learn that she was only a second-year Fellow, since she already had a reputation as an expert classroom manager. I soon respected Ms. Slocumb as one of the most kindhearted people in the school, who put on that tough façade in the classroom because it was the only way to keep the students under control.

Carol had had Dennis Foster and Tayshaun Jackson last year. When I asked about them, she solemnly shook her head. “Tayshaun. He was pretty consistent until that mess with his brother. Then forget about it. It's a real shame because he's smart. And Dennis is such
a sad story.Very, very slow. I stopped calling home because I knew the beating he would catch.”

My understanding of the mess with Tayshaun's brother went as follows: The Jackson family has no father and six kids. The oldest is twenty. Tayshaun has a twin brother and they're the youngest. Last year, the twenty-year-old brother molested Tayshaun's twin, causing the twin to suffer a mental collapse that resulted in institutionalization. With his twin brother and best friend gone, Tayshaun decided he wanted to be expelled and started bringing matches to school. His intelligence made him even more of a negative force in the classroom, since his rebellious snickers were more conscientious objections than random grumblings. He drove Ms. Slocumb nuts.

Stacy Shanline looked like she belonged at Fashion Week rather than Public School 85. She had taught Sonandia, Destiny, and Lito Ruiz in third grade. “Sonandia is a doll. I love her. You can tell why she's so wonderful; her mom loves her. You know Olga, right?”

Of course I knew Olga Tavarez. She was a P.S. 85 paraprofessional who unobtrusively checked in on Sonandia several times a day. She made sure Sonandia was punctual and dressed neatly. She always smiled and said good morning to me. She held Sonandia's hand and said things like, “Have a great day, Sony. I love you.”

Shanline continued, “Destiny is such a sad story. She's really a sweet girl, but her parents give her
nothing.
Her cousins are always beating on her and she has terrible asthma. She's really sensitive. Actually, she's more than sensitive. She's a wuss.” I thought about how Destiny made a point to approach me every day with some statement that resembled, “My cousin zipped me up in a suitcase,” or “This morning, my brother bit me in the knee.”

“As for Lito,” she went on, “he's the saddest story of them all. No father. In second grade his mother passed away.” She lowered her voice. “We think it was AIDS. He stopped doing his work and got held back. The next year he didn't smile or do his work again but they had to move him up. When I had him, he barely did anything
and he looked like the most cold-blooded kid you've ever seen. He lives with his grandmother, who doesn't speak English. He's not clean. He used to stink like shit. I mean actual feces.”