

Fellows In Arms

A 21st Century Teaching Saga

Aaron Roston

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2011 by Aaron Roston

All rights reserved

There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, hate into love, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is absolute ambiguity. – Tim O'Brien, "How to Tell A True War Story"

The United States enters the 21st century as an undisputed world leader... But our nation is at a crossroads. We will not continue to lead if we persist in viewing teaching—the profession that makes all other professions possible—as a second-rate occupation. Nothing is more vital to our future than ensuring that we attract and retain the best teachers in our public schools. Over the next decade, we will need to bring two million new teachers into our nation's public schools—700,000 in urban areas alone. — Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Chairman of The Teaching Commission and former Chairman of IBM, in The Teaching Commission Report titled Teaching At Risk: A Call to Action (spring 2004)

All bad writers are in love with the epic. – Ernest Hemingway
Prologue: A Shock to the System

WHEN I was training for a possible novice shot at the Golden Gloves out at Gleason's Gym, at the improbable age of 29, I used to go during the late morning, after the guys who trained super-early had gone to work at UPS or wherever. I was the only white guy there at that hour; my nickname became "El Blanco." After the mirror work and the sparring, after the rope, the bags, the mitts, Hector would point to me and say "Now you run, Blanco." That's when I would run across the Brooklyn Bridge for stamina. This is the unacknowledged secret weapon of all demanding endeavors: endurance. With my shirt already glued to my body, I would head off from the gym to run across the Bridge, there and back, twice, a Calvary of almost five miles. The Brooklyn side rises more steeply than the back end, the Manhattan side, which has a long slow slope upwards. I say back end because I'm from Brooklyn myself, and so the Brooklyn side will always be the front to me.

If Brooklyn can be said to have a seat of power, then the forum surrounding and including Borough Hall would have to be it. The pedestrian route from City Hall in Manhattan to its opposite number in Downtown Brooklyn hasn't changed since 1885. I never ran the Bridge after the summer of '98, when I got injured in a sparring accident and my amateur career came to a close, but I know from past experience that the middle of winter is not the best of times to take this scenic stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge; the wind will come howling up from the Narrows and froth the grey surface of the sluggish East River white, scouring the skin from your cheeks. But if on a whim you decide that the relative solitude of such a walk outweighs the concerns of streaming eyes, runny nose, and chapped lips, then the pedestrian walkway's first exit is a down staircase leading to Cadman Plaza. Take a right, and you'll pass the Brooklyn War Memorial; go past the Memorial and cross Tillary Street – you'll find a cluster of official buildings laagered around the Korean War Veterans Plaza and Columbus Park, amongst them the imposing columns of Borough Hall itself. The entrance to the headquarters of the old Board of Education is right around the corner at 65 Court Street (though the Board of Ed's official address was 110 Livingston Street). I used to walk past it all the time when I was growing up, on my way to the subway, but I would never set foot inside it until the fall of 1999, in my first failed attempt at becoming a teacher. I never paid any attention to it before; it was just there, like the Brooklyn House of Detention (which I also never visited). But it was in this building that the newly appointed Chancellor of the Board of Education, Harold Levy, would be installed a few months after my first visit, in the winter of the infancy of the year 2000.

Levy did not know much about education, true; he was a businessman (recently a corporate attorney for financial powerhouse Citigroup, in fact). What he did understand were numbers, and he knew how to read the numerical auguries in the reports and spreadsheets being piled daily onto his desk by various aides, advisors, and viziers. The numbers were little short of alarming. Of the Board of Education's 78,000 teachers in its 1,100 schools, since 1999 some 8,000 a year were new hires; the shortage of certified teachers was becoming acute. This shortage hit the worst schools in the system the hardest, those known as "hard to staff," especially those on what was cryptically known as the SURR list: Schools Under Registration Review. This indicated a school that had consistently failed minimum state standards for so long that it was now under a state mandate to improve within two years or be shut down. New teachers took two years of graduate school, including a semester of student teaching, in order to become state certified. Levy didn't have that kind of time: something had to be done. Hired as a problem-solver, he knew drastic measures were needed. The result became the New York City Teaching Fellows program, which I would join in the summer of 2002.

Alternative-certification programs already existed to some extent in other cities (notably Boston and Los Angeles), and on the Federal level with Teach for America. Designed in conjunction with a non-profit organization called The New Teacher Project, Levy's idea was to attract bright, highly qualified career-changers, those (like Levy himself) with no background in education (in other words, those with no taint of the traditional educational establishment). Once accepted, the candidate was committed to teach for two years. They would receive one summer of intensive training and temporary (or more accurately "emergency") state certification; then the Fellows would be stuck as educational shock troops into the SURR and "hard to staff" schools. Levy wanted the program to start that summer of 2000. It was a bold, even audacious, plan to try and turn the worst schools in the system around; it was a risky (not to mention expensive) experiment: including graduate school, training each Fellow would be estimated to cost $25,000 apiece. It bore more than a passing similarity to Army recruiting: the appeal to the idealistic, with its notion of service, combined with the mercenarial, in the manner of the G.I. Bill. But it was the quickest way to both infuse the plasma of change and boost the badly needed certified teacher numbers.

What happened to the numbers when we got there, of course, hadn't been included in the plan.

CANTO I

Légion Étrangère

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill

What's In A Name, Part I

EVERYONE'S a nigga. "That nigga mad lazy" refers to anyone who's very lazy. It's not about skin color, since the Dominicans are niggas too. No, it was: "Yo, Mr. Roston, you got youself a bunch a Special Ed niggas in here," said pithy Jessica S. to the class at large (which is half Dominican) before she was suspended (and you'll be missed!). Glen Rogers, second-year Teaching Fellow, was made an "honorary nigga" in his class at the end of last year, despite being extremely white. For a guy like Rogers, though, this is the highest compliment, the ultimate badge of honor, since being called a nigga is not a pejorative even if used in conjunction with an insult; it merely means "one of us" – it's the stamp of student approval and acceptance. Normally, though, teachers are 'Mister' or 'Miss.' There's a certain kind of anonymity to the term I don't like – to them we're all the same (just one more white authority figure, just another white face). I don't like being just a symbol, so I insist they use my name. My rationale, which I explain to them, is that I take the trouble to learn theirs, so they should learn mine. It's common courtesy, a matter of respect, blah blah blah... In reality what I mean (and which they understand, no fools they) is: I'm the boss.

"Yo, Mistuh."

"Mister Roston."

"Mistuh Roston."

"Raise your hand to be recognized, Nestor." Eyes roll heavenward, but the hand follows. In a room where the average age is 16, Nestor looks young even by those standards. He's 14 but he's small and mouse-like and looks 10.

"Yes, Nestor."

"How big a house you live in?"

"Why do you ask?"

"'Cause all white people live in big houses."

"And they all own cars," adds Raphael, who as usual has one foot in his lap and is playing with the sole of his sneaker.

This comment gives me pause. Once, my wife and I went on a road trip from New York City to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We drove all the way up to the very top of the island in a Ford Explorer, to a place called Meat Cove, a cliffside campground overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. When we got out, I beeped the truck with the remote to unlock the trunk. The car made its chirping sound, the lights flashed, and the locks popped up. Behind me I heard a chorus of giggles. I turned around, and standing there were a pack of urchins, the kids of the people who owned the place, their hair so blonde they were practically albinos. One of them, a boy, said, "Do it again." Do what again? I asked. He pointed at the remote in my hand. So I re-beeped the truck, which dutifully chirped, the lights flashed again, and the locks shot down. The kids giggled again. They had never seen a car alarm before. It has come as a surprise to me that, in their way, my students at Taft have turned out to be startlingly similar. It was like Salomon told me at the job fair, that when he took a class trip to Manhattan his students clung to him in unfamiliar terror. "Assume they have no a priori knowledge about anything," he'd said. That, and at any given time, one in ten of these kids is homeless. And I'm not one to talk: until a few months ago, I'd never been to this part of the Bronx either.

"What kind of car you got, Mistuh?" someone calls out.

"I don't own a car."

A puzzled look. "Then how you get to school?"

"Limo. But it's in the shop this week." Get those hands up! I feel like a bank robber, but my boss, Charlie, has been firm on this point. If I am to accomplish nothing else, I am to make sure they raise their hands to speak.

A snort of derision as Laquisha says, "He take the subway. I seen him on the platform."

"Where you live, Mistuh Roston? Manhattan?"

"I live in the greater metropolitan area, yes." I'm working hard on maintaining my 'air of mystery.' The less they know about me, the better. The hands!

"You gotta go to college to be a teacher?"

"Raise your hand, Ricardo." Ricardo, like Nestor, is also Dominican, but he's pale while Nestor is dark; that Caribbean island has a wide range of pigments. Kid's also got an incipient pencil-thin mustache. Teeth get sucked, but the hand goes up in an exaggerated manner. "Yes?"

"You gotta go to college to be a teacher, Mistuh Roston?"

"Yes."

"Man, when I get to college I ain't never bein' no teacher. I'm gonna make me some real money."

"Good for you."

A hand! "Mistuh Roston."

"Yes, Isabel?"

"What's your first name?"

"Mister. Does this question have to do with the assignment, Nestor?"

"No."

"Then – "

"One more, one more. What'd you do this weekend?" The class smiles. This they want to hear.

I sigh. We're in what is termed "the honeymoon" period, the second week or so of class, after the roster has finally stabilized. It's the period when the students are on their best behavior as they suss you out, watching your every move and gesture, probing for weaknesses they can exploit later. This has become a standard September strategy so far: ask all about the teacher in lieu of doing any work. There I stand in my tie, collared shirt (chalk on the cuffs), pressed slacks (chalk around the pockets), black lace-up shoes (rubber soles). I am the very image of what they feel a teacher should look like (or the living embodiment of The Other, as they might have said in summer training) – not dirty jeans, like Charlie, or stained polyester and greasy collar like their history teacher. So, in my best authoritarian voice (my "whitest" voice), I say, "Well, Nestor, I do what I do every weekend. I went rolling with my homies in the stretch limo (which is why it's in the shop), and we were sipping on some Cristal. Then we went to the club, where we picked up some bitches and ho's. Or was it ho's and bitches? Anyway, we brought them back to my crib and we all got our freak on."

It takes me ten minutes to calm the class down.

* * *

Later, I would be one of those teachers it was impossible to imagine had a personal life. I cultivated the impression that after the day was done, I returned to my pod in the school basement, there to await the morning bell that would cause me to emerge again. Or that I spent the night hanging from my ankles in the book room, like a giant teaching bat... Was I a little out of touch? Perhaps. This may have stemmed from the fact that I didn't watch much television – I only rarely watched what few channels I got through my building's cable system. I viewed cable television much the same way I did prostitution – while I enjoyed both services that were provided, I didn't enjoy them enough to pay for them.

* * *

Good works, great deeds, are meant to be their own reward. Most strivers need incentive, though; imply some gesture for posterity and they might end up splitting the atom. In the past, a victorious general would be given a statue, a monument to his triumph in stone or bronze. A successful artist might rate a street. The more modern idea is naming a highway or even an airport after you. Or in this case, a high school. I didn't know what William Howard Taft's claim to fame was aside from being the fattest President in history (it is said he had a special tub made and installed in the White House to soak his bulk), but simply because he was a President he got this school in the South Bronx named after him. And he wasn't alone; a lot of dead Presidents got their names carved on schools around here: Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, JFK. Naming an educational edifice after you was supposed to confer immortality: Yes, the star of your accomplishments will shine in the firmament of a grateful society forever, a perpetual reminder of possibilities to the countless generations who stride through its halls. But just as people die, just as ideas wither, buildings die too. And Taft was dying. The entire Hall of Presidents in the Bronx was dying. In the cosmos of the Bronx educational system, their stars were flickering and going out, leaving nothing more than a burnt-out constellation.

On my first visit to the school in the spring of 2002, I realized there was a good reason I'd never ventured into this part of the Bronx before: I'm white. I'm a native New Yorker, specifically brownstone Brooklyn, who grew up during the crack epidemic years of the 80's, when it seemed it wasn't worth your life to travel above 96th Street. From there on, the map was a blank drawn by medieval cartographers: Here be dragons... The biggest mistake you could ever make was making eye contact with black or Hispanic kids your own age: Whatchoo lookin' at...? What the fuck you lookin' at, white boy...? As I took the rickety B train from the Upper West Side, I didn't have to hear the announcements to know we were in the Bronx. The farther north you went on the subway, the darker and more run-down the stations became; actually, the same might've been said for the passengers. All sorts of childhood demons were jostling for position in my head. What the hell did I know about the Bronx? I was from Brooklyn – to me the Bronx was the Zoo, the Botanical Gardens, Yankee Stadium. And you caught I-95 to New England there. That was about it. Taft was going to be The Bronx, like that movie Fort Apache: The Bronx with Paul Newman. I had visions of bombed-out and boarded-up buildings, rabid packs of feral dogs, menacing locals gathered around oil-drum fires in fingerless gloves, Snake Plisskin asking for directions... But when I got to the station, things weren't anything like that. In the daylight, the streets didn't appear particularly menacing or desolate. The Grand Concourse, once the Champs Elysee (on which it was modeled) of the Bronx, a magnificent old-world boulevard, still maintained an air of its former grandness. On the corner of 172nd Street sat a bodega, in front of which a group of Hispanic kids lounged against cars, their baggy jeans billowing around their ankles. They didn't even look my way. Just east of the Concourse along 172nd Street sat Taft.

Taft High School was built just before the Second World War to serve the children of a neighborhood burgeoning with the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. A family friend and former resident of the area at that time told me, "Taft used to be the best school around. You had to be smart to go there. Taft was 'across the Concourse' – the area that was more well-to-do." Needless to say, times had changed somewhat, but from the outside Taft didn't look forbidding. Many have described New York schools as blockhouses or prisons, but I didn't feel that way. Having gone to New York public schools all my life, I guess I was used to it. In fact, the building was nicer than the dilapidated one I'd gone to high school in: Stuyvesant, on Manhattan's East 15th Street. Taft even had a baseball diamond, named Jonathan Levin Field (I'd discovered what his claim to fame was: a Taft teacher who had been murdered in his own home by his own students in a botched kidnapping in the spring of 1998 – he had unwisely let it slip that he was the son of the chairman of Time-Warner). The school had a manicured lawn in front of the main entrance; you walked past the flagpole with the Stars and Stripes flapping in the breeze, through the doors and, just like the airport, ran smack into the scanning area with its two huge metal detectors. After that, you got your ID checked at the security desk, and then directed to the English Department, Room 153.

The hallways of the school were tall and wide, giving a sense of space, and it was here that I discovered that like many another striver, Taft High School had an image of its own permanence once, too. This was symbolized by the Honor Roll, a series of heavy wooden panels that wrapped around the first floor. The years and names rolled by on it, carefully inscribed in gold lettering: 1947, 1951, 1954. The names were all Jewish until the Jews begin their northern migration in the 60's (first to Yonkers and then to Westchester); the Jewish names began to give way to Hispanic (presumably Puerto Rican) names. By the mid-60's the list of names under the years began to diminish. By the 70's they'd dropped below five names a year. Taft finally stopped keeping an Honor Roll in 1983. There seemed to have been a half-hearted effort to revive it in 1998, but the few names were sloppily done, as if the craft of inscribing them had been lost.

I was here to meet the man, my new boss presumptive: Charlie Osewalt. I'd been told he was an ordained minister and had a PhD from Oxford; what the hell was he doing here? For that matter, what the hell was I doing here...? At the riot masquerading as a Teaching Fellows job fair, with queues of prospective teachers snaking crazily across the room, I'd looked over at a sign that said "Chancellor's District." There were two high schools there, and the line was both short and moving fast, so that's where I decided to make my stand. The guy in front of me went to the table marked Roosevelt, so I sat down at the one marked Taft.

My interviewers were a Neil Salomon and a Mr. Januzzi. Salomon was a puckish 40's with a boyish haircut, friendly eyes framed by massive black specs and dressed in a black polo shirt; he airily waved a hand from the wrist of which dangled a gold bracelet. Next to him, in studied contrast, looking for all the world like Salomon' consigliore, sat immaculate Mr. Januzzi (who reminded me a bit of a lizard – he had a disturbing habit of not blinking), his blue-black slick-backed hair ashine, dressed crisply in a tan Italian suit, pink collared shirt, and silk tie with gold clasp. As far as accessories went, he favored the gold pinky ring and sported a massive watch. I would smell his aftershave (or was it cologne? and what was the difference?) on my hand hours after the interview. "Howyadoin," he said. "Nicetameetcha." Salomon explained that Chancellor's District schools were schools that had performed so poorly for so long they were under the direct supervision of the Chancellor's Office. The worst schools in the city, in other words. Then he said: "I would hire you on the spot, but I want you to visit the school and meet the AP of English first. I want you to be aware of what you're getting into, so you can't say you weren't warned. I don't want you quitting your first week." Startled, I'd said, "Does that happen often?" Januzzi had swiveled his unblinking orbs upon me. "Every fall."

Where do teachers come from? To answer this question, I have to go even further back: I was at the job fair because I was a sinner. A sinner, however, who did not violate the social compact in the typically anti-social manner: I was neither a criminal nor an alcoholic, nor one who abused drugs. No, I was a sinner of a peculiarly American stripe, in a particularly American mold: I was unsuccessful at making money.

From an early age, I've always loved history. It started with an avid interest in military history, as it does with so many boys – battles and generals and maneuvers and such, but my interest later expanded to include all kinds of historical areas (and eras). So, when I'd gone to high school, I'd assumed that I was going to be a history teacher of some kind; I figured there wasn't much else you could do with a history degree. In college, I became diverted into becoming a rock musician (I just wanted to be the bass player), which then diverted me into getting expelled from the University of Virginia (or as the Dean of Academic Affairs put it, it was time to "expand my horizons outside the restrictive confines of a university setting") – so I moved to London with bass in case, living in a room in Brent Cross with three guys from New Zealand, to see what developed.

Nothing did, so I came back to the States and finished college at Hunter (where my focus switched from history to literature). Then, I was off again – life became a series of meandering side roads and abrupt cul-de-sacs in my 20's; I was a sort of itinerant aspirant. My chimerical pursuits included trying to become a screenwriter (an unproductive if enlightening year in Hollywood, where I lived in a furnished apartment complete with Murphy bed, close enough to the on-ramp for the 101 that if I left my window open my walls became covered in soot), a novelist (when I moved back to Brooklyn), a journalist (my sojourn in New Orleans, a romantic French Quarter garret on Royal Street that I shared with my girlfriend, who would become my wife in 1997), and a rock and roll songwriter (back to Manhattan). I got briefly swept up in the Internet madness, until I figured out that the demands for unpaid overtime in exchange for mythical stock options wasn't a fair trade. So I worked a series of very uninteresting day jobs in the interim; the idea of teaching always lurked in the background as a fallback should my other interests "not work out" (or, alternately, when I opted to "grow up"). After all, since I considered teaching my eventual destiny, why rush it?

By 1999, my parents had retired to Florida, and all my childhood friends had similarly scattered to places like Chicago and Montreal. It felt like a major transition period, so I flirted with the idea of teaching, but was put off by the Board of Education's infamous Byzantine bureaucracy. Thus, I continued to haphazardly troll the white-collar world. I went to the odd networking event; I even went to job fairs, handing out a deeply fictional resume for jobs I didn't really want to strangers I would never meet again. It was a shock, considering the booming Internet job market; I'd assumed that when I finally decided to "go straight," that is, when I finally settled on getting a real job, that one would be there waiting for me. What job that would be exactly, of course, I had only the vaguest idea. The mystery was resolved in the spring of 2001; the great economic bubble finally became the Hindenburg, seemingly taking all professional and entry-level careers down with it. This caused me to make the transition from sporadically employed to nearly unemployable. I began to second-guess almost every decision I had ever made. I had wanted to live my life a certain way, so that I could look back and say I had done what I wanted – but now I started to question the wisdom of this approach. This period also placed hairline fractures in my marriage, cracks beneath the ice of our shared floe: sensed but not seen. Once, then, two paths (at least) had diverged in the woods, and I had chosen the ones less traveled by; but by now, those same woods had become savage, dark, and tangled, and I had become lost.

"Should I come home?" My wife was on the phone, calling from the kitchen at work. "Nah, I don't think you need to. Apparently a plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center. I don't think it's serious." About 20 minutes later, I called her back. "Come home," I said. "But don't take the subway." The World Trade Center was gone; Windows On the World, where we'd had our rehearsal dinner, was gone. I walked over to Amsterdam, and I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing: A sea of people filled the entire width of the avenue, underground commuters converted to pedestrians, making the long march past me to their homes. There was a dazed stillness about them, as there was about me. Where were they all going? Were they going to walk back to Westchester...? That night, my wife and I huddled in front of the TV (as we would be for three days). The whole city got quiet that night, quiet as it will ever be again – for the first time in my life, I didn't hear traffic, I didn't hear the constant sound of planes, only a rare pass from one of the Combat Air Patrols.

After the shock wore off, I felt galvanized to do something for the first time in a long time. So I followed the sign I saw in the subway, 212-RECRUIT, and took the exam to join the NYPD – having just turned 33, I was still eligible for one more year. But upon further reflection, I wasn't sure being a cop was for me. I felt I could do the job, at least I was pretty sure I could, but I'd be working nights for at least my first year, and I was married; my wife wasn't happy about the idea, but she knew I needed something, a focus. But given my pathological aversion to authority, neither of us was sure I was paramilitary material.

One day, during what would turn out to be one of the last of my temporary midtown commuting days before being laid off a final time, as I blearily rose to my feet with my stick of fellow straphangers, preparing for the red jump light to detrain at 42nd Street, I saw another sign in black and white: Because your spreadsheets don't grow up to be doctors and lawyers. Become a New York City Teaching Fellow... Leaving aside the dubious value of having a hand in creating yet more lawyers, I was intrigued. Not to say desperate – I think part of me wanted to do something radical as a form of clearing the slate, starting over, reinventing myself. In any case, it beat joining the circus.

I looked up the Teaching Fellows website at one of my many lulls at work in yet another glassine tower. The Teaching Fellows gave you eight weeks of summer training and placed you in certain schools located in the Bronx and eastern Brooklyn, thus circumventing the red tape snafu I had been subjected to. You didn't have to read between the lines to know what kind of schools they were referring to. The starting salary was $39,000; with a Master's it was $44,000. That was still a lot more money than the cops, whose base pay still hadn't changed from a paltry $27,000 in years. As a further incentive, the Fellows were throwing in a free Master's degree in education. I sent in my resume and cover letter (as I'd been doing unsuccessfully for months attempting to secure a variety of other jobs); I learned 12,000 people were doing the same for less than 2,000 spots. Happily, after making it through an all-day interview process, I was accepted in February, the same day I was told to report for my police physical.

So here I was. When I got to Taft's room 153, I don't know what I expected – I mean, it sure wasn't a fastidious Oxford don – but it certainly wasn't the Falstaff in an oversized Rangers jersey and faded jeans who came bustling out of his office, apparently delighted to see me. He was a burly, hirsute figure in his mid-to-late 40's: overweight, sweaty despite the fact it was a cool day in April, with small academic spectacles underneath a head of salt and pepper hair. His graying beard hugged his neck and disappeared into the depths of his jersey. I felt ludicrously overdressed in The Suit, my sole remaining nod to professional life: a careworn brown linen suit I'd procured in a New Orleans boutique years before. I glanced into his office: it was spectacularly disorganized – papers, folders, and books were stacked on every available surface.

"You must be Aaron."

"Mr. Osewalt?"

"Call me Charlie. I really enjoyed your resume, it was very well written. Most of them aren't." His Bronx accent was thicker than his unseen back hair. And no one, to my knowledge, had ever enjoyed a resume, mine or anyone else's.

One of my character flaws (one of many, according to some) is that I have a problem with authority, and this has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years, because I'm also not a very good dissembler. But it's fair to say I liked Charlie right off – he inspired instant trust and confidence; he fairly exuded brain power, and he had what I can only term as charisma. I wasn't sure, since I hadn't had much exposure to charisma in my working life, but I felt instantly that I would have no trouble obeying whatever directives came from his office.

He had me tag along to watch him teach. He and a Fellow already at the school, Glen Rogers, taught a class of Advanced Placement English, and I was impressed; Charlie also had stage presence – when he walked into the classroom, all eyes were on him as his booming voice carried to every corner of the room. It was obvious he was a damn good teacher (not that I knew anything about teaching, of course, but I had certainly been taught by my fair share). He took me to the basement to see the department's computer lab, the Jonathan Levin Media Center. It was a large, well-lit room filled with old refurbished PowerMacs. There was a bulletin board with Levin's picture on it, as well as letters and poems from his students: he had been popular. I turned to Charlie. "Salomon told me what happened to him at the job fair."

He sighed heavily, shaking his head. "Truly tragic. Great guy. Great teacher. And that's why we get money from Time-Warner to help us out here." I took another look around the room, and thought: Levin's dad had to be worth tens of millions; you'd think he'd offer to rebuild the entire school, not donate a few crappy old computers. But I suppose the vagaries of the super-rich will forever remain a mystery to me.

Back in the office, I noticed a well-thumbed King James Bible on the corner of his desk. "You read that a lot?" I asked.

"Every day. Know what my favorite book is?"

Which one was the Teacher again...? I took a stab. "Ecclesiastes?"

Charlie smiled. "Very good."

"'There is no new thing under the sun. Vanity of vanities, sayeth the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.'" He looked pleased. I don't think I'd ever quoted Scripture to get a job before. "But don't get too excited," I felt compelled to add. "I'm an atheist."

He smiled and shrugged, as if to say: "All kinds." Then, using his steepled hands to point, he gave me the hard sell. "There's something I want you to understand. My primary goal is to make sure all my new teachers become good teachers. I place a priority emphasis on professional development. Most other schools aren't gonna do that. I haven't had anyone quit while I've been AP, Aaron, and I want to keep the streak going. I'm gonna be hiring a whole bunch of Fellows, and it's an opportunity for me to finally shape the department the way I want. I'd like you to be a part of it. Now, do you have any questions for me?"

I thought of the kids lounging on the corner. "Do you have a gang problem here?"

"We've got gangs, but most of the time they keep their activities outside the building. Why I don't know, they just do."

I couldn't really think of anything else off hand, so I asked him if he wanted to see a demonstration lesson before hiring me. He smiled and spread his hands. "Why? I already know you can't teach."

So I signed on.

...You do not, strictly speaking, have to teach anything new, anything that is not already as familiar to you as it is to all good people. And when we speak to you of your mission and apostolate, you should not misunderstand us. You are not the apostles of a new gospel. The legislator did not wish to transform you into philosophers or makeshift theologians. He asks of you what one may ask of any man of heart and sense... But, once you are thus loyally confined to the humble and secure role of everyday morality, what do we ask of you? Speeches? Wise explanations? Brilliant exposés, scholarly teaching? No! Family and society ask you to help raise their children, to make honest people of them. That is to say that they expect not words but acts, not another course added to the program but a completely practical service that you can render to the country more as a man than as a teacher. – Jules Ferry, Letter to Teachers, 1883

Teachers of the World, Unite!

THE Fellows program, like the Olympics, held opening ceremonies the day before summer training was to begin, an unusually hot day in late June. It was basically a big pep rally held at a hotel ballroom across from Penn Station. Guest speakers included the outgoing lame duck Chancellor, Harold Levy – things hadn't worked out between him and the new billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg (I wasn't entirely clear why a billionaire wanted to be mayor; I figured Mike was simply bored out of his mind – once a striver, always a striver, I guess), who wanted his mayoralty to be judged on his commitment to education. One of his primary aims was to accomplish what Giuliani had been unable to do: re-centralize the Board of Ed under the control of the mayor's office (it had been de-centralized in 1969). We didn't know who was replacing Levy yet, but we did know that our employer had changed. The Board of Education, in a desperate image-makeover bid, had suddenly renamed itself the Department of Education.

We got a brief earful about the recent No Child Left Behind Act, which had been signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 8th. It was touted by the White House as the "magic bullet" that would somehow close the achievement gaps (caused by race and poverty) in America's public schools. Its major goal was to have student "achievement parity" by 2014, and have what it termed a "highly qualified" teacher in every classroom by the 2005 – 2006 academic year.

The majority of the time seemed to be spent praising us, and telling us how important we were going to be in the lives of these special children. Every speaker felt it necessary to tell us how wonderful we all were, what an amazing thing we had chosen to do, how badly we were needed, etc. On the surface, this would seem to be both flattering and comforting, but it must be said here that I tend to be a cynical man. Whenever people in authority start effusively praising impressionable neophytes, my hackles go up; you sense they're trying to lull you into a false sense of security just prior to some kind of debacle. It was obvious that this job was going to be a lot tougher than anyone was letting on.

As I sat there in the audience, holding my program, I thought back to my Fellows interview – why was I here again? What had I told the guy why I'd wanted to teach high school? I'd put on my best suck-up face and said, "My fondest educational memories are the ones stemming from my days at Stuyvesant High School." I'd continued in this rhapsodic vein: "Yes, a whole group of teacher's names can spring to mind from Stuyvesant, whereas I can barely remember more than a couple of my college professors..." Though the answer had felt phony, I knew it to be sincere – I hadn't been a big fan of college.

Now, as the speeches droned on, I decided now was the time to examine a little more closely my motivation for becoming a teacher. First and foremost, I knew that I was not a crusader. I wanted to teach what I had been taught, and how I had been taught it (unbeknownst to me, this would make me singularly unqualified for the coming task). I'd enjoyed high school, but I had not, at any time, ever wanted to teach at a high school in the ghetto; this program was a means to an end. And that end? My primary motivation was that once I broke into the system, and got certified, got a few years of experience under my belt, it would be a job that traveled, had benefits, which would always be in demand, and be on an academic calendar: in other words, I'd get my summers off. Part of its appeal was that I would not be working to make money for somebody else; thus the job had inherent humanistic meaning, and a sense of purpose. Did I love children? Well, children were people – I loved some people, so I guess it would be fair to say that I could bring myself to love some children. But to me love was something doled out sparingly and with discretion, it was not a soggy blanket to be draped over entire categories of people, and certainly not as a matter of principle: you must love all children because... they are children... seemed a kind of tautological argument. St. Francis (or even Jesus) I was not.

The main item on the agenda was general exhortation, trying to get us all geared up for the tasks ahead. It wasn't quite like a prayer-tent revival, though that was certainly its intent, and there were quite a few people in the audience who certainly seemed to feel that way about the proceedings, as they swayed and nodded. But for more than a few of us out there in the dark, there was more than an air of the soviet about it all – it was as if we were at some Party Congress applauding wildly at the unveiling of the next Five Year Plan. We were not so much a choir of the converted as a group submerging its misgivings for the cause – it was too late now, training was to begin the next day at CCNY.

* * *

The City College of New York, or CCNY, is located on a hill in Harlem at the intersection of 137th Street and Convent Avenue. The school itself has a long legacy of helping the poor, in the person of Townsend Harris (1808 – 1878), who attributed the difficulty of his journey from poverty to wealth to his inability to afford a decent education. Thus, he resolved to find a way to offer this opportunity to the poor and new immigrants of the city; he founded the Free Academy in 1847 (tuition was, as the name implies, free); later changing its name to the CCNY, it was incorporated into the CUNY system in 1961. By the turn of the 20th century, CCNY had become informally known as the "Jewish Harvard," because the Ivy League had developed the SAT to keep the Eastern European barbarians outside their gates (and then had had to develop "the interview" once they'd cracked the test). During the 1940's, however, Harvard became the "Jewish Harvard," and CCNY became more and more a school of color; the culture became less Cracow, more Caribbean.

In 1969, the same year that the New York City school system was de-centralized into 32 community school boards, City College was perceived as no longer fulfilling its original mission of providing a higher educational opportunity for the poor; the high standards the school had for admission were now seen as a barrier to social equality. So in response, CCNY adopted an "open admissions" policy for the fall of 1970: now, any student who had graduated from a high school in New York could attend, regardless of academic records. This policy, in conjunction with ever-dwindling funding (CCNY began charging tuition in 1976), started a long period of intense decline for the school. The once-proud institution became a shell of its former self, increasingly devoted to remedial education, as most incoming graduates of the NYC secondary school system were discovered to be practically illiterate. Powerless to raise the standards of the high schools, CCNY had to slowly but surely lower theirs. Finally, tacitly admitting that open admissions had been a dismal failure, the school ended the policy beginning in the fall of 1999. High school graduates now had to have an 80 average, and be able to pass a battery of assessment tests, to be admitted. But City College, despite its faults, was there to answer the call when the Teaching Fellows needed schools to train their ghetto-bound teachers. The school was still trying to keep the faith, staying true to its original mission of education for the city's poorest and most disadvantaged citizens.

Re-enter me. As I marched up the slope towards City College under the baking concrete heat of Harlem in summer to begin my training, I remembered that I'd vowed never to return to this place after getting my first M.A. (in writing) back in '96, as my classes had been for the most part an appallingly bad joke (though I had met my wife there – and admittedly I'd only attended to avoid getting a job). Many of the original Gothic buildings had been under renovation when I'd attended the first time around, and here it was 2002 and they were still busy working. On the same buildings. Looming above the campus was the violet-and-grey-hued stone of the Northern Academic Center (the NAC, pronounced "knack"), the Rikers Island architect's lowball abortion of a school building. I don't know anything about architecture, I admit – maybe in some circles the NAC's early 70's modernism was considered sleek, even elegantly utilitarian. To me it looked like the command center from Battle for the Planet of the Apes – I kept expecting to see sentient chimps and gorillas led by Roddy McDowell storming the place. Its sole saving grace was the air-conditioning.

If possible, the interior of the NAC building was even more hideous than the exterior; yellow cinderblock halls had garish orange doors recessed into them. It was behind one of these orange doors that I met the 24 members of my group, designated by the program as 5CC10: 5th Cohort, City College, Fellow Advisory group 10; we were all the presumptive English teachers in the city's worst schools: Taft High School, Theodore Roosevelt High School (located near Fordham University in the Bronx), and Louis D. Brandeis High School, the only zoned school in Manhattan, located on the Upper West Side.

On the first day of class, we went around the room introducing ourselves and what had brought us here. As I sat there listening, I felt like a Hollywood producer; I could hear the gravelly voice of the movie previews guy in my head: In the aftermath of 9/11, in the summer of 2002, a rag-tag group of societal misfits and money-world drop-outs from all over America would answer New York City's plaintive call for teachers. In eight short weeks they'd be turned into lean, mean, teaching machines and unleashed on a rotting, but deeply entrenched, public education system. No one expected any of them to come back alive... Circumstance and temperament: as far back as high school, I had never been much of a joiner – I'd never liked clubs or teams, and yet here I was. I looked around the stuffy, overcrowded room that we would begin to learn how to teach and wondered, with my supercilious eye: Who was going to make it?

As for me, I remember being somewhat appalled. All these total strangers with this bizarre penchant for sharing... It felt more than a little like group therapy. It just wasn't me. When it came to be my turn, I debated opening with "Call me Ishmael," and leaving it at that, but I settled for saying that I was a very private person, one who didn't like to bare one's soul to people he didn't know. I had become a somewhat reticent person in the last few years, I said, so I hoped they wouldn't mind if I kept my background notes brief. Or, as the Smith's song said, "If you've got five seconds to spare, I'll tell you the story of my life," reduced to a type: middle class kid from Brooklyn who had gone to the city's schools from Pre-K to M.A., the soundtrack to the gentrification of his neighborhood "All Things Considered" on the radio and the silver trumpets of "Masterpiece Theatre" on the TV.

* * *

The knock on my door came before dawn. "Roston," the voice said. "Let's go." The floor was freezing, and I shivered as I put on my white t-shirt and blue shorts. My partner was waiting for me in the hallway – he knew what he was doing, he'd been with the fleet. We quickly moved down to the assembly area, and then were marched across the street in the cold pre-dawn darkness to a mist-shrouded field. Standing there in white t-shirt and blue shorts was the former Vietnam Force Recon Gunnery Sergeant who was going to lead us through Hell Week. In August of 1986, I was a Midshipman 4th Class, having made the mistake of joining NROTC without the benefit of a scholarship; I had originally wanted to attend the Naval Academy. I had walked to the Court Street offices of Steven Solarz, my local Congressman, to go over my qualifications with him. As a result, and because my mother's uncle's cousin had been his Washington mentor, Solarz made me the principal nominee for the district. Normally, this would have meant automatic acceptance, equivalent to early admission, but there was a catch: I wore glasses, and the service academies at that time had a strict quota as to how many vision-deficient candidates they would accept. Therefore, all such candidates went back into the regular applicant pool, where I shared space with all those Eagle Scouts and three-letter athletes. I did not make the cut. So I had joined NROTC with the intention of trying to transfer my sophomore year.

This was how I found myself in Charlottesville, standing in front of a mirthlessly grinning fire hydrant of a marine, who stuck his finger in my face and told me to give him twenty push-ups or he was going to tear my head off and shit down my neck. Or something like that. After a brutal series of calisthenics, we went on our first of many long runs, singing jodies under the rising sun:

C-140 rollin' down the strip,

Recon Marine gonna take a little trip.

Mission top secret, destination unknown,

Don't even know if we'll make it home.

Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door,

Take a deep breath and shout "Marine Corps!"

And if I should die in a Commie ditch,

Bury me with the son-of-a-bitch...

Along the way, some fell by the roadside to vomit; when we returned to the field, upperclassmen went up and down the line putting ice cubes in our parched mouths so we wouldn't puke or pass out, because we had another series of calisthenics to do. We then ran back to the dorm to take a Marine Corps shower – if you got wet, you were in too long. After donning our khaki uniforms, we were marched to the cafeteria, and I have never eaten breakfasts like that before or since. We all of us loaded our trays to the breaking point – we were putting pancakes on waffles, wrapping sausage in bacon, and it still wasn't enough. We sat at the tables stuffing our faces and giggling in disbelief. Then we'd spend the rest of the day marching around and drilling under the August sun, before more calisthenics before dinner. At the end of training, to my surprise, an upperclassman named Karl Kime pulled me aside and said I should consider joining the marines instead of the navy. This was a man I often saw running in boots and utes as he prepared for Quantico. "Why?" I remember asking him. "Because you're an oddball, Roston, and the marines love oddballs." During the fall semester, I trained every Wednesday with the marine candidates, going on 8-mile runs, then the calisthenics circuit in the basement of the NROTC building, "C-140 rollin' down the strip..." But it didn't last. My uniform was ill-fitting in more ways than one – I started failing inspections, was late for drill. I found I'd lost my taste for just about everything associated with college, and having discovered rock music I was coming into my own as a rebel, shedding my straight-arrow skin, so I dropped out of the program at the end of the term.

But had I stayed in, there is every possibility that, like Karl Kime, who I later heard commanded a rifle platoon over there, I would've been shipped to Iraq just in time for the first Gulf War. From the accounts I've read about it, it doesn't sound like I missed much (Jarhead comes to mind, and with my luck I probably would've ended up as a Quartermaster), but every once in a while over the years I've wondered, and regretted.

* * *

Teaching Fellows summer training had been frequently referred to in the media as "boot camp" for teachers. This was because you had eight weeks to learn an entirely new profession, in much the same way that civilians had thirteen weeks to become transformed from individual civilians into a community of soldiers. Under normal circumstances, graduate training of a teacher consisted of 38 credits spread out over four semesters, including hundreds of hours of observational fieldwork and one semester as a student-teacher in a high school classroom, basically co-teaching with an experienced and licensed teacher. Then you were given your M.A. in Secondary Education and your initial state certification. However, this was not normal circumstances, and, because of this, the schedule was extremely compressed.

The focus of the summer training was six graduate credits in education, presumably to acquaint us with the latest in pedagogical methods. We would be in school Monday through Thursday, in class from 8am to 4pm. After that, we had what was known as Fellow Advisory from 4pm to 6pm – this was a special training session specifically for us as Fellows, which would be led by an experienced Teaching Fellow, meant to introduce us to the vagaries of the New York City system. After our graduate work was completed, in about six weeks, we would be sent to our respective schools to help teach summer school there in the mornings. We didn't march around under the hot sun, but we did get a $5 voucher for a helping of glutinous starch from the City College cafeteria that we hungrily devoured every day.

What did I know about this job before I arrived? Not much. I had been taught all my life, of course, but that didn't tell me anything. When I'd owned a car, I'd taken it to get fixed – this didn't mean I knew how a carburetor worked. Teaching to me was some smart person standing in front of a classroom of kids who were there as a stopping point on their way to somewhere else – college, career – and telling them something new, the archetypal "sage on the stage." In the case of good teachers, the new was also exciting and interesting. I was lucky – most of the teachers in my life had been good ones, especially in high school. I still fancied myself a lifelong student, or learner. But mostly what I knew about teaching, especially in the ghetto, came from the movies. In this I was no different from anybody else in the room.

There are two kinds of teaching movie: teaching in the white world, and teaching in the ghetto world. But teaching movies in both worlds are not about teaching per se. Why? Because it's like welding when it's well done; we can admire the skill that goes into it, but it's boring to watch. After all, welding only became interesting when the welder took off her clothes and danced around under a bucket of water. That's why no movies about teachers and teaching actually waste a lot of time on things like curriculum; instead they traffic in the "bigger" issues: inspiration, motivation, changing society.

For instance: In the white-world movie Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams, teaching at a stand-in for Philips Exeter, gives the kids a shock by asking them to tear out the boring introductions to their poetry textbooks, and spends a lot of time jumping on his desk to make a point. Of course what he's really teaching these privileged boys is how to think for yourself; one of his students is actually stupid enough to take this advice and ends up committing suicide. In Mona Lisa Smile, Julia Roberts wants the girls she teaches to see that there is more to life than looming housewifery. Her students are hostile at the start: "Long way from Oakland State?" snipes the Jewish girl (considering this is Wellesley in 1953, I'm sure she was the only one attending). But Julia Roberts perseveres in the face of this withering firestorm: she wins the girls over with her knowledge of modern art combined with think-for-yourself ideals. In both cases, the teachers become inspirational firebrands beloved by their students. And both teachers, of course, end up being fired.

Movies about teaching in the ghetto or teaching kids from the ghetto fall into a formula: inexperienced teacher, usually white and middle class, for reasons of their own, ends up in a "tough" school, a wreck of a building located in the middle of a war zone neighborhood. They are faced with a class of cynical, unruly minority teenagers; there is even violence. This teacher is completely unprepared for the culture shock of such a place, and is nearly overwhelmed by the demands of the job in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. These include an incompetent school administration. There is a soul-searching moment when the teacher has to decide if they can make it. They find some inner reserve of strength, or are convinced to go on by some mentor-like figure, and things begin to turn around. Somehow, the teacher reaches the toughest kid in the class, and soon every other student follows suit. By the end of the story, everybody realizes they love each other, and there is renewed hope for the future.

This is the formula followed by Michelle Pfeiffer in the most famous ghetto world movie, Dangerous Minds. How does she end up motivating the students to learn? First, she proves she's tough, by teaching them the karate she learned in the Marines. Then she begins throwing them candy bars for right answers; then, she takes the whole class to an amusement park to ride the rollercoaster. Finally, she sponsors a contest in which the three winners get taken to the fanciest restaurant in Palo Alto. Did I mention this woman is making twenty-four thousand a year? Overwhelmed by issues she is ill-equipped to handle (she cares "too much"), she decides to quit. She changes her mind, though, when the class tells her how much they love her. In Stand and Deliver, Edward James Olmos (not white) cares so much he nearly has a fatal heart attack; in The Blackboard Jungle, Glenn Ford (very white) is nearly beaten to death by his students, but goes back to the school to teach anyway. The underlying assumption of these movies, and by extension American society, is: the only way to be an effective teacher of the poor is to bankrupt yourself financially, emotionally, and physically. You had to aspire to martyrdom, in other words. This was not, however, the message that any of us were taking with us to training. We took the messages we wanted to take instead.

* * *

Every boot camp needs its sadistic DI; the best we could do was the titular head of the CCNY Secondary English Department, one Alison Stoker, a corpulent, be-spectacled study in non-passive aggression. She was one of those unfortunate female academics whose first angry thought upon waking in the morning was "Dominant patriarchy!" She was impatient with stupid, repetitive questions, which was not a bad thing, but she also turned out to be impatient with relevant and legitimate questions. And as time went on, she became impatient with just about anything to do with the Teaching Fellows. Her professed ignorance of the New York public schools system (she'd never taught in it) made her both unsympathetic and impervious to rational requests.

She made no secret of her contempt for Teaching Fellows in her few meetings with us, working stiffs who had been foisted on her pristine academic program. Unless, that is, the Fellow in question had attended an Ivy League university (five of our group had such credentials), in which case she toadied upon them in a most loathsome manner. As for the rest of us, she let us know in no uncertain terms that we were "educational imperialists," "cultural colonizers" who were being sent to prop up the status quo by bringing "white" culture to "helpless, voiceless" victims.

While we had a hard time swallowing Stoker's out-of-touch self-righteousness, we did muster up a suitable amount of righteous outrage discussing the June 25th decision of the Appellate Division of New York State's Supreme Court. Back in 1995, an organization founded to advocate for proper funding for the New York City public school system, the Council for Fiscal Equity, filed suit against New York State; on January 10th, 2001 the state Supreme Court declared that the state Constitution guaranteed every child in New York the right to the opportunity for a "sound basic education." The court also found that the state system of funding schools was "inequitable and unconstitutional." However, on June 25th, 2002, in a 4-1 vote, the Appellate Division struck down that ruling, holding that students in New York State were only entitled to an eighth-grade level education ("functional literacy") as a preparation for low-level jobs. The sole dissenting opinion chastised the court majority for a decision that meant the State had "no meaningful obligation to provide any high school education at all."

Like all Education Departments everywhere, the City College program claimed to be where the "catalysts for change" in education were being formed, forged, molded – however catalysts are slapped together. You could feel the progressive vibe they were trying to put out: here was where they were reinventing America's approach to pedagogy. No more teacher-centered chalk-and-talk, no more sitting in rows like dutiful drones, no! Now it was all about student-centered "jigsawing" in group work and "alternative" seating.

The two young female adjuncts who taught the graduate classes were both very nice, very bright, but again, neither of them had taught in an inner-city school. We got introduced to a lot of the educational theories currently in vogue. However, the training was noticeably deficient in either practice or practicality. We were never taught the basic rudiments of the job, be it designing and delivering an actual lesson or even how to grade. This filled me (and the rest of the class) with foreboding; they were giving us a scalpel for a job requiring a hammer and nails. Or, put another way, our training was being compared to boot camp; imagine, then, a boot camp where they didn't teach you how to shoot a rifle, but instead spent the time discussing Von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.

English teaching is a trade like any other (though after several more graduate classes in the ensuing years, I would come to regard it not so much a trade as a messianic cult). Thus, it had its own jargon: we were introduced to the concept of "scaffolding," building up to what you wanted to teach in a series of steps by "frontloading" information. We made the acquaintance of the educational behaviorist Lev Vygotsky and his Zone of Proximal Development (the prime theory behind the concept of "student-centered" group work) in books laden with footnotes. We were also issued "field manuals" which included a quick breakdown of all the tools apparently needed to meet the criteria for "high expectations." Among these tools were Venn diagrams and the KWL chart.

One of the many problems with these manuals was that they were too general: they were aimed at all teachers, from grammar school to math, not just high school English teachers. They were also shy of specifics. For instance, when it came to designing essay questions, the guidelines were: "Clearly articulate expectations in terms of content, form, style, and length." Okay, great. How? Very little of these manuals were ever covered in our classes – we were left to read them and sort it out on our own.

Instead, a primary emphasis in the training was the constant solicitation of our reflections, opinions, and especially feelings about our own education, especially with regards to reading and writing: How do you remember being taught to read and write? We even wrote a class magazine around this topic. This was presumably so we could see things from the student's perspective, so it might "inform our pedagogy."

I don't remember being taught how to read and write, it was just something I did. My mother tells me that in my early years I was greatly assisted in my literacy by Sesame Street and the Electric Company, hosted by muppets and Morgan Freeman respectively. But muppets aside, my house was filled with books; I grew up surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (my father was an auto-didactic theatre director and my mother had been an English Lit major at Vassar). I don't remember a time when I didn't read. I always remember loving it, and I especially liked reading to my parents as opposed to being read to by them (I still enjoyed reading aloud to others – until recently, I used to read to my wife every night). Most of the class had similar experiences; after all, most of us were cut from the same cloth: white and middle-class. And even those who weren't were from households or circumstances that valued literacy. We had all been successful readers from an early age.

While perhaps a noble effort on the part of the adjuncts, the salient flaw in this approach was that our own educational experiences bore no similarities whatsoever to the educational experiences of our charges, making the entire exercise pointless. This approach on the adjuncts' part would, in fact, lull many of us into a dangerously misguided feeling of "understanding" with the students we would be encountering. In other words, are strengths would quickly be turned into our weaknesses.

The most important concept, however obliquely imparted, was leadership. Teachers are leaders, and must always lead by example. The edu-jargon for this concept was "modeling." You were always supposed to be modeling how you wanted the students to perform. Perhaps I'd get to channel some of the person I used to be, the one who wanted to go to the Naval Academy all those years ago.

Despite their ostensible importance, I found that my mind would wander in these sessions; I would gaze out of the window down onto the school's tennis courts and watch some truly awful volleying sessions – racket, ball, net; racket, ball, net. I would think: How can they even try to play in this heat...? And there were other thoughts aside from mine banging around NAC 6/207:

It reminds me of Lifespring, these constant references to self-esteem... God, I'm so old! ...I'm learning far too much too fast about a bunch of people I don't even know... Is this some kind of sociology experiment in group dynamics? ...My ass is asleep... It feels like basic training – strangers bonding over a common goal, that same total, intense commitment to a single idea... Back home we've got a saying: You don't take a dump with the door open to a roomful of strangers... She's never going to make it... He's never going to make it... Man, I think that clock is slow ...We're being taught 'parlor tricks.' Where's the long-term strategy? ...Will somebody please tell me what I'm supposed to focus on? ...This group has to be the smartest one they have – either that or we're all great bullshit artists...

There was one enormous positive generated by the close-quarters summer training: it created a close-knit team. All that time in the same room bonded us all rather strongly, creating an instant support network that would prove to the most valuable aspect of the training come the fall. We felt like we were all in it together, and this allowed us to psych each other up. The energy level in the room was always high. However, this also tended to make us gloss over what might actually happen in the fall. The predominant attitude became: The schools can't possibly be as bad as everybody says they are. Kids are just kids, after all. You can't believe everything you see in the movies or television or read in the papers. We're going to be different, and better, than the rest. However, there was one major item that was never discussed in training: we were serving point on another hot-button issue, namely teacher retention. The issue went deeper than just hiring new teachers; it was keeping them once they were hired. And what we didn't know was that we were fighting upstream against the tide of history: the teachers were all going the other way. Attrition rates for new teachers were over 40% within three years.

* * *

During summer training, just as in high school, cliques had formed. Liz Meadows, Mike Abernethy, and myself had gravitated towards each other probably because we were the more irreverent and cynical members of the class.

Taft-bound Elizabeth Meadows, 33, was a strawberry blond decorated with blue tribal tattoos on her right shoulder blade and left arm. She had been salutatorian of her class at Columbia and Phi Beta Kappa; she'd almost decorated the gaudy pink gown of the Dean of the School of General Studies with vomit at commencement – for her, public speaking was right up there with "getting rogered with a hot poker." She had been born and raised in Manhattan's Morningside Heights; her friends had been from the local Grant Housing Project. She'd attended Hunter High School, and had attended the University of Wisconsin briefly before dropping out. She'd moved back and worked in the garment industry for 10 years before opting to return to school. While attending Columbia, she thought she'd teach English at the college level, but she changed her mind for three reasons. "One, by the time I finished my PhD I would be too old for a tenure-track position, even if there were any available in the field at the time, which there weren't. Two, after Columbia I was sick of being around over-privileged white kids; I had no desire to teach those kinds of students. Finally, I grew up around the kids who had gone to places like Taft, and I knew they needed the help." By teaching high school, she said, she was hoping to find a job that was a vocation. "I love reading so much, I wanted to get others to enjoy it as much as I do. I wanted that world accessible to everybody. I wanted them to get to know 'the other' through literature, something outside their own narrow experience."

Mike Abernethy was a 27-year-old native of El Paso, Texas, who looked like the overweight Theta Chi frat brother he had been at UT Austin. He had the distinction of being the only person I'd met who had been shot. He'd moved to New York to try his hand at acting, but "I got caught up in the whole Internet thing, and then got laid off like everybody else in the spring of 2001." As for the program, "My dad told me about it. Teaching made more than temping, and it had to be more interesting than sitting at your desk eating a cheese sandwich, checking your e-mail about a thousand times. It seemed 'respectable,' at least better than saying 'administrative support for middle management.' It had health insurance, and frankly the job didn't seem all that hard." He'd wanted to be a history teacher, but he was told at the interview there were no jobs for history teachers, "and like an idiot I believed them." Finding himself at the Roosevelt table (shortest line), Mandell seemed "real peppy. She said I'd be a 'great fit,' especially with my acting experience." Since Roosevelt was located across from Fordham University, she claimed this gave the school a "collegiate" atmosphere. Mike wanted to say, "If you're so 'collegiate,' what the fuck's the school doing in the Chancellor's District?"

The three of us formed a weekly drinking club (though Mike and I sometimes ended up changing it to daily) that met after class at the Parlour on West 86th Street. From the outside, given its grand frontage enclosed in black iron fencing, and draped in huge flags, it might be mistaken for the Irish embassy. Once inside, though, with its exposed brick walls, wood paneling in low pink light, Premiership soccer on the TV and Guinness on tap, you would be forgiven for thinking you were in the Irish embassy. I jest, of course. The Irish embassy doesn't have pink lighting.

Over Guinness (and cigarettes – Liz and Mike chain-smoked; I had quit four years before), we'd discuss our misgivings and thoughts about the training and our fellow classmates. I illustrated how out of place I felt at Taft; putting on a posh English accent, I'd turn to Mike: "I say, old boy, just got back from a recce to Taft, and some peevish Hottentot made noises to the effect that he was going to insert some of 'cap' into my hindquarters. Any idea what he might've been getting at?" We tried to make predictions as to who would make it and who wouldn't: we called it the Quit List. The three of us would make it, that was a given – we might not be the best teachers, but we sure as hell planned on being the toughest through virtue of our "life experience." We christened ourselves "The Untouchables." Not in the Vedic caste system, but after the manner of the Brian DePalma movie: we wouldn't let the job "touch" us the way it would the others. But it was already beginning to tell on my already shaky home life: if I wasn't coming home exhausted, doing my homework, and falling asleep, I was staying out late, drinking more, and passing out. I was developing new friendships for the first time in a long time, and so was more social than I or my wife was used to; I had been a lot lonelier than either of us had realized. I said my long bouts of unemployment had been bad for my self-respect; she countered that drinking back my pride was not the answer. I tried to allay her concerns as being a temporary aberration; once I began work, things would settle down.

It was during one of these drinking sessions that I brought up that I felt 5CC10 had a Foreign Legion feel to it. Mike disagreed. In his voice made prematurely gravelly by cigarettes, Mike said the group was more like a Forlorn Hope. Mike was an expert on the Napoleonic Wars; he could talk at great length about men like Marshal Ney, the 'bravest of the brave', because that had been his Master's focus. He'd done his Master's thesis on the Battle of Waterloo. Sucking an American Spirit down to the filter, he said, "A Forlorn Hope was what the British Army used in attacking wall breaches during a siege. In order to distract the enemy from the main attack at one breach, they'd send a Forlorn Hope into another breach as a distraction. Usually, it consisted of a handful of drunken Irishmen, incorrigible discipline problems, and some 16-year-old ensign that didn't have any political connections."

"Would it be safe to assume this Hope had a fairly low survival rate?" I asked.

Drag, exhale, squint. "It would."

* * *

The last and most useful part of the training, unsurprisingly, was the information imparted by a Teaching Fellow who had been in the field for two years, our Fellow Advisor Molly MacLeod. Two summers ago, she'd been sitting in one of the very same seats we were, a bright-eyed member of Cohort 1, a blue-eyed blonde from a town near Columbus, Ohio. She'd seen herself standing on her desk like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, or getting poor kids to love Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. Molly had begun her career teaching 5th grade science at PS 92 in Flatbush. It began to dawn on her that grammar school wasn't for her when she started to come into work hungover. Every day. So for her second year, she asked to be switched to high school; she was assigned a Special Ed class in the basement of John Jay High School, where her Emotionally Disturbed students bounced off the windowless walls all day long. And now they were shutting John Jay down, so she'd have to move to a third school in the fall. I remember thinking, when I heard this, three schools in three years? Jesus – how unlucky could you get?

Bloodied but hardly unbowed, she was now 27 years old and all set to advise Cohort 5 Fellows. But it quickly became more of a challenge than she had expected. The toughest part was the incessant classroom management questions; we hadn't been told as much, but we all knew student misbehavior was a major issue. She understood our concerns, but her FA training had stressed that she should emphasize that "Good planning is good management." And besides, she felt that classroom management wasn't something you could teach; it was all a matter of personal style, you either had it or you didn't. Classroom management was related to your "teaching personality," the kind of teacher you felt comfortable being. And that only emerged, like a butterfly from a cocoon, on the job. And you should prepare to be surprised how the image of yourself as a teacher differed from what you actually became.

But as the class became more and more insistent about it, she felt like she was deliberately avoiding the issue; she began to think maybe it wasn't such a good idea to wait for the "management fairy" to come by and wave her magic wand. So she put together a classroom management session: she asked for a couple of volunteers to teach a sample lesson, while the rest of the class were given sample student roles on an index card, with behaviors such as "You won't stop talking," "You are trying to light a piece of paper," "You won't move your seat when asked," "You are going to take a swing at the student sitting next to you for no reason." These were all behaviors she'd been faced with the previous year; it turned out to be the best thing she did all summer – everybody got into it, and it was hilariously informative to watch the volunteers get trampled. She tried to assure them all that this was close to a sample classroom experience, but most of us were incredulous; the skeptical looks exchanged plainly said: This has to be the worst-case scenario...

As the summer wound down, Molly became increasingly disquieted. She felt she hadn't stressed how hard-core the classroom experience was going to be, that it was all about management. So in the few remaining sessions she began to hurriedly reel off all the hard-won tips she could: "Maintain an air of mystery at all times: the students are deeply unsettled by the unknown, so exploit it. Always have back-up work. Have a plan B. Have a plan C or even D if you can. This can be something as simple as a worksheet, but have something. Be sure to save your sick days for March – the stretch between Winter Break and Spring Break is murder. Never take anything personally, it's not about you, you're just a symbol: of authority, of failure. Don't hold grudges, every day is a clean slate with them. And I know this is going to sound weird, but try not to give too much homework. They never do it; assigning it just gives them one more thing to fail at, to feel bad about. It lowers their self-esteem." She also advised against talking too much to veteran teachers – "Avoid the teacher's cafeteria," was the subtle way she decided to put it. The veterans as a rule were portrayed as a negative, dispirited bunch – the Fellows didn't want their new shiny happy people becoming 'infected' with any of their malaise.

"And if you remember nothing else, remember this: Once that door closes, it's just you and the students. You're on your own."

In other words, while the training did develop a sense of teamwork, in the end teaching, like boxing, is not a team sport. In the fall we would be a series of tenuously connected individuals, each of us alone in the watertight compartment of our classrooms. In the end, we all set out in the same naïve spirit as Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness. Sitting behind the wheel of a snowplow about to crash into Capone's warehouse for his first big bust, Chicago Police's Flying Squad trotting alongside in their jodhpurs, Ness leans out the plow window and yells: "Okay, now: Let's do some good!"

CANTO II

Enter the Dragons

The Bronx

.

Percent of Households below the Poverty Line with: Single Parent. No Husband Present, Children Under 18

Source: US Census Bureau, Census 2000 (SF3)

..As the record reflects, approximately 30% of [New York City] high school students drop out and fail to obtain a degree. Approximately 10% of high school students obtain only a general equivalency diploma (GED), for which the requirements are so low that GED recipients who attend college have only a 2% completion rate... The record further reflects that 80% of City public school graduates who enter the City University of New York require remedial help in basic areas such as reading and math, and 50% require remedial help in more than one area... (From opinion of Justice J.P. Tom of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division, in decision of Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, 6/25/02)

September

THE week before students report, we receive our programs (or what classes we would be teaching), get a chance to decorate the rooms, and get further orientation from Charlie. We are also to get our timecards from the Payroll Secretary. Like the shift at any Pittsburgh steel mill, we have to actually punch in and out on a vintage 50's time clock. We're issued Delaney books with their accompanying cards, grade books, school and departmental handbooks, and, most importantly of all, bathroom keys. Charlie has had the keys cut himself; he assures us we'd have died of old age waiting for the school to get around to doing it.

In addition to all the unfamiliar equipment and procedures that ushered us into the school year, we also had our new Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein. In July of 2002, it seemed that Mayor Bloomberg had merely replaced one bald, be-spectacled wealthy Jewish businessman-lawyer with another (though Klein was shorter). While Levy could have at least passed for an academic, Klein, with his pronounced overbite and small troll-like ears, quite honestly resembled Rumpelstiltskin; in any case, he was another espouser of the belief that businessmen and business methods could solve any problem. We had one thing in common, Joel and us: we were all new to education. The similarities ended there; we certainly weren't getting paid $250,000 a year.

Of more immediate concern to us was the fact that we were starting the year with a new principal. I'd only met Principal Grayson once; I dimly remembered her as a kindly granny figure, all gray hair and glasses; she had been fired the week before we reported (for reasons that were never explained – one day she was principal, the next she was gone, poof), and her replacement was one Lisa Heinz – short, severely dark-haired, severely middle-aged. She had an extremely aloof demeanor and an impassive face; whether it was immobile because she wore foundation the consistency of face-spackle, or simply because she wasn't nice, remained to be seen. I had certainly seen clowns with less makeup. She had a funereal air about her; this was because she had been charged with basically putting Taft to sleep.

Her first gesture as our new leader was to summon the faculty to the auditorium so she could introduce herself and give us all a pep talk. She had to give up on the microphone due to technical problems (the mike, like the time clock, was an art-deco original). So, she had to try and project her voice. She knew, she began – only to be interrupted by a chant of "We can't hear you!" from the row of disgruntled lifers behind me. She knew, she said (this time louder), that Taft was a troubled school, and she knew that the only way things were going to change for the better was if we, the faculty, were like a rowing crew – if we didn't all pull together, we wouldn't get anywhere. She repeated this analogy several times, presumably in case any of us had nodded off at some point (which, of course, by now some of us had). After this rousing speech, I wouldn't see her again until December (and I would come to wish it were longer than that). As far as I could ascertain, she spent most of her time in meetings, either on-site or off-site, and going to lunch. She was almost never seen outside the confines of her air-conditioned office, which I christened the Bunker. On her rare perambulations around the school, she made a point of never saying hello to anyone she saw in the hallways. I was curious as to what type of leadership this was – was she modeling how to show you didn't care what others thought of you? To reinforce she was the boss and didn't lower herself to speak to peons? Perhaps she was just preoccupied with weightier matters than professional courtesy.

It was around this time that Charlie took it upon himself to teach his new English teachers how to design and deliver the New York City "developmental lesson," the standard 46-minute lesson in a subject class, since we told him that nobody else had done it. It was called a developmental because the lesson developed over a series of stages. The lesson, like life, should have an Aim, a question which the lesson is designed to answer (known as "beginning with the end in mind"). Then comes something called a 'Do-Now,' a focus question that is related to the Aim but that has some kind 'real-world' application; that is, a question that should somehow be relevant to the students' lives. The students answer the 'Do-Now' in writing, and then you are to relate the ensuing discussion to the Aim. This is the jumping-off point for the lesson. It is here you begin to address the text being studied. After reading aloud certain selections from the text that you have deemed important, you ask pivotal questions on which the lesson hinges. After a brief discussion of their answers, you continue with the PQ's until the Final Summary, which is basically having the students answer the Aim in writing. At the end of the lesson, an understanding of a concept or idea should have been imparted, one that should be tied to a larger understanding for the marking period, or even semester. Or, even, God forbid, life... It was, Charlie explained, all in the timing, what was termed bell-to-bell instruction. If a lesson was planned down to the minute with interesting questions and activities, management issues would quickly dissipate. "Remember," he said. "Good planning is good management."

Then came the final wrinkle. Taft, like Gaul, was to be divided into parts. There was the "old" Taft, which as has been mentioned was supposed to be gradually phasing out, and three new schools on the fourth floor of the building: the High School of Medical Sciences, The Jonathan Levin School of Media and Communications, and the High School for Business. Each school would have their own principal. These schools, organized around a so-called theme that in point of fact was meaningless (you didn't study more math or science classes in Medical Science, or get extra computer lab in Media – the names were just that: names), were part of the new "small schools" movement that Chancellor Klein wanted to make the centerpiece of his tenure (though the small schools movement originated with his predecessors, Fernandez and Levy). The theory was this: Take the big, failing high schools and break them down into smaller high schools so that students could reap the benefits of smaller class size, more individual teacher time, and heightened security. However, you weren't changing the makeup of the student body or changing their socioeconomic status. In any case, all three new schools in Taft would receive only 9th graders; the "old" Taft was also ostensibly accepting only one more class of freshmen, and they were to be sent to the Taft Academy, the "new" Taft, similar in structure to the new schools. The new schools were built on a "new" model which was really an "old" model, namely the grammar school model.

Let me explain. The most out-of-control, least secure locations in any inner-city high school are the hallways. The halls at Taft had been legendary flashpoints in this regard, students running amok being chased by guards, getting into fights, banging on class windows and doors. This not only led to serious security issues, but it also resulted in an enormous amount of student cutting. If you can't control the hallways, partly because you can't control who enters the building, how can you possibly stop somebody from leaving the building when they feel like it? So, in order to improve hallway security, bring down the cutting rate, and quarantine the new students from possible "infection" from the "old" Taft students (in the same manner Fellows were supposed to avoid infection from the veterans), the 9th graders were to be kept in the same room all day long. Instead of the normal high school routine of changing classes, teachers would come to the students. Lockdown, in other words.

This wasn't all, of course. Not only were the 9th grades in lockdown, they would be utilizing a new instructional method, one that was to be spearheaded by the English teachers. This new model would be teaching what was termed a "literacy double-block," meaning English class was now 92 minutes instead of 46 (though since there would be no class change-over at the bell it was actually 96 minutes), and it would have its own specialized structure, or script: 20 minutes for this, 30 minutes for that, etc. Instead of teaching three other classes, however, the English teacher would be doing something called "push-in." In theory this meant "co-teaching" with two teachers outside the English subject area, usually history and either math or science. The other departments were already making noises about this, either unwilling or incapable of helping out. The fifth class these English teachers would teach was something called Advisory, and nobody even pretended to know what that was. The details of this new program, even in the eleventh hour, had yet to be worked out. In any case, this meant that the English teacher (and only the English teacher) would be in the same room with the same kids for five periods. I pitied those poor bastards.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Over the summer, Charlie had asked me for my teaching preferences: I wanted older students since I thought I'd work better with them – I figured if nothing else they'd get my jokes. Charlie agreed with my self-assessment, and I knew he liked me, so when I received my program I was more than a little shocked to learn I had been slotted for the Taft Academy. I would be teaching periods 7, 8, and 9, the last three periods of the day. This meant the students would have spent five periods in the room already, as well it being after lunch, when, as Glen Rogers noted, most unhelpfully, "they'll all be hopped up on Doritos and grape soda."

I wish I could say that my cynical and world-weary attitude caused me to merely shrug at this horrifying news. I wish I could say that my innate respect for Charlie, and my natural professionalism, led me to take this new assignment with aplomb and dignity. Yes, I wish I could say these things, I really do. But I can't. In point of fact, I hit the ceiling. I felt betrayed – I felt that I was being set up for failure. I stormed into Charlie's office (who appeared to be expecting my imminent arrival). I stood distraught in front of his desk, full of bitter recriminations, waving my program around like a demented Chicago commodities trader.

Now, good leaders not only have to be smart and charismatic, they also have to be, to a certain degree, con-men. And Charlie-O was no exception. After patiently weathering my immature vituperations, he held up his hands and asked if he would be allowed to explain things. Huffily, I said fine. He explained that my success in summer school had come back to haunt me. It transpired that then-principal Grayson had secretly observed me from the hallway the one day I had used group work, and she had, apparently, been impressed. She told Charlie she wanted me to help spearhead the "new" Taft. After Grayson's removal, now principal Heinz had opted not to change any programs, and there was nothing he, Charlie, could do about it.

Then he leaned back in his chair and assumed his regal pose: glasses pushed forward to the end of his nose, hands folded over his prodigious belly, eyes looking up from under bushy brows, he began to grease me. "Aaron, as far as I'm concerned, this was the best thing that could have happened to you. First of all, the 90-minute literacy block is going to become the new educational model, so you'll have something that'll look great on a resume. Second, it's an honor to be selected for any new program. Third, think of the reduction in paperwork – only 30 students! And, finally, you know what the great thing is about untried programs? Nobody knows how they're supposed to go! You'll have all kinds of freedom to experiment. Quite frankly, if I'd had more time to think about it, I would've assigned this to you anyway." A younger, more impressionable person might have been taken in by this, but I knew when I was being massaged. But calmer now, and a bit shamefaced at my behavior, I reasoned: what was my choice? This was the gig, man. So, gritting my teeth, I submitted with as much grace as I could manage. As a final consolation, Charlie said he would be having me co-teach AP English with him instead of one of my "push-ins;" that did make me feel a little better.

Finally, just before classes were to begin, we were acquainted with the major task that we as teachers had to perform (and this was driven home to us by Heinz and her cronies time and again): this was ensuring all students removed their hats and do-rags once inside the building. It struck me as the strangest place for a school system to take a stand. I certainly agreed with it; you took your hat off in church so you should take it off in school, it was a matter of respect. Not to mention it couldn't shield any miscreant's eyes. But it seemed to me that if they could be this draconian about something so trivial, why couldn't they be draconian with anything of real value, such as making sure the school got textbooks or reducing class size? But it was on this sartorial issue they had decided to hold the line.

I got a single emergency training session in the 90-minute block before I was sent to clean my assigned room, Room 437. There, windows let in a grimy daylight; all the shades were broken, hanging askew in a tangle of brown canvas and string like the rigging of a stricken clipper. It was to be here that I would set out on the voyage of developing into the kind of teacher I wanted to be.

In my brief exposure to the population, and given what I was intuiting about the situation in general, I knew I wanted to be tough but fair. However, I was prepared to become a major-league hard-ass, and I was going to err on the side of being perhaps too tough at the beginning. I knew it was easier to relinquish gradually than try to impose suddenly. I had designed my class contract (the one thing we had gone over and over in summer training, in order to establish "how you want your class to run"), which included my rules and procedures, and gotten Charlie's okay. I had taken his and Molly's advice: keep the contract simple, with a few memorable items. I'd titled it the "7 Pillars of Success Contract," after T.E. Lawrence's book. Charlie had loved it. "The seven pillars of wisdom. Very nice."

The day before school was to begin, as I was putting the finishing touches on my room, Glen Rogers came wandering by to check things out (Charlie had told him to keep him an eye on me). He'd recently made himself a minor hero when the Union had informed us about the new schedule for the school day in our first meeting in the teacher's cafeteria. As a condition of the city raising salaries, the Union had had to concede teachers devoting an extra 100 minutes a week for "professional development." The members had been given a choice: each school could add two 50-minute periods a week to the end of the day, or add the entire 100 minutes to the entire school week for an extra 20 minutes a day. Taft had taken a vote and voted overwhelmingly for the 20 minutes a day. Rogers had raised his hand and asked the Union rep, "I think I need some clarification. If we're being paid more but we have to work more, how is that a raise?" The room had applauded wildly.

Rogers took a look around and then sat down next to me on my desk. "Looks good. Try to keep them away from the windows as much as you can. Don't open the windows from the bottom if you can help it. Things go airborne very easily."

Things?

"Books, mostly. These are freshmen – you're basically a lion-tamer, nothing more. They don't have a clue how to behave, so..."

"That's my job to teach them?"

"Right. The one thing you have to do is make sure your doors are locked. Last year, I had two guys bust into my freshman class and literally drag one of my students out of the room. Never saw the kid again."

I found that I was finally beginning to get nervous. "Is it really as bad as all that?"

He laughed and shook his head. "Nah, it's worse. Much worse."

* * *

My first school day actually begins the previous Sunday morning, since I don't sleep the night before; I have the exhausted edginess of the caffeinated insomniac when I take the deserted B train clattering towards the Bronx. Everybody else is going the other way. I get to school, punch the clock, get to the fourth floor, and double-check everything twice. The bell rings (though actually it's a high-pitched electronic beep piped through the public address system), and I take up my post standing in the classroom door, and here they come. Meet the new Taft, same as the old Taft...

The one redeeming feature of freshmen is: It's all new to them. So at least you're on equal footing there. There they go, cruising the halls, saying hello to the odd friend from junior high, pretending they know where they're going while they clutch their programs. When they enter my class, I wouldn't go so far as to say they're meek and docile; it's more like they're restrained. "Take off your hats, please," are the first words out of my mouth, I think. Name-brands float before my eyes: FUBU ("For Us, By Us," as I later learned), Rocawear, North Face, Fila. Most of them are older than I expect – their average age will turn out to be 16, all of them black or Hispanic except a kid here or there from Bangladesh or Ghana.

I stick to the script: give out the contracts and class rules, and go over them step-by-step, no matter what – I am to begin scaffolding proper behavior, or building the stairway to classroom control heaven, immediately. Everyone has stressed that it's vitally important to establish law and order from the outset – if you don't have it before the honeymoon ends you are never going to have it. I have the kids bring the contract home, get some parent or guardian to sign it, and give the kid a 100 quiz grade to start off the year. Why not start on an up note? Why not the best? However, this is all harder than it sounds in what is basically a triple period, having the same group of teenagers for around 140 minutes straight.

First days are usually the Getting to Know You period. Unfortunately, before we can get into the actual "getting to know you" stuff, there's a snag: turns out my room is being used as a holding area for students they don't know where to put yet due to overflow from over-the-counter registration (a process referred to as "stacking"); ergo, I have a completely new class rotated through every two days. I have to modify The Speech, the one that every first-year teacher prepares for their first meeting with the class, equal parts introduction, sermon, and drill instruction; it shouldn't be overly friendly (Welcome to high school, kids! Boy, are we going to have us some fun this term!), or it'll be mistaken for weakness; nor should it be too harsh (Listen up, maggots! Your mommas aren't here to hold your hand or wipe your nose, it's just you and me now!), or you'll start the semester off on too dark a note. Since it transpires I won't have any of these kids, staring at me expectantly, for more than a day or two, I have to settle for this half-role of greeter/administrator, neither fish nor fowl, more like a customer-service rep than anything else: Thank you for coming to Taft today! Your attendance is important to us, but please be patient as we organize the school to serve you better... The upside of all this is that I get to meet a lot of freshmen this way, as I hand out Delaney cards like a car parts salesman at a Shriner's convention (Hey there Roy, how the hell are ya?). It was during this, what, transitional period? that I discover Taft has a couple of charming local acronyms: Training Animals for Tomorrow, or Teachers Asking for Trouble. Apparently, as the students are only too happy to enlighten me, Taft is the school that parents use as the ogre in ghetto fairy tales: If you don't study, you'll end up at Taft! I would learn later that kids at Roosevelt were afraid of being transferred to Taft.

Overall, though, the atmosphere remains fairly casual; the students aren't sure I'll be their teacher tomorrow, so they aren't taking any chances one way or the other just yet. In retrospect, the chaos of those days began to lead to a creeping feeling that no one in authority really knew what they were doing (they were right of course), and in that sense the students began to realize it wasn't much different from middle school. Thus their guarded fear-tinted optimism (maybe it won't be so bad) turned quickly to disillusionment, the sure-fire Petri dish for classroom control problems.

By the second week the rosters begin to stabilize, shooting for a 30-student class size. For two days in a row, it seems that I have a class. Then, the three other new schools on the fourth floor come around and "recruit" the brighter students, the more alert ones, the ones that have even the slightest stirring of future ambition (ooh, High School for Media! That sounds interesting...!) After this cherry-picking, leftovers and runoff from other classes replace the dearly departed, and I have my class. And so my fall semester begins, standing in front of 30 sullen teens, 15 boys and 15 girls, all of us new to this... experience... and all of us feeling just a bit cheap and tawdry, a little used maybe, a little unwanted.

Welcome to high school, kids.

* * *

One of my favorite and most memorable teachers had been the man who taught me to box: Hector Roca, out at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn. I didn't become athletic until I was 27; I no longer remember the reason I decided to take up boxing then, when I was living in New Orleans, what possessed me to suddenly want to push my body to its absolute limits. It was more than just the boredom of weight lifting, more even than the desire to see if I could take a punch. It either would take an entire book to explain or it could be reduced to a simple sentence. But what that sentence would be, I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with having to rely only on oneself to win.

Hector managed to teach an athletic neophyte to get good enough to dream of the Golden Gloves – he felt that if I entered the white collar nights "they'll have to stop the fight." His methods were fairly simple, at first – if I did something wrong, he'd smack me up the side of the head. It was very effective. But I never resented it – I labored under few illusions as to what boxing was all about. Then I received two serious eye injuries in separate sparring sessions, and I was forced to abandon the idea of competition. But I never forgot the lessons.

In the same way it was hard to learn a sport, it was hard to learn the rhythm of the classroom; like Charlie said, it's all in the timing. But it's not a musical rhythm, it's an athletic rhythm. It's like boxing in that way. You have to learn a sense for the bell, but instead of three minutes, the rounds are 46 minutes, or even 92 minutes, long. Boxing is high-speed muscle memory – in the ring, you can't think: "Hm, let me try a jab here," there isn't time – you have to learn a choreographed series of repetitive moves over and over; your body has to react instinctively. So to that end I try to slow the lessons down, let the class (the fight) come to me (or as boxers would say, let your hands go), but I have a tendency to get flustered and panic and thus rush on through material that the students haven't grasped yet.

In addition, I only teach the one ELA class so that I don't have any other classes to compare it to. This means that if something doesn't work, I don't have the opportunity to tweak it and try it on somebody else – it gets hard to maintain confidence in your amateurish planning. Then there is the matter of engagement. Why are they not doing their homework, why are they doing nothing in class? I find that my first standard reply is, when they say, "We know, we know, we hear you," I say: "You hear, but you don't listen."

And the novelty wears off any job all too soon; we all fall into routines and patterns pretty quickly. I stride in, plunk all my stuff down on the desk, and start my daily spiel. "Take your seats, please. I'm putting a Do-Now on the board, please do it. That's the late bell. You should have your notebook out. No, I do not have paper. No, I do not have pens. Please come prepared to class." Hey, I even sounded like a teacher. My standard piece of equipment has become the one-liter water bottle; the first couple of weeks I need it just to combat nervous dry mouth – I always feel like an actor with only the most tenuous grip on his lines. After the nervousness settles a bit, I need the water because I do a lot of talking. I use the water bottle as a prop – I bang it down on the desk when I'm displeased, I use it to take a sip as a way of inserting a meaningful pause, either to calm things down ("Oh-oh, there goes the water!") or to give them a minute to think about something. However, I find that I am so distracted between one thing or another that I'm constantly forgetting my bottle somewhere and I have to buy a new one every day.

I've made the dubious choice of calling them on every possible infraction, no matter how minor, in an effort to exert control: zero tolerance, for anything. No gum chewing allowed – I can't stand the sound of gum snapping, it seems to travel right into my spine. Raise your hand to ask a question or to move from your seat, including throwing away garbage. Anybody caught throwing paper has to clean up the entire floor. If you don't do it, you get a zero; then somebody else gets to do it for 'extra credit.' Someone caught writing on their desk is guilty of vandalism; since seating is assigned, they own that desk and they're easy to nail; they have to clean it up with my bottle of Clorox with Bleach, which makes the whole room stink. After the first couple of times, the other students begin to complain about the harsh ammonia smell (and attendant possibility of some getting on designer clothing) and roundly insult the offender, so desk defacement ends (at least while I'm in the room).

After the honeymoon is over, classroom control begins to slip. It's hard to quantify, to describe, since there's no one moment when it falls apart; it's just a gradual process of stiffening resistance. The troublemakers begin making their presence known, and of these, Patrick A. is the worst. His favorite activities consist of writing on his desk with permanent marker (I decide not to risk giving him the Clorox), baiting fellow students (especially girls), rapping and singing to himself, talking to anyone who will (or won't) listen, and trying to take his pants off in class. And here was where you ran into the core new teacher dilemma: Okay, now what do I do? In many respects, teachers faced with this daily, recurrent problem are very much like that unarmed London bobby in the Robin Williams joke: Stop, thief! Or...I'll yell stop again! Your options are limited.

There is something known as the Ladder of Referral. What happens when a student is disruptive is supposed to go in an orderly series of stages, a scaffold, if you will. First, you try verbal warnings. Next, you threaten academic penalties, but I discover quickly grades are inherently without meaning to these students, so it's not a threat they take seriously. Then, you try to get the kid in the hallway for a private conference. Problem is, the kid won't go, because he thinks you're tricking him into leaving the room so you can lock him out. Now, you are supposed to make a phone call home, which is fine later on, but what do you do now? I mean, the kid is disruptive now. Because he is making a mockery of your authority, and he is preventing other students from learning while you cope with his unending outbursts, he needs to somehow be removed from the class. This means resorting to a dean or security guard, which is what I try to do. I have a phone in my room, but the box is locked and I have never received the key despite numerous requests to the main office; thus, I have to wait until I see a guard walk by. Finally, I flag down a surly black woman in uniform.

"Guard!" I call.

She ambles over. "I'm not a guard."

Silence. "Okay... So what – "

"I'm a School Security Agent. You can address me as 'Officer."

"Very well, officer, can you help me out here?"

"What's the problem?"

"Patrick refuses to follow any class rules, he won't stop talking, and he won't keep his pants on."

"Classroom management issue. Nothing to do with me." And off she fucks. I want to yell after her: Of course it's a classroom management problem, you bitch! That's why I sent for you  I quickly discover that it is nearly impossible to remove a disruptive student from your room unless they are physically threatening you or another student. However, cursing a teacher can qualify if the dean or SSA is sympathetic, and Patrick obliges me by giving me the finger and mouthing "Fuck you," so I am able to get a more cooperative dean to remove him. I'm supposed to write a referral, basically a quick incident report, on the spot, further wasting class time. Only after half the period has gone by is Patrick a bad memory. Later, after a lot of hunting, I discover Patrick's disciplinary file from middle school: it's an inch thick.

I use the phone in Charlie's office to make the required phone call to Patrick's house; it results in a busy signal. You are often faced with the fact that sometimes there's no working phone in their house, or they can't afford one at all. I later discover from a guidance counselor that Patrick's family is legendary; his sister had been expelled a year or two before; the matriarch, whom I never end up meeting, was a professional foster parent (common in this part of town) who didn't like phones as a rule. Presumably because it only brought bad news.

* * *

Who teaches the teachers? I'm taking my two education classes at night, but you can only learn this job on the job itself. To do that, you need a mentor to show you the ropes, and mine is Charlie. On the first floor, true to his word, Charlie has me help him with Advanced Placement English, namely King Lear; it's a lot more intimidating, however, for that and a couple of other reasons. First, these students are the cream of the Taft old hands; second, Charlie watches me every time I teach. I've never had a mentor before, so it takes some getting used to. I want to do a good job for Charlie because I like and admire him; I find I have this need to please him, so when I screw up I feel like I've let him down.

The good part of having him watch me every day is that I get a quick, personalized debrief every lesson. After the period ends, he asks me: "How do you think it went? Give yourself a grade." I wildly overshoot in my first couple of guesses: I'd guess B, and Charlie would give me a look and say "F." Why? Lesson planning. I just couldn't seem to do it right. They were either too long, and I'd run out of time, failing to make the salient point, or they were too vague, and never make a point at all. Either way, they'd be incomplete.

"Aaron, what do you want them to learn?"

I'd sit there furiously spinning the wheels in my brain, finally having to admit defeat. "I don't know."

"There's your problem. You need to pick one idea, one concept, that you want them to leave the class with."

"How do I decide?"

"Pick what you think is important, based on the state standards. Don't be afraid to use your judgment. The worst thing you'll be is wrong."

"But isn't wrong bad?"

"Sure, if you're a guy who thinks he knows everything. Teaching isn't about showing off what you know, Aaron, it's about leading the kids to some sort of understanding. The worst kind of teaching is telling them something you know that they don't. This isn't Jeopardy. Who cares? I know you know it, you know you know it. Move on."

"But what if I give them some wrong information, or teach them something that turns out to be untrue?"

"So? Go back and fix it. One bad lesson, two bad lessons, whatever, you're not gonna give 'em brain damage, they're not made out of glass. Just remember, teaching, like learning, is a gradual process."

Charlie's favorite classroom experience is the 'teachable moment,' something spontaneous and unplanned that occurs as a result of the lesson but that reveals something important. He never fails to point out when I've missed one. Charlie has me sit in the class and takes notes just like a student, so I can get the feel for what board-notes should contain. After a few weeks, I become overly frustrated: I'm still not getting it. But hey, at least I'm not being disruptive.

Charlie gets frustrated right back. "What, you think you were gonna learn how to teach in a few weeks? Listen: I used to teach the same class at LaGuardia five times a day my first year. The same class! Five times a day! And it still took me until April to even begin to get it. I remember the day my lesson plan finally worked, that light bulb moment. When it happens, you'll know. Until then, relax a little."

I must have looked skeptical or morose or both, and he sat forward in his chair, hunching over his intertwined hands. "Aaron, I hired you because I think you could be a good teacher. Maybe even a great one. But it takes three years just to get decent at this job. It takes five years to get good. Nobody understands this, least of all new teachers. Teaching... It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Remember that or you'll burn out. And I'm not doing this just for you: I'm doing this for the hundreds, maybe thousands, of kids you're going to end up standing in front of, teaching them. So the better I teach you, the better you'll teach them. And so on, down the line. Besides, how often are these kids going to meet a Stuyvesant graduate?"

Effective teachers have a clear system for responding to student interruptions. Their responses gradually increase in severity, while always respecting the dignity of students. (The Teaching Fellows Handbook 2002)

September: The Fellows

MEANWHILE, my classmates also start their schedules. CJ Kaufman, 25, had a stammer that contained a slight lisp, and I worried – what were the students going to do with that? He was a husky, muscular Jewish boy from a well-to-do-family located on some elm-lined street in brownstone Park Slope. He was psyched about teaching in the ghetto. "I think it's important for kids in this demographic to know that there are guys from my socio-economic background who want to play an integral part in their lives." "Why is that important?" I'd asked. "So they don't feel so disconnected from mainstream society." Three days before school begins, he learns he's teaching the 8+ program. The students are expected to do an entire year of 8th grade in one semester and then they're to be placed in 9th grade in the spring. CJ will be in the room with the same students all day – 12 of them – teaching them a double period of English with 1 period of Kaplan test review for the ELA exam (which they have to pass to advance into the 9th grade). He's also responsible for something called the students' "exit project," some kind of long-term portfolio project, the details of which are not forthcoming. He had absolutely no training whatsoever in any of this. CJ felt like he'd gotten the shaft: What the hell...? I was supposed to be teaching high school! So there was CJ, making the best of it, singing in the bathroom, whistling on the train, getting into school for the first day jazzed and ready to go. The first day, he has exactly two students. It takes a couple of weeks to gather all 12 students together in the same room; he would soon come to pine for the days when he had just the two. Because a couple of weeks into September, there comes that moment, that awful moment when you know things are going to go terribly, terribly wrong.

He's blithely teaching one of his favorite college poems, "The Sleeper in the Valley," by Rimbaud (that night he would berate himself: Why the hell did I try to teach that?) and the students are becoming confused and getting more and more frustrated. Finally Jennifer M., 14 years old, jumps up and starts screaming "Y'all don't know how to tell us anything! What the fuck you want us to learn?" But it doesn't stop there. She keeps screaming, working herself into hysterics, the class egging her on, screaming these incredible screams, these blood-curdling screams that imply rape, torture, god knows what...! And the thing was, as he stood there stunned, he realized to a certain degree she was right: What do I want them to learn...?

Elizabeth Meadows, formerly of Columbia via Morningside Heights, walked a lap around the school with a smoke to take some of the edge off – the ball field; the Jamaican patty place; 170th Street; the ball field again; the Dominican chicken place. Three days before the starting gun: two classes of E1 repeaters, two classes of E3 repeaters, and one class of E7 repeaters. She slept fitfully the night before school started – would it be possible, she asked the ceiling, to be able to sit down and teach, so she didn't get nauseous? First day, standing in the doorway when the bell rang, she was reminded of her bouncer work back at the strip club in Madison, standing shivering in front of the entrance in her leather, chains, and liberty-spiked Mohawk, clapping her hands to get the feeling back...

In her first class she had exactly one student show up. This was... disturbing. On the first day of school, in her experience, everybody, even the delinquents, showed up to class. The student, Shenice, seemed cowed because she was the only person in the class. She felt she couldn't do a lesson for one student so she gave Shenice a writing assignment. After the bell rang, Shenice was never seen again. This was a pattern that didn't change much—attendance for the E1's would never be much more than 10 students on a good day. The E3's were slightly better—around 20 or so on a roster of 34. The class loved her tattoos: "Yo, Miss, you get those tattoos in jail?" "Yes," she'd deadpan. And they believed her. Why not? Let them think what they want, if it helped to control the class. A normal class routine began to emerge: seven students out cold, seven engaged, three actively disruptive, and a mix of the rest trying to follow without taking notes.

Her first problem became Steven C. He was a lantern-jawed 18-year-old E3 repeater who loomed a good six inches over her, and was easily double her width. She had requested him to move his seat over a talking issue and there was nothing doing. So she walked over to his desk very slowly. She stood over him, hands on hips, and told him in no uncertain terms that he had to move, that it was not an issue of punishment, but he had to be seated elsewhere. He stood up just as slowly – up, up, up he went, scaffolding his hostility. When his skull reached the top floor, he glared down at her, chewing his gum. "I ain't movin'." She quelled a flutter and stared steel back. "Yes, you are." There was a long pause – time seemed to slow down. She heard the air bubbles in the gum he was chewing pop. She noticed he had some facial stubble. Finally, he sucked his teeth, rolled his eyes, and moved.

* * *

Fordham Road is one of the busiest thoroughfares in the Bronx; at its western terminus lies a sward of gated green acreage. This is the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University, a private Jesuit institution founded in 1841, long known as one of the best institutions of higher learning in the city. Gaping across the street from Fordham's heavily guarded main gate is the columned portico of Theodore Roosevelt High School's main entrance, erected in 1921. From the front, Roosevelt resembles either a municipal courthouse or some bad memory of the antebellum South. Upon entrance into its gloomy interior, one is confronted by two scanning centers: one for girls, and one for boys. This is in the event of a strip-search, a daily occurrence. The classrooms are high-ceilinged and dingy, with the original wooden floors still in place; there are marks showing the placement of the original bolted-down desks, the quaint wooden ones with inkwell holders in the top. Since the room could only fit 24 of those bolted-down desks, they had to be torn out and replaced by the plastic folding-arm model so 34 students (or more) could be shoe-horned inside.

A few days before the start of class, all the 5CC10 Fellows at Roosevelt were informed they were to be teaching the literacy double block; only one of them had received any training in this model: Robert Gladding. Short, around five-six, he had somewhat childish features – a head slightly too outsized for his body, a shortened torso and very small hands. During training he'd emphasized that he had been a working New York actor/playwright for the last 15 years, a real live Village bohemian, when 9/11 happened. Around the same time, his girlfriend of 15 years became pregnant. These events caused him to take serious stock – he was 39 years old, and about to be a father, so he knew he needed a more grounded profession with a steady paycheck (and health insurance). Teaching appealed to the actor in him – being spontaneous, "in the moment," in front of a roomful of people. At the Roosevelt table at his job fair, AP of English Marie Mandell, a blowsy middle-aged divorcee from Long Island, said, "Look me in the eye, Robert. Robert, look me in the eye! Not this year, but the next: Fordham High School for the Performing Arts." This was one of the new "theme" schools they were breaking Roosevelt down into. Basically, the offer was: Do a year in the shit, and next year you'll be rewarded with drama classes. He thought: Hey, if you're going to do it, just do it.

He'd had all of four days of training in the double block, so he felt he was reasonably prepared – at least he knew all the components and where they were supposed to go. "I wanted to commune with my students in the process of discovering stories together: telling stories, writing stories. I love literature and the creative process – after all I was writing a novel that was 800 pages and growing – so since I enjoyed it I thought I could share it, make it infectious. In my heart, I knew one thing for sure: if I only cared enough, good things were going to happen." First days, he thought he had a rapport with the kids; they were as unsure as he was. He wanted them to bond, so he tried name-games and the like, and he used a contract that the kids designed. At first, he was all about positive reinforcement – he wouldn't get mad, he'd get disappointed to try and make them feel guilty: "You're not living up to the spirit of the class we've all created together."

The first thing 23-year-old Amberdawn Collier had wanted to know during training, in her horn-rimmed specs and short dyed hair, was: What was the best way to let her students know she was a lesbian? She was from Chillichote, Ohio, a blue-collar town an hour south of Columbus. After the University of Cincinnati she'd become an assistant manager at an Urban Outfitters on the Lower East Side, and quickly came to really, really hate retail. "I was going to kill the next person that asked for a return." Slumped in a grey plastic seat on the N train after another ten-hour day, she'd found her eyes focused on the stark black-and-white lettering: No One Comes Back Twenty Years Later to Thank a Middle Manager... A job that would make the world a better place! The sign was a sign, it had to be. At the Taft table, Januzzi had said, "You're too young, too pretty, and too white to teach here." Discouraged, she walked over to the Roosevelt table just as they were packing up. She plunked down in front of Mandell and said, "I know you've talked to a lot of people, but I can do a better job than all of them." Mandell couldn't resist: "You're hired."

Now "The Wind That Blows Through the Trees" (this was a Chinese name-saying tattooed on her shoulder) was also placed on the third floor. She came out of summer training thinking: I've got the training and the attitude to do anything. She felt totally prepared. "I vowed that, if nothing else, they would know more when they left my class than they did when they came in. I wanted to make them better readers so they would be able to view mass media more critically. Basically I wanted them to be more informed and not take everything at face value."

The English teachers of Amberdawn's high school experience had been sticklers for commas; for them, English was about memorizing Shakespeare and the perfect five-paragraph essay. They didn't have emotional attachments to students; they didn't make the kind of connection that would bring a student back twenty years later to thank them. She was destined to be a different breed of English teacher, to be one who would nurture her students. Mandell encouraged her to be the 'mother hen' to her students; she accepted the role gladly. Her students would know without a doubt that she was there for them. Back home in Chillichote, she'd had 97 students in her graduating class. Here, there were going to be thousands of students. It did seem a tad more... daunting... in the fall than it had in the summer. And the windows in her room were designed to not open fully, and the heaters ran even when it was 80 degrees – apparently the school had to consume their fuel oil budget no matter what so the school would get the same amount next year. It was always sweltering – eventually the kids would always be trying to put their faces at the window trying to get some air, gasping like landed trout...

Amberdawn had a class roster of 34, but in one sense she was lucky: she taught 1st and 2nd periods, so they were completely groggy. But this also meant that most of them were always late. She was not allowed to lock students out no matter how late they were. She thought: Why? Later than 10 minutes, and they should have gone to the auditorium or something... So they'd come straggling in, desultorily sign the late book, and then she'd have to try and integrate them into an ongoing lesson – without disruption. Which was some trick, boy. She tried to fight it for about 3 weeks, being very strict, "You have to be here or else!" But finally she realized that she was not going to change habits ingrained over years. So even though she was mandated to start the double-block with a lesson, she made the first period the time for independent reading and writing – it was more like a tutorial since she only had 8 or 10 students.

* * *

Martin Brooks had just graduated from Hamilton College, and he had the look of a true ascetic: tall and thin, wiry even, but he slouched and that made him look shorter. He also wore horn-rims, and had a pronounced Adam's apple – he was more your idea of an accountant, or even a math teacher; you kept looking for the pocket protector and slide-rule. With his quietude and impeccable manners, he reminded you a bit of Ichabod Crane. He was raised on a farm outside a town of forty thousand souls upstate; to say the town was homogeneous was the understatement of the year. Sheltered would probably be the word I would pick to describe his upbringing. He wanted to teach in New York City as a way of escaping home, and who could blame him? He felt that, having gone to college, he was reasonably qualified to teach. Initially assigned to Taft, Martin Brooks and his nice manners got excessed. This is an interesting term that needs to be explained. Every school is given a certain budget based on projected attendance figures. Should the projected figures not match the actual attendance registration list, the corresponding money built into the budget is re-absorbed by the district. The school now has a surfeit, or excess, of teachers (i.e. technically more than they need for the students registered, but since you can never have too many teachers the reality is that the school just can't afford them) and they have to be released back to the district to be placed in another school. A teacher is supposed to be "placed in excess," or "excessed" for short, on the basis of seniority. It doesn't always happen that way. In any case, Martin was transferred because Roosevelt had accidentally excessed too many teachers due to over-the-counter mishaps.

More confused than anything else, he went over there thinking: "I guess I wanted them to understand concepts such as imagery and the plot pyramid. I felt this would be helpful in terms of their future opportunities; when they went on to college, they'd need that kind of thing." He couldn't believe the size of Roosevelt, the hugeness of it. The same for the students – some of them looked older than he did, and you could have fit two of him in the baggy jeans some of them wore. Martin was given a 9th grade double-block. The room he was assigned was dirty and overcrowded, there were no books, and the departmental copier was already broken by the time he arrived. As for the class itself, well. #2 pencils fluttered through the air like migrating swallows: ah, the pencils of San Capistrano... Martin started his tenure with politeness, explaining patiently why things had to work a certain way. This accomplished nothing. So he became more forceful and commanding: "You will do this! Now!" That didn't work either. He tried shouting. He tried walking around the room, trying to reach each kid individually. This got a good laugh all around. The best he could manage was trying to never turn his back on them: this reduced the volume of airborne missiles. No matter how strenuously he protested, in couple of weeks things deteriorated to the point where he couldn't get through a 'Do-Now' in the entire 90 minutes.

A 24-year-old gangly drink of water with a skull-hugging haircut, Anthony Wheeler was from a wealthy town in suburban Connecticut. He'd come out of Princeton wanting to be a writer, so he had taken the tried-and-true Ivy League route to literary success: editorial assistant in publishing, shoveling through the slush pile. But the reality set in quickly: his boss was insane, without a trust fund the pay was a joke, and he hated the office vibe of "We're the arbiters of taste." Anthony had tutored inner city kids before, though not in the ghetto itself, and was an avid listener of rap and hip-hop; he had confidence this and his education would see him through. He listened to 50 Cent, Jay-Z, felt he understood the power behind the lyrics and the sentiments, the rhyming street-stories providing a window into a normally hidden world; he felt he'd have communication of a kind in common with his students.

The hidden world materialized as not knowing where his classroom was – all he was told was that it was somewhere on the third floor, and the only working teacher's bathroom for men was in the basement. It didn't really matter, though, since he didn't have the key for it anyway. Nor did he have the key to his room. In the corridors, he heard "cracker" and "honky" muttered as he passed groups of students. His first roster had 50 names on it; he had desks for 20. For two weeks, the classroom was SRO, with over 40 kids. Some sat on the floor, some stood in the back, leaning against the lockers. He went to the Main Office daily to tell anyone present that he had too many kids. A secretary said, with a shrug, "Yeah, we ordered more desks last spring, but they never arrived." And? What are you doing about it now? Finally, he had enough: He went to see the APO. Nodding understandingly, steepling his fingers, the APO said, alas, there was nothing he could do. Anthony said: "Then I'll talk to the Superintendent's office. Let's see if there's something they can do." The APO leaned forward, smiling mirthlessly. "Mister, ah, Wheeler, is it? I would, ah, refrain from doing something like that if I were you. Not if you value your job."

By the same token, there was only one black man in 5CC10: 23-year-old Bronx native Richard Smith; slim, with some elegant head stubble, a winning smile and an open, generous nature – he was also deeply religious, spiritual even, you could feel he was a man who liked to feel. He'd been looking into a Master's of Public Administration, the Peace Corps, even the military; what finally decided him was 9/11. He'd been tutoring students from New York City at Hobart College, and he'd seen "so many kids with poor skills, with no skills. There was one girl, I had to teach her how to write her own name in script. When we finished, she said, 'Thank you, Mr. Smith, nobody ever taught me how to write my name before.' That's when I knew things were bad." He decided if he was going to do anything, he needed to do something for the community back home. Educated young black men as role models were rare, he knew that, especially in the Bronx. "Basically, I wanted to give back. I wanted to share my experiences, empower somebody, and serve as an example: yes, you can make it."

When he got to Roosevelt, he didn't feel prepared, he felt newly minted. He didn't think a summer of boot camp had been nearly enough either. He was placed in one of the small schools they were breaking Roosevelt into: The Fordham Leadership Academy. The first week of school, he was co-teaching with a nice soft-spoken man, who managed the class without yelling. The second week, a new teacher quit in the new Law & Community Service School, and they put Richard in there to plug the gap. The transition was like night and day: his new co-teacher, one Mr. Cohen, was an aggressive, combative 30-something, and the whole environment in the room was downright hostile. He talked to his co-teacher about maybe changing his style, making the atmosphere a little less poisonous. The man replied, "Hey, back off pal, I'm just here to get a paycheck."

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Subject: October Teaching Fellows Newsletter!

It may seem early to "reflect" on this time, but there are some fairly universal stages of which you should be aware. They start with the "Anticipation Phase" in August and early September, when you were excited, anxious and (probably) overly romantic about your role as a teacher. As September unfolded, you entered the "Survival Phase," during which you were faced with unfamiliar, and often inscrutable, systems, procedures and policies. At the same time, you were meeting students and trying to connect with them in the classroom. This phase is usually about struggling to stay on top of everything and feeling overwhelmed... October is the beginning of the "Disillusionment Phase," during which you find yourself questioning your commitment and competence. Feelings of inadequacy and frustration can overshadow the successes that are occurring every day...

October

LIKE Richard, I too had a Mr. Cohen; mine was the history teacher. My Mr. Cohen was a veteran of the late 70's, when the system was so desperate for teachers they were hiring anyone whose breath fogged up a mirror. He was a slouched, pudgy curmudgeon with thinning grey hair, goggles for glasses, and a loose, frog-like mouth. His collared shirt, held down on his pigeon chest by a soiled sweater, was forever riding out of his polyester slacks; this would cause him to constantly hitch up his drooping trousers as he was teaching. A curriculum had been developed for the Chancellor's District History departments; I think it was meant to be more of a guide, but My Mr. Cohen followed it like it was carved in stone. Thus he could (and did) say, when the kids were particularly bored, "It's not my fault, it's the curriculum. Those creeps at District designed it, not me. But I have to teach it, so what can you do?" My Mr. Cohen wore his mien, the hopeless look and rounded shoulders of Defeated Man, Life's Loser, proudly.

The pattern never changed: every class began with a worksheet that took more than half the class to fill out and go over; then he would stand in front of the class holding his Delaney Book like a painter's palette, so whenever a student raised their hand and gave an answer from the textbook, he could make a mark on the kid's card. Needless to say, the students despised him; he was typical of the breed they'd had their entire educational lives. He was the living embodiment of the kind of teacher the Fellows were designed to replace: stupid, ignorant, uncaring. Somewhere along the way, the students had learned the term "cultural diffusion," which they explained by way of example that this was rich white kids acting like poor black ones. However, they then proceeded to torture Cohen with this as an answer to every question: "Yo, mistuh, is that an example of cultural diffusion?" When pushed by this veiled and not-so veiled taunting (which was daily), My Mr. Cohen's favorite riposte to being insulted or derided was "I get paid whether you learn or not!" This was the first time I'd ever heard this uttered – I thought it had been hyperbolic teacher put-down. But no, here it was, in the sagging flesh. He would try to enlist my sympathy (and disciplinary muscle) when this reply didn't meet with its anticipated success. Even though my sympathies lay with the students, I couldn't break ranks with another teacher, even My Mr. Cohen, in front of the class. So I stifled my laughter and tried to look disapproving. The students would just grin at me: they knew what was going on.

* * *

When I was a boy, I used to travel to Milwaukee to visit my grandfather, and one of his favorite activities was listening to his Bearcat Police Scanner during dinner like it was the radio. That's how I felt sitting in Charlie's office during debriefs – like all administrators he'd been issued a walkie-talkie, and you weren't supposed to turn it off. It would sit there, crackling and spitting static in its cradle: Base, we have an incident in Room 147, English – we need the AP... Roger that. This is Base to Mister Osewalt. Mister Osewalt, what's your 20 please...? Like the Bedouin, who could sense a sandstorm miles away from a subtle shift in the mistral, you could tell trouble was coming from the slowly increasing amount of electronic hissing on the walkie-talkies that began in early October.

The first teachable moment that occurs in Room 437 involves a tall and rangy 16-year-old black kid named Jamell, with a mouthful of metal from his braces. He has a laconic, smart-ass comment for every question he is never asked. I threaten grade reduction, of course, but he responds, "Gonna give me the double nickel, Mistah Roston? Yeah, I seen that one before." He's right: how do you discipline students for whom grades don't mean anything? And he points out a hard truth in a nasal sing-song when I try to get him removed by a dean: "What's the mattah, Mistah Roston? Can't control your class?" The problem is this: calling a dean or SSA indicates you can't control your own turf; thus, you lose face. Jamell was right, but I just didn't know what else to do. Faced with mounting opposition in the classroom, on Charlie's orders I call nearly every student's home without warning. I am to never call from home, since most of their phones use Caller ID – you do not want them to have your home phone number, we do not want any Levin repeats, please. However, this is harder to do than it sounds, since there's a dearth of phones that are usable by teachers in the school, almost none in fact. Many parents of course do not speak English, so I do what I can in pidgin Spanish; those that understand seem happy that I bothered. The students, ambushed, act surly and betrayed the following day. "You called my house. Yo, Mistuh Roston called my house." Phone calls, however, never improve student behavior beyond one day.

Since Glen Rogers had been at Taft the year before, I asked him for classroom management techniques. He said he'd used an actual dunce cap made out of colored cardboard paper; he'd even put the kid in a stool facing the corner, until Charlie caught him and made him stop. "Technically, he told me it was corporal punishment, but I'm a big fan of humiliation: it's pretty much the only thing that works." While teaching Of Mice and Men, he was continually asked the same question because nobody was paying attention; finally fed up, he said "The next person who asks me 'Which is the retarded one?' is going to be called Lenny for the rest of the semester." Sure enough, someone asked a minute later, and was promptly christened Lenny. It was a name that had stuck – every once in a while, in the hallways I'd hear a kid call out "Hey, Lenny!" (As compared to the more normal call of "G-Unit!").

"I also like fucking with them," he said. He took out his wallet and removed a picture of a handsome young black man in a tux. "Student of mine last year – this is his prom picture. I tell the students he's my son, so I'm down because my wife's black."

"They believe that? You can't be ten years older than this kid."

"How do you think I got made 'honorary nigga'?"

Then Glen suffers a collapsed lung in the midst of taking a shower. Why it happens remained a mystery – his UFT doctor, just before refusing to refer him for surgery, tells him that it's something that sometimes happens to young white men, though I opine the Newports he chain-smoked probably hadn't helped. But his disappearance is sudden and dramatic; it's as if he's been dropped through a trapdoor, out for over a month. Poof.

My class becomes famous for having the most students in trouble on the 4th floor when I'm not around: they raise holy hell with the other subject teachers who came to "visit" them. I was constantly hearing the squawk on the walkie-talkies: Any dean on 4, any dean on 4, deans to Room 437. I christened them, somewhat proudly, Roston's Reprobates. They couldn't be controlled anywhere, especially the library; I was discouraged from attempting any visits after the first one. When I'd drop by in the middle of their other classes for something, they'd boo me – which I acknowledged with a smile and a wave. It was a sign of grudging respect. I think.

Teachable Moment: "Yo, Mistuh, why we got to know all these big words?" says Nestor. "A good question," I begin. Laquisha interrupts laconically. "So we can talk white." I discover they consider being educated "acting white." I am dumbfounded by this attitude, and my attempt to engender a discussion about it is feeble. "Being able to express yourself with eloquence and precision is not a white thing, Laquisha." Snickers. How could an inexperienced teacher be able to challenge, let alone change, this attitude?

The heart of my teaching day does not begin until 7th period, and when I arrive the class is invariably rowdy and out of control (they have gym 1st period, why I do not pretend to know); the room is knee-deep in paper that has been tossed around, because they despise the 6th period permanent sub (who is their Spanish teacher, of which by October they'd had three). When I enter the classroom, Nestor might say "Finally, somebody in here who can teach!" but I have to re-establish control every day. They are relentless; every day is a pissing contest. Where do they get the energy...? Candy? How much grape soda can they drink...? It becomes an increasingly exhausting experience, and I come to dub this triple-period block the Meatgrinder.

On top of all this, I have to implement the new literacy block. I'm supposed to Read Aloud using one of the "7 Strategies of Highly Effective Readers." The students really enjoy it when I read aloud, because nobody ever reads to them at home. Charlie assigned the book Holes, by Louis Sachar. A novel aimed at 4th graders, it's about a group of pubescent discipline problems sentenced to dig holes in the Texas desert; it was heavy on supposed "themes of interest," such as overcoming adversity, changing your destiny, and the power of friendship. The theory is: they can really relate. I thought, oh come on, but they did, uh, dig it. Well, most of them; several students (girls, mostly) found it boring and spent a lot of their time ignoring me or sleeping. This is because their reading levels were either slightly more advanced or their English wasn't good enough to follow it.

Teachable Moment: "What do you want to do when you graduate from high school, Isabel?" I say. Lifting her head off the desk, she replies, "A high school English teacher." I'm about to say something when she adds, "'Cept not as boring as you."

As for the listeners, I was supposed to stop at strategic points in the reading and model a reading strategy by 'thinking aloud.' The theory was I was to verbalize what should be going on in an effective reader's head while reading. Then I was supposed to finish reading, and ask questions using Bloom's Taxonomy hierarchy to facilitate a discussion by writing notes on the board (but I never really learned what Bloom's Taxonomy hierarchy was). For instance, one of the reading strategies was Asking Questions. So, I would read something, stop, and then say something like, "Gee, I wonder why Zero did that?" Or "I wonder what that word means?" This quickly began to drive both me and the students crazy, and they began to pester me with frustrated questions of their own: "Yo, why you keep stopping for? Shit." It quickly became counterproductive to interrupt the narrative flow, so with gratitude on all sides I dropped the reading strategies.

But I was constantly amazed at how angry they could make me (They're just kids, aren't they?), and I was pushed to my temper limits on a daily basis. Despite the perception that teachers are supposed to be above it all and not react like human beings to persistent verbal abuse, when a student persists in being personally insulting your first reaction is not: "Oh, I know that poverty is making him act this way, he just doesn't know any better." It's: "Sit down and shut the fuck up, you fucking asshole."

I got so mad at Patrick once that after I tossed him out (a daily ritual by now), I turned to the class and said, "See? That's what happens when your mother sucks on the glass dick." There was a moment of silence until Laquisha snickered from the back, "He mean crack pipe." The class roared; this became a famous classroom maxim for the rest of the term. "Yo, your momma must'a been suckin' on the glass dick!" Not one of my prouder moments, I have to admit. But hey, at least they remembered something.

I tried to go to Charlie with my problems when I could, but he'd become overwhelmed; he was basically the only competent administrator in the building, and Heinz was piling more and more tasks on him. He was not without his sense of humor or irony, however. He had me teach an essay in AP English during the unit on The Stranger: it was the Myth of Sisyphus. I also read this quote from Teddy Roosevelt that was written on a light blue laminated poster hanging on a wall in my classroom on a daily basis:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

As members of the Chancellor's District, we have to hang up numerous posters with sayings like this all over the school (in addition to other posters bearing the state standards, presumably so that the students could double-check I was following them). It's meant as an inspirational tool – education, like athletics, is heavy on this kind of sloganeering. It's similar to the kind of thing you might see in a gym, as I always did when I sparred out at Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn; they had a quote painted on the wall over there, from Virgil: "Now whoever has courage, and a strong and collected spirit in his breast, let him come forth, lace up his gloves, and put up his hands."

For obvious reasons, I decide not to make up flyers saying this.

* * *

The Untouchables gatherings change to a weekly Friday ritual once school begins. We switched from the Parlour to Tap-A-Keg on Broadway around 104th Street, as it was closer to all our schools and we could start drinking sooner. Unlike the Parlour, which was neat and clean and had pretensions as a restaurant, Tap-A-Keg was a low-lit, low-rent hole in the wall (Broadway seemed to be practically at eye level) that served both a corps of eccentric alcoholic regulars (including a one-armed man in a wheelchair and a famously reclusive writer) and a group of eccentric alcoholic Bronx teachers, all of whom would proceed to drink copiously of a grey New York afternoon starting around 4 PM.

This change of scene was just fine with us, since the new locale fit our new moods. Besides, Tap-A-Keg had a more generous happy hour and free (if a bit mushy) popcorn. Our bartender at the Parlour had been a pretty young Irish woman from County Cork who remembered your name after one visit. The bartender here was a hard-looking middle-aged peroxide blonde with a vaguely Germanic accent; she didn't want to know your name unless you were one of her ex-husbands, so she could curse you.

Friday, of course, was always the worst day of the week at school; the students were always more insane than usual. Did I know why that was, Charlie asked me one day. "Because the weekend is upon us?" Hell, on Fridays I wanted to run down the hallways screaming too.

"No. It's because they have to go home for two whole days without a break. For most of them, Taft is their only escape from their home lives."

In that case, I'll begin with the end in mind! On Friday, that was a concept I happened to agree with. My goal, as it was for the rest of us, was to get incredibly, stupidly, legless drunk. As the fall wore on, we began to find we needed to get blind in a way we hadn't for years, with the attendant strains on our personal relationships back home (Liz had gotten married over the summer). Our drinking capacity became superhuman to compensate. I'd get to the bar running on so much adrenaline I'd chug my first beer without any effect whatsoever; the alcohol would just get burned away. Mike would get creamed on Grey Goose martinis, while Liz stuck to boilermakers.

The reason behind the drinking was at the root of our emerging relationship trouble: we had all become crashing bores. Teaching was all we could talk about, all we wanted to talk about. And when I say teaching, I mean we talked about behavior and how we weren't teaching. The sad fact was that the civilians we knew and loved didn't, couldn't, understand any of it. All we talked about, all we ever talked about, were our classroom nightmares. We were obsessed, we were stressed, and only other first-year teachers seemed to understand it. Friday became a necessary habit. Through clouds of cigarette smoke, sweaty pints would be hoisted to lips repeatedly until 8, 9, 10 o'clock (remember, we started at 4); there would be endless phone calls home: first claiming lateness, then begging off entirely, whatever it was – dinner, movies, in-laws, whatever had been planned in some brief interval of lucidity. Liz would discuss the conversations she was having at home with her new husband, which were variations on the ones I was having with my wife: "Why can't I come to your Friday get-togethers?" Answers included: "You'd be bored" and "You wouldn't understand." When what she (we) really meant was: "We don't want outsiders there. No civilians." And then the arguments the following night, too hungover to go out, the feelings of hurt and neglect we could do nothing to assuage...

If 'normal' people had overheard us talking about the students the way we did (the crowd at Tap-A-Keg kept to themselves), they'd have been horrified. These people are teaching children? My god, somebody call the cops! When we'd get drunk enough to be calm and seemingly more clear-headed, what puzzled us the most was the fact the students were so polite and friendly to us when they weren't in our classes. "It's just business," I'd mumble through a mouthful of popcorn, mashing the stuff in with hands turned to mittens by Wild Turkey. "It's like that Warner Brothers cartoon with the sheepdog named Fred and the talking Wile E. Coyote, you know? They spend their day trying to kill one another, and then they punch out and go home together."
Everybody has a plan when they enter the ring. And then they get hit. – Sonny Liston

October: The Fellows

Taft

IN Liz's room, lovable but dim Kuamel G. tried to start a fight in class between a Blood and a Crip, which she managed to defuse just in time. A few days later, she's standing at the board holding her totemistic piece of chalk, which at this point is the only way she can define her job – I write on a chalk board, therefore I must be a teacher – when her door bangs open and at least seven sweaty, burly SSA's boil through the entrance and tackle a snoozing Kuamel out of his desk onto the floor – they each grab a limb and carry him bodily from the room. Liz follows them out (along with the few members of her class present) to see them holding Kuamel against the wall and frisking him with abandon. He's not happy about it: "Yo, Miss, get these mothahfuckuh's off a me!" Kuamel, an SSA explains to her breathlessly, is strapped: he has a gun on him. The students in the door snicker as Liz says "Kuamel? You must be kidding." But then, why not Kuamel? However, it does turn out to be untrue—merely a rumor planted by one (or both) of the gang members as payback.

A common issue by October: a girl leapt out of her seat to run into the hallway in order to help her twin sister in a fight while her back was turned. Kuamel said, wide-eyed helpfully, "Girl took off her bling and ran out the room, Miss!" She came back a few minutes later calm as you please, put her jewelry back on, and sat down. Then she asked Jonathan S. why he wasn't working, but he wouldn't answer. When she persisted he said, "Fuck this shit!" throwing his pen across the room and storming out. Jonathan found her later and apologized. Seems that particular day the cops had found the guy who'd murdered his father. It all began to remind her of her own teen years in the 80's, Crack Fever raging in Morningside, going to the deli for ice cream and having to hit the dirt during a drive-by.

If they became particularly unruly Liz played the trump: sit down at her desk and read. This would truly mystify them—Whoa-whoa-whoa hold up a minute - is she ignoring us? Yo, she's ignoring us! How can she ignore us? Is she allowed to ignore us? Hey...! Miss...! It took concentration, but eventually they'd get the message. The trick was being unafraid to wait. Also, no yelling, just the Stare of Disgust: I am making no secret of the fact that I have utter contempt for you as a human being.

Back down in the basement with CJ, the students became nasty and confrontational every single day. Not just about doing work, oh no – they would walk in and say "Shut the fuckin' window, man, it's cold." So this would set him off too, and he'd be pissed for the whole day. They wouldn't follow directions no matter how detailed or specific, and would only work when constantly prodded to do so, whereupon they would say "Why you bee-stin'? What the fuck you talkin' about? Here, I'll do your motherfuckin' work." Initially it made him feel a bit snobbish: Don't you see how your behavior is holding you back? You live in the ghetto for god's sake, this is your ticket out! That's when what little confidence he had began to slip. He was genuinely hurt: Why don't they like me? I'm young, I'm personable. For Chrissakes, I only want to help them to grow...! He called their homes, but the parents would usually end up yelling at him. They were fed up and frustrated too, but they never once blamed themselves or took any responsibility for their children's behavior. It was: "I already got me a job. Why ain't you doin' yours?"

CJ requested a meeting with the guidance counselor and a set of parents. Maybe he didn't ask right, because the guidance counselor brings the parents into the classroom while he's teaching and leaves. He has to have an impromptu meeting with the parents at his desk in front of the whole class. The mother berates him in broken English, then relays CJ's stammering explanations (it got worse when he was nervous) to the father in Spanish, who does nothing but stare at him in total silence. For the kids it was better than TV. He went home, locked himself in the bathroom, and cried. He looked at himself in the mirror, raccoon-eyed: These are the absolute worst kids in the world... This became a regular occurrence. He was all alone down there. He felt powerless. No more whistling in the shower: he began to dread going to work.

Roosevelt

Then one fine October day it all came to an end in the classroom for Robert. Vincent ended up getting into a knock-down drag-out fight in the middle of class with Ebony, replete with a bullring of students exhorting their favorite. There were no deans in sight, so Robert ran off in search of one while the social studies teacher held the fort. He found a security guard (officer!), and when he came back the fight was over – the two combatants stood facing each other, sweaty, heaving, clothes torn. The officer took Ebony out into the hallway and said, "If you do that again, we'll have to call your home." Robert was flabbergasted. Shouldn't they be suspended for fighting in class? On the contrary, it would turn out to be the normal state of affairs – dean's referrals were routinely ignored, and every time he wrote a student up the students would just laugh. He had two boys who had daily referrals through November. The attitude of the deans and security officers was "You can't possibly have the proper judgment to assess the situation." It was like... hazing. So Robert wrote a formal letter of complaint to the principal. He got the letter back in his mailbox with a Post-It note on it that had "You have my full support" scribbled on it. That was the one and only time he ever heard from the principal.

Robert had 30 students, and by mid-October three-quarters of them would act out on a given day. He tried the anecdotal log, especially with cursing and threats. He would mark down the time and date, saying "You said what to whom?" Next, he tried walking around with a clipboard with the seating assignment of the room on it using plus or minus points as things happened. That didn't work either. Then he tried using the last four digits of their phone numbers – if a student was misbehaving, he would say, "If I hear 8039 one more time, that's the number I'm calling tonight!" And so he would call home. If the parents spoke English, which wasn't often, they were positive, but nothing changed. Then he tried a poster with the student's names on it, using the "three strikes and you're out policy." He would make a big show of going over to the poster and making checks – if you got three checks you were going to detention. Unfortunately, this just became entertainment for the kids – they would go "Whoa!" or "Uh-oh, here it comes!" Why? Because if you didn't show up for detention there were no consequences. So of course students didn't bother going. What added to his frustration was that the administration wasn't able to control the hallways, let alone classrooms, so why should he continue to expend the energy?

One thing Martin was grateful about Roosevelt was the number of his fellow classmates that were still there. He gravitated towards the person his age, Amberdawn, and told her his woes. She saw how stressed out he was; he needed a good, solid bitch session with another teacher. And frankly, so did she, since her girlfriend was sick of hearing about it by now. The arguments at home were getting increasingly ugly: "Teaching, teaching, teaching! That's all you fucking talk about anymore!"

"I don't really drink very much," he said.

"That's okay," said Amberdawn, "I don't either."

They went to a bar near Columbia on Friday and had themselves a little drink. She and Martin had a lot things in common, of course, such as their small town backgrounds and their extreme youth, and by god they felt they had to have a drink to that. Then they began to exchange war stories, and for each new anecdote or soliloquy of utter incomprehension about ghetto mores, they felt they had to treat themselves to another little drink. They seemed to be holding their alcoholic own, but trips to the bathroom were becoming increasingly wobbly for both of them. The next thing they knew, the bartender was yelling "Last call!" She knew she couldn't go home like this, she was completely shit-faced; her girlfriend would kill her. Martin, trying to focus so he could bring the two streetlamps in front of him together to form just the one, said she could crash at his place, if she wanted. Amberdawn gratefully (and slurringly) accepted.

* * *

In late October, a group of Chancellor's District people sailed into Roosevelt one day to observe the English Fellows. After they dutifully observed, District decided that it would be a good idea if Mandell held weekly lunch meetings on Friday to talk about lesson planning. So Martin, Amberdawn, Robert, Anthony and Richard were dutifully assembled to lose a lunch period. The meetings quickly became frustrating because all anybody wanted to talk about were classroom management issues, which she kept deflecting by saying, over and over again, in her slow and level way, "Good ... planning... is ... good... management." It quickly became obvious that she wasn't interested in talking about it, and she would stall those questions with long digressions about something totally unrelated until the bell rang. "Oh, is that the time? I guess we have to go back to class."

* * *

Anthony had no books, since he didn't know who was in charge of the bookroom – he couldn't even find Mandell most days. So he just Xeroxed poems – Whitman, because he was American, and they were all Americans here, right? Turns out Whitman wasn't their kind of American, though. Crumpled copies of the man's poetry soon littered the floor. After three days of this, the copier in the English Department broke, and was never fixed. He tried to sneak copies in the History Department, but somebody caught him and threw him out. Finally, he managed to track down the lady in charge of the bookroom. The only book they had left that had 45 copies was The Diary of Anne Frank. He couldn't assign seating even if he'd wanted to, due to the crush, so it made it next to impossible to learn names. The class became nothing more than a social club, routinely ignoring him. He would summon a security guard, and he would stand in the doorway, hands on hips, and say, "Now, you be quiet and listen to your teacher." Then he'd leave. Finally, two weeks into the semester, he was ordered to pick 16 kids to be removed from his class. Since he still didn't know any of them, he chose randomly. An uproar ensued as friends were separated. By the end of the day, he wanted to quit. And due to a paperwork snafu, he still hadn't even been paid yet – he wouldn't be until mid-October.

Richard's Mr. Cohen didn't want to get his paycheck after October, so it became Richard's class. He decided the co-teacher was a prime example of what not to do, so he talked to the students, never raising his voice or yelling. He had them decorate the class together so they could take some pride in the room, and it was a big success. "My bulletin boards, if I do say so myself, were spectacular." Other students would walk by the room and see the bulletin boards and say, "Why don't we do that in our class?" Then, the routine became familiar: Do the Do-Now please hey come back here get away from the window please hey leave that girl alone would you two stop talking please sit down back there would you stop writing on the desk please would you take that walkman off wake up its time for class would you please be quiet please please please! Occasionally, a wrestling match broke out in the back of the room, chairs and tables thrown, or some boys would start throwing themselves into lockers. And the language! It was foul beyond description. It added to the overall level of hostility in the room. He brought his concerns to his principal, Morales. He found him very removed and indifferent; he could just not seem to relate. On the rare occasions he made a room appearance, Richard had to referee when the principal and the kids would get into a shouting match. And he prayed. Oh, how he prayed! He prayed when he woke up, prayed when he went to bed: Lord, help me, tell me: how can I be a better teacher to these kids? In the end, he decided it was his faith that really started changing things; he thought that the students sensed his spirituality. It was God had to change their heads, and Richard would be the conduit for that. But it came at a high cost: He was wiped out every single day. Lesson planning the night before? Please. He was so exhausted, he went home and went to sleep, then walk in the next day with only a general idea of what he wanted to do. But it was the only way to do the job.

* * *

Halloween, and Charlie-O asked Liz to stop by his office before she left for the day. She found him looking glum; he asked her to take a seat and her stomach dropped. "I've got some bad news. You've been placed in excess." A nearby junior high school had just lost a teacher and she'd been picked to fill the slot.

"Junior high school? But I teach high school, Charlie."

"This came direct from the District. I had nothing to do with it."

"But I don't want to teach junior high school. I'm a high school teacher."

Charlie sighed, ran a hand through his hair. "I know." It galled him to run up against the limitations of his own power. "I'm sorry. I'm going to see what I can do, but I have to be honest, Liz, it doesn't look good."

She rolled her eyes, but refrained from sucking her teeth. Shit. When had it ever looked good...?
Promoting good student behavior is an important and challenging aspect of teaching. Students have their own compelling reasons why they choose to behave inappropriately or misbehave in class. (New Teacher Project 105)

November

IN the English Office at Taft, sotto voce, the Fellows talked amongst themselves. Were we discussing lesson planning? Behavior problems? Dickens, Wordsworth, Poe? No, it was: Ambien, Xanax, Valium. Insomnia and anxiety attacks were running at epidemic levels. As for me, I don't remember exactly when it happens. I stumble out of the subway station into the late fall chill, squinting into the weak orange rays of the rising sun, preoccupied as usual with, well, everything. I cross the street and enter the corner bodega to order café con leche like I always do. The cup gets plunked down on the counter, runoff staining the white plastic cover, and I've got my fingers in my wallet ready to remove a bill, when suddenly the bodega man quotes me some impossible price for the coffee. Seven bucks? He points down: his index finger taps a fresh pack of Marlboro Reds. There they are, lying right next to my coffee. Now how did they get there? Did I actually ask for those? Somebody in line behind me clears their throat. The bodega man has an eyebrow raised. "Senor?" I snatch the pack, my hand like a frog's tongue zapping a bug, before one of us changes their mind. "And matches," I add sharply, like the junkie I am. Outside, cracking the plastic and pulling out the foil, I hold my first purchased cigarette, my first morning cigarette, in over four years: the acrid smell of the match, and then the chemical, almost petroleum taste of the Marlboro makes its way through the fiberglass filter to my tongue. The first hit is vile, of course, but I'm patient – I feel better already...

The English Office is also Tabloid City. Like any Bronx native, Charlie's a rabid Yankees fan, and they were in the Series yet again. The office was always littered with Posts and the News. I tried not to sniff: I was raised solidly with the Times (not to mention being a long-suffering Mets fan). I discover one thing the tabloids like to cover besides the Yankees, however, and that's the public schools. The first time I saw Taft appear in screaming type was when we made the list of Top Five Worst Schools. We were number two (Roosevelt was first), which bummed us all out. We wanted to be number one...!

The second time was when we had a full-fledged riot. It began where all good riots do: the cafeteria. Like an arson-inspired fire it accelerated up the stairs to the gym, and from there the blowback engulfed a good part of the first floor. Walkie-talkies exploded into frantic warbling all over the school. For some reason I was in Charlie's office again when it happened – he grabbed his walkie-talkie, and before charging out he yelled at me to close and lock the door: I was only to open it for teachers seeking shelter. There were a number of arrests – cops were seen hustling handcuffed students to waiting patrol cars. The ringleader was charged with inciting a riot, a felony. It was none other than Liz's student Steve C.

* * *

And then came parent-teacher night (or Open School Night, its official designation – nothing to hide here!). Ah, parent-teacher night. The administrators rolled out the red carpet (to sweep the riot under, no doubt); rooms had to look just so, and even Charlie wore a tie. We sat behind our desks in anticipation; our grade books were out and in order, all our paperwork at our elbows ready to go. We were ready to show exactly where the problem areas were, what needed to be worked on, what behavior issues might have come up. Where to begin... We had sign-in sheets to keep track of who attended, as well as making sure nobody got skipped in line.

During my preparation, I had neglected one important thing: bringing a book to read. Why was this important? Because at the end of the night, three hours, I had six names on my sign-in sheet. And only two of these parents had even spoken English: the others had brought the student in question to translate. God knows what the kid was telling them, but at least they always left smiling...

* * *

The second marking period was winding down, and I needed an official observation from Charlie (as opposed to his normal daily observing). As "probationary" teachers, all the Fellows had to have three a term and one of these would have to be done by the principal herself. And we would have to go through this for the next three years (as all new teachers did). Once again, Charlie called me into his office.

"You're due for an observation, guy." Teachers, just like students, get graded. However, teachers are graded pass/fail (students aren't, but they act like they are): Satisfactory (an 'S') or Unsatisfactory (a 'U'). There are two schools of thought (forgive the pun) when it comes to observations: they are either there to help you improve as a teacher, or they are there to get you fired. It all depends on who's doing the observing.

"Charlie, I barely know what I'm doing up there."

"Don't worry so much. It's going to go great."

"Boss, all due respect, I'm going to get creamed."

"Kid, relax. We're going to sit down right now and plan the whole lesson step-by-step. Get out your copy of Lear and your notes. So tell me: What has interested you so far enough to teach it?"

Dear Mr. Roston:

When I entered the room, the Aim on the board was "Why does King Lear put his daughters on trial in Act III of Shakespeare's play King Lear?" Homework on the board was "Permission slips and essays on King Lear due." The Do-Now was to briefly review notes from the previous day's lesson with the class as a frontloading exercise. You made a graphic organizer on the board divided into two sections (a 'T'). The first heading was "King Lear's grievances." (Act 3, Scene 6) The second heading was "Daughters' Point of View." (Act 3, Scene 7) You proceeded to elicit from the class the nature of Lear's grievances against his daughters. Student responses were they were "disdainful," "disrespectful," "neglectful." Then the daughters' grievances against their father were elicited from the students. Some of their responses: The 100 knights were wrecking and making expenses in the castle; Lear plays favorites with Cordelia; their father gave them what he wanted to give them, not what they needed; he sees only what he wants to see. Your summary statement elicited from students was that Lear was shallow and blinded by his pride.

The commendable features of the lesson were:

You are teaching a high level piece of literature to our students, the play King Lear. You are using professional audio tapes. Students were responding well to your classroom developmental lesson plan. They were asking and responding to higher level thinking questions such as: How is King Lear literally and metaphorically blinded? Your summary moved naturally from the content of the lesson.

As we discussed, Benny's question on how Gloucester was blinded should have been referred back to lines 80 – 85 of Act III, Scene 7. When dealing with student questions, try to refer them back to specific points of text so that different types of meanings can be developed. Also, NYS ELA standards must be posted on the board for each lesson.

This was a satisfactory lesson. Welcome to the Taft Educational Campus.

Sincerely yours,

Charles Osewalt

* * *

Heinz had a memo circulated, in which she stated that it had come to her attention teachers were smoking too close to the building – we were to all cease this practice immediately. There was an outside door right near the English Office that opened onto the rear of the school; off to the side was the Levin ball field. It was on the other side of the building from the Bunker, so this is where the teachers and SSA's went to smoke. I dubbed it the Smoker's Porch. There I'd smoke (god why had I ever quit?) and watch the police cars show up to the family shelter out back, as planes from LaGuardia were re-routed overhead. One day, Glen joined me – his lung had healed, so to celebrate he lit up a Newport.

"Do you think you should be doing that?"

He shrugged. Apropos of nothing, he said, "Did you know Stanley Kubrick went here?"

"Why, no, I didn't."

"Last year, I went downstairs into the old files, rooted around a while, and dug out his report card."

"They still have that stuff on file?"

"The system never throws anything away. At least, not intentionally. Anyway, Kubrick? Terrible student. Cut all the time."

The mention of Kubrick caused a memory flash of Mr. Arnold Bellush, my former Physics teacher and coach of the Westinghouse Science Talent Contest team (now Intel Science Talent Search) back at Stuyvesant. I'd loved Mr. Bellush; I'd written my college application essay about him. I remembered the meta-teaching he'd used now and then: "You notice how I'm looking into all of your eyes, so that it appears that I'm talking to you personally? That's a teaching trick." I'd ended up using it myself: students always self-consciously nodded when you did this – yes, I am paying attention, and yes, you are correct, whatever it is you happen to be saying at the moment. On the Westinghouse team, I'd been really interested in astronautics, though more the movie version of it: I'd wanted to know whether it would be feasible to build the wheel-like space station in Kubrick's 2001 (this is before I learned he'd gone to Taft) so that it had the artificial gravity it did in the movie. I'd learned about the Coriolis effect, and discovered the damn thing would have to be miles in diameter in order to create artificial gravity on the edges; the space shuttle would need to spin like a top to generate a single G. My presentation won a bronze medal at the city math fair, and that had been due to Mr. Bellush.

I stepped on my cigarette end. "Are you trying to tell me that perhaps one of our students is the next Stanley Kubrick?"

Glen stared at me, as he forced smoke to curl through his nostrils. Then he just shook his head.

* * *

My first coverage came not long after this, on the heels of another major incident: a popular ESL teacher got jumped in a stairwell by two former students he'd gotten transferred to Park West High School for disciplinary reasons. Apparently, they hadn't liked being separated from their friends, so they caved the guy's head in with a cinderblock while four other students jumped on him; paramedics carried him out on a stretcher. Poof. So we made the papers again, and Heinz sent a memo around warning us not to talk to unscrupulous reporters sneaking in and looking for comments. Rogers casually remarked he might go outside and talk to the TV reporters camped out in front of the school instead, off the record of course, but Charlie talked him out of it. That was the last thing he needed: Rogers in trouble (teachers were not allowed to talk to the media without permission from higher-ups). There was even talk of a teacher walk-out, but that went nowhere.

Oh, what's a coverage? Good question. When teachers call in sick (they get 7 sick days and 3 personal days a year, though there is no difference between a sick day and personal day), their classes must, obviously, be covered for the day. Substitute teachers cost money, money that comes out of the school's budget; the administration refrains from using them until absolutely necessary. So teachers within the school are assigned to cover one of the absent teacher's classes on one of their own free periods. Union regulations stipulated that the first classroom coverage was "on the house;" after that, teachers were compensated with extra money (called per-session pay) for every coverage performed. Many teachers expressed interest in covering classes for that very reason. Coordinating substitutes to perform coverages at Taft was difficult; the school did not have an answering machine, so technically you had to call at 6 AM so they could call the District to send a sub. However, nobody ever manned the phones before 6:45 AM, and so assignments were always last minute. In addition, it was hard to get subs at all for schools like Taft and Roosevelt – oddly, no one wanted to go there.

The coverage I received was for a Special Ed detention cell on the second floor, right in the rotten heart of old Taft. I'd only been onto the second floor once before, and it was the only time I'd ever been truly nervous: the halls had been eerily empty. I thought crowded and noisy hallways were the toughest, but empty hallways were downright spooky. There was this inchoate, evil vibe in the air. I showed Charlie my slip, because I didn't know where the room was. He looked at it, grabbed his walkie-talkie, and took me to the stairwell. "Listen to me. Are you listening?"

"I'm listening."

"When you get to that room, get a dean or SSA to open the door for you. Then you are to lock that door, and you are not to open it for a student unless there is a dean or security guard escorting that student. Do you understand me? Do not open that door for any other reason."

When I got to the room, I understood his concern. Special Ed rooms are very small, they only house about ten or a dozen students at most, and there's only one way in or out. As usual, the phone in the room didn't work, and the second floor was badly understaffed with deans. I was only supervising one student, who spent his time at the computer surfing the Web for interesting hip-hop sites, when there came a knock on the door porthole; I felt like an old lady in the projects, looking through my peephole with a chain on the door. It was two large, unsupervised students draped in heavy blue denim, meaning they were Crips. They explained, in their charming guttural fuck-talk way, that they wanted ingress in order to "use the computer," but following Charlie's orders, I gave them my regrets. They said they were supposed to be using the room; if I opened the door, they'd show me their programs. I said they could press their programs against the window, as I could see them that way, but that they wouldn't do. They began to get agitated, since I wasn't as stupid as they had been counting on. "Yo, open the fuckin' door, man." I told them as politely as I could to, you know, fuck off. They weren't happy about my intractability on the whole in/out issue; their faces became blank, which by now I knew foreshadowed violence. The kid at the computer looked up from the screen mildly interested – how was this going to go down? His bemused look said: I'm just curious, you unnerstand, don't think for a minute I'm going to lift a finger to help you out. No offense. I wondered if they could break down the door...? I cast my gaze about the room for a weapon. Maybe I could hurl the computer at them? Or, even better, the kid...? At that moment, however, a dean appeared around the corner and they skedaddled without trying anything.

That coverage marked the beginning of a refrain Charlie would repeat until Christmas: "Don't quit on me." He should have put it on a banner and flown it from the flagpole in front of the school. That was the kind of sloganeering I could get behind. "Any suggestions for inner strength besides the Good Book?" I asked. After a pause, he said, "Marcus Aurelius."

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

November: The Fellows

JHS 117: On Top of Mount Hope

LIZ was excessed to JHS 117, or the Robert H. Wade Academy as it's called (though solely by the administration); it is deep in the asthmatic lungs of the South Bronx. It's what is known as a "feeder" school for Taft and Roosevelt: these two high schools are going to be the final destination for most of the students here. Unlike Taft, from which you can at least see the subway station and the faded grandeur of the Grand Concourse, you can't see anything from JHS 117. It's hemmed in by tenements, and a long climb up the steep grade of Mount Hope Avenue from the subway at 176th Street. As she trudged up the hill for her first day, Liz saw a massive edifice located near the top of the hill. She thought: Can that be a middle school? It was a four-story colossus.

She went to the main office on the second floor. A male administrator, some grey-haired fossil, handed her her program. She was to have a homeroom, two English classes, and a history class (despite not having certification in the subject). She would be replacing a popular teacher who had just lost his certification for reasons that remained shadowy. The class had had substitutes for three weeks, and the students were "restless." The school Instructional Specialist walked in as the situation was being explained, and as she escorted Liz to her classroom quickly tried to explain the literacy strategies they were trying to implement in the school. That turned out to be the only conversation on the topic Liz would have.

There was one redeeming thing about getting shipped here: Mike Abernethy had been here since September.

* * *

Back in those halcyon days at the Parlour, Mike and I had always rolled our eyes about the constant 'goal-setting' questions we were subjected to in training. It seemed to require such rote answers, like our initial interviews, or when Sean Connery asked the new recruit in The Untouchables why he wanted to be a cop: "To protect the property and citizenry of the City of Chicago..." Though I'd been sincere when I'd said, "I want the students to realize that there's more to life than the five-block area around Taft High School, that there's a whole world waiting for them, and that mastery of reading and writing is their ticket there."

But I always preferred Mike's answer. "Bill Hicks said it best. He's a comic. Now a dead one. And he said, 'I was down South and I went to a Waffle House. I'm not proud, I was hungry, I'll admit it. So I'm reading my book and the waitress comes over and says 'What are you reading for?' Not, 'What are you reading?' but 'What are you reading for?' I don't know. Maybe so it's I don't end up a fucking waffle waitress.' So, I figure if I can help students develop some reading skills, maybe I can remove some of the negative impressions conjured up by reading books."

Dear Mr. Abernethy :

You have been declared a teacher in excess. You will remain in your current assignment until a vacancy occurs in your license area. At that time you may be transferred to another school in the Chancellor's District or within the city.

He'd reported to Roosevelt, and an hour after he received his program he was given the letter. What the hell did this mean? The letter was signed by the APO so that's who Peter went to see. The APO purred silkily: "That means your AP, ah, Miss Mandell, hired too many English teachers, Mr., ah, Abernethy. In the parlance of the airline industry, your flight was over-booked. Or, perhaps it is better to say that Miss Mandell 'hedged her bets.' Either way, there is no longer a position for you here at the present time. However, I would venture to say the odds are excellent that this turn of events will alter shortly. Should your impatience get the better of you, though, you are free to call around to other schools and find another position."

He was kept on-site for three days as an ATR, doing coverages, and then was called back in to see the APO. "Ah, Mr. Abernethy, is it? I've just received a fax from District. You're to report to JHS 117 immediately."

Holy fuck. "A junior high? Why? I'm a high school teacher."

"I'm afraid I have absolutely no answers for you, Mr. Abernethy. If it comes from District, it's nothing to do with me. They work in strange and mysterious ways over there, believe me."

Mike sprinted across Fordham Road to a phone booth (you weren't allowed to make personal phone calls from the school, from the few that worked anyway, and he had no cell); amidst the bus exhaust fumes and traffic noise, he tried to reach somebody, anybody – the Fellows, the DOE – as he stood there chain-smoking Marlboro reds. He was panicking – from what he'd heard about middle schools, it was supposed to be the worst of all possible placements, the "black hole" of the system. Several quarters and half a pack later, he hadn't been able to reach a single person who either knew anything or who could help him. He was trapped. He turned around to look through the iron fence at Fordham University and shook his head in disgust. Collegiate atmosphere my ass.

He reported to 117 that afternoon, and then sat in the main office there for a week making conversation with the grey-haired office fossil, doing absolutely nothing. Then, for one week, he was sent into classes as a one-on-one tutor. His third week, he started doing coverages every day. His major coverage was the 6th grade reading program, part of the school's SFA (Success For All) program. These kids were the lowest performers in the school, and there was no room anywhere in the overcrowded school for them; Mike had to teach in the cafeteria. The kids would arrive and start literally running around the entire cafeteria, doing laps; the hair-netted hags who ran the kitchen would call upstairs: "This man cannot control his class." He had no classroom materials: no blackboard, no chart paper, no markers, nothing, nada, zip. So he'd sit and talk to them, ask questions about their lives, their hopes and dreams, though three of the kids didn't speak a word of English. It felt like he was doing something, anyway. The last 15 minutes of the period was supposed to be 'book club,' but, surprise, no books. So he had to kill time. It was like being on a talk show, the producer pulling his hands apart, mouthing: "Stretch! Stretch!" Then the principal, one Mr. Cooper, a bearded 50-something who wore ugly polyester ties and cheap suits, came down and yelled at him. "Where are your groups? This is unacceptable." Mike was puzzled. He was going to say, "But they are in groups." But instead he held his tongue while Cooper rearranged groups he'd already established. This turned out to be a major tactical error on Mike's part: from then on, Cooper felt he could have his way with him. Mike was now officially Cooper's bitch.

In November, right when Liz arrived, Mike got his own program and his own room: 7th grade. His room had a giant hole in a corner at the front of the room, around 2' x 4', that was covered by a sheet. When he was teaching, he had to be careful where he paced or he'd end up in the basement. He would be teaching English, history, and something called "English Skills." Since they were in the Chancellor's District, the school was on 'extra time,' meaning the teachers were there until 3 except for Tuesdays when they were there until 3:40 (they were at least paid extra for this). They were supposed to be providing 'extra help' during this 'extra time,' but no one ever showed up and the class was thus 'extra empty.'

On his first day in his new room, Mike got a taste of how things were going to go: he got written up by Cooper because the blinds in his room were broken. The thing was, this had happened before he'd taken over the room. "How is that my fault?" he asked his mentor, who said, "I think he's gunning for you." Mike was taking over from another Fellow who had quit two weeks in. Since this person had worn a shirt and tie, Cooper decided to insist that Mike do the same, just because... well, just because he was the principal and could do it. Thus, Mike became only one of two teachers in the entire school who did. "Everybody else was wearing ratty jeans and Ohio State sweatshirts, and here's me: King Asshole." On his numerous passes through the halls, Cooper never smiled at him; he always seemed pissed off about something Mike was doing or not doing, and didn't hesitate to let Mike know it.

* * *

Liz had to come down hard on the class to gain control. She went back to her tried-and-true method of ignoring them and sitting at her desk to read; this provoked an even bigger reaction in middle school than it had in high school, they couldn't believe she would just sit down and read in class. No teacher had actually ignored them before! "Yo, Miss, whatchoo doin'?" "I'm modeling," she deadpanned. Three weeks in, the class finally figured out she was for real. She found that there were some major differences between middle and high schools. The first was nearly full attendance every single day. The students, especially the boys, were mostly smaller, and though they weren't as violent they were certainly crazier and more erratic. Girls were boy-crazy, but for older boys, so the middle-school boys were always trying to prove themselves. It was difficult to keep them on a task as they got battered by the storm-surge of hormones. The age range was wider: from 12 to almost 16. Lectures didn't work, this age group needed to do the work for themselves, so group work worked far better here. But they had a reading range from 2nd grade to 10th grade, too wide for any kind of organized or consistent teaching.

And after the relatively sedate noise level in her classroom at Taft (attendance had been super-low and most of the students that did show up slept anyway), Liz found the noise level in the middle school classroom otherworldly. They screamed and yelled across the room at each other non-stop. Favorite refrains aimed at her were: "This is stupid!" and "This is boring!" Okay, let me check the Suggestion Box... Favorite questions when she began assignments: "Why do we have to do this?" "Why can't you make this easy?" "Why can't you make this fun?" After getting no joy in Liz's impassivity to these questions, they'd simply refuse to do the work. They wanted class to be like TV – they refused to see school as something that required hard work. Grades were something that should merely be 'given' to them. At first she was puzzled at this attitude: where had they gotten that idea? She became increasingly frustrated with this attitude. Frustration quickly turned to disgust.

Roosevelt

It was like a slap across Robert's face every morning – fuckinniggabitch, fuckinniggabitch, fuckinniggabitch. A Babel built by Dante, a heady witches' brew of poverty and hormones, hundreds of teenagers in the hallways laughing, cursing, threatening, boasting – fuckinniggabitch, fuckinniggabitch, fuckniniggabitch. The garble that was all he could ever make out as he bobbed and weaved his way to his classroom. He had never heard a noise level like it. Everything had to be shouted, screamed, as if it were a packed dance club where nobody realizes the music has been turned off, that the DJ's have gone home... The noise! It was – beyond belief! It was – incredible! Like beating on tom-toms, it had a Vachel Lindsay rhythm to it: Fuckinniggabitch! Fuckinniggabitch! Fuckinniggabitch! The walls, ceiling, floor: concrete, all of it, like a tunnel especially built to maximize decibels... His nerves began to get jangled so badly from the bedlam in the hallways that he would seek refuge in the English Office with other Fellows. It was like a bomb shelter, everybody huddled around drained and exhausted, the door closed against the incessant hallway noise...

It was around November that students Amberdawn had never seen before began showing up. This type of students, those that disappeared for weeks at a time, were known as LTA's (Long Term Absentees), and when they magically appeared their function seemed to be to disrupt the class. It was almost impossible to kick them out, because 2nd period at Roosevelt was their official class, not 3rd like everywhere else. This became abundantly clear when she asked for help. Mandell bluntly told her, "Suck it up, dearie. We need the numbers." So she started using extra point incentives to the students who were there most often – "I'll give you extra points if you don't talk to that kid."

She had one dean stationed at the end of the hall who tried to be the kids' buddy, and so he didn't do much. Referrals were completely toothless; one kid was walking around with 17 referrals. That's when she started the behavior chart, which she posted at the front of the room for all to see. They could earn up to 20 points a day, and she would keep track of their progress with colored stars – gold for 20, silver for 15, blue for 10, red for 5, and no stars. She wasn't sure this was going to work: I mean, really. Stars? Aren't they going to feel like babies? But it worked beautifully. "Miss, Miss, where's my star, miss?" In fact she had to start writing the point values above the stars, because kids would come in and switch them around; she'd come in one morning and suddenly the worst students would have gold stars and the best students would have red stars. Did they really think I wasn't going to notice...?

She had nearly had a riot on her hands the one time she tried group work. Note to self: Never, ever do group work again... One morning not long after this, she was circulating through the class checking on the progress of their 'Do-Nows' when she discovered one of her female students with her hand underneath the desk, inside the open zipper of a male student's jeans – and the girl's hand motion was moving up and down in an unambiguous fashion. The Zen warrior, the liberal lesbian, the political subversive, well. This little incident turned her into a shocked 60-year-old school-marm. "Young lady, you there! Young lady, you – you stop doing that right now! Young man, come with me into the hall." "No Miss. I can't stand up." "What do you mean you can't stand up? Stand up!" "Miss, I can't stand up." "You can't... Oh. Never mind." She thought: What kind of management issue did this fall under? Should this go in the contract...?

Anthony resolved to teach them something, anything. He responded to their behavior by becoming tough: he gave lots of classwork, homework every night, placed a vocabulary word on the board every day. He gave daily reading quizzes after the read-aloud. Inevitably, kids started to fail, since they wouldn't do the work; so they decided en masse, "Fuck it, I ain't never gonna pass, so I'm just gonna cause trouble." Anthony was up-front with the rest of the class: he told them specifically what they needed to do to pass – but he emphasized he wasn't a tough grader; it was all about making the effort. His requirements were nothing more than low-level comprehension questions, requiring only a modicum of attention. But still they didn't do anything, so he was forced to fail half the class. This caused even more kids to adopt the "Fuck it" attitude, and behavior continued to deteriorate. The kids hated the book, they hated the lessons, they hated him – always mouthing off, giving him dirty looks. He figured, finally, there were about ten kids attempting to learn, so that's who he decided to teach to. He wouldn't budge on the academics; otherwise, what was the point? There was going to be no bargaining, no negotiating, no deals. He spun out the platitudes: "It's up to you to pass or fail." "I don't give grades, you earn them." He tried to liven up Anne Frank by showing Schindler's List. Every time a Jew got shot, especially in the head, the students cheered. It wasn't anti-Semitism, not really, they just loved the brutality.

The history teacher wasn't being driven crazy, so Anthony went to him to find out how he was coping with the class. He found out why the history teacher wasn't crazed: the guy merely assigned random grades to maintain a good pass percentage and never collected any work. So he went to Mandell, whom he actually kind of admired: he felt that despite her shortcomings as an AP, if nothing else, she was morally committed to everything about the job. She told him, "You have to plan your lessons down to the minute, and the management problems will disappear." He explained this wasn't working, so she said, "Well, cheer up, Anthony! We made it through another day. Yes, there is a lot of evil out there, but there is a loving God who will help us to find the good."

Anthony was given two students who were so troublesome in another class they were beyond the teacher's ability to control them. He thought: So why give them to me? George just wanted to make trouble, but Jose – Jose was scary. Jose would always sit with his hood up, doing nothing but glower, spoiling for a fight with someone, anyone. He'd sit in the smaller kid's seats, be a bully to provoke an incident. Whenever Anthony would come over to fix the situation, Jose would mutter under his breath: Cracker. Honky. It was different than the hallways; in the halls there was anonymity to it, it could be brushed off. But not this. This was directed malice. He wrote letters home, and this improved behavior for a couple of days, except for Jose – he was worse, so god knows what his home life was like.

It was right after that letter home that Jose started following Anthony to the bus stop with three of his friends in tow. Oh, they weren't obvious about it; they'd just somehow always be near the entrance when Anthony left, and they'd follow a distance behind him. Not close enough to talk to, but close enough so that he could be aware he was being followed. Then they'd wait at the bus stop with Anthony, but never get on a bus. He'd see them standing there, staring at him as the bus pulled away. One day Anthony finally had enough: He walked up to Jose at the bus stop, snapping out: "What are you following me for?" Jose gave this arrogant little smile. "Following you? What we want to follow you for?" His friends chimed in. "Yo, this teacher be paranoid." "Yo, you need to be easy." In class, Jose would stare at him, and then his mouth would slowly creep into a smirk. By incessant complaining, Anthony finally got him removed from the class in November.

Richard tried ideas from the field manual, the 150-page Teaching Fellows Guidebook. He assigned journals, which worked well for a while, but he had to refer Louis to counseling because one day he wrote, "I'm sick of life." The next day, Louis' aunt barged in, between classes, and confronted him on the spot in the hallway: "How dare you refer Louis! He's not crazy! That boy is not crazy!" After that, nobody would write in their journals. He wanted to tell the class: But what else could I have done? What would you have had me do? Instead of becoming a disciplinarian, which was just not his style, Richard resorted to lesson tricks: He used drama, having the class acting out scenes; he read in different voices; he stood on desks, turned out lights, whatever he could do to get their attention. He brought in his radio to play songs that matched the books they were reading, brought in videos. Every day was a song and dance routine. He tried to incorporate the positive into every comment, and he gained their respect. They listened. Well, some of the time anyway. When they didn't listen, the level at which they acted out never ceased to astound him. One of their favorite activities to "let off steam" was throwing themselves out of windows, since they were on the first floor. They'd go back around the school, come back to class, and do it again.

Richard knew you couldn't turn your back on Miguel, he would take things from his desk just to see how he would react. Richard referred him to guidance when he handed in a picture for an assignment that was filled with guns, slogans like "I want to kill the world," "F— the world." He got angry and upset about that, felt Richard had betrayed him. But at some point, somehow, he shifted. He saw that Richard really cared enough to stay on him. Richard could see him thinking: Man, this guy's not going to give up on me no matter what I do. "Miguel, can you be with us today? Miguel, look alive there." He began to hand in work, even volunteered to erase the board. At the first snowfall, though, Miguel joined the rest of the class when they opened the windows and had a full-fledged snowball fight in the classroom. Richard couldn't believe it. If the principal walks in now, I am so fired...
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SUBJECT: December Teaching Fellows Newsletter!

For the most part, you have been successful in everything you've ever tried, and chances are, you're pretty good at most things... If you've not been successful at something, it's most likely because you weren't all that interested. Furthermore, because of your ability and intelligence, you've always known that if you put your heart and mind to anything, you would do well. True? Newsflash: teaching isn't like this; it's not completely linear. No matter how hard you work, how bright you are, or how much you want to be effective, you're not going to be great right away... the learning curve in teaching is about time and experience. You have to move through all the difficulties and challenges of the first few months; there is little that makes it better, and nothing that makes it go faster.

December

AP observations are supposed to be the observations that help you prepare for the most important observation, namely the one performed by the Principal (and because principals are the school's Rating Officer, the only ones that count). This is because if you are given a 'U' by the principal, you are in big trouble.

All teachers get graded at the end of the year based on the two Principal's observations; if you have received two 'U's, the Principal will give you a 'U' for the year, and you will lose your teaching license and be fired. This is harder to do once a teacher is tenured, but probationary teachers have no protection against a 'U'. In order to make it through probation, a teacher has to have three years of Satisfactory year-end ratings. Otherwise, their license "is not recommended for renewal." Since this is a learn-as-you-go job, new teachers are not supposed to get what are termed 'surprise' observations, which entails being observed with no warning by the Principal. You are supposed to get what is known as a Pre-Observation Conference, in which the Principal goes over what they expect to see when they observe you. This ensures you'll be able to at least cover some of the bases – no new teacher can be expected to cover them all.

So imagine my surprise when one fine day in December, the day I tried to teach something called Regents Task IV, the "Critical Lens," for the first time, who should walk into my classroom but Principal Heinz on a surprise observation? Charlie followed close behind her, looking unhappy. What little control I had before they entered completely fell apart on me. I got badly rattled, and I knew it had not gone well. I was tersely informed to attend a post-observation conference in the principal's conference room in the Bunker.

Nailed to the faux wood-paneled walls of the principal's conference room were numerous framed pictures and official-looking documents. It reminded me a little of my grandfather's basement rec-room back in Milwaukee, where there'd been a wet-bar, a pool table, and a sign that said "Martini Spoken Here." There we were: Heinz and Charlie and me, the three of us gathered around a table, just three members of the staff having ourselves a friendly little sit-down. She made a big show of being displeased with me, but you couldn't tell it from looking at her face, which from close up seemed completely immobilized by her death-mask level of cosmetics. She shuffled her notes and papers in front of her officiously, taking great pride in performing her duty of "weeding out." Charlie sat there looking glum.

Her words washed over me; I tuned in and out as if Heinz were a scratchy radio sending a signal from some distant planet, nodding my head to a transmitted music only I could hear: "...Unsatisfactory lesson... your Aim was too general and you never answered the Aim in the end summary of the lesson... students were confused about the relationship between supporting details and main ideas... students continued to call out answers until the end of the lesson... a number of times you answered your own questions... your bathroom pass was not readily available to you... the New York State ELA standards were not on the board... Mr. Roston...? Mr. Roston?"

"Uh, right. Got it." Nod.

"As a result of this unsatisfactory percooperce, you will be meeting with Mr. Osewalt on a weekly basis to go over your lessons for the students. Do you have any questions?"

Oddly, I did not. I shook my head. She nodded once, perhaps in an uncontrollable reflex reaction to my own nods, got up from the table, and left the room trailing the vapor of cheap eau du toilette. Now I understood why Charlie had kept asking me not to quit. Here was my reward for all the hard work I was doing. Charlie sighed. "It wasn't fair, Aaron, I'm sorry. I knew about it five minutes before you did."

"Shit, I barely even know what a Regents Task IV is myself yet, Charlie."

"It's my fault – I haven't been keeping track of you up there. But for the next one, we're going to sit down and go over it step by step until it's perfect." Charlie in fact ended up doing more than this: he put a commendation letter in my file praising my work to try and take some of the sting out of my 'U.'

Since I was given an observation without a conference, I could have grieved what happened to the union (though as a new teacher it's unlikely anything would have come of it, which is why Charlie discouraged me from bothering). Technically, a 'U' issued in this manner is not allowed to go into your file (though mine certainly did, as I discovered later). But partly as a way to head off these possible complications, and partly under pressure from Charlie, Heinz grudgingly agreed to re-observe me in January.

The first thing to decide when an interruption occurs is, "Do I respond?" (The Teaching Fellows Handbook 2002)

December: The Fellows

JHS 117

If possible, the administration at JHS 117 was even more hostile than at Taft. Every faculty meeting the teachers would get a dressing-down from Cooper. It was always the teachers fault that there were problems, never the fact the students simply refused to do the work. "If they aren't doing the work, it's something you're not doing right." It was also the school's first year in the Chancellor's District, so there was enormous pressure to pass students to get the numbers up. There were less-than-subtle implications that the students weren't passing because of poor teaching, with the possible repercussions to one's continuing receipt of a paycheck. There was a huge emphasis placed on classroom decoration. Learning took a back seat to creating a 'print-rich' environment, such as hanging pretty student work and changing words on the Word Wall. You were never to write on student work, only use Post-It notes, because otherwise you would be 'defacing' their work. You were to never use red pens because 'it destroyed their self-esteem.'

Liz refused absolutely to obey these orders: she wasn't taking part in any cosmetic bullshit. She didn't worry about getting in trouble: Cooper and Foster were both disgusting old lechers who let her get away with just about anything if she batted her eyes at them. She found that the new curriculum required the students had to have a binder with an English section, a reading journal, and a writing journal; it was too much stuff, they could barely manage to bring one of the required items. Liz found the lessons were scripted right down to the openings. "Begin lesson by saying, 'Well, Readers...' or 'Well, Writers...'" As if this canned crap would suddenly make them more literate. But it certainly put paid to the lie that bell-to-bell instruction would manage behavior; it affected that not one jot. She received no formal guidance whatsoever on how to implement the curriculum, and there was never enough time to do the work in the allotted time, so they were always behind. There was a big emphasis on 'peer editing,' but how could you edit your peers if you didn't have the slightest understanding of grammar or punctuation? She saw parents exactly once, on parent-teacher night. They made a big show of getting mad in front of their kids ("Open your mouth, girl! I said, open your mouth so's the teacher can see how far up your ass I've got my shoe!"), and then she never saw or heard from them again.

Mike was also issued the canned curriculum, but the students wouldn't follow the seating chart, and they would take up the rest of the class time taking out notebooks or asking for pens and paper. They wouldn't even do the 'Do Now.' And he had a 17-year-old girl in his class, despite the age-out policy. Her name was Chanel, and she was on parole for arson and assault, "a cum-dumpster for the Bloods, and a mangy, awful bitch." She gave Mike no end of hell. If she didn't work, what was he supposed to do? Say "Do your work or I'll fail you"? This girl was on parole, for god's sake. So he went to his AP, Foster (who had to be some kind of pedophile, he always had scantily clad female students in the office cleaning up and giving him backrubs, he looked like some kind of Ottoman satrap). Foster appeared to be listening, nodding at the appropriate moments. When Mike finished he said, "Your room has to look good." The philosophy went: If your room is pretty, presto! No more problems. Despite warnings, kids ate in class and stuffed the garbage into their desks; soon, the room began to stink. There was no recourse to curbing bad behavior during the day, since there was no detention. He went back to Foster (god only knew why). Again, Foster listened (I think he's paying attention, I mean, he seems to be looking right at me and everything...). When Mike finished, he snapped, "You need to take some get-tough pills." Do I get those at Duane Reade...? Even a few kids took him aside. "Mistuh, you too nice. You got to get meaner, know what we sayin'?"

But what had he expected? Foster's staff meetings were legendary, since every staff meeting was exactly the same. They always involved a story he repeated so often that it took on the status of a parable. Foster, declaiming in grand Homeric style, would recite the epic of how he'd managed to lose all his retirement savings to a con-artist friend hawking an 'investment opportunity,' and that's the only reason why he was still trapped here, here at JHS 117. He, poor Everyman Foster, was supposed to have retired years ago; he was supposed to be soaking up the Florida sun, not standing in front of a bunch of incompetents in some godforsaken hellhole in the Bronx. The moral was hazy (like a good teacher, Foster never told them what it meant), but it seemed to be: working in public education sucked.

When Mike went to him for advice again (I know his eyes are open, but...), Foster leaned back and put his hands behind his head. "You know, Mike, things aren't like they used to be, and that's a good thing. Man, did the system use to be corrupt! Did you know that you used to have to bribe school boards to get any kind of principal's job? That's right! Yeah, they used to go for as much as twenty-two K! Jesus, twenty-two! I managed to talk them down to twenty. Boy, I sure could use that kind of money now..." After a few minutes, it was obvious he wasn't going to stop, so Mike excused himself and left Foster lost in reverie. Mike got his formal observation by Cooper in December. Everybody got the required pre-observation but Mike. Cooper said, "This is the worst class I have ever seen in my life." He gave Mike a 'U', which everybody told him to take to the union, but he decided against it. In his post-observation conference, Foster said, "Try to get the kids on your side." The day after this conversation his good buddy Chanel stood up in the middle of class and shouted: "Nobody fucking respects you, you fucking fuck! Nobody gives a fuck what you say!" The dean took her out and returned her 15 minutes later. Thing is, this began to happen daily, and eventually the dean stopped bothering; he'd just stick his head into Mike's room and say, "Would you please keep it down in here? The other teachers are complaining." Back to Foster, it was "Mike, you wouldn't believe how corrupt the local school boards used to be. Why, there was this one time, a board member wanted a piano. Well, the school had a piano in the auditorium that was almost never used, right? So she – it was a woman – she decided that since no one was really using it, she'd take that piano. Used students to roll it up the aisle and get it out of the building. Boy, those days were really something..."

Right after that, Mike had a fight take place in his class between a boy and a Dominican girl who looked to be some kind of pituitary mistake – she seemed seven-nine, 800 pounds compared to this scrawny little kid. The boy throws a textbook at her head, and she picks it off the floor and throws it overhand right down the pipe, brains the boy with it: kid goes down like a sack of fertilizer, boom. Following procedure, he summoned the dean, who said "This isn't a fight. If they didn't hit each other with their hands, it's not a fight."

Mike replied, "So you mean I could kick you in the balls and that wouldn't be a fight because I'm using my feet?"

"Exactly."

For months afterwards, Mike often wondered why he hadn't done it.

Taft

CJ began to panic. He started second-guessing himself all over the place because he assumed the problems were all his fault. Mistake #1: He started making deals with them. "If you work today, we'll do games tomorrow." Mistake #2: He'd plead with them, basically, which was merely a sign of weakness to them, and they despised him for it, and he knew it. And then he did it, he finally did it. Mistake #3. He did the absolute worst thing a teacher could say to a disruptive class: "Aw, c'mon, guys!" And he said it over and over and over again. "Aw, c'mon, guys!" The phrase was nothing more than an admission of total defeat: I can't control you, and you know it. CJ's assigned mentor trained him on the use of a point system, rewarding a meritocracy – gifts included pens, pencils, and McDonald's gift certificates. It was a 'token economy' that involved a behavior chart that was posted in the front of the room. You would make marks on it only for good behavior. He placed little happy stickers everywhere. It was not effective – there were too many behaviors, something like 15, to be practical. The rewards were insufficient – "Why should I behave for a fuckin' pencil, man?" There were no consequences for misbehavior. CJ could have a kid removed, but they'd be brought back next period. He never did get control of the class. His mentor took him aside and told him frankly, "Now it's all about your survival. Hang in there until after Christmas break, and I will see to it personally you get a different schedule."

Roosevelt

For Robert, classroom control fluctuated wildly even after Thanksgiving. The two students he had been referring in November, Alex and Rolvin, were finally taken out for a week's suspension. This was unfortunate, because by then their behavior had improved somewhat, and they viewed the suspension as a betrayal by Robert. When they came back they were sullen and hostile. That was when a kid, apropos of nothing, looked up at him and said, "Those boys going to shoot you, Mister."

Had he heard that right? Apparently he had – the kid had overheard Alex and Rolvin discussing it. Deeply disturbed, he filed a police report (against the wishes of the principal), but there wasn't anything they could about it solely on hearsay – they hadn't made a direct threat to his face. So he walked around for a week, watching his back – and for the first time he thought he was going to quit. Shit, he had to quit! What do I need this level of horror for? I have a new baby at home; this job certainly isn't worth dying over. So Alex and Rolvin's parents were brought in, and Alex and Rolvin went to see Robert, contrite that he had actually thought they would do such a terrible thing. After a long conversation with them, he felt they were being sincere. So after lengthy consideration, he decided to stay on.

After Thanksgiving, they broke up Martin's class and reconstituted it as a Special Ed class. This worked better for him, despite Martin having had no training in Special Ed. The kids were more respectful, at least to his face. Just before Christmas Break, the lock on his locker was broken and he lost his checkbook, wallet, and cellphone. For some reason, they left his coat. He chalked it up to Christmas spirit.

All chancellor's district students were classified as 'High-Needs' students. This in turn made also them 'At-Risk' students, those at high risk for dropping out (which they did, in large numbers). Thus was born the period known as Advisory. In an effort to address this perpetual problem, Advisory was part of an anti-dropout program centered around a book entitled The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Teens (ostensibly written by the son of the self-help guru who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People). The philosophy went something like this: these teenagers were at risk for dropping out of school because they'd gotten into patterns of bad habits their whole life; so, through the use of this book, the idea was to change those bad habits into good habits. But by December, the kids were going nuts in Advisory. And why not? Amberdawn didn't have any guidance or structure for it whatsoever. She hated the 7 Habits, and the kids hated it too – they would throw their copies across the room in disgust. So she turned it into 'Habits by the Movies.' They'd discuss the book Monday through Wednesday and then watch a movie Thursday and Friday. When she taught the book she would write M-O-V-I-E on the board, and when they misbehaved she would erase a letter. If the word disappeared, no movie. They watched "issue-themed" films like Amistad and Cider House Rules, and it worked well.

And then she found out she was pregnant.

Anthony switched Anne Frank with Call of the Wild and the girls rebelled. They started to yell insults at him, and suddenly they all had to go to the nurse every day, claiming they were pregnant. He discovered they were wandering the halls, of course, and the nurse said none of them were pregnant as far as she knew, but then, fuck it, he gave them the pass anyway, just to get them the hell out of the room. His new energy wore off quickly; he became totally exhausted at the end of the day; the short trip from the subway to his apartment felt like a death march. He stopped planning at home, just planned when he got to school in the morning, since it didn't seem to make any difference. At night, he would stare out the window, looking towards the Bronx, from his flat on the Upper East Side. Only two miles away, it seemed like the moon, one the richest zip codes in the country two miles from one of the poorest. He thought: Why don't they just march down here and torch the place? A mystery.

And Jose had not gone away. Jose continued to wander into class from time to time, giving him The Look, fucking with him, until Anthony threatened to call security. The walking-in matter was resolved when Jose was officially put back in his class in January, to Anthony's total disbelief. Then, a student he nicknamed Worst Girl, her boyfriend started coming around and getting in his face about how he was 'mistreating' his girlfriend. He was coming from another floor, another class, to do this (why is this guy allowed to roam the halls at will?), so Anthony kept calling security until eventually security just stopped coming. After that, the boyfriend would actually just sit in the class, because he knew there was nothing that Anthony could do about it.

Then one day, he brought a friend with him, because they figured out the class was a free-for-all, and Anthony finally snapped. When the two of them left his class, Anthony followed them, abandoning his room of students. He cornered the two of them in the stairwell. They were much bigger than he was, but Anthony was on the verge of violence and he didn't care, he was no longer rational. He jabbed his finger in the boyfriend's chest and said, "You need to stay the fuck away from my class." The two of them started to laugh. "Yo, check it out. This teachah crazy." Anthony did it again, harder. The boyfriend began to scowl. "I ain't messin' with you, man. You'd best back the fuck off me, yo." Anthony replied, "I'm not messing with you either." His adrenaline was going, and so was theirs; he knew a fight was just about to break out, you could smell it, he felt his armpits heat up and dampen, when another teacher came walking down the stairwell. The two students melted away, grumbling threats. Anthony returned to class, shaking with a mixture of exhilaration and fear. The next day, he called out sick for the first time on a job; he called out sick the day after that. And that's when he knew. He called Mandell and told her he wouldn't be coming back anymore. He felt bad, because he felt he was letting her down, but he couldn't take it anymore. Lavirgine said she understood. After he hung up, he went to his music collection and began rifling through it, separating out the rap and hip-hop CD's: DMX, Nas. He piled all them into a bag, walked down to the front of his building, and threw them all out.

Richard's faith had been giving him the strength to keep going, but the first Friday in January, the roof caved in on him: faith was no longer enough. He got home, and he just cried and cried. He felt sapped of all energy; he didn't, he couldn't, care anymore. He was overwhelmed; he was too inexperienced; he felt inadequate to the task. "The kids were so needy! I had been unprepared for how emotionally draining it was." That night, in fact that entire weekend, he prayed as hard as he could for guidance, and got his answer. On Monday, he gave his notice that morning, as soon as he walked in. When he told the class he was leaving, they couldn't believe it. He poured his heart out to them, and it brought him and the class to tears. They got so upset that security had to come to the classroom. They begged him to stay. They wrote him a long letter, and a poem, saying he was the best teacher they'd ever had. It tore at the depths of his heart, but he no longer felt capable. The simple fact was, he had looked inside himself, and discovered he had nothing left to give. It was as if he had been hollowed out by fire.

* * *

It was inevitable that the stress and the after-hours binge drinking would lead to serious trouble for me too. Case in point: Liz and I got also close – too close, in the end. We developed a "foxhole romance"; it wasn't supposed to be more than that, but things spiraled out of control. I've had some long nights in my life, but the night I confessed the affair to my wife was the longest I hope to ever experience; she left the next morning for her parents' place. Liz had also confessed to her new husband, and after that, things get pretty murky – my mind has walled off certain parts of that time, and alcohol has wiped some more; I only remember flashes of it. The soundtrack to this period, as I recall, was Coldplay's "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Among the highlights were threatening phone calls from Liz's husband at all hours; I took to carrying a roll of quarters around, half-hoping he'd have the balls to jump me. I spent a lot of time on the phone with my wife, engulfed in cigarette smoke and tearful recriminations, begging for a forgiveness I wasn't sure I wanted. And why didn't I want it? This seemed a fairly pivotal question – where was Socrates when I needed him...? As soon as I struggled awake in the ghastly emptiness of the dark apartment, I began to mark the days to Christmas Break like the Count of Monte Christo in his cell. Or was I thinking of the Prisoner of Zenda? Below 96th Street, back in the white world, the holiday season was in full swing; the tree in Rockefeller Center was lit, lights were strung along Park Avenue, Macy's store windows were decorated. I knew because I saw it happening on TV as I kept one eye on my marking and writing my graduate work; otherwise, my world was the Bronx now. I went to Charlie for succor – he served a marriage counselor for his church's congregation. I told him what had happened, and what was happening. He hugged me, then said: "It's pretty simple, guy. You really want to save your marriage, you gotta stop seeing Liz." But I didn't want to do that either. As the December air became tactile and the sky turned grey, my right index and middle fingers began to turn a festive yellow from the nicotine...

For our Untouchables private holiday party, the three of us move drinking operations to Rudy's Tap Room, a dump near Times Square. It's a favorite destination (along with the Full Moon Saloon) of horny sailors during Fleet Week. Inside, once you wipe the condensation from your glasses, you can see the red pleather banquettes are held together with tinsel-colored duct tape (so this cuts down on the decorating they have to do). Making your way through the crush to the bar, you see the hotbox of free hot dogs: the glistening meat rotates, slowly shriveling underneath the glare of a heat lamp. Wait long enough to get one and it's like putting a pink, wizened bread stick on a bun. Hanging from the ceiling, a wino's mobile, is a tassled cardboard Santa-and-sleigh, pulling the phrase "Merry Christmas!" behind like one of those summertime banner-toting planes at Jones Beach. Tonight, in the name of holiday cheer, we've decided to drag CJ down into our debauchery. When we prepare to move on to another bar, we have to pour CJ into a cab, where we learn later he vomits on the backseat all the way back to Brooklyn. Liz, Mike and I drink at another bar nearby until closing time. We toast the mayor – he's managed to do what Giuliani had not, he's gotten control of the schools. We wonder what he's going to do with all that luscious new power. I stay out as late as I can, because I don't want to go home to my apartment: it's like living in a windswept, tumbledown ruin. I know the rest of Christmas break happened – it's marked on my calendar – I just don't remember much about it. I gather most if it was spent asleep. Otherwise...? I'm a detective at my own crime scene. Dirty dishes indicate I ate. From the empties I know that I drank. The mounds of butts that resemble the spoor of some monstrous animal have turned every conceivable surface into an ashtray. These are the witnesses as to how I spent the rest of my waking hours. As for New Year's Eve, I have no idea what resolutions I may or may not have made. My hope is that, perhaps, I resolved to have resolve...

CANTO III

The Good Soldier

####

January 15, 2003: In his unveiling of a system-wide school reform plan today, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that, "next September will be different from the past years."... [He] also announced plans to increase parental involvement in schools. "Fixing our schools is too important to be left to the teachers and school administrators," he said, "At home, the buck stops with the parents." The sweeping changes intended to end the "bureaucratic sclerosis" currently plaguing the system, according to Bloomberg, will be accompanied by a commitment to widespread accountability. He said, "When entire schools are failing, accountability cannot stop with students and teachers. The problem is systemic. When we look to those responsible for this disgraceful state of affairs we need to go no further than our own mirrors. We are all responsible, and we are all part of the solution." – CFE.org

The first casualty of war is the truth. – Aeschylus

Room 147: This Man

"UFT."

"Yes, I'd like to register a change of address please."

"What's your new address?"

I told her my new (actually old) Brooklyn address.

"Okay, we'll mail you a change of address form that you have to fill out and send back to us."

Pause. "But I just gave you my new address."

"You still have to fill out the form."

"Let me get this straight. You are going to mail me a change of address form for my new address to my new address? Why don't you just enter it into the computer right now?"

Pause. "You need to fill out the form."

* * *

Unsurprisingly, my wife and I are unable to reconcile; this is partly because neither of us is sure we want to. She says that I've done the one unforgivable thing, and she's not sure who I am anymore, and I'm beginning to agree with her; she files for divorce in January. I get my first introduction to the legal profession (how had I avoided it for so long?) in the person of a matrimonial attorney my mother has found for me. Sitting in a leather chair in the man's office as he goes over details that I'm barely listening to, I have never felt like a more colossal failure – I feel like I've been given a 'U' in life. I remembered my wedding day, a rainy night the first weekend of November. "They say a wet bride is good luck," my mother had said, but I think that was just something people say as an excuse for bad weather on the big day. It was bad luck to see the bride before the ceremony, but I heard the rustle of her dress behind me as we entered the temple. My brother played the triumphant entry march from "Aida" on his trombone. On the bema I placed my hand in the small of her back because she was trembling so much – when I did that we smiled at each other. The glass broke with one sharp stomp. Good luck was following us around. We took the advice of a married friend: "Make sure to have a good time at your own reception, because it will go by so fast." I had never felt more like a man than that night, not even when I stood up in that lawyer's office and signed the separation papers.

* * *

My new digs were my parent's pied-a-terre, the basement apartment of the house in which I had grown up in Brooklyn. So it was that I came full circle and found myself taking the same streets to the same train (the F) that I had when I'd gone to high school. When I had traveled the F train as a student, I had taken it during morning rush hour, when you needed the helping hand of a Tokyo-style train pusher to pack yourself into a car fogged-up from commuter fug. You'd ride with your nose pressed to the door until the next stop, when most of the passengers would switch to the A. Now that I was traveling to teach high school, I had a proportionally greater distance to go than East 15th Street and caught the train at a disproportionately earlier hour (in fact, I walked the familiar route in the dark – the sun came up while I was underground); at this time of the morning, the F train was nearly deserted. Now, instead of paper-reading professional types, most of my fellow commuters were dozing manual laborers; I took my place as one of these head-sagging denizens. I switched at 34th Street for the Bronx-bound D, which was also nearly devoid of passengers, aside from a cluster or two of Chinese kids. They were taking the D to switch at 161st Street for the 4, on their way to Bronx Science. If they weren't reading or doing homework, they were talking quietly amongst themselves, and they looked to be carrying enough material in their backpacks for an Everest ascent.

This was a far cry from the standard Taft student equipage, whose portage was similar to a small black laundry bag, closed in the same manner by pulling a nylon cord. It seemed to be a contest as to who could bring the least amount of material to school; there was usually nothing more in their sack than a small spiral notebook and a couple of broken pencils. Hard-core Taftees rolled the spiral notebook up and shoved it into the front pocket of their oversized jeans, with one pen or pencil in the line of rings. This ensured they didn't have to carry anything at all. Some mornings, I would stare wistfully at those Chinese kids, as they pored over some textbook as they listened to music, and I wondered what it was like to teach those kinds of kids, my kinds of kids; or rather, the kinds of kids like me. It was the same feeling I got when I went to City College and passed the station for Columbia at 116th Street, watching all the pretty white kids get off, wondering: what must it be like to go to a school like that? Beautiful buildings, a real campus, a massive library...?

My trip from Brooklyn did nothing to improve my mood once I got to school and punched in, especially not the second Monday of the month, which was the day of the mandatory Faculty Conference. (Public high schools have grandiose notions of themselves, such as referring to their staff as faculty.) This was the last thing you wanted to do, especially after coming back from a long (and yet all-too-short) break. Faculty conferences, tied in with mandated "professional development," were held in the library, and were a combination of dressing down, a variation on "you're not all rowing together" and kindergarten. Teachers would be seated at tables in groups. We would have our attendance taken multiple times, in order to ensure a friend wouldn't sign in for you (this was the most important thing to do – there was always a mad scramble to sign one's name – failure to attend faculty conferences could lead to a "letter in your file"), and then every table would get a bunch of magic markers dumped in the middle, followed by the issuing of chart paper. We would then engage in some kind of "cooperative learning" exercise. Just like the kids!

However, this faculty conference cum professional development workshop in January was different in one major respect: this one had Kenneth Block leading it.

Since Taft was in the Chancellor's District, this ostensibly meant we were under the direct supervision of his most worthy eminence Joel Klein. However, Joel Klein had more important things to do than deal with one of the worst high schools in the country. No, that job fell to the Bronx District Superintendent for the Chancellor's District, and this was Mr. Kenneth Hall. Ken was a fit-looking gentleman in his 40's with classy specs, a graying goatee, and nice suits. Like most administrators, he had started as a grammar school teacher, and later had risen to prominence as the principal of Roosevelt High School, so this was a man who knew his way around failing schools. I'd seen Ken in the hallways on the 4th Floor on one memorable occasion, when he had cornered one of our wayward hallway miscreants and proceeded to get red in the face: he was trying to give the kid an earful but instead the Taftee was giving old Kenneth a mouthful. The kid was not only decidedly unimpressed that he was getting chewed out by no less a personage than the Bronx District Superintendent for the Chancellor's District himself, the kid busily informed Kenneth what sexual positions the Superintendent could assume with members of his own immediate family. I heard the kid got suspended, but still, you had to admire the sheer balls of it.

This confrontation must have sparked something in the Superintendent's brain box, because our first faculty meeting of the New Year was about classroom management; he frontloaded his little presentation by asking us our ideas on classroom management (our Do-Now, if you will). What techniques had worked for us? What hadn't? The groups dutifully came up with lists on the chart paper, and each group elected a teacher to present the findings to Ken. After discussing our work, and eliciting appropriate responses, he finally revealed his true purpose for being there. He was aware, he said, of our incessant complaints about the classroom management issues we faced on a daily basis (surprising, but good to hear if true). He had come bearing the Good News: with a flourish he unveiled the Tool, as it (and often, in particularly ungenerous moments, Ken himself) would come to be known. It was to be the solution to our classroom management woes.

As far as secret weapons went, at first glance it didn't look like much, merely an Excel spreadsheet. It was a grid divided into 35 rows and 5 columns, and it basically initiated a demerit system. Ken and his brain trust had decided that in order for students to be successful in a school like Taft, they had to adhere to what they termed 'Five Core Behaviors,' which were: Arrive on Time, [Sit In] Assigned Seat, [Be] Prepared for Class, Taking Notes, and [Constructive] Participation. It was supposed to work like this: You multiplied the number of instructional days by 15, and this was the amount of points they had for the marking period. Each student had 3 points per behavior that they could lose per day. For a first infraction, you issued a verbal warning ("Quannisha, please stop talking."); after that you were to tick a mark in the appropriate box for each infraction up to a maximum of 3. Behavior was now to be included in their grade. This meant that now, students could be legitimately penalized for disciplinary reasons.

Ken finished his presentation, and there was a moment of silence. I don't know what he was expecting. Perhaps a Hollywood style moment, like The Slow Clap: one person starts clapping slowly, followed by a smattering of others, building to a crescendo of the entire room applauding wildly, all the teachers standing up and cheering, getting up on chairs, high-fiving each other... But I think I underestimated him, because I think he knew what was coming: resistance. Teachers, as personified by the UFT, are notoriously resistant to change of any kind, and for good reason: usually, it means more work for them. Complaints began to emanate from tables around the library. "How are we supposed to tick off all these boxes and teach at the same time?" "Why can't it be positive reinforcement?" He had stood his ground and, give him credit, was diplomatic to a group of people who weren't quite returning the favor. Yes, he understood their concerns, and it wasn't perfect, it would need to be adjusted, yes, but its usage was mandatory, and that was that. He wanted us to give it a try, as a school, as a faculty, and see how it went.

I still had to have my critical second observation with Heinz to try and expunge my initial 'U.' I had my mandated pre-observation conference with her in The Bunker, and she spelled out what she wanted to see; I took this list to Charlie, where we both sat down and planned the lesson step-by-step. Now, it's one thing of course to plan a lesson; it's an entirely different matter to implement it. And I was nervous, because so much was on the line, so it didn't go as well as I would have liked, but it went much better than it had before. Charlie gave me the thumbs-up when he and Heinz left by the back door. The principal kept me cooling my heels in her outer office for almost my entire lunch period before getting to my five-minute post-observation conference. She made it abundantly clear that she still hadn't liked what she saw, but she didn't dislike it enough to give me a 'U.' She was giving me, she said, a 'conditional' 'S;' she warned me that when she saw me in the spring my improvement had better be considerable.

When I reported this to Charlie as he sat behind his desk, he shook his head and laughed. "A conditional 'S'! Baby, there ain't no such animal! You got an 'S.' Congratulations. And I've got more good news for you. Maybe."

Charlie had given me my wish – in the spring, I'd be taken off the 4th floor and placed in the 'old' Taft. Charlie warned me, however, that this measure could leave me open to being excessed. I told him I didn't care; the literacy block was killing me. I had a soft spot for a few of the kids, of course – you never forget your first class, for better or worse – but I wanted a chance to teach a "normal" academic schedule; I knew I was far more suited to that kind of teaching.

* * *

I was riveted. I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I wanted to, believe me. But I just couldn't... tear my gaze away. It was monstrous. Zakaluk's Toe. It sounded like a place off the Grand Banks where they used to catch cod, like the Flemish Cap, or some rock formation in Utah, some igneous tower that only extreme climbers would attempt. Its nail was being eaten away by some kind of fungus, you could see how brittle it was, its ragged white edges flaking off, while the whole length of the toe was sheathed in a massive, yellowing corn. And that bunion... was the size of an onion! It gave the side of her foot a hunchback. Was this why this woman was allowed to wear flip-flops to school, something medical...? I was getting my first briefing on the 9+ or Nineplus Program (it was different on each handout), of which Mrs. Susan Zakaluk was now formally in charge.

Why was at the Nineplus briefing? On January 27th, I got The Letter in my box:

Dear Mr. Roston :

You have been declared a teacher in excess...

As usual, Charlie's fears had been well-founded. This turn of events made me more than a little nervous, of course – I didn't want to have to go to middle school or be parted from Charlie. Luckily, Taft needed warm bodies for the time being; I was kept on-site as an ATR. I was given a temporary program, but when spring term began the disorganization was still the same; for two weeks, students were wildly shuffled as the administration attempted to sort out the rosters. It was conceivably possible I might be covering a different class every day. However, two weeks into the spring term, a senior English teacher spilled hot coffee on himself in the teacher's cafeteria, and claimed it as a line-of-work injury; he used it as an excuse to take off work indefinitely and get paid. So, Charlie gave me his schedule. I would teach 10th grade 1st period, but I was to get two sections of yet another demented red-headed brainchild: Nineplus.

The Nineplus Program was Taft's attempt to deal with their worst bottom-feeding students, the so-called Repeater 9's (or Nines). They were called this because they were repeating 9th grade for the third or fourth time. There were some in this particular group who had been attending Taft for three years and hadn't earned as much as a single credit. They were usually the worst discipline cases, and they created a chaotic and unsafe environment on the first floor. Because attendance was taken 3rd period, they'd arrive halfway through 2nd period, get settled, get their attendance taken (often for reasons of parole – their probation officers needed proof they were 'in' school), see their friends in the hallways for a couple of periods, then bounce. The powers that be decided that since the Taft Academy model was working so well, why didn't they implement it in the old Taft? Thus the Nineplus students would not be allowed to leave the room, and would get the Deuce: a double block of English (once again leaving primary responsibility for the class on the shoulders of the English teachers). Sections of the first floor were designated a "containment" area where the Nineplus students would be housed. Entering freshmen were one thing; keeping these kids (I hesitated to even use the word) locked up in the same room all day? Not only did it sound implausible, not to say impossible, it sounded downright dangerous.

Not coincidentally, it was also designed to be a holding area for the worst of the worst, the hard-core cases who were supposed to be shipped to something called the Twilight Program two weeks into the first marking period. Basically, these no-hopers were being sent to an annex of Taft, St. Mary's, where the middle school used to be before they moved it into the basement. There, these students were supposed to get counseling and take GED classes. Basically it was to be Riker's Lite.

The upshot was this: I would be taking over for a popular teacher (popular because he gave no work) and expected to help make another new program work from scratch my second semester of teaching. Because I was now attached to what was essentially a new department, I had a new boss: heavy, weary, grey-haired Mrs. Zakaluk, AP of math, who had never been able to make the jump to principal. And that toe...!

A Note On Research: Plus Ça Change

In the course of my research for this book, I discovered that Susan Zakaluk coincidentally makes an appearance in another book about teaching in New York City called Shut Up and Let the Lady Teach! Now out-of-print, it was an expose of a scandalously bad middle school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Walt Whitman Intermediate School, written by a Newsday reporter who spent a year as a math teacher there in 1988 – 1989.

Then, Zakaluk was in her third year as director of mathematics for the entire NYC school system; previous to that, she had taught for 14 years in four different high schools. The portrait of Zakaluk painted by the journalist in that book was not flattering; in her interview the reporter conducted after she'd left the school, Zakaluk was portrayed as yet another hopelessly out-of-touch administrator (but let's be honest, that's pretty easy to do):

What about scientific notation for kids in the eighth grade who couldn't multiply and didn't understand how to give change [the reporter asked]?

"Scientific notation is there because they need it for science, to prepare them for more advanced work in high school with exponents. But, with a class like the one you had, one of the most important benefits you can get is to reinforce place value."

"Why should I be reinforcing place value?" I asked.

"For the kids to build up to an understanding of scientific notation and its use in the world."

Zakaluk had moved fairly quickly from teaching to administration; I asked her why. "Because I felt I had so much to contribute. Training teacher trainers, working with districts in implementation of curricula, things like that." (pp. 244 - 5)

When I knew her, Zakaluk was one who gave off an air of someone who had devoted their entire life to something that had, in the end, turned out to be a terrible mistake. Now, she was nearing retirement; with more than 30 years in service to the system, it was time. However, she had claimed to be retiring the year before and had come back, so who knew? I wondered how she'd ended up in Taft in the twilight of her career. Maybe someone had read the book...

End of note.

* * *

Three of my five teaching periods would be spent in Room 147, a corner room whose salient feature was a single door: there was only one way in or out. On the one hand, this was good, as there would be fewer opportunities for outside disruption (banging on the rear windows and doors, etc.) However, this also meant that if a violent student decided to block the door, since the room had no phone I was going to be in a tight spot.

I had two kinds of classes: a 'regular' 10th grade, and two sections of Nineplus. My 10th grade class was 1st period, so I began to get a taste of how the lateness issue affected class. The first few days I had very few students. This was when I decided to give The Speech: While I was aware they needed their beauty rest, I said, in an effort to guarantee they would pass the Regents Exam, I told them I was making the class harder than the Regents and they were responsible for getting there on time no matter what. When they began to see I was for real, that I was using the Tool, and that I wasn't going anywhere, the roster began to climb. I had a few interesting characters, such as Steven S., a funny Dominican kid with cornrows who tried to imitate speaking like a 'white guy' all the time: "Dude, where's my teacher? Dude, where's my homework?" And then there was Joseph L., who began to show up every day and sit in his assigned seat, and hand in homework, which he emphasized to me was the first time he had done any of these things in high school. The upshot was I should be properly grateful.

An especially memorable assignment was: "You have one week left to live. What do you do with the time?" With few exceptions, the boys expressed a desire to commit multiple felonies. One wanted to get hookers and rob banks, another wanted to buy a grenade launcher and start lobbing grenades into buildings at random. One would even burn the school down (though I would probably buy him the gasoline). The girls merely wanted to spend more time with their families and travel (to unspecified destinations).

6th and 7th periods were also a Nineplus Deuce. However, since it began the period when most Taftees felt it was time to get on with their real lives, I ended up teaching four students, including Liz's students Kuamel and Steven C. Kuamel was in trouble with the law (he'd recently mugged somebody), hard to believe because he seemed so sweet; his brother was already in Riker's on a more serious charge. Steven C. was never going to make it and he knew it – in one of his few appearances in my class, he would explain how he was trying to tell his little cousins not to follow his example. He was still running a crew in the lunchroom and he was on the list to be shipped to Twilight. I did have two hugely swollen pregnant girls in class the first day, but when it became apparent that I wasn't going to just let them sit there and gossip with one another in Spanish as other teachers did, they both sucked their teeth, rolled their eyes, got up and waddled out, never to return. I never saw any of the other names on my 31-student roster.

Steven C. didn't like me much (too strict), so he got himself transferred out, as he was good friends with the head of security, so he could get what he wanted from her. In his new class, he also got into a thing with the English teacher there, so eventually he stopped going at all. (Because he was friends with the head of security, however, he also managed to hustle her into taking him off the list for Twilight). As we motored along, Kuamel's attendance became spotty, and he never did any work. He'd always respond to my "Homework, Kuamel?" with a spacey faraway look and an "Oh, dag, I forgot. My fault, my fault, Roston."

"That's Mister Roston, Kuamel."

"My fault, my fault."

My test was really with the 3rd and 4th period class, a truly rough bunch. They were like the negative image of the Advanced Placement kids; they were the same age, just as Taft savvy, but instead of learning anything they were interested in burning down the substitute: me. They assumed I wouldn't last too long. These were all the hardest of the hard cases, mostly girls, split equally amongst Dominicans and blacks – Leugim, Rosalba, Emerald, and the one and only Unique. I even had CJ's Christian for a brief while until he got suspended, and I thought I was also teaching the school's white kid, William, but it turned out he was just a very-light skinned boricua, or Puerto Rican.

I knew the Taft drill by now: I had to make it through the pissing contest if I was to have any chance at all, so I waded in with The Tool, laying wildly about me. I gave them my "new sheriff in town" rap, with some Hollywood posturing I felt was more appropriate to the situation then tearing out introductions to textbooks: They call me Mister Roston...! Now, what we have here... is failure... to communicate, so let me explain this new grading policy to you... At first, it wasn't pretty; at this point in their high school lives, they had become, well, let's say rather set in their ways. Everything was either a joke ("You want me to sit where? Nah, you wallin.'") or a cause for intense anger – they could go from zero to sixty, from calmness to nuclear, in an instant. Emerald, when truly angry, would turn her head to Unique and refer to me in the third person as if I wasn't there. She referred to me as "this man," as in "This man better watch what he say to me, or I'm a smack him upside his head!" or "This man be mad rude!" In any case, the primary leitmotifs were resistance to work of any kind, screaming backtalk, and profane (not to say profound) disrespect.

I didn't have a lot of time to waste, so I quickly dispensed with the ticking-off hashmark business; I just started taking points off in huge chunks. No pen? Three points. Mouthing off? Three points. "But I'm only late by two minutes!" "Being late is like being pregnant, Ms. Sanchez. You either are or you aren't. Besides, you're actually fifteen minutes late. Three points." I'd only had them for two weeks in the first marking period, but by the end of it, I discovered that after using the Tool in this manner I was going to end up failing the entire class. This worried me – I knew vaguely that I would get into trouble if I did this, but I didn't know what else to do. I went to the Porch and asked Glen for his advice. He held a Newport in his hand palm-up, Nazi commandant style, and said, "Fail zem. Fail zem all." So I held my breath and did.

When the grades came out, I was summoned to an emergency meeting in Charlie's office. He had computer spreadsheets covering his desk like a tablecloth. With a meaty finger, he jabbed down at my name and swept his finger across to my 'scholarship report,' which was highlighted in bright red. "You wanna tell me about this 97% failure rate third and fourth period?" (I'd ended up passing one kid in gratitude because he'd moved to Florida.) "I have to go into a cabinet meeting and explain it to Heinz." In his experience, he said, any teacher who failed that many kids was doing something wrong. He was upset. I said, "Charlie, look, I'm only following orders. I've been beating them over the head with the Tool. I have the paperwork to back these numbers up."

"Good," he said grimly. "You might have to produce it."

I actually did end up producing it, but not in the way any of us intended. Phil Shapiro came to my rescue.

* * *

Charlie had been teaching in the Bronx an awfully long time, so he knew a lot of people in the business. His office would often sport some unusual visitor. Phil Shapiro was one of these educational pirates who would sweep in to speak to Charlie. He was the District Instructional Specialist, so he worked closely with Kenneth Hall; however, District Instructional Specialists had a measure of autonomy that suited Phil down to the ground. Like Charlie, he was an iconoclast; the guy had to be in his 50's, but he sported a dashing diamond-stud earring and a graying walrus mustache. He referred to me as Charlie's "saucy lad," because somehow he formed the opinion that I was some kind of smart-ass. He told me what the teaching corps used to be like at Taft: "They were the last of that gang of Jewish guys who came up through CCNY after the war. They were all of 'em brilliant, absolutely brilliant. They all retired around the same time, a whole generation of smarts gone just like that. The school was never the same."

It was in the next faculty meeting in the library with Kenneth Hall that Phil came to my aid. Ken was trying to find out how his baby, the Tool, was doing, and he was getting the usual shrugs, the usual silent pushback. Heinz was standing up there next to him, trying not to shift from one foot to the other, looking obviously embarrassed that she had command of such an intractable staff. In the lull Phil plunked down next to me, and muttered in my ear, "Well, my saucy lad, are you using this cockamamie thing?" I flipped open my binder and showed him my marked-up spreadsheets. His eyes widened. "Holy cow! Can I see those?" I shrugged. Sure, why not? He took them out of my binder, and then to my shock Phil stood up. I tried grabbing his arm, but he pushed me off.

"Ken, Kenneth! Over here!" He started waving around my Tool sheets like they were the Jolly Roger – there they were, covered in numbers, hatch marks, X's, zeroes. This was the last thing I needed: here I was trying to stay under Heinz's radar, and I was being put on the spot in front of the District Superintendent. Phil pointed down at me. "This new teacher here has been using them," he said. Ken looked pleased as punch, like the teacher who'd gotten the answer he was looking for. "Great! Are they working?" I cleared my throat. "Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. But I, uh, had to fail an entire class. Heh." There were a few titters. Ken looked a bit taken aback at that. "I was trying to send them a message," I added lamely.

His expression said: what, a Sicilian message? "You're a new teacher, is that right?"

"Yes sir. I'm a first-year Teaching Fellow."

After a suitable pause to digest, he said, "Well, let's hope your students have gotten the message. Does anybody have any questions for this young man?"

A veteran teacher turned around in his seat. "How do you have time to teach when you're spending all your time filling in those boxes during class?"

I laughed uncomfortably. "Well, this is pretty much my curriculum for the time being."

And then the light bulb went on over my head.

Every teacher has that breakthrough moment. This moment is spoken of in hushed, reverential terms: Charlie spoke of the day he finally got a lesson to work after teaching it five times a day for weeks. Other teachers, in movies or books or real life, might say it was the day the teacher figured out how they got the students to finally get it.  Well, it was Mr. Roston who had finally gotten it.

I realized what I wanted them to learn.

In my heightened state of awareness, it suddenly seemed so obvious. I'd been going about this all wrong. My mission, such as it was, had changed. Oh, sure, I was supposed to be teaching English, not to mention the educational intangibles such as inspiration. But, as a colleague of mine had pointed out, "It's hard to be inspirational when you're being put on the defensive every day." And I knew first-hand that literature did not soothe the savage breast. What I did see was that these 16, 17, 18 year-old kids had never learned how to properly attend school. And I knew what my job was going to be from now on: I was going to train them how to be students. If I got to teach a little English in the process, that was fine. But in the end this was totally unnecessary and irrelevant. So, I was going to put discipline first, last, and always. I was going to be the Rock of Gibraltar upon whom a tide of excuses and abuse would break harmlessly. They would learn that my class was a place with rules that never bent, that you couldn't do what you wanted when you felt like doing it.

I'd do it or die trying.

Or until they fired me.

* * *

Sicilian message? Maybe. But the day after report cards were handed out, my attendance tripled. They were all in shock. Nobody, and I mean nobody, in their experience had ever failed an entire class before (I almost decked a grinning Rogers when I found out he had never actually done it himself). Emerald looked about her, shaking her head, saying in utter disbelief, "This man failed the whole class."

But that's when things began to change. First, in a sweeping reform, the Nineplus program was renamed TOP – the Taft Opportunity Program. And I still had to face certain realities: Firstly, they didn't do homework. Ever. So everything had to be done in class – I tried to get them to start something in class and finish at home, but only a couple of students managed this feat. This made improving their writing harder in general – "I can't grade what you won't give me." (This slogan would become part of my mantra collection).

When the bell rang between periods, the students stampeded for the door and into the hall; I wasn't about to stand in front of them and stop them, despite what I was told by the administration (had they seen the size of some of these students?). But, I got this to stop by timing my read-aloud so that I was reading through the bell (I read them The Pearl, by Steinbeck). I even managed to reach Emerald. I had the students write little biographical sketches about their favorite moment, and since I got so few turned in I had the freedom to write little letters back to the students. One was to Emerald, who'd written about a trip she'd taken with her family to the Poconos:

Dear Emerald:

This is a great start. I really enjoyed the attention to detail, such as describing all the activities and the description of the cabins. However, the main thing I wanted to know as the reader was: Why was this trip to the Poconos so important to you? You enjoyed yourself, but what about the trip made it so memorable? For instance, did you find that you had become closer to your family, or that it was a trip you had never taken before? If so, what did that make you realize about yourself or your family? What might help this is being more specific: Who in your family went? How many were you? In terms of corrections, the one thing I would have you work on for this draft is the tense – you start it in the past tense, but you end up writing in the present tense (In other words, you say "I went to the Poconos," and then later say "They also had a room that you can go to see people do karaoke." You want to change the 'can' to 'could.' (See your paper). Try to keep the whole piece in the past.

Keep up the good work!

Sincerely,

Mr. Roston

When I handed the letter to her with her work, she came up to me after class and quietly thanked me. Shyly, she said, "I never received no letter before."

"See what happens when you give me a chance?" I said.

But my greatest triumph occurred one day when the bell rang to begin 3rd period; I was about to close the door when a short black girl appeared and loudly declared that she had to talk to Unique. When I told her unambiguously to depart, she began making no secret of the fact that my curt refusal was getting her a trifle ruffled. She assumed the standard fighting position: one step back, rise to full height, hands on hips, move neck in manner of a turkey. "No? No? Whatchoo mean no?" To my surprise, Unique appeared at my elbow. "Yo, girl, get to class, I'll catch you later. This teacher don't play." I nearly choked up. I was almost sorry she was getting sent to Twilight. Almost.

No matter. The date for shipment to the Twilight Program came and went, pushed back two more weeks. Then suddenly Twilight was renamed the New Beginnings Program, in the spirit of positive reinforcement, and scheduled to start the beginning of the third marking period. Charlie warned me: "After they figure out who's going to these schools, and remove the no-shows from the rosters, they're going to reorganize the TOP program. That means more than likely you'll have a new program – they won't need as many teachers." In other words: excessed again.

And sure enough, that's what happened. They folded my two students from my 6/7 deuce into my 3/4 deuce. And wouldn't you know it, but the teacher whose Java had apparently been lava came back from convalescence without so much as an announcement. Poof. To Charlie's total astonishment the guy just showed up, assuming he would pick up where he left off as if nothing had happened. Charlie said, "I used to keep telling myself I'd seen it all, but I finally realized in this job you'll never see it all." The man's return, combined with the restructuring, put me in excess again; finding a place for me was going to be tricky. I might have to go back to being an ATR, or worse.

The teacher's cafeteria was, as advertised, home to the veterans in their off periods. It was a lot like any other high school cafeteria – cliques sat at their own tables. One table was for the administrators. One table contained teachers who only spoke Spanish. Another table housed the disgruntled veterans. Combined with the stench coming out of the steam tables, it had more than the air of the Star Wars cantina about it.

The teachers ate the same food as the students, and the food service was just like the rest of the system: lowest bidder gets the contract. Thus, as with everything else, quality was not a consideration. In short, it was vile. A typical meal might consist of a chunk of Grade D processed chicken meat stamped into the shape of a patty, replete with fake grill marks, swimming in some kind of greasy orange sauce; potatoes a mound of starchy sand; green beans so overcooked as to be grey, drooping lifelessly over the sides of the ladle. It was best not to ponder what the negligible nutritional value of this garbage was; it tasted like it was 50% sugar and 50% salt. And that's even if there was any food left. Lunch was spread out over 4 periods, 3rd through 6th. On many days, by 6th period, they'd run out of food. But what were the alternatives? The bodega on the corner? Not after I'd watched the roach crawl over the Boar's Head ham. And who had time or energy to make a proper lunch at home during the week?

Liz had moved to an apartment in Brooklyn – she had left her husband over the holidays. We decided to try and make it work. She was often over at my apartment, which was so drafty I had to wear a scarf indoors like Bob Cratchit and keep a fire going in the fireplace every night (which I fueled with empty pizza boxes). While things between us went well, I discovered that you don't realize how attached you are to someone until the attachment is severed – bonds can be just as hidden as fault lines. I'd been with my wife for eight years; so I was often plagued with guilt and doubt – some days I felt less like a divorcee than a widower. Oh, I could have blamed the booze, I could have blamed the stress, but in the end it was me that was to blame: I wanted to be with someone else. But it taught me a lesson I hoped I would remember and try to bring into my new relationship: It's just as much a responsibility being loved as it is in loving someone.

* * *

The cafeteria was also the hotbed of union activity, as personified by the Kommie Kids. The Kommie Kids were a pair of new Teaching Fellows in the History department; they were both white and 22, on the run from their bourgeois upbringings, and therefore radicals of the old school – revolutionaries and lovers, who lived together in Harlem (closer to the struggle, of course). I could picture their pad, man: floor strewn with old copies of the Daily Worker, posters with images of blocky fists clutching wrenches over exhortations in Cyrillic lettering, a board on cinderblocks for a coffee table, candles stuck in empty bottles of cheap red wine, and earnest pillow talk about imperialist running dogs: No sentiment, comrade – just mount me for the revolution... The guy, Frank, had a Leninesque chin-patch beard, and the girl, Sarah, swear to god, had a Mao jacket. They were always handing out or hanging up leaflets about some march somewhere, some injustice so profound that it required walking. They would often corral me and rail against something like the evils of the Delaney Card system – sitting those students in rows was a merely a capitalist tool in order to create mindless drones and consumers, didn't I know that? Well, if it helps shut them up, so what? Have you seen what happens when you try 'alternative' seating...? Needless to say, they were ardent UFT supporters – Frank was, in fact, on the school UFT committee (he had to be at least half the age of the other members) – but they were both members of the militant wing of the New Action Coalition, that is Teachers for A Just Contract.

Like any proto-revolutionary organization, the UFT is riven with factions. There are two parties who send delegates to the monthly union assemblies: the Unity Party, which is made up primarily of grammar school teachers (the majority of teachers in the city), and the New Action Coalition, which is composed mostly of high school teachers. The Unity Party was the party that keeps current president Weingarten in power; they were the Menshiviks, conservative status-quo types claiming the time wasn't ripe for world revolution. The New Action Coalition, specifically the splinter group Teachers For A Just Contract, were the Bolsheviks – the militants, always talking strike as the only language management understood. The Unity Party had been in control a long time, with no sign that would ever change.

This didn't stop the Kommie Kids from trying, bless them, which endeared them to me no end, but I did have some fundamental differences with them that we would bandy about when I saw them.

"Listen, Tovarisch," I said to Frank as I stuffed one of his leaflets into my pocket, "I'm a union man, basically, but there are certain issues I have to take exception with. For instance, the guy who spilled coffee on himself. Why can't we fire this guy? Why shouldn't we fire this guy?"

Sarah responded, "Yeah, but when the city was desperate for teachers, he took the job when no one else would. Now, after being kicked around and treated like shit for 25 years, we're supposed to keep our mouths shut when the administration says to him 'Well, thanks for showing up all those years, but we don't need you anymore,' and throw him onto the garbage heap? Is that fair?"

"Well, Jesus, can't we at least put the guy out to pasture, golden parachute his ass?"

This time Frank took over. "Good luck getting the administration to agree to that. They want to fire the veterans without any recompense. Don't you get it? Veterans are expensive. Why do you think they don't care that so many of them are leaving? Look, the tenure system is there to protect teachers from arbitrary firing decisions. And someday, buddy, that might be you."

Small schools are not a panacea – negative working conditions for teachers still persist there... A reconceptualized teacher role will demand a kind of support from supervisors that teachers are not now getting. Encouragement, concern, caring, and love will have to replace the attitudes many teachers now face: suspicion, lack of support, lackadaisical efforts, and sometimes harsh criticism. – John Devine, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools (1996)

The Fellows

CJ's mentor had been true to his word; CJ got his program changed for the spring term – he was transferred to the 4th floor (Room 402), to the Taft Academy, to teach the Deuce. CJ's class was one of the classes created from the remnants of other classes during the spring reorganization (or "cleaning"). The shutters of the windows were made out of thin sheets of aluminum, so when they were played with (every day, in other words) they sounded like a rattlesnake's rattle. Routine, however, did work here – they knew what was supposed to happen when, and CJ had The Tool, which he called "Preparedness Charts" to give them a more positive spin. And CJ stopped cutting deals. He phrased things a lot more matter-of-factly; there were to be no more explanations. He removed a major variable: the element of choice. Every day was the same: "Good morning, write down the journal topic, get your reading book from the library." And besides, after surviving the fall, CJ was a lot more confident.

* * *

Amberdawn discovered her spring problem was apathy. Trying to get them to do their work when everything either bored them or was "whack" or too hard, trying to get them to keep a decent notebook. There was also initially a problem with talking, but she was able to silence them by threatening transfer to Taft. "I know some people over there. One more word, and you're gone."

When her pregnancy began to show, the class suddenly became sympathetic and turned Amberdawn into the class den mother. The girls had a lot of experience with this kind of thing – one of her students, in fact, was two weeks behind her in due date. When the boys would get rowdy girls would say, "Yo, Miss Collier's baby don't need to be hearin' that. Behave yourselves!" Even the dean on the hall suddenly became protective. But her pregnancy also led to her scariest episode. There was this girl, a hardcore hallway roamer, and she'd come around because she had a friend in the class (Monique) and bang on the door. When Amberdawn went outside to ask her to stop, she replied "Fuck you, you white bitch!" She didn't know who she was, and certainly Monique wasn't going to give her up, so she reported her to a dean. The dean nodded – this girl was well known to them, her name was Malaysia. Amberdawn looked at the dean: Then why is she still in school? The next day she was walking in the stairwell and here came Malaysia with five of her friends; she immediately starts talking shit, right in front of Amberdawn as if she's not there: "This bitch think she goin' to write me up. She do, I'm goin' kick her ass down the stairs and punch her in that pregnant belly."

Amberdawn filed a police report (despite the principal and APO begging her not to, since incident reports made them look bad), and like Robert's experience, nothing happened. Amberdawn would actually have to get punched in her pregnant stomach to get help. And then... well, the breakthrough moment. One of her LTA's was a Blood, a teenage mother whose own mother had AIDS. The girl was also bisexual. Amberdawn knew this because she'd come onto her a couple of times, saying "Hey, Miss, I'm bi – you're pretty cute." When she reappeared in class, she heard about what was going on. After class, she went up to Amberdawn. "She threatened you?" When Amberdawn said yes, the girl just nodded, and left. Later that day, Malaysia got jumped by a pack of girl Bloods. To coin a phrase, they kicked the living shit out of her – Malaysia had to be taken out of school on a gurney; she never came back. Amberdawn went downstairs when she was told who had done it; the Blood student was getting a 90-day suspension, but as she was being led out of the building in cuffs, she winked at Amberdawn and said, "Don't worry, Miss, I got your back." What twisted level of loyalty is this? And if they're so loyal, why do they give me so much shit everyday...?

As the semester ground on, Amberdawn went out of her way to pick something engaging to study instead of their awful anthologies. She read them Cruddy, a strict no-no (a story written from the point of view of a disturbed adolescent girl, it was considered 'too realistic') – she asked the class to keep it on the DL, which they were happy to do because a) they loved the book, and b) they would take any opportunity they were offered to play the administration. A lookout would warn them when the principal or AP was coming, and the kids would reach under the desks and whip out their anthologies and pretend to be engrossed in them. But it was so much of an actual fight to teach them. Why did education have to be some kind of TV show? Why did every day have to be a contest over control? Plus, she was constantly surprised at how angry the kids made her. She wasn't normally an angry person, she didn't like being angry, especially at children; she liked being zen. But they could push her buttons to the point where she'd find herself out of control, saying wildly inappropriate things. She realized you could never underestimate their ability to drive you insane. She found herself hoping certain kids would cut and never come back; she'd be praying in the morning, on the bus: Please God let this kid be absent today...

Robert developed the "Sunday Night Dreads;" he dreaded having to go in on Mondays. Taking the train to the bus on Fordham Road, and it happened every day, rain or shine: climbing onto the bus it almost had a smell, an odor, the bus permeated with it, all that hostility, all that hate. People going to work, clutching bags, all kinds of bags, paper, plastic, and someone would bump or rub up against somebody by accident, and it was always a showdown: "Watch the fuck you goin', yo." "Yo, I said excuse me, aiight?" "Fuck you, bitch!" Given the brutality of daily life up here, why was it so shocking the students were so aggressive? Just the violence of the vocabulary alone, an entire language made up of consonants.

He had to keep lowering the bar in class – even magazine articles were a struggle. And the hallways! His nerves were so jangled, he would do anything to avoid walking the halls between periods. The main problem with his teaching was that he was teaching what he knew and liked – college freshman stuff, way over their heads: Blake, Yeats, Thomas. Why? Well, he had no books or guidance – it was make it up as you went along, trial and error. The students did appreciate the high-order questions that went with these sort of works, however – it made them feel more like adults, like you weren't talking down to them. His breakthrough? Get them to do the work – his new mantra was: Always have something for them to do. No more of this "bonding" bullshit. Unlike the summer, he was finally forced to acknowledge reality: you had to dictate and give directions at all times. You had to do all the pulling, since there was no pushing coming from the other side. As the term wound down, though, he found himself having this weird sort of respect for his students. Robert could never acted out in school (or anywhere else for that matter) the way they did as a matter of routine, on a daily basis, so casually. It was a kind of deranged courage in the face of enormous odds that he had to admire.

After Martin flew out to Ohio to meet Amberdawn's family, they got married. This would be the last good thing that would happen to Martin for a while, since his spring term began with him being excessed yet again. This time he was being sent down to the minors, MS 158 in Mott Haven. He was inheriting a class in which the teacher, it was explained, "had abruptly decided to take his sabbatical." When he got there, they'd had a sub for a month. The scheduling at the school was really screwed up; here, the Deuce was a floating block, meaning it was never the same periods on a given day. This made things even worse; it made everything feel structureless. There were only two minutes between classes, so he was often just as late as the students. There was less outright fighting, but the kids were far more obnoxious. They'd be talking, rapping, singing, tipping over desks. He had one kid, Sinestro (who fully lived up to his name) whose mother even worked in the school, who would bounce a basketball against the wall. When a guard showed up, all he'd say was "Put the ball away, Sinestro," and turn back around. As soon as the guy left, Sinestro would start up again. He would do write-ups and nothing would happen, so needless to say there was more shouting and cursing. "Fuck you, Mistuh!" was not uncommon. He would've put the kids in rows but you weren't allowed to, you had to use "alternative" seating – in this case, the seats were arranged as a set of four desks to form a table. This was a catastrophe. Some days it was, "You know, I think I'll lie on top of the group's desks today." With sheer persistence, it took a month to gain control, but he got it.

* * *

What always floored Liz: their complete inability to retain information, any information, about what she taught in class – "Guys, we did this yesterday!" They never remembered anything. It was like... it had never happened. Some days, it was so persistent that it could lead to disorientation, serious self-doubt – I mean, I did teach this yesterday, didn't I...? They were like... goldfish. Goldfish had no short-term memory; they swam around in circles in this tiny little bowl, over and over and over, day after day after day, but everything on their unchanging circuit was always a brand-new discovery: Ooh, look, the castle! Ooh, look, the castle! Ooh, look...!

They banned his class from the computer room. That's how Mike's spring started, with a note in his mailbox: Mr. Abernethy: After numerous complaints from the computer room staff regarding your class, you are denied use of the computer room indefinitely. According to Cooper, whatever Mike introduced to try and do was wrong – everything he did was stupid and fucked up. He began to feel totally written off. His mentor said him, "They're banging you hard." His mentor would come in before his observations and actually arrange the entire room for him – Mike still got a 'U.' Finally unable to take it anymore, he almost quit one day in March – he grabbed his bag and was leaving the building. You hear about teachers quitting the same way, just walking away right in the middle of a class, and you don't believe it. And then it happens... But he stopped outside for a cigarette, and came back, god only knew why. He walked back in the room and he said to some kid, "Look, why don't you grab a pen and start doing something?" The student smiled. "Fuck you, you pussy little bitch." At that moment, the lights went out in his skull: Mike went insane – he became truly unhinged for the first time in his life. He went around the room and tipped all the desks over, punched lockers, all the while screaming at the top of his lungs: "SHUT UP! SIT DOWN!" It completely stunned them: that was the first time all year he'd gotten their attention. (Later, over many strong drinks, Liz, Mike and I had a chuckle: that's all it took, going insane. Why hadn't we thought of that?)

The Dean of Discipline (isn't that a pro wrestler...?) disciplined Mike's class twice. It didn't take, because nobody could do it. Nobody. As the term came to an end, they were under intense pressure from Cooper to pass everybody. They were ordered not to fail more than 10% of the class (never in writing, though, of course: Principals had to maintain plausible deniability at all times, like the President). Finally, it happened: One kid had matches and lit the junk in his desk on fire, and the whole desk caught. Just like that training day of Molly's. And at the end of May, Mike got his final observation.

This is the way it happens when a principal, any principal, decides to get rid of you. The principal conducts a final observation of a lesson that even veteran teachers would have problems with; they're the teaching equivalent of show trials. When the teacher gets their expected U, an observer from District is called in ostensibly as a neutral third party to see if the principal is within his rights to terminate the employee's license. In reality, this is nothing more than a rubber stamp for a principal – the District never overrules the decision, their presence is merely a formality. It was through this fair and balanced process that Mike got a 'U' for the entire year and lost his NYC teaching license.

Touchable.

He saw his spineless UFT rep to file a grievance and the rep found the nerve to say, "Are you sure you're supposed to be a teacher?" Mike looked at him like a bug under glass. "How the fuck would I know?" he finally said. "I haven't taught anything yet."

The thing he really couldn't understand was that the kids actually seemed to like him. When he told the class he was walking out and quitting one day in June, they begged him, literally begged him not to. It was the first time he had seen them emotional. But it was too late: by then his motivation to try was zero. He stopped talking to the class entirely; he just gave them worksheets or put the assignment on chart paper and sat there and read the rest of the time. He just didn't care anymore. Interestingly, the class test scores all went up, but he got no credit for it. His breakthrough? As a Teaching Fellow, he could do no right.

The Fellows was the first thing Mike had ever failed at. Sitting on the floor of his Spanish Harlem apartment in his underwear, he drunkenly told his mother over the phone "I'm not a failure, mom! I am not a failure!" The UFT office told Mike to get another job (meaning a regular day job, such as temping) while he waited for his appeal, which would take until at least October. He said fuck that, he still wanted to teach; he had a score to settle. He wanted to prove to himself teaching was something he could do. He applied to schools back home in Maine, and got a job teaching in a dying mill town 40 miles north of Bangor named Lincoln. The school had a campus of 90 acres and 450 students. When he found out he got the job towards the end of June, he went to the bodega near the school and bought a 40 of Olde English. After chugging it, he went around to the back of 117 and took a massive piss on the building. "I felt much better."
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Subject: April Teaching Fellows Newsletter!

"April is the cruelest month" —T.S. Eliot

If you agree with T.S., you just might be a teacher... Spring is a time when everyone feels good and optimistic, when everyone smiles a bit more. But teachers have to go to school, and somehow the energy that spring engenders in every student, every teacher, and every administrator all too quickly turns into bitterness over missed sunshine when bottled inside school walls. ...Breathe in some of the optimism and sense of promise that the season brings...Rather than fighting with the students, bring the spring inside the classroom. Spring has come and gone since the beginning of time. As hard as it is to believe, this year won't be any different, and at the end of this one, a summer will come...

The Breaker

RIGHT around the same time that Taft officially became the lowest-attended high school in the city (our attendance had just descended to a record 57%), and the country went to war in Iraq – oh, we're at war again? OK – my first major bright spot occurred when Kenneth Hall sent one of his minions to Taft: Deputy Superintendent Applewhite, a short, bald, bespectacled Caribbean man who dressed in suits that looked to have come from Savile Row. He was sent to check up on Taft's progress from time to time. One day I saw his round head as he peered into the porthole of 147 as I was reading aloud to my TOP class. When the bell rang ending 4th period, I saw him down the hallway talking to none other than Principal Heinz; he spotted me and gestured me over. "Excuse me, young man, what's your name?"

"Mr. Roston." We shook hands. "A pleasure, Deputy Superintendent."

"Mr. Roston, this is the second time I have seen you actually teaching the Nineplus children." It always jarred me when somebody referred to Taft students as children – wasn't children a grammar school term? It struck me as highly patronizing – my students would've kicked his Uncle Tom ass around the room. And it seemed nobody had informed him of the program name change yet – I wasn't about to correct him. "You seem to be one of the few teachers who is making any progress with them. If I might ask, what's your license in?"

"English, but I'm currently in excess. I've temporarily taken over from another teacher."

His eyebrows went up. He turned to Melissa Heinz. "Excessed?"

This was the first color I had ever seen in Heinz's cheeks (her body temperature must have rocketed to 40 degrees), and she was as flummoxed as I was ever going to see her. Despite union seniority rules, it was administrators who decided who got the boot, and Applewhite knew it. "Yes, well, not exactly. Don't you remember, Mr. Roston that meeting we had with Mr. Osewalt about finding you a permanent place in the next few days?"

Now, this meeting had never taken place and we both knew it. Inside, I was suddenly the Cheshire cat. I had her! I had this awful woman nailed, and purely by chance. Here was my personal Opportunity Program – I had the chance to make her look bad in front of her boss! This chance would never come again...! But just as quickly, I calmed down. I knew that, in the end, it would cause grief not only for me but for Charlie if I called her on it, and that I couldn't do. So I looked her right in the eyes and said "Oh... yes, that's right. It must've slipped my mind. Yes, Mr. Applewhite, we're just ironing out the particulars."

He nodded. "Good. We don't want to lose you." Heinz nodded at me once as they got in the elevator.

Heinz would try to repay the favor. A week before the Twilight – I mean New Beginnings – schools were to start, the administration discovered they had a small problem: who was going to teach in them? There hadn't been enough volunteers to do it. That's when I ran into Heinz, who pulled me aside as I was walking down the hallway (she was once again waiting for the elevator – aside from her office, this was the only place I ever saw her) and said, "Mr. Roston, I was wondering if you might do me a favor. We need teachers at the New Beginnings School in the St. Mary's Annex, and I still need an English teacher over there. I think it would be a marvelous opportunity for you."

Now, Mrs. Roston didn't raise any sons foolish enough to suddenly believe in the magnanimity of a supervisor who was either actively hostile or who didn't acknowledge your existence unless she needed something. I flashed on teaching the story "To Build A Fire," remembering when the man, freezing to death, tries to call his dog over so that he can kill it and use it for warmth; to do this, he speaks kindly to the dog for the first time, but this frightened the animal, who had never known the man to speak in such a way before. Something was the matter, and its suspicious nature sensed danger – it knew not what danger, but somewhere, somehow, in its brain arose an apprehension of the man... "Well, it's certainly is kind of you to think of me, Miss Heinz, but no thank you. I'm going to try and finish out the term."

She looked astonished at this abrupt refusal. I guess it didn't happen often. After a moment, she snapped, "Well, think about it." And she got on the elevator.

When I reported this conversation to Charlie, he said "And you just turned her down flat? Without saying you'd think about it? Aaron, you have to start thinking more diplomatically. She's the boss: don't piss her off."

How did I explain that this was impossible?

As it turned out, I didn't have to pretend to think about it and dodge her; after leaving me on the 1st floor, Heinz had taken the elevator to the 4th floor and ambushed another teacher named Andre with the offer. Andre, who was a bit dim, and seeing what he thought was an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boss, immediately accepted, thinking he would return in the fall with brownie points. What he didn't know was that by accepting the job, Andre resigned from Taft – he would have to find a new job at a new school in the fall. This tickled Charlie, since he'd been trying to get rid of poor hapless Andre for two years. "Nice guy, lousy teacher." Charlie also shook his head in wonderment that I'd managed to dodge another bullet. However, this meant that I would have to take over Andre's program: I would be returning to the 4th floor, going back to the Taft Academy for the final marking period (which began in late April). Once again, I'd have to break in another class. That would mean I would have had a new program every marking period. Was this, I wondered, some kind of record?

Charlie grinned wolfishly. "Not even close."

* * *

Well, here we went again. After moving heaven and earth to get off the 4th floor and away from the Taft Academy, I'm right back there, Room 413 of Hotel Hell. I'd get on the room phone if it worked: Hello, room service? Yes, this is Room 413. Could you send up a bottle of Wild Turkey and a Mossberg 12-gauge, please? I've been stuck with another low-skills, under-attended class of new 9th graders to see me through June 13th. I am to teach another triple period, this time 2 – 4. The class is registered for about 25, but I'll only see about 18 of them – not necessarily the same ones two days running, and not all at once, mind you.

I'm taking over from yet another teacher who had demanded nothing of his students. Andre had apparently been a pushover; they are not prepared for the Breaker. I find that my persona is evolving, and if we were to define it in movie terms, it certainly wasn't Robin Williams or Michelle Pfeiffer. It was Edward Woodward, in a little Australian movie called I Breaker Morant. Set during the Boer War, a trio of Australian officers are used as scapegoats for missteps by the British Army; they are tried by a, um, kangaroo court and shot by firing squad. The title role, Harry "Breaker" Morant, got his nickname from being the best horse breaker in Australia.  Because that's what I am, and I fully embrace my role. And I was using a Russian theorist to do it – not Vygotsky, he could stick his Z.P.D. up his A.S.S. – no, I was using Pavlov. I had become a behaviorist, a Behavior Management Specialist. And I was at peace with that. When you know what your job is, and you know how to execute it properly, there can be a certain amount of inner tranquility to be found.

Maybe it was something about 9th graders – the added level of immaturity, perhaps, but in their way, these were the most obnoxious students I had encountered yet, from Patricia (who could pop her gum with the report of a .38) to Riley (who was just plain crazy, the black boys were almost always the craziest). I set the tone on the first day by announcing, "There's a new sheriff in town. Now, here's what's going to happen: first and foremost, you're going to behave." Of course, I knew ahead of time that they wouldn't behave – like all Taft classes, they were going to feel obligated to test me – they were going to have to be taught how to behave. Their favorite insult was calling me Harry Potter (the book Andre had been reading with them), which puzzled me. "Let me see if I can get this straight. You're trying to insult me by comparing me to a great student and powerful wizard? I don't get it."

"Because he looks like a nerd, Mistuh! Just like you!"

I nodded my head sagely. "Ah. Of course. Nerd. How awful."

In any case, I knew what I wanted them to learn. I brought the noise in the form of the Tool, and I was merciless. After two weeks of nasty confrontation, the deadwood stopped showing up and I could conduct a semblance of a class most of the time. It wasn't so bad, since I'd only have them for one marking period. I was able to deflect the nastier students with, er, black humor.

"I hate you, Mr. Roston! You a racist!"

"Don't be a hater, Riley. That's mad grimy."

While I liked a couple of the kids, I was having a hard time empathizing with this bunch. I was beginning to realize that I was the wrong guy in the wrong place for the wrong kids. What they needed was a bi-lingual social worker trained in both literacy and special education. What they got was me. Did they need a teacher who could see beyond their abuse, their belligerence, and perhaps see them for what they were, and meet it with love? Charlie did it, and frankly I envied him this ability. But I watched other mere mortal teachers like myself try it and be treated just the same. For instance, they had an anti-dropout class once a week; the anti-dropout teacher was a sweet and caring 22-year-old black woman who cared, dammit, she really really cared, and yet the class loved to make her cry. When I would arrive for my push-in after she'd left, they'd say, "We made her cry, Mistuh Roston." They said it with a mix of bewilderment and contempt. They didn't feel bad about it: they despised her for being weak. She didn't know how to play the game.

As for the first floor, when I punched in first period, I made a point of walking past 147 to see what was happening. The room was mostly empty. The few 10th grade students in attendance didn't appear to be doing much, just reading the newspaper. A few students would smile and wave when they saw me. And when I walked past the 3/ 4 class, it was even emptier. Kuamel would be in there sometimes, usually chatting up a girl, and he'd give me the thumbs-up when I walked by. But while I was breaking in the new class on the 4th floor, I had some visitors from the 10th grade knock on the door. It was corn-rowed Steven S. and Joseph L. "Yo, Mistuh Roston, why you ain't teachin' us no more?"

"I'm sorry, Joseph, I had nothing to do with it. It wasn't my decision."

Steven's face twisted. "But this guy can't teach!"

I didn't know what to say to him.

I also had a pair of visitors from my 3 /4 Deuce: Emerald and Unique. Emerald wanted to thank me for passing her. I told her she didn't have to thank me, she'd earned it. And, oddly, she had. And Unique was leaving for New Beginnings, and had wanted to say goodbye. She stuck her head into the classroom, looked around, and said, "You niggas in trouble now! Mistuh Roston's in the house!"

But discouragement was in the air along with spring. I walked into Charlie's office, and there was the boss at his desk, looking dejected. "I never thought I'd hear myself say this, Aaron, but you were right."

Stunned, I said, "Really? About what?"

"Phone calls home. They don't work."

Since the weather was getting warmer, attendance was plummeting. (A lot of kids came to school in winter because their apartments were either underheated or unheated); this included the AP class. Charlie had his Delaney book out in front of him, trying to call homes. As I took a seat, he dialed, and actually got one of the kids from the AP class on the phone. "Hi sweetie," he said sarcastically. "Why are you at home at 11 o'clock? Why weren't you in class today? You were tired? You were tired?" He gave me a look: this was an AP class.

Meanwhile, I was still in excess, and more cuts were coming. Charlie told me it was almost certain I wouldn't be re-hired at the old Taft. So to stick around, my only choice would have been to apply to the new schools on the 4th floor; they were getting a new crop of 9th graders. I opted not to do this since I wanted to retain what little sanity I had left. I felt a small sense of satisfaction, because Heinz was chairing the interview committee: she wouldn't be given the opportunity of turning me down. Instead I opted for what was known as an SBO Transfer, or Schools-Based Option Transfer.

I secured an interview at Windsor High School, using a demonstration lesson partially written by Charlie ("I can't believe I'm doing this, trying to help you get work at another school!"). Windsor was an above-average school for the Bronx, and the class I taught my demo lesson to there was definitely different, in a good way; they answered questions with thought, and weren't screaming at me. When I told Charlie that they'd made me an offer, he felt obliged to issue a warning. The principal was an infamous union-busting teacher-hater who was connected with the Bronx Superintendent's Office and could therefore do whatever he pleased with impunity. "He's a major micromanager, and uses kids to inform on teachers. The man is, by all accounts, crazy. Nobody wants to teach there." I decided I would like to teach "normal" kids and take my chance with the administration. So while I thanked Charlie for his warning, I decided I was going to take my chances, and I accepted Windsor's offer.

CJ was not accepted into the new schools, and he was moved from the 4th floor into the 'Old' Taft, teaching grades 9, 11, and 12. With a little help from 5CC10 classmates, Liz got out of JHS 117, and got a job at Brandeis for the fall. Robert was staying put. Martin was still in excess, and had no idea where he'd be come September, while Amberdawn would be going on maternity leave in the fall.

And Charlie? Scanning the paper one afternoon, I saw that there was an AP of English vacancy at Bronx Science. I went into work all excited to tell him to apply for it, but he just laughed and waved me off. "I'm flattered. But I'm going down with the ship."

On June 26th, the last day of the term and a year to the day since the previous Council for Fiscal Equity decision, the New York State Court of Appeals, also in a 4-1 decision, ruled that every public school student was entitled to the opportunity for a meaningful high school education, overturning the decision of the previous year. It defined a "sound basic education" as one that included a meaningful high school education with the skills and knowledge to "function productively as civic participants" in 21st-century society, including being capable and knowledgeable voters and jurors able to sustain employment.

And because I had taught Advanced Placement, Charlie said I should attend graduation; all the AP kids would be there. (The class performance on the exam had been extremely poor. Two members of the class received 3's; every other student received 2's or 1's.)

The decrepit auditorium was mostly empty; a few rows were filled with a smattering of proud parents and guardians. The band consisted of a student on a spit-and baling-wire trap kit who tried valiantly to keep a ragged beat, and the music teacher, who hammered out "Pomp and Circumstance" on an out-of-tune upright piano. It sounded like a wedding ceremony being held in a New Orleans whorehouse. Then the graduates began to enter the auditorium, a line of silky blue gowns and mortar boards with tassels a-dangle; as they marched slowly down the aisle, I noticed they were all stepping in rhythmic unison. Step left, shuffle, step right, step left, shuffle, step right...

Like graduates everywhere, they were all smiling, half-proud, half-embarrassed. Years ago, who knew how many, these same students had entered Taft for the first time with over a thousand of their fellows. Today, there were 88 seniors attending this honky-tonk graduation; of these, only 12 had Regents diplomas. It transpired that some wouldn't actually graduate until August; they still had to finish summer school. Where would they all go? What would happen to them? It was hard to say. One of the AP kids had scored 1200 on his SAT and had gotten a full scholarship to Penn State. As for the rest, when responding to a survey about plans after high school, which included college and the military, fully half of them had said 'Other.' Filled with melancholy, I left before Heinz's speech filled me with nausea.

Class was still supposed to be going on that day, but as I left the auditorium I spotted Kuamel about to bounce out the side entrance a few periods early. I couldn't resist; I called down the hallway after him. "Had enough for today, Kuamel?" He turned around, startled, then saw it was me. He grinned. "Yo, yo, what up, Roston!"

"That's Mister Roston, Kuamel."

"Oh, my fault, my fault!" Then he pounded his chest twice. "You know you my nigga, right, Roston? You my nigga!"

And with that he was gone.
Ah, those hazy, lazy days of summer vacation: July and August, the two best reasons to be a teacher. Liz and I debate moving in together, an apartment on the Upper East Side. Neither of us is sure how good an idea it is – too soon? In the end it begins as a New York marriage of convenience: as teachers we can't afford to have separate apartments in a decent neighborhood, and neither of us wants roommates. But we also decide to give it a try because we also both want this to work out; as part of the package we rescue a dog from Bide-A-Wee, a black lab mix named Bo. And then, most of July is spent sleeping. After a few weeks, those purple blooms under my eyes finally fade away. I drink less and I smoke less, though I haven't been able to bring myself to quit. I put on weight. A curious phenomenon had occurred this past year – no matter how much food I ate, and I ate a lot, and despite my massive beer consumption, I still managed to lose 20 pounds. Manhattan is an island universe, each neighborhood its own galaxy – I have lived in the East Village, Chelsea, and the Upper West Side; the Upper East Side is new to me. It's known for its dowagers and recent college grads getting their feet wet in finance during the week and filling the gutters with vomit on the weekends. However, I learn there is room for people like us, the working stiffs – we can get wine and coffee, good pizza, affordable haircuts – who knew? Just as we begin to get the feel for this new neighborhood, it's goodbye to Mike. The night before he leaves for Maine is the Blackout of 2003: Liz, Mike and I spend the night drinking cut-price bottled beer at a local college bar anxious to unload its stock before it warms past drinkability. Hungover, Mike manages to drag his ass and his U-Haul to Lincoln in 14 hours. His hiring makes the front page of the local paper – he sends us the clipping. He informs us the entire town smells like rotting garbage, because the mill that keeps the town on life support is a paper mill, and the paper pulping process apparently stinks – thus the town nickname "Stinkin' Lincoln." And then like that it's time to report to Windsor.

CANTO IV

Nothing But Honor

A

Percent of Households Below the Poverty Line With: Single Parent, No Husband Present, Children Under 18

Source: US Census Bureau, Census 2000 (SF3)

Manha **ttan**

s regards the mind, the American school... is, generally speaking, not an educational, but a philanthropic institution. It tries to reduce competition and abolish failure; it is interested in the sociable personality rather than the powers of Intellect; above all, it wants to preserve its own brand of happiness, in which everyone can – indeed must – participate. (Jacques Barzun, "The Place and Price of Excellence," Phi Beta Kappa Journal, Spring 1960)

Fall

IT'S quiet in here. Too quiet. 1st period. Juniors. I've asked a question and I'm staring out at a group of about 25 studies in apathy. I rephrase the question (it's the Do Now: "What problems might arise from wanting to be liked as a leader?") and wait again. While I wait for teenage brains to come on line, underneath my frowning exterior, I'm thinking: it's 8:20 in the fucking morning, I've only had one cup of coffee, and frankly my brain isn't working too well right now either. I mean, who the hell wants to answer questions at this hour? About anything? I sure don't. Plus, the room itself is dreary, dark and windowless, and I have a new sleep schedule that is playing havoc with my bio-electric system. Since Labor Day, I've stopped sleeping Sunday through Thursday; I can only sleep Friday and Saturday nights. So this two-on, five-off rotation is leading to some pretty serious sleep deficits. Those purple fatigue blossoms are back with a vengeance, and it's only October.

When no hands go up after a suitable pause I use my call-on strategy. First of all, no student wants to look at me, a bad sign. This would seem to indicate a lack of homework preparation. Some students are clutching their books with both hands, knuckles white, staring into the pages as if an answer will miraculously come to them if only they look hard enough. They aren't the ones I want. They're pathetic, yes, but they are, at least to a certain extent, here. No, I'm looking for staring off into space, a yawn, or the worst offense of all, glancing at a watch (it doesn't do any good to look past my shoulder at the clock on the wall – it doesn't work, no clock in any room in any school in the Bronx works). Unfortunately, this morning the pickings are ripe. Later, I will explain to them that the best strategy for not getting called on is to look right into my eyes when I look at you. This will give the impression that you know what is going on when you really don't. The first time a student does this with me, I call on him immediately.

The kid, flustered, says, "But I looked right in your eyes!"

I stare back impassively. "Always expect the unexpected." I would've said "Don't trust anybody," but they already subscribe to this philosophy (at least, they all claim to).

But that will be later, when we all know each other a little better: right now all they know about me is that I used to teach at Taft, which news I spread around on Day One to establish my management credentials ("You taught at Taft, Mistuh? Yo, that place is crazy!"), and that, at 8:20 AM, I'm harder than a nail.

We're reading A Bell for Adano, by John Hersey, as both a tie-in to the ongoing occupation of Iraq and as a preparation for their first marking period project, writing a letter to an American soldier serving overseas. I've already been in touch with the USO about this – since for security reasons they can't give me names ahead of time, all letters have to begin "Dear Soldier." So that's what the project is called – I'll show them the format, then they'll write a draft, peer edit it together in groups, revise it, and then give it back to me. I will send the whole bunch with the other two classes of mine that are doing this to the USO, who will forward it on at random to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. I inform them that since military recruiters are constantly prowling the school (there's an Army recruiting depot down the street), they should write a letter in the manner they would like to receive one should any of them have the misfortune to be sent somewhere they'll be shot at. I also tell them that most of the soldiers who they will be writing to aren't much older than they are. A few students, in fact, have friends and relations in Iraq already.

So, because of this, combined with my own lack of sleep, I'm taking their lack of enthusiasm for the novel, and in turn the project, personally (I know, Molly: Never take anything personally...). I've got a drifter in my sights and about to let him have it when I hear the jingle of keys outside the door. I'm getting my daily surprise visit, as all teachers get them; they are termed "pop-ins", which make them sound like he's giving out pastry. Basically this is his little game of "Gotcha!" He's not looking for what you're doing right; rather, he's looking to catch you doing something wrong, no matter how minor. I've come to find that a lot of outsiders and veteran teachers consider the principal of Windsor some kind of monster, but in the end I find it's all rather absurd. I mean, can you imagine anything more ridiculous than running a school like a police state? It was as silly as a rabbit using a secret police to run a warren, like General Woundwort in Watership Down. So, I nickname him Woundwort, in honor of the fascist Chief Rabbit of Efrafa.

* * *

My second year began with my third new teacher orientation in two years. In some ways, I was more nervous now than I had been the year before. Now I was going it alone – there would be no other members of 5CC10 with me this time. I would be the New Guy, singular. Charlie's parting words to me had been "Be careful. Watch yourself over there." So a week before Labor Day, I found myself near on the 6 line deep in the East Bronx. Unlike the B or D train to Taft, the 6 train had a lot more people on it (though there were still plenty of seats). Many of the passengers were wearing white rubber soled shoes and varicolored surgical scrubs – there were a lot of hospitals along the route. And unlike the trip to Taft, which was completely underground, the 6 rose out of the ground at Longwood Avenue and became an elevated, bobbing and swaying across the roofs of tar.

Walking along the avenue towards the school, you passed a corner laden with the primary businesses of the Bronx: a seedy Irish bar, a City Marshals office, an Army recruiting center, a Dunkin' Doughnuts, a White Castle. The area in front of the White Castle parking lot was host to small groups of nervous Mexicans, illegal immigrants waiting for the vans and pickup trucks that swung by looking for cheap day labor on local construction sites. Immediately afterwards was the expanse of the Windsor athletic field and its carpet of artificial turf, surrounded by a chain-link fence; the edifice of the school loomed behind. Windsor was constructed in the 70's, and it held true to that decade's design ethos: except for belching chimneys, it looked exactly like a factory.

Schools, by which I mean the buildings themselves, are ostensibly built to be part of the fabric of a community. Taft and Roosevelt were both located in the middle of residential neighborhoods. Windsor High School, on the other hand, was located in the middle of nowhere, right off an overpass of a highway. It was hard to tell exactly what community the school was meant to be a part of – the truck driver's community? The commuter's community?

Walking through the front entrance, as I'd seen on my interview day, I was reminded that Windsor did not have metal detectors or scanners; students would merely walk past a security checkpoint waving their ID's. An unusual state of affairs for the Bronx, I had to admit. I was early, so I trudged up to the third floor and waited in the English Office. The highway was visible from its windows, as was the sickly trickle of a creek. The turgid water swirled with industrial waste the color of antifreeze, and oil that leaked from a decrepit barge-pusher, seemingly permanently docked; it reminded me of the Gowanus Canal back in Brooklyn.

To get some harder information about the school other than rumors, I had gone to insideschools.org, a student and parental resource. Windsor had been troubled, but had improved. A major reason for the improvement was "the principal's ability to fire and hire his own teachers. 'When I first came here, the kids were going nowhere and those people who were teaching them were nowhere,' he says. On our visit, we saw Woundwort greet staff and students with vigor and optimism. He traded light banter with them and offered supportive hugs when they were needed." Students said that Woundwort "always has time for you." Also, "Unlike so many other schools that have had to pare back extras, Windsor fields 32 sports teams, and offers activities ranging from an intermediate guitar class to step aerobics, bowling, and fishing." It also had an impressive number of graduates going to college – the site claimed upwards of 90%. It certainly sounded promising, closer to what a "real" school was supposed to be like.

At orientation, I learned that I was to be one of many New Guys. I was one of the startling number of 13, out of a department of 29 (excluding the AP and a teacher who taught only 1 class of AP juniors), including three other Teaching Fellows. I had volunteered to become a Lead Fellow, a point-of-contact person for Windsor Teaching Fellows, since I had aspirations of becoming an FA myself the following summer.

We were given the tour and shown the considerable resources that would be available to us: a large library with a computer lab, two other computer rooms, and a teacher's lounge on the third floor with vending machines and computers with working DSL connections. And then there was the bookroom; gazing at the rigid metal shelves holding row upon row of neatly ordered books, I couldn't help but be reminded of the Taft bookroom, with its 1950's gang graffiti, which had been a spectacular disaster. Mismatched sets of books had rested on sagging metal shelves; stacks of tottering books had balanced precariously against the walls; books had spilled across the floor from the ruptured sides of rotting cardboard boxes; there were even books in an old sink in the back. Here there were no leaning towers of Anne Frank in dust seemingly inches deep – it was more like walking through an organized used book store.

We were assigned buddy teachers; mine was one of the Advanced Placement teachers, an Orthodox Jew replete with yarmulke I nicknamed the Rebbe. He had been teaching at Windsor since he'd gotten out of college, 11 years, which was an impressive number for a younger teacher. When we went downstairs to the auditorium to get the Welcome Back speech from the principal, the Rebbe said he felt obliged to fill me in on this man about whom I'd no doubt heard nothing but negative things; the Rebbe was an unapologetic fan of the man, who, if the Rebbe was to be believed, single-handedly turned the school around. I shouldn't believe what I'd heard about Woundwort – he just wanted to keep the staff "on its toes." I was assured he was a nice guy once you got to know him. That's when the man himself took the stage.

I'd met him before of course, at my interview – he was small and grey-haired, eyes enclosed behind thick metal-rimmed glasses, dressed in what would be his daily attire of suit and tie, cufflinks a-glitter. Now his high-pitched nasal voice with its Bronx inflections crackled over through the loudspeakers: "For all the new people, there's one thing you gotta know: preparation is the key. You need to have a lesson plan. Don't let me catch you without one. If I catch you without one – well, just make sure you have a lesson plan, that's all." The he continued with the other business. Windsor had more than double the students of Taft already, but thanks to the NCLB Act, Windsor would have to find room for at least 300 more students, bulging it further past its 125% capacity. Somehow, through administrative bare knuckling, he informed us that he had managed to find room for the students without having to go to a multiple-bell schedule.

My schedule includes three classes of Regents juniors, one of College Prep juniors, and one Regents Prep class for seniors who only needed to pass the Regents to graduate. I will be a nomad, teaching in three separate rooms. I'd been asked if I wanted Ramp-Up, but as politely as possible I declined the opportunity. Ramp-Up (or Rump-Up, as it came to be called) was none other than the formalization of the 90-minute block for freshmen I'd had to learn on the fly at Taft. It was part of the Chancellor's "Balanced Literacy" curriculum – the brainchild of his Deputy, Diana Lam. However, almost all of the new teachers were assigned Ramp-Up, since a record number of freshmen were entering the system at ELA 1.

So with the new school year about to begin, I became more and more nervous. Not about Woundwort – if his primary concern was unprepared teachers, I had nothing to worry about. I wasn't one of those teachers who could stand up in front of a class without something written down, show up and say "What are we going to do today?" I needed focus and structure – it wasn't just that without a plan control could slip, but a lesson that wandered all over the place and went nowhere was inherently unsatisfying. When the bell rang, it left you with a feeling of not having accomplished anything. In addition, lack of planning usually lead to long, boring dead spots punctuated by the odd moment of panicked improvisation. No, I needed to prepare.

I was nervous because I was going to actually have to handle a full academic load, and I wondered: Could I do it? I would actually have to teach a subject, not just instill a sense of discipline and respect. With no Charlie around, would I be able to teach "normal" students? I needed ideas, and lots of them. I hustled the Rebbe for whatever he could scare up, but mostly I spent time searching the Internet. I began to suffer from teaching anxiety dreams: in them, I show up to class without a lesson plan, with absolutely no idea what to do, the students look of expectation changing, they begin to stir... On a phone call to my parents, I mention this; my mother tells me that even though she hasn't been on stage with Nottingham Rep in 35 years, she still has actor's anxiety dreams. "Really?" I say.

"Oh yes," my mom says. "They're always the same: I get to the stage door late, and I'm looking out at the audience from the wings just before going on, out of breath, and I can't remember a single line."

Somehow, this does not reassure me. That's when I settled into the worst period of insomnia of my life – it began to feel like some hideous sleep-deprivation experience.

At Windsor, I remember being struck with two things: how crowded the hallways were (the corridors were far narrower and ceilings much lower than they had been at Taft), and I was startled to see so many white kids (they turned out to be mostly Albanians, with a scattering of Russian Jews – no Moby here). My classroom management skills had been honed to a fine edge (the Rebbe told me I had the best classroom management skills he'd ever seen), so I had control of my classes from the get-go; I could concentrate on learning how to teach the vaunted developmental lesson. Luckily, my fears proved short-lived – I began to see that while they certainly weren't Taft students (most of them came to class and turned in their work, for one thing), their skills were still poor, reading levels at least two years behind; so I was able to both slow down and calm down.

Teachable Moment: Students think all male English teachers are gay. "You're gay, right, Mistuh Roston?" "For the last time, stop asking me, Patrick. How many times do I have to say it? I'm too old for you – I'm not taking you to the prom!" Class erupts; the question never comes up again. Back at Stuy, we had one gay English teacher that I knew about. I don't remember speculating about the rest.

I got my first Woundwort observation in late October. I discovered that Windsor had its own rating system, as a spin on the normal S or U. There were grades of satisfactory: minimal, satisfactory, highly satisfactory, and excellent. They didn't really mean anything, since you didn't get a pay bonus, nor did it have any effect on UFT tenure rules. They were to be used solely for the purpose of "internal review." My observation for Woundwort was considered "minimally satisfactory." While I was praised for being "a scholarly, diligent new teacher who has strong rapport and classroom management skills," I had a lot of problem areas I was asked to address. I needed to: circulate and provide individualized instruction to the students during the Do-Now and medial summary; be certain that the context of the mid-period writing activity pertained to the text; have students share aloud and bullet responses at the chalkboard under the heading Summary; have a written summary; provide salient aspects of the lesson in either Harvard outline form or a graphic organizer. I thought they were reasonable suggestions. After all, I hadn't really taught academically before.

My interactions with Woundwort had been brief but cordial until now – his only comment to me was "Sure beats Taft, doesn't it?" However, right after my first observation, he corralled me in the main office while I was checking my mailbox. "Mr. Roston," he said, "I happened to call over to Taft on some other business, and Miss Heinz asked me why I hadn't called her for a reference about you. Boy, did she give me an earful!"

When I'd interviewed for the job, Woundwort had asked me what he would hear if he talked to Heinz by way of a reference. I said that we had a mutual dislike society and that it wouldn't be worth his time, but if he contacted Charlie he would hear quite a few good things. He seemed to leave it at that – he certainly never contacted Charlie (I discovered later this was because for the most part, he didn't give a shit what AP's thought). So I reiterated that I had warned him this would be the case. Undeterred, he continued (you could never deter him, I quickly learned he was never interested in what you had to say), "My goodness! She said you were very negative, that the kids hated you. I said to her, 'I can't believe it! He seems so nice!'" Given that I had never seen or heard of Heinz interacting with a single student, I was curious as to how she had arrived at that opinion, but as I had sent a message using the Tool, so now was Woundwort sending a message to me. Because of what Heinz had said, he had now opened his mental black book on me. This was his way of telling me that he had his eye on me now and I had better watch my step. If I had only known it, from that moment on I was a marked man. Since I would later discover that Woundwort was also an inveterate liar, it's entirely possible that he called Heinz specifically about me. In any case, this little tidbit about Heinz and how the kids at Taft hated me became his permanent conversation opener with me.

I took my gig as Lead Fellow seriously (or tried to), so I observed a Fellow teaching Ramp-Up. I sat in the back, just like Charlie had, and jotted notes in my battered plastic binder: Talking. Do-rag. Calling out. Getting up and wandering around the room. Sleeping. There was poor Rachel, first-year English teacher and Teaching Fellow, bravely marching up and down the middle of the room between the desks, her plan held out before, trying vainly to ram the lesson through until the bitter end. When she turned her back to write something on the board, a couple of pens hurtled back and forth across the room. "Who did that?" she yelled. Snitches get stitches, Miss. The bell sounded the reprieve.

In our post-observation conference, as I mentally referred to it, her red-faced frustration was obvious. "How'm I supposed to teach in this environment?" I asked her if she'd received any training in management over the summer. I knew the answer she gave me already: none to speak of. "Was it like this your first year?" she asked me with a sigh. "Oh, I was much worse than you," I said. Then I smiled ruefully. "But I was also teaching in a different place." As bad as Ramp-Up, and it was bad, Taft itself had been one big Ramp-Up classroom. The best piece of advice I could give her was this: "You are not expected to teach these kids the curriculum. Your job is to teach these kids how to behave like normal students. If you can bring yourself to understand this, you'll have an easier time of it."

I also visited a few veteran teachers (aside from the Rebbe of course), including one that was supposed to have some of the best board notes. This was the twice (or was it thrice?) divorced menopausal shrew who was in charge of the bookroom – she even had glasses on a chain. She desperately, transparently wanted to be AP, but you could tell it was never going to happen – she was going to be one of those permanent also-rans. On some level, I think she sensed this, so she ingratiated herself with the AP to become her de facto second-in-command. I nicknamed her the Sarge. She was suspiciously nosy, and hid her busybody nature behind a thin veil of helpfulness. She was always trying to hustle up money for the Sunshine Fund, the "office pool" money used for cards and flowers for ill colleagues. I learned later that everybody hated her, but nobody ever complained. I found that strange, but I soon put it from my mind. Her board notes, like the woman herself, were most definitely lacking in imagination; she praised her students to the skies whenever they had something to say, no matter how inane.

When the revolution came, one of the first groups up against the wall were the teachers; this was because they were highly educated and prone to independence of thought and ideas. I realized that most of the staff at Windsor would have nothing to fear from a revolution. This was because I began to get an idea of how Woundwort had turned Windsor around. No man can control a building Windsor's size alone. Thus, every department was riddled with teacher incooperts. In the Teacher's Lounge, the unofficial Windsor mottoes were: The Walls Have Ears and Trust Nobody. You had to watch what you said; it would always get back to Woundwort.

Woundwort also made a big show of how much he cared for the students. This was his touchstone: compassion. He liked to repeat how "needy" the kids were, as if they were somehow different from other kids. Aren't all kids needy? And they certainly weren't needy in the same way the Taft kids were. As time went on, this attitude began to smack of insecure narcissism; the subtext clearly became: You have to like me better than your teachers! I'm the most compassionate man in the building! He liked to portray himself as the student's hero – teachers were the enemy that would only stand in the way of a student's potential unless he, Woundwort, were there to set that awful teacher straight. So, to that end he conducted an "open-door" policy for the students; this meant if they ever had a complaint about a teacher, for any reason, about anything, they could go directly to him with it and be assured of a sympathetic hearing. Students were encouraged to "keep tabs" on their teachers; if they had the slightest problem, they were to report to his office at any time and he'd "take care of it." Basically he tried to turn the student body into a network of incooperts, his own amateur NKVD.

As I had been warned, Woundwort was indeed hands-on, but in the proctologist's sense of the word (his version of "internal review"). The jingle-jangle of the keys in his giant key ring (it resembled one carried by some medieval dungeon master), just prior to opening your door, was likened to the tramp of doom. Whenever he was nearby, the news spread like wildfire from room to room, teacher to teacher, like a game of telephone: "He's on the floor, he's on the floor." There were very few teachers in the building who were not in constant fear for their jobs. The only ones who weren't were those teachers who subscribed to his cult of personality – Woundwort expected slavish devotion or he marked you down as trouble.

I know what you're thinking. Say what you want about the man, Windsor worked (at least for the students) – no scanners, plenty of clubs and teams, lots of support. I am perfectly willing to grant you all of that. And let me say this: I wanted to like Woundwort, because I believed in excellence; I wanted to be one of his fans and be able to say, when people complained, "You just don't get it." However, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and Windsor was no exception. Woundwort's tactics led to certain unintended side-effects, ones that caused me to doubt the "great man" theory of education so espoused by the minions at Tweed Courthouse.

I began to observe in my classes was that social promotion was alive and well. I noticed that I was often teaching kids who were taking two or even three English classes at one time: juniors who had failed freshman and sophomore English, or seniors taking senior English who had failed junior and sophomore English. It was to get more kids into the higher grades, and give the illusion that they were somehow closer to graduating. It wasn't just the lack of windows that gave Windsor the feel of a casino. And I wasn't shy about failing the kids who deserved to fail. Now, I don't have to tell you how unpopular my grading policy was at Windsor. Woundwort and I had a little discussion about it in his office after a number of students complained. He insinuated that I wasn't being positive enough, that what these kids needed was as much positive reinforcement as you could get. For instance, he said, he noticed on his "pop-ins" that I didn't praise the students enough when they answered my questions. I said I only praised answers that deserved praise; I wasn't interested in praising students who stuck their hand in the air and said whatever nonsense sprang into their head. I understood this was a habit they had learned in grammar and middle school, but I was trying to break them of it. If every answer is a good answer, I replied, then all the answers are meaningless. Woundwort considered that an example of my "negative thinking." He warned me that I would have to find a way to become "more positive." Another one of Woundwort's bywords was positive reinforcement. This sentiment, however, did not apply to the teachers, and certainly not to me. For one thing, I never got a hug.

I certainly understood where the kids were coming from, though, since I found I was pretty lonely with my strict standards. The English Department was divided into two camps: the younger crop of teachers, and the older crop of teachers, made up primarily of middle-aged women. These middle-aged women were the power base of the department. For one, they were Woundwort's creatures. Secondly, they were not academics nor were they intellectuals. Like their boss, they operated under a different set of criteria: you graded according to compassion, not ability. These women were renowned for their lax grading policies.

Now, you have to understand that they did this with the best of intentions; they legitimately cared about their students. But their grading policies infected the entire department; if, after all, these women were grading the way they were, then students went to Woundwort to complain when they ran into teachers who didn't grade that way. Thus, even teachers who knew better inflated their grades to stay under Woundwort's radar. Who wanted to deal with the complaints from students and parents and the Boss? So this put me on the spot: the students in the end were given a choice – you could work like a dog for Mr. Roston and eke out a 75 or an 80, or you could take the old lady's class down the hall and get a 95 for doing almost nothing. Most students would choose the latter, since they figured with the grades the old ladies were giving they could get into a good college and worry about it when they got there. The difference was, if they took my class, they'd actually learn skills that would be valuable in college; taking the old ladies would ensure they'd get killed in college, which most of them did – you only had to look at CUNY's drop-out figures.

Finally, there were the artificial attendance and lateness numbers. In order to prevent being seen as having too low an attendance or too many students late (your attendance and lateness figures were generated in a report that would be scrutinized by both the AP and Woundwort), teachers would doctor their bubble sheets. I saw at least two teachers doing it in the English Department, so I can only assume that it was occurring in other departments as well. After all, who wanted the aggravation? And what difference did it really make? So you mark a few kids present who weren't, and you mark only a couple of kids late. Who did it hurt? Who wanted more unwanted attention from Woundwort?

At one community college, a top administrator confided that because of remedial needs, a "two-year associate's degree" takes students an average of 3.5 years to complete... High school students heading toward college do not understand this; they know that their older peers who graduated with poor grades went on to college – and they assume they can, as well... This partial picture may encourage lax academic effort and college-for-all fantasies on the part of many high-school students – maybe even on the part of school faculty. These fantasies are fed by high school administrators who boast about the high percentage of students they send to college – but neglect to mention how few graduate. (James E. Rosenbaum, Beyond College For All, 2004)

We had fed the hearts on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare.

W.B. Yeats, "Meditations in Time of Civil War"

The Fellows

THE Upper West Side of Manhattan is one of the city's nicest neighborhoods. Despite being wedged around some of the city's busiest thoroughfares (Columbus, Amsterdam, and Broadway), the tree-lined side streets are placid and serene. 19th century brownstones stand shoulder-to-shoulder around the corner from the upscale markets of Zabar's and Fairway (where it pays to know krav maga if you want so much as a fresh vegetable). It is a family neighborhood – it's where the young Wall Streeters from the Upper East Side and the Downtown hipsters move as mature adults after they get married in order to raise kids. It is a wealthy zip code that is fiercely proud of its well-deserved reputation as a center of liberalism. It is no coincidence that the neighborhood is also heavily Jewish; thus, it is also the home of Brandeis High School.

Brandeis High School, built in 1971, is the only zoned school in the borough of Manhattan. Its hideous modern architecture is depressingly incongruous in the midst of all those lovely brownstones on West 84th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway. Unlike the college in Boston, no Jews attend this particular Brandeis. In fact, no one from the neighborhood attends the school at all: the students are shipped in from Washington Heights and the South Bronx. Due to a shortage of scanners and security agents, in the morning lines of students waiting to be scanned course around the block, causing frequent, not to say endemic, lateness; police cars are parked at strategic places along the line until 8:30. Since the vast majority of petty crime in the area is committed by Brandeis students, every afternoon, at 2:30, the neighborhood displays its displeasure at having to host the school's presence: the local precinct blocks off both ends of the street and ushers groups of exiting students to the nearest subway station. Brandeis students are discouraged from lingering in the area. The principal of the school watches this daily ritual with dismay. It is the principal's deepest desire to turn Brandeis into a neighborhood school, one in which the local (white) parents would be proud to send their children. Unfortunately, just as she is unwilling to acknowledge that the school has a major gang problem (confrontations between the Bloods and Crips are frequent), she is unable to see that as long as Brandeis remains a zoned school, this is never going to happen. The NIMBY liberals of the Upper West Side just want the school closed. Permanently.

Brandeis was also home to a significant portion of 5CC10. The year previous, five members of the class had started there; added to that this year, besides Liz, was another classmate who was coming from middle school. Liz was given the dirt; she learned that the unofficial motto for the staff was: "Deal with it." It was the only thing the administration ever said to teachers. On a daily basis, objects of all sizes and descriptions got thrown at doors, students banging on doors and windows. At least a couple of riots a month started in the hallways; there wasn't any kind of long-term strategy to deal with it, they were treated like a fact of life, like the weather. Fighting, in fact, was the number one spectator sport at Brandeis. If there was a fight anywhere in the building, between anyone, whole classes stampeded out the door en masse to watch. There was no coherent school pass or lateness policy. The principal hated the students and the staff, and they all hated her right back. Nothing positive was ever said by her in staff meetings; it was all about what the staff wasn't doing right.

But for Elizabeth, teaching high school, any high school, was like dying and going to heaven compared to middle school. Looking back on her first year, she wished she'd broken more rules from the start—for instance, she would have chucked the curriculum entirely; it couldn't have been implemented without team teaching anyway. But now, at Brandeis, she was going to do what she felt was right. She was going to make the students do all the reading in class and teach only to that reading, and she would do grammar lessons despite what the DOE said. She noticed that a lot of the senior English teachers were always worried about the principal sticking her head in, afraid of visits from District (now Region, since in the fall of 2003, the 32 instructional Districts had been pared down to 10 academic Regions) – they were always wondering could they do this, should they do that. This confused Liz; if they have such vaunted tenure, she thought, why are they always so scared? Because she was new, she didn't care; she didn't care about implementing group seating, or writing down the agenda. She didn't care about the format, she knew her job was primarily to keep the kids under control.

Aim: Fuck You. Do Now: Suck my dick. Written on the board as a courtesy by her 9th grade repeaters. Her 2nd period: less than 8 students out of 30 attended on a regular basis, so the three kids who appeared regularly passed, despite their crappy work. She had lowest passing rate in the department, less than 15%. Conversely, it was also the first time she taught smart, motivated students – a single 10th grade class where they showed up and did the work, all 30 of them. This was the same class with her first really smart student, Abraham – he was so unchallenged that he became a nuisance. He was an ugly kid, but he pulled the girls because he was funny and smart. He wrote enjoyable stories that were fun to read, but he was obviously bored all the time – she tried to push him, but he wouldn't do enough of the work to get him into an Honors class.

CJ found that he had more time, finally, to be reflective; as his mentor had promised, this did inform his teaching. For instance, lesson planning. First year, he had sweated blood over his lessons, spending four hours planning what would turn out to be a disaster four days out of five. Now, he spent an hour planning something that three out of five days he knew would have an effect in the classroom. He came to enjoy doing it – when he finished writing a lesson, he felt he'd created something. He got so good at it that Principal Heinz gave him the task of planning curricula for all the new English texts. He felt like he was making himself a niche. He had three preps, 9th, 11th, and 12th, but because he had a frame of reference now, he knew what Taft was like, he found that he had more of a rapport with his students. However, he was also given the Prison Room to teach as well. The Prison Room was a kind of super Cooler from his first year; the denizens this time were kids who were actually still in jail and being considered for parole. They had to demonstrate to a judge they could show up for two consecutive weeks at school – then they'd be released back into the system. It wasn't so bad, really – there were only 12 students on the roster, and most of them wanted to get out of jail, so they behaved themselves.

Dante Gabriel Collier Brooks was born in August of 2003, and his mother Amberdawn took the fall semester off; his father Martin was sent back to Roosevelt again, to the small school Belmont Prep. There was a bit more student accountability – there was detention, and row seating. Martin, who had learned the hard way how to teach this population, slowed everything way down. While their ability level was still astoundingly low, he knew the students better, which was good. And he was looser. The one real hiccup was that he had to teach math for a few weeks because their first two math teachers quit in the first couple of months. He found he was more strong-willed, more assertive, which he never used to be. He drank and cursed a lot more than he used to as well, and he had brandy every day after work. Sometimes, a lot of brandy. He found he was also more bitter and cynical – he felt like a 30-year veteran some days. His first year, he'd really wanted to stick to the rules, and he'd been worried when an administrator would threaten him with a "letter in his file." Now, he just didn't give a shit. He'd become a lot more apathetic about that kind of thing.

Mandell kept her word: he had survived, so Robert was placed in the Fordham Academy of the Performing Arts. There was a holding room for the hard cases, the deans knew who you were, and principal's edicts were enforced. Robert had new goals. Be direct: decide what was going to happen and move forward; get through his game plan no matter what. Get the students to consistently work at whatever was put in from of them first; then, get them to hook into the subtleties of what they were reading so they could enjoy it, enjoy the language, and get some real pleasure out of the experience. He felt (hoped) this would in turn make them more reflective, understand more about who they were – teach them self-awareness so they could change things from the inside out. He still didn't have any time to do his own creative work. He had this digital video project he wanted to edit as a demo reel, and he'd gotten this amazing idea for a whole new outline for his novel but that meant now he'd have to-restructure the whole thing... But who had the time? The job took all of it. The best part of the job was when he could finally get them into something which relieved him of the burden of trying to create all the momentum: when he changed resistance into interest. It didn't happen much, but it was something.

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of the earth. – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Spring

"SOME clients think private eyes have a code, something like never quit or seek justice whatever the cost or punish the guilty whoever they might be, but the code is probably more like never give the money back..." I was re-reading James Crumley's The Mexican Tree Duck because someone at Windsor asked me why I hadn't thought about quitting at Taft. Well, there had been Charlie first year, for one, but there had been another reason. One of the caveats the Teaching Fellows program issued when you started was that if you quit before your two-year commitment was up, you would have to repay the program for your tuition at CCNY. So if you substituted Teaching Fellow for private eye in the Crumley quote, then you had my reasoning: I'd had no intention of giving the program its money back. Perhaps it was my part of my deep distrust of organizations, which went back a long way.

I remember the day I lost my faith in government. When I was around 12, with Ronald Reagan elected to the White House, I developed a terrible fear of dying in a nuclear war. When I asked my mother what we would do if this happened, she said when the sirens went off, the family would sit at the dining room table and play cards until the end. Perhaps it was merely an example of my mother's stiff-upper-lip WASP fortitude, but today, I admire my mother's response. Then, it wasn't very reassuring. I couldn't understand why Reagan was goading the Russians – what was the purpose of all those nuclear weapons? My mother suggested I write to the President to get some answers. So I sat down and did it – basically asking Reagan why he felt it necessary to arm us to the teeth and push us to the brink of annihilation. I don't remember how long it took to get an answer, a few months probably, but I did get an answer. A large and unwieldy manila envelope arrived one day. It was from the Department of Defense. It had a form letter in it, thanking me for my interest in the President's defense policy. I was to please find enclosed the defense budget for the year 1981 – 1982. And sure enough, inside was a document the size of a small phone book, full of spreadsheeted facts and figures. I began to see the sense of my mother wanting to play cards instead.

The same feeling overcame me when I received in my school mailbox a letter with the Department of Defense logo in the upper left-hand corner. It was from a Lieutenant Colonel in the 404th Civil Affairs Battalion, stationed in Irbil, Iraq. He was the battalion's executive officer, and his three page single-spaced letter, addressed to me and seven of my students (he or someone else had obviously intercepted letters meant for private soldiers, and he had been ordered to reply to them), went on to justify and explain what the Army was doing in Iraq. It was full of helpful facts and figures. He went on to say that "liberating Iraq has been a very rewarding experience." In closing, he said that "America needs great young people like you." I wondered what he'd had in mind – that I was going to stand in front of the class and read the letter, with a giant flag as a backdrop, like Patton? Maybe I should have, had a discussion about propaganda and misinformation – but I was too overwhelmed with feelings of both despair and disgust. I went home and put the letter in my files.

This is because I would end up losing my faith about other things of more immediate concern.

* * *

Need to determine whether a teacher is qualified? Give them a test. Want to determine the ELA reading level of your average 8th grader? Give them a test. New York City public school students, like their teachers, take lots of standardized tests, the so-called "high-stakes" tests. They are called this because so much is supposedly riding on whether or not a student passes them. They have always been with us, just as the arguments about their relative merits have been. Competitive high school exams and the SAT are also examples of "high-stakes" exams. Add to that distinguished list the New York State Regents Examinations, the gas-bloated corpse that must float to the surface of any discussion about public high school in New York.

Why study history? Because we inherit it. Case in point: The Regents Examinations. The New York State Board of Regents, in existence since 1784, had as one of its original aims the creation of high standards in secondary schools. The Board of Regents specified the texts or subjects that schools had to teach to qualify for state aid as early as 1817. An unintended consequence of this requirement was that, beginning in 1817, schools began lowering their standards in order to attract students and receive said state aid. By 1877, in response to the call of colleges for higher standards in secondary schools, the Regents began to give academic examinations as a standard for high school graduation. By 1925, Regents high school exams were given in as many as 68 different subjects.

The city's increasingly shifting demographics (the end result of post-World War II immigration) caused the Regents Exams to come increasingly under fire. In that magic year 1969, a movement was launched to abolish the exams entirely (which walked hand-in-hand with the idea of open admissions at CUNY in the dubious name of "social justice"). The Board of Regents decided to continue the Regents high school exams and the Regents diploma, pending the development of so-called "alternative student assessment programs."

27 years later, alternative assessments having failed to spontaneously materialize, in the spring of 1996, the Board of Regents voted to overhaul the Regents testing system in lieu of replacing it. New Regents graduation exams, to be required of all public high school students, were to be introduced. The English Regents, once all multiple-choice, would now require students to write four multi-paragraph essays that displayed certain literacy skills. The new English Regents, as well as the Math Regents, were now to become a graduation requirement for all students, including those students getting a local diploma, beginning with the Class of 2000. However, a passing grade on the initial exam would be 55, as a way of "phasing in" the new standards; it was supposed to go up to 65 in 2001. By 2003, all New York State public school students would be required to pass five Regents exams in order to receive the now-required Regents diploma.

And so, back to the present. After the January Regents exam scores came out, I had a mother show up unannounced to a classroom and ask me how her daughter could get a 65 from me when she got a 92 on the Regents. Of course, I had not seen her Parent-Teacher Night, after her daughter had been given a 55 the first marking period, but I humored her. I explained that the Regents had no bearing on the class grade, since grades were in before the exams were graded. In addition, I explained that my class was meant to be harder than the Regents exam, to ensure students would have a better chance of receiving a 75 (if students received between a 65 and a 74 they would have to take remedial English if they attended CUNY). However, I said, while I wasn't a particularly tough grader, I did assign a lot of work, and her daughter hadn't done much. She appeared satisfied with this answer, but I failed to mention the real reason her daughter had received a 92 on the English Regents.

The pass rate at Taft had been abysmal; the exams were depressingly easy to grade. Leaving aside the issue of ELL and ESL students (a huge percentage), many students failed merely because they didn't show up for the second day of the test. Now, who was to be held accountable for that, I wondered. Windsor's Regents scores, on the other hand, were excellent.

There was a very good reason for this: they cheated.

You would think, of course, that since the Regents was a state exam, the bundles of exams would be shipped off to Albany to be graded by objective third parties. You would think. But that is not the case – all high schools grade their own Regents exams. Wait, I hear you cry. How can that be honest and fair? Don't schools have a vested interest in making sure as many students as possible pass? Well, yes. But the Board of Regents would like to think that it has anticipated that by creating strict rubrics with sample anchor papers, and weighting the multiple-choice section in such a way as to cut down on that kind of thing. They also do random audits of a "test sample" of schools.

Grade inflation carried into everything at Windsor, and the Regents was no exception. How does this occur? Again, it was the old ladies for the most part (their ringleader, interestingly, was the Sarge), but the new teachers were compelled to comply with the old guard. Grades within spitting distance of 65 never happened – they were always re-graded to pass. Rubrics were routinely ignored – if the essay "seemed" good, it got a good grade. Also, these teachers kept a lookout for their own students (in theory, you were never supposed to grade your own students), to make sure they did well. After all, teachers had a stake in Regents passing rates as well.

While I am happy to report that of my 30 College Prep juniors, 29 passed the Regents, many of their grades were too high. Some that might have benefited from remedial English at CUNY got 75 or more. This is one of the many drawbacks to having schools grade their own Regents. I'm not saying that if you had an independent audit you would find that the Regents scores of 65 and over at Windsor would plummet by half. No, it would probably go down to bring it into line around the city average. And given the fact that all schools in the system grade their own Regents, and all schools have a vested interest in their score reports, you can be certain that cheating goes on at far more schools than Windsor. More than likely the citywide average itself is far too high.

* * *

As at Taft, the spring would see major changes. And like Taft, most of them wouldn't be positive. Where Charlie had not lost a single new teacher, Windsor lost three new members of the English Department. Woundwort had decided that he didn't like how three teachers in their first semester were doing their job; rather than trying to improve them, he opted merely to get rid of them through staged observations. Thus, the department was now short-handed once again. They were only able to find one replacement for the three teachers Woundwort had disposed of; they stuck a History Teaching Fellow with a section of Ramp-Up, but that still left two Ramp-Up sections to cover.

The next piece of news was that the AP of the department had taken the sudden decision to retire in January; her last gesture as AP was assigning me Ramp-Up. Once again, I was the victim of my own success. The explanation I was given was that because I had taught an early model of it at Taft, it would be better for all concerned. The real reason, of course, was that Ramp-Up was nothing more than an exercise in classroom management, a skill I was now known to possess in spades.

The AP's replacement was Joanne Mazzilli; I didn't know anything about her aside from the fact that she made the school announcements over the PA everyday, but Mazzilli would turn out to be a pleasant surprise, in fact a rara avis: a skilled administrator with superb people skills. I tried to reason with her: I told her that I did not possess the temperament for the Ramp-Up population; I'd just gotten a taste of what it was like to actually teach, and I didn't want to take a step backwards into Taft territory. Not only that, you weren't supposed to teach Ramp-Up without the week of training provided over the summer. At that point, however, she'd just had the job dumped unceremoniously in her lap at the last minute, without a summer to prepare. She was feeling overwhelmed, and didn't want to monkey with the schedule. She said her hands were tied, so I was stuck.

Ramp-Up was the good old double-block. I was issued the new canned curriculum; while its content was truly awful, it gave me enough material so I didn't have to waste too much of my time planning for the class – academics would always run a distant second to discipline. Again, Ramp-Up was really a literacy/Special Education program, not an English program; I was not qualified to work with this population. I did decide to plan a unit around The Pearl, one that I refined from my earlier work with Twilight/Nineplus, with an emphasis on the moral aspects of the parable. I was going to be a "values" guy. Now, if I could only get my hands on a copy of Pilgrim's Progress...

In addition to Ramp-Up, I was given a continuing semester with my 11th grade College Prep. There were two major advantages to getting the class again in the spring: one was continuity; most of the students knew me, so I didn't have to waste inordinate amounts of time getting them adjusted to my style and level of expectation. The next was that I wouldn't have to teach to the test anymore, since they had already taken the Regents in January. I discovered how liberating this was – I could concentrate on higher-level assignments, for one thing.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. Since I didn't have to teach to the test, I could go back and see just what other standards were ostensibly required of high school students. Since I was not one of those English teachers who liked giving lists of vocabulary words to look up and use in a sentence to be promptly forgotten (not to mention how boring it was to check), I decided to be true to one of my mantras, one of the many catchphrases I was evolving: "Information without application is useless." So I'd give them 20 words to look up, and then they had to use all 20 words in a story in the first person. The story could be fiction or non-fiction, but it had to have a setting, a recognizable conflict that resolved, and dialogue (so that meant more than one character). The story had to use at least four paragraphs and be in the past tense only throughout – all assigned words had to therefore be conjugated correctly. Spelling, needless to say, counted, and it couldn't be more than three pages. Compare this to items in the City of New York's "Writing Standards for High School English Language Arts" (the famous ELA standards that had to appear on the board):

E2c & d: The student produces a narrative account (fictional or autobiographical) that:

  * Engages the reader by establishing a context, creating a point of view, and otherwise developing reader interest;

  * Establishes a situation, plot, point of view, setting, and conflict;

  * Creates an organizing structure;

  * Uses a range of appropriate strategies, such as dialogue, tension or suspense, naming, pacing;

  * Provides a sense of closure to the writing

E4a: The student demonstrates control of:

  * Grammar

  * Paragraph structure

  * Punctuation

  * Sentence construction

  * Spelling

  * Usage

Not bad for one assignment for writing-challenged students, and it took two things to be able to create it: being allowed to accumulate experience, and freedom from a standardized test. What use it actually was can be freely debated.

I also got to teach A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, so I decided to explore the idea of peer pressure (not exactly reinventing the wheel, but always relevant), so I put the students in groups and had the students come up with a list of peer-pressure situations they faced in their lives, both in and out of school. Then, after class discussion, each group picked one situation and wrote a funny sketch about it (anything presented had to be funny, I needed the laugh, and frankly so did they), to be then performed in front of the class. In the interest of posterity I'm enclosing this sketch, written by the best student in the class. I recommended the writer, a girl (they were almost always girls, the high flyers), for Advanced Placement English. To my consternation, she turned it down (though she did later ask for a letter of reference for a summer job, which I happily provided). I enclose her sketch not just for what it reveals about how my students saw me, their interminable obsession with betrayal (usually romantic), but also about the culture of Windsor High School itself:

Characters

Ms. Oswald

Katie

Randy

Francis

Principal

Scene 1:

(students are chattering in the classroom, when Ms. Oswald walks in).

Ms. Oswald: Quiet, I graded your tests over the weekend and boy were they disgusting. You're grades should be in the 80's and 90's, you're grades were so low I wasn't even in college at that age. (she begins handing out the test).

Katie: Maybe they'd be higher if you weren't so lame.

Ms. Oswald: Did someone say something, you know with these grades you shouldn't even speak at all, just listen, and then maybe you'll learn something and actually pass the class!

Francis: Ms. Oswald the bell is about to ring.

Ms. Oswald: Well, in that case let me give you your homework assignment, read chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, 22, and 23 and answer questions 1 – 100.

(students groan)

Ms. Oswald: Oo, stop you complaining, there are going to be a lot of things in life that you're not going to want to do, and this is one of them, so deal with it. Class dismissed.

(students get up from chairs)

Katie: I swear Ms. Oswald is a witch, her life is miserable so she has to make everyone else's life miserable.

Randy: There's definitely something wrong with that lady, she's like a dominatrix or something.

Katie: what do you think of her, Francis?

Francis: Well she definitely isn't the nicest person in the world, but if I want to past I guess I got to deal with it.

Katie: What?! You've got to be kidding me, you're just going to take it like that. That lady is trying to destroy our lives and you're going to "deal with it," Francis she's evil. Tell him Randy.

Randy: She's definitely got some issues.

Katie: Issues can't even begin to describe it, if we don't do something about her fast, we're going to be in high school for the next six years of our lives.

Randy: so what do you want to do?

Katie: I've got the perfect idea... let's get her fired.

Francis: Fired? What for?

Katie: For being a witch, for ruining our lives and giving us massive amounts of homework

Francis: I don't know guys, I mean I think we're taking this way out of proportion

Randy: Well, I'm down

Katie: Francis?

Francis: I don't –

Katie: oh, come on Francis we're depending on you. We need at least three complains for the vice principle to even investigate the problem... come on, you can sign your's anonymous.

Francis: Well what are you guys going to say exactly?

Katie: I was thinking you'd bring some marijuana to school, provided by yours truly Randy. Then you'd get caught by security, intentionally, and then you'll say Ms. Oswald sold it to you, in fact she promotes the use of drugs.

Francis: They'll never go for it.

Katie: O yeah they will, see Randy and I will be there to back you up. She tried to sell to us too. Okay?

Francis: okay.

(goes to Principal's office)

Katie: Hi, Principal Chaney, we have something to tell you that we feel is really important.

Principal: Okay

Katie: Francis, Randy.

Francis: Well, Ms. Oswald gave us an exam

Randy: that we didn't do well on

Francis: so when we go it back

Principal: you know failing an exam, it happens sometimes, I don't think this calls for desperate measures.

Katie: O but it does, you see Ms. Oswald has been promoting some illegal activities in the school.

Principal: Has she?

Katie: Yes, she has, tell her Francis.

Francis: yeah, and Katie has been kind of like her protégé, running errands for her,selling marijuana to different kids in the school.

Katie: What?!

Randy: Yes, Ms. Chaney, I have to admit Katie has been doing things of that sort, lately I tried to stop her, but she wouldn't listen.

Principal: and Ms. Oswald?

Randy: well Ms. Oswald assigned us to do research on a particular drug, but Katie took it upon herself to start selling it.

Francis: she even forced me to smoke it.

Katie: You liars! Randy! I'm surprised at you and Francis I always knew you were a snitch.

Francis: and so are you, so how does it feel now Katie? Huh? How does it feel? How does it feel to have the shoe on the other foot?

The End

It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. – Patrick Henry

The Fellows

IN the spring all the administrators at Fordham Arts, who were decent, were replaced with Klein's flunkies, who were reviled. They told Robert they were going to build a 'Black Box' theatre for shows, but it turned out fire codes wouldn't permit it. So they had to use the auditorium, which was horrible. He had staged a multimedia version of Monster, part play and part movie, they'd filmed the flashbacks using DV – the acoustics had been so bad you couldn't hear anybody on the stage from the third row. He got to teach advanced drama in the 9th and 10th grades, but he found it took too much stamina to do the simplest things. He'd get something going, and then the students would flake out, resist, not do the work, whatever. It was like physical labor, like bricklaying. But he wanted out of Roosevelt by now – he had a few gang-members come into his class in the spring and deck one of his students at the beginning of the period and just walk back out. And one of them had been one of his students from last year! The kid looked right at Robert, and he knew, and he knew Robert knew. And he didn't care.

Upon her return to school from maternity leave, Amberdawn was handed Roosevelt's "new" 8+ Program, three classes with 77 of the worst kids to ever sidle and pimp-roll their way down a high school hallway. They were, according to Mrs. Brooks, "Off. The. Fucking. Wall." Some of the students were 16 or 17, and their attitude was "I'm not going to do this work and you can't make me." As if this were somehow punishing her. The noise level of constant bickering in the classroom was so huge that you literally couldn't be heard over it. When asked to move seats, they'd reply, "I'm not moving my fucking seat." This time, though, she stayed calm and kept her composure. It wasn't exactly new anymore, so she was able to eventually get things settled to a more manageable level.

* * *

In the spring, Liz was given three classes of 10th graders, and two Regents prep for juniors and seniors. The Regents prep classes had rosters for 15 but sometimes she only 2 students. The classes were depressing – for the first time she felt like a horrible teacher, that she was so boring nobody wanted to come. She spoke to her AP, Amber: "I feel like I'm not doing a good job." Amber said, "It's not your fault – some of these kids have failed the test three times already. Make the phone calls and keep a record to cover yourself." She was in three different rooms, so she didn't have to decorate or keep her handouts with her all the time – it was, "Get it when I have it or you're out of luck." She ended up getting most of her 10th graders into Honors, and all of the kids who got into Honors passed the Regents.

* * *

One rainy weekday afternoon, I met Anthony Wheeler at a corporate coffee shop. He'd let his hair grow out to a less severe length, and he'd gained weight. He had been working as a paralegal since he quit, and in a couple of weeks he and his wife were moving to the Midwest so he could attend law school. With a wandering gaze, hands fidgeting with his cup of coffee, it was obvious he was still uncomfortable about what happened.

One of his students had nearly gotten beaten to death in front of the school just before Anthony left. Why? Because he wouldn't join a gang. That was the level of peer pressure they were dealing with, it was no wonder they saw no incentive to play school. If you did well, you were literally putting yourself at risk, because you might get the shit kicked out of you. "When I went home over Christmas break, it felt like a foreign country." He took long walks on the streets of his affluent New England town, looking at all the happy white faces, something out of Norman Rockwell, and "for the first time I felt that you couldn't work your way out of every situation the way I'd been taught, with the American Dream bootstraps. If I was from that neighborhood, I don't know if I could make it out either." He remembered talking to his future father-in-law, a lawyer, who went on and on about how noble and selfless Anthony was. "I don't know how you do it, young man," he'd said. "I really admire you." With a wan smile, "I said 'thanks,' but inside I was thinking: How I wish I could be doing what you do! Don't admire me, I'm a big fake. I felt like a complete phony.

"The whole experience was eye-opening in a truly disturbing way. The fact that I hadn't been able to deal with it... that still haunts me. I lost my idealism. When I'd left summer training, I felt salty, I felt I could change something, effect some sort of understanding with writing. I don't feel like that anymore; I've become more selfish.

"What bothered me the most...? The entire situation in public education is more than irrational, it's evil. My god, that there should be this level of poverty in the United States... What the fuck are we doing, going into other countries? The war is in our own backyard. The social problems are too big for teachers, especially new ones, and the fact that the DOE and the Fellows were aware of this makes me angry. I hope that when I finish law school I'll want to try and do something to make things better, I really do, but I just don't know. There are days when I still think about all the 5CC10 Fellows, and even though I was never so glad to leave a job in my life, I find myself envying that you were able to stick it out."

On my day off, Saturday, I took the train back to the Windsor High School stop to meet Richard Smith at a diner near his house. Richard Smith still radiated joy and friendliness, hope and promise. I asked him what he thought we should be teaching. "Students should be taught how to appreciate literature on a basic, fundamental level in preparation for college," he said. "They should be able to explore ideas and learn the process of writing to get better, not merely become literate. Right now it's all just regurgitation."

"Would you have done the program again, knowing what you know now?"

"No, because the Fellows program couldn't be separated from the DOE monster. The Fellows, or some other program, has to be made into an organization that operates outside the system."

"What do you think you learned?"

"The experience of seeing for yourself just how big this job is. You couldn't possibly know until you've been there. Oh, I plan on going back into teaching, but on my own terms. I want to go to a school where I'm appreciated, where I can flourish with what I know to be my 'multiplicity of talents.'"

"When you find it, will you let me know?"

He laughed. "God's plan is my plan, my brother!"

Back on the elevated Manhattan-bound train platform, as I did every weekday, I watched the passenger jets hit the outer marker and begin their gentle glide path for final approach into LaGuardia. I find I have an urge to cross over and take the train to the end of the line, Pelham Bay Park. Every morning on the way to work, I've always wanted to go there, see it for myself, play hooky; as a native, you're always amazed at the number of places in your own city you don't know. But I don't. I've got to go back home – I've got too much work to do.

Up in Lincoln, "if a student ever says something like 'Fuck you!' to a teacher (which has almost never happened), it's an automatic five-day suspension and he gets the shit beat out of him at home." Mike was regaling me with tales from Maine at an Irish bar near my apartment. "The parents are all blue-collar, sure, but they care: they want their kids to get the fuck out of Lincoln." He took a drink from his Grey Goose martini and a pull on his American Spirit. "In a fucked-up way, I think it was good I got kicked out, because if I'd stayed I would've become a raging alcoholic, without a doubt." I asked him for some kind of sign-off for the NYC schools. "I'll admit it, the way things turned out still bugs me; I was set up for failure, and that's not fair. And while I can't believe that all the people on our 'Quit' list outlasted me, I'll give you their epitaph: In the end, the teachers are always to blame."

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. – Ecclesiastes 2:11

The Combine

THE single factor that made the Ramp-Up experience a misery were the same six students, three per class, two boys and a girl, about whom I could do nothing. The deans at Windsor were generally responsive and helpful, which was good – the fact that a couple of them coached the football team was an added bonus, since I learned which of my rowdier boys played ball and used this as leverage. Any misbehavior, and I went right to the coach. Unfortunately, none of my worst Ramp-Up head cases were athletes, and a principal's suspension was merely a stop-gap measure. I tried sending them to the English Office to "cool off," but I was told I wasn't allowed to do that. I had resolved a year ago not to put up with this nonsense, and I was even more emphatic now. It galled me, frankly – in the fall, with a normal academic schedule, I hadn't contacted the Dean's Office so much as once. So what to do? I kicked them out. I told them I didn't care where they went, they couldn't stay in the room. They would wander the halls and stairwells for the period, unless policed up by a dean's sweep or SSA patrol. Needless to say, this was a major no-no, but I didn't care. I wasn't going to have my classes held hostage by a small group of students the system was unwilling to do anything about.

However, the Ramp-Up issue that cropped up was tied in with the new mandated phone call log – Woundwort, a principal and therefore interested in public relations, was big on keeping in touch with parents. It had come to Woundwort's attention that some teachers weren't calling homes enough to suit him (what teachers these were, and in which departments, he was mum)– he mandated a minimum of 10 calls per week per teacher; you had to log the calls in on a sheet to be turned in and checked, like homework. Now, on the surface, you might say, hey, 10 phone calls, big deal. It wasn't that it was 10 phone calls – the phone calls themselves were symbolic of two things: first, you weren't being trusted as a professional, you had to be checked up on like a shirking student; and second, because phone calls as a general rule accomplished nothing, they were essentially busywork that cut into time that could be used for other things.

At this point I think I should say for the record that high schools as a rule are enormous "contact machines": once the ATS sheets are bubbled, white "cut cards" are generated and sent home if the student is absent; report cards are sent home three times a term; the school is constantly sending letters updating parents on various issues; and there is always parent-teacher night or afternoon. Also, in the fall, I and every other teacher in the department had sent out massive stacks of progress reports to parents indicating what their child was having trouble with (or that their child was trouble in general). So what an extra phone call on top of that was going to accomplish was truly hard to fathom. A call home to Edwin S., one of my Ramp-Up nightmares, indicates the general tone. His aunt answered the phone. After I explained that Edwin was a major behavior problem, she told me that Edwin had already been in Spofford, and had recently been arrested not once but twice. His aunt, however, wanted to assure me that Edwin had assured her they were both cases of "mistaken identity." Denial, as they say, is not just the second-longest river in the world formed by the confluence of the White and the Blue. So, I did what most of the other teachers were doing: I forged my phone log. It was all the sweeter as a form of resistance to Woundwort.

And I had to be honest: by now, Woundwort was beginning to grate on my nerves. Why couldn't he shut the fuck up and leave me alone, if he didn't have anything positive to say? So I went back to Mazzilli, since I believed in using channels, and asked her to ask Woundwort in her nice and formal way to lay off of me. She was surprised at the request, though not as it turns out as surprised as Woundwort was when she made it – teachers whom he couldn't intimidate bothered him no end. I don't know what she ended up saying to him, but he did lay off me for a time.

Another issue that nagged at Woundwort: sitting teachers. He wanted to keep his teachers "on their toes" literally: you were not allowed to sit down in your classroom for any reason, ever. A teacher who tried to run his class like a college seminar and sit in a chair in a circle with his students was reprimanded. You were not allowed to sit while giving an exam – you had to be an "active proctor," constantly circulating within the lifeblood of the classroom (another one of his favorite expressions – circulate, circulate, circulate around the room like some kind of demented educational corpuscle). Now, I couldn't teach and sit at the same time, it just wasn't possible, I always had be pacing at the board, but if he thought I was going to walk around the room for 45 minutes while students took an exam he needed his head examined.

Mazzilli, though an administrator who suffered under the delusion that endless meetings cured all ills (I had at least two free periods a week eaten up in meetings of one kind or another), did try making Woundwort's "pop-in" visits less random: she set up organized times for principal walk-throughs. Having heard about my Ramp-Up problems, he chose to visit me every day during Sustained Silent Reading. Now, one of the requirements of SSR was that I was to sit and read quietly as a model (the only good thing about the 90-minute block) – this drove Woundwort wild, because every time he came into my room I was sitting. Sitting! A teacher! But there was nothing he could do about it, since this curriculum came from the Chancellor's Office. Mazzilli had to constantly explain that, yes, I was doing my job properly. He would then draw me aside, and say "I'm hearing things, you know, but every time I come in here, they're all quiet and doing their work." He seemed genuinely surprised – that's when I realized somebody was reporting me to Woundwort.

* * *

Because it was in writing, and official, the tone of my observation was markedly different than my daily reality. As I sat in her office reading over the observation, something was troubling Mazzilli. I asked her if there was as problem, and she said "I wanted to rate this lesson highly satisfactory, but he said no. I thought he was being way too nit-picky... I don't know. It didn't feel right." In a sense, she was right; if a principal wants to catch you doing something wrong, they will. For instance, you may find yourself asking a rhetorical question, or asking a question and not liking its sound and re-wording it immediately, or thinking aloud. Also, after a couple of months, you get to know the kids that just will not participate, for a variety of reasons; since I wasn't big into first-strike humiliation, I didn't force the issue.

These of course were all no-nos to Woundwort, but I laughed it off and told her it didn't bother me; I didn't care about their informal rating system, which was true. An 'S,' as Charlie had explained, was an 'S,' no matter what language was attached. She shook her head and said, "Thing is, once he gets this idea in his head about you, watch out. He's got some idea about you, and I don't know where it's coming from." It concerned her enough for her to put a commendation letter in my file just as Charlie had, an unusual move after such a good observation. I realize in retrospect I should have paid closer attention to such things. Not that there would have been anything I could have done about it.

It was around this time that I began to question Woundwort's management style, which in effect was this: If I don't watch you every minute, because you're a teacher I assume you're an idiot, I know you're going to fuck up and tarnish these little gems of children, who only I really understand and love. In an effort to foster a positive attitude in you, so that students are showered in your praise, I'm going to needle you about everything I perceive you've done wrong (whether it's true or not), try to intimidate you with subtle (or not-so-subtle) threats, and generate an atmosphere of distrust. I felt perhaps that he was being just a tad counterproductive – after all, the students could tell the difference between a real smile and a pasted-on rictus one. This was one of the things I really liked about teenagers: they can smell hypocrisy in one part per million.

Woundwort's main effect was that, in the end, he didn't make it much fun to come to work; I missed the camaraderie of the Fellows at Taft. The English Department at Windsor was purely professional (when they weren't looking over their shoulders) – the staff didn't socialize with one another. I also missed Charlie, but I knew he was incredibly busy; back in August, a principal's vacancy had occurred at one of the new small high schools in one of the New Visions Project schools in the basement of Morris High School, and Charlie got the nod.

I went on an interview to become a Fellow Advisor, as Molly Mac had been the best thing about our training; but it didn't go well, even though I had drawn up a sample summer curriculum (emphasizing, I might add, classroom management): Tip #1 – The answer to any student request is 'No.' When I sat down in front of the interviewer, she gave me that clueless sunny Teaching Fellows smile from across the table, and it bothered me. So, she asked, why did I want to be an FA? "So new teachers will know what to do the first time a student calls them a motherfucking white bitch." Her eyebrows shot up. End of interview. But don't you want to see my curriculum...? So much for truth in advertising.

Various grievances (so to speak) aside, at Windsor I'd had one semester of learning how to teach academically, and one semester to teach without having to deal with the Regents: these were not small things. So I was actually looking forward to returning the following fall; I'd be working with an AP I liked, I'd have some seniority, and more importantly some familiarity with the school. I wouldn't be the new guy, and I wouldn't have to stress out nearly as much. Plus, I learned that the Rebbe was leaving, so there was an outside chance I'd get to teach Advanced Placement next year. However, I didn't want to leave it all to chance. Windsor had a small series of English electives, but nobody had come up with a new one in quite a while. So I designed two at the Honors level, and was given permission to try and rustle up students (you had to get a certain number of interested student signatories in order for the classes to be put into the schedule). Despite my so-called "negative" reputation, I got plenty of signatures for both. Word had gotten around – Roston was a hard-ass, but you would actually learn something useful). As for Woundwort, I figured that he and I had come to an understanding – we didn't have to like each other much, but we could put our animus aside "for the good of the service."

I have never been more wrong.

By June, sheer exhaustion had finally caught up with me. I had worked very hard all year (I'd taken two more graduate classes, including writing my thesis), and now I was crabby and unwilling to just "get along, go along." For some reason, I was put into a grading group with most of the worst grade inflators (Sarge was the table captain who had chosen her team, and I learned later this was no accident), and every time I graded a paper, I was asked to re-read it and "reconsider" my grade (in other words, make it higher). Now, I didn't care if other teachers wanted to cheat, I wasn't senior enough to stick my nose in; but what I did not want to be was coerced into doing it myself. So I kept saying no. And I got less and less polite about it. This resulted in some heated exchanges, but I assumed it was nothing more than a disagreement between colleagues and didn't give it a second thought.

I came in the next morning (the second-to-last day of school) to find that Woundwort wanted to see me immediately. I was hastily ushered into his office along with Mazzilli; the faux-wood walls were adorned with photos many and varied of Woundwort hugging or shaking hands (or both) with somebody; the particle-board shelves were sagging, laden as they were with trophies from all the various school teams. Woundwort himself, dressed casually (and therefore unsettlingly out of character) in preparation for summer, said that the conversation we were about to have never took place. If I was to ever mention it to anyone, he would deny he'd ever said anything.

Turns out Woundwort was quietly livid, and proceeded to read me off a list of infractions of which I was unaware. He let me know that he felt he had a good chance of writing me up for something called 'Conduct Unbecoming.' Not only had the entire old biddy contingent complained officially about me, he said, but a mole in the English Department had been spying on me since February. Taken aback, I listened with one ear as I turned it over in my mind: who could his informer have been? I had my suspicions – all signs began to point towards the Sarge. Now I discovered why no one had ever said anything to her: she was Woundwort's Weasel.

Woundwort was still talking – it didn't matter if I was paying attention or not, he liked to hear himself dress people down; he'd refined it to an art form. I looked at him in his short-sleeve shirt, and noticed he had a heavy bracelet on one wrist. It looked like a medic alert badge – I wonder what it said? Lactose of Human Kindness Intolerant? He said that if he wanted, he could take away my teaching license. "You know me by now, Aaron," he said, his eyes glittering behind his oversized spectacles, his use of my first name chilling my blood. "You know I'll do it." I looked over at Mazzilli, who was trying to find somewhere else to look. Woundwort continued: if I were to come back the next year, he said, he was going to put me under a microscope. If he got so much as one complaint, from anybody, about anything, he was going to give me a show-trial observation and that was going to be the end of me. He gave me 24 hours to think it over; I was to report back to his office the first thing in the morning.

The Myth of Tenure

One of the Chancellor's favorite bugbears was the so-called "200 page" UFT contract with the city, one of the many ways he and the mayor found for not agreeing to any sort of contract with the teachers. The people at Tweed Courthouse and City Hall wanted to reduce it to 10 pages or so, by basically stripping away anything the teachers had resembling job security. Teachers were being asked to rely on the "good will" of the system's administrators.

What does this supposed "200 page" contract do? On a daily basis, two things.

  1. Establishes certain work rules. Teachers can only teach five periods a day, ensures they get a lunch and time to prepare for their job, and theoretically caps class size at 34 students.

  2. Establishes the rules for tenure. All this means on paper is that you cannot be fired merely because you don't happen to agree with the principal, or the local school board can't on a whim replace you with somebody's cousin.

And that's it. The tenure issue was the thorniest of negotiating points – the DOE always wanted it removed from the contract; it was always presented as a way of making teachers "unfirable." On a certain level, this would seem to be the case. Of the 78,000 teachers in the system, only 132 had been terminated for professional incompetence in 2002; that number rose to 800 by 2003. But in the main, it's still a small number. It's not tenure, however, that protects teachers, and it's this: Who are you going to get to replace them...? Most principals in one respect weren't Woundwort – they didn't like to be short-staffed.

Shaken from my sandbagging, I went right to the Windsor UFT rep (the first time in two years I had gone to the union). I explained the situation to him, and I told him of my suspicions as to who had been informing on me. He nodded and said I was certainly right – Sarge was a known quantity, her name frequently mentioned in conjunction with Woundwort (why hadn't it been made well-known to me, I wondered?). He called her "a cancer on the faculty." Unfortunately, since I was a probationary teacher, my options were nil (I wished I'd had Tovarisch there at that moment); the union couldn't really do anything to protect me. He went on to explain that principals could write letters accusing a teacher of anything to get them fired. One of their favorites was 'Insubordination,' but another one was the one Woundwort had briefly mentioned: 'Conduct Unbecoming a Professional.' If Woundwort didn't have actual proof, he could make it up, and would – he'd done it before. Now I knew what that glitter in his eyes was: it was the look of deep-seated madness. If I came back, I'd be at the mercy of Sarge and her Dark Master. My UFT rep's advice? "Get out of here as fast as you can."

I went upstairs and repeated my conversation with Woundwort to those people on the faculty that I had come to know. He might deny it happened, but I wasn't about to play along at this point. Even the Rebbe was shocked. That was when I got a surprise – one of the older grade inflators from the grading table took me aside and sat me down. "I heard what happened," she said. "And I want you to know that despite our differences, I would never, ever tell that man anything." And I believed her, because she was the nicest people I'd met there. She was a long-time veteran, a sweet lady with a large family, who absolutely loved the students. "I know you're strict, but that's because I know you care. I've got a friend at Clinton High School, she's the AP of English there. Let me make a phone call." I sat there and looked at this woman that I had shared a room with in the spring; sometimes I'd spooked her when she locked the classroom door to give a test – my key ring would jingle and she'd jump out of her skin, thinking it was the boss. The simple fact of the matter was, despite her tenure and her compassion, Woundwort had her absolutely terrified for her job every day of the week. And that's when I realized what I hadn't liked, in fact truly despised, about Woundwort: he was a bully, pure and simple.

True to her word, I got an interview at DeWitt Clinton High School. Clinton was even bigger than Windsor (the English faculty exceeded 40 people alone) and therefore had a constant need for teachers (though I would learn not nearly as dire a need as Windsor). The school was located in the North Bronx, off of Mosholu Parkway (so I would be exchanging one highway for another). I met the AP (herself a former Windsor teacher) and the principal of Clinton, Geraldine Ambrosio, in the Clinton cafeteria. They wanted to know what had happened, and as circuitously as I could told them that Woundwort and I had a falling out. I was vague as to the specifics (objectively, I could be seen as a troublemaker), but they nodded sympathetically, knowing his reputation, and I was hired without even having to give a demonstration lesson.

When I came into work for my last day at Windsor, I told Woundwort I was, regrettably, going to have to pass on his generous offer – I wasn't going to be one of those trophies on the shelves, boy – and would he be so kind as to release me from the Region, as Clinton was in a different one from Windsor? As he told his secretary to type it up, his parting words to me were, "You've only got yourself to blame." And in a way, he was right: I'd been warned about the man, I'd known ahead of time what I'd been getting myself into. I just figured I could handle it, but I turned out to be wrong. With my letter of release in my hand, I managed not to literally run out of the building.

But only just.

Liz and I get along rather well in our small apartment – at least, I think so. She thinks the place is too small, but I like it (though that's partly because I'm given the spare room to work in, which doubled as storage). The dog's barking has resulted in a war of sorts with the crazy Irish woman across the courtyard – she's constantly screaming out her window at us – but otherwise it's peaceful. In fact, it's one of the quietest apartments I've lived in, and it has a lot of light. While Liz begins to learn how to cook as a way of finding something non-teaching related to do, I decide to join the darts team at my local Irish pub. It feels liberating, and a bit naughty, to have a few drinks on Monday night, something I normally wouldn't have thought twice about. But I'm the only teacher on the team, which includes the two owners of the bar and an Atlantic City magician, and thus the only one who has to cut the evening short. Most of my friends I'd become gradually estranged from by now; some had sided with my wife in the divorce; and so I had only a couple remaining, and they didn't even live in the city. My parents lived a thousand miles away. It's basically just me and Liz. But the rhythm of life is, for the most part, the same – get home from work around 3:30, walk and feed the dog; then take out the quire of materials from the day, whatever has to be graded, usually a huge sheaf; then lesson planning; then Internet research (I'd gotten a new laptop, and it had wireless – I was piggybacking on one of the numerous unlocked networks in the building – yeah, I was that guy). Around 7 or 7:30, I go out to the wine shop for a bottle, and then maybe the video store for a DVD. And then it's time for dinner, which Liz prepares – she quickly becomes a damn good cook (partially due to our getting the Food Network for free on the building cable line.) On Saturday, we take the dog to the dog run in Carl Schurz Park; on the way back, we might stop at Pet Wines for a bottle or two. Sunday, after sleeping late, is a workday – grading and planning, maybe with the TV playing a football game as background noise. We don't socialize much with anybody else. We miss Mike. We miss other Fellows from our class. It's a consolation (and a big help) to live with another teacher who works in the system. No one else seems to get it.

CANTO V

The Forlorn Hope

"Join New York's Brightest – Teach NYC!" (Ad campaign begun by the NYC Department of Education, 4/15/04, taking its cue from the fact that the NYPD is referred to as New York's Finest and the NYFD as New York's Bravest.)

New York City faces a 'brain drain' in its schools; a staffing crisis looms on the horizon as New York City public school teachers retire or leave the system at alarming rates. A report by the New York City Council Investigation Division (CID) shows that over 70% of the most experienced NYC public school teachers are likely to retire within the next two years, while more than 25% of mid-career teachers and nearly 30% of newer teachers say it is likely that they will leave the system within the next three years—potentially creating as many as 30,000 vacancies in the City's classrooms in that time. Some 19-25% of new teachers leave the system within one year of being hired, while the national rate is only 10%. The Department of Education (DOE) estimates that the three-year attrition rate in New York City schools is approximately 40%. Figures from the United Federation of Teachers... indicate that 42% of teachers leave within three years. The number of retiring teachers has been increasing, up 20% in 2003, and up 67% from 1998 to 2002. New teachers are most dissatisfied with: salary and benefits, class size, and school safety and discipline. Common concerns [between new and veteran teachers] include 'lack of support, lower pay than surrounding areas, and more difficult working conditions.' From a report by the NYC Council Investigation Division titled "Teacher Attrition and Retention" provided to Members of the Committee on Oversight and Investigations, June 2004

Fall

THE villages are small, and the conditions overcrowded and squalid. Disease is rampant, as are local superstitions. No one travels much, especially at night, because the roads are rife with highwaymen of all descriptions. And there's not much reason to travel, anyway – the next village may be entirely different in custom and even language, and possibly hostile. Plus, all villagers everywhere are deeply suspicious of strangers. Local warlords often embark on petty wars and the innocent villagers are sometimes caught in the middle. News from the outside world, what there is of it, is sparse and often unreliable.

I am speaking, of course, not of Europe in the 14th Century but of the Bronx in the fall of 2004. The "villages" are the five-square-block areas that most of the residents inhabit and rarely leave. Medical treatment, what there is of it, is hard to come by – you'll spend a lot of time waiting in the clinics at Lincoln Hospital. One five-block area may be Puerto Rican, the next Dominican – try to travel between the two without getting beaten up if you're one or the other. The local warlords are of course the drug dealers, and nobody reads much besides the sports section of the newspaper. Teach long enough, and you'll also find that the students are like medieval peasantry in another way – they take off days from school for any reason, like the endless medieval saint's days that the Catholic Church had to finally consolidate. They'll be absent if it's raining, or snowing, or if it's too hot; they'll have the humors in the form of a mild tummy ache or sore toe; they'll be absent a few days before vacation and a few days after vacation (they'll come back when they're ready), or a day or two before a long weekend and a day or two afterwards. This is exclusive of just cutting to attend hooky parties.

Of course, teachers view the school calendar in a similar way. For instance, here's the academic calendar for the fall of 2004: Though we are to report, as usual, the day after Labor Day, September 7th, that entire week is supposed to be spent in 'professional development' – students do not report until Monday, September 13th. However, that week, Thursday and Friday are holidays thanks to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (also known to teachers as the Gifts of the Jews). This means that most students won't actually report until Monday, September 20th (Yo, why'm I gonna go in for a three day week? Shit). Then, school is closed, Monday, October 11th for Columbus Day; November 11th, Veterans Day; November 25th and 26th, Thanksgiving; and from the 24th to 31st of December. We report back on Monday, January 3rd. So then how do teachers translate this? Starting September 20th and going forward to November 24th, we have three five-day weeks, one four-day week, three five-day weeks, one four-day week, one five-day week, and one blissful three-day week (though really only two days since students won't be in attendance the day before Thanksgiving – in fact, many won't be in at all that week). The question thus becomes: where will I place my personal days...?

The student outlook towards the school calendar is part of an outgrowth of a student mini-philosophy that I have christened Ghetto Fatalism (though later I realized it could easily be renamed American Fatalism). They will use these three answers to answer any and all higher-order 'why' questions you put to them if you allow them to:

  1. Everything happens for a reason. Meaning: I have no control over what happens to me, good or bad, so I don't have to bother trying. For instance: I was going to fail that test anyway, that's why I didn't study. Or, I'm going to be a famous basketball player even though I'm not on a team and I only play on my local court.

  2. What goes around, comes around. Their version of karma. Meaning: You do something bad to me, something bad is going to happen to you. This does NOT apply, however, to the speaker. See 3, below.

  3. You gotta do what you gotta do. A spin on "the ends justify the means" and "it's a dog-eat-dog world." Meaning: Any action I take to benefit myself is acceptable, and should not result in consequences even if it's at your expense. See 2, above.

You are not allowed to use these three stock answers in any of my classes at Clinton for any reason; you would be amazed at how this restriction improves responses. It goes along with my 'Do-Now' mantra, the one I repeat while they scribble in their journals: "Remember, one sentence beginning with 'Because' is not an answer. You must be able to explain your reasoning. If you cannot answer 'why,' you have not answered the question."

* * *

Long considered the best high school in the Bronx, and one of the best (and oldest) in the entire city itself, DeWitt Clinton High School was founded in 1899 as a prep school for college-bound boys; its current location right below the entrance to Van Cortlandt Park was established in 1922. It also boasts possibly the most distinguished group of graduates of any alma mater in the system. A partial list would read as follows: George Cukor ('17), Fats Waller ('17), Francis Trilling ('21), Countee Cullen ('22), Irving Howe ('30), Burt Lancaster ('30), Paddy Chayevsky ('39), Stan Lee ('39), Richard Avedon ('41), James Baldwin ('41), Neil Simon ('43), Ralph Lauren ('57).

As I had with Windsor, I checked Insideschools.org to see what I was in for. Besides its 26-acre campus, Clinton had 13 Advanced Placement courses and 24 different sports teams. But the school's greatest pride, it said, was its Macy program (their version of a gifted program). Bronx students who scored above the 80th percentile on standardized tests in both reading and math, who had a grade point average of 90, and who had good attendance records, were eligible for admission; there were some 700 students in the Macy program.

As usual, we had the staff Welcome Back in the auditorium, where I learned that Clinton was now a Title I school in its second year as a SINI school (School In Need of Improvement), which was why it was being broken down into small schools (something the once-powerful alumni association had long opposed – they knew it would mean the end of Clinton). Principal D'Ambrosio was honest – she expected that the school would be designated a SURR school the following year. Thus, I was taking a few steps backwards into Taft territory (just like Taft, Clinton also had a burled and engraved wrap-around wooden honors board that ended in 1985). Clinton had no metal detectors (yet), but there were rumors that they would be getting them the following year after a student was caught with a gun the previous spring. For the time being, Clinton would have just ID scanners.

At this auditorium orientation, we were also informed of Clinton's new "get tough" lateness and detention policy. There were a lot of hand-outs to this effect, as the new head of security wanted to "send a message." If a student was late to class three days in a week, that student was to serve a day of detention. If the student was more than 15 minutes late to class, that student was to serve a day of detention. A new Detention Center was being set up in the basement for this purpose. Furthermore, there was to be a massive crackdown on not just hats, but the newest scourge, cellphones. If a student was so much as seen having one, a dean was to be notified and the phone would be confiscated – a parent or guardian would have to come in to retrieve it. It all sounded very law and orderish, and given that the school had an enrollment of some 4,350 students, so that the school would be operating at 135% capacity, it sounded necessary. Despite my third year in the system, I found that some of my naivete had not worn off: I actually believed her when D'Ambrosio said, "This year, things are going to be different."

However, there were ominous internal warning signs in the new school year of the heart, namely mine. This was my third school in as many years; I would have to start over yet again; I'd have to get used to yet another supervisor, yet another faculty, yet another school environment. It was hard perpetually being the new kid. And the Clinton English Department was absolutely huge – it was so big, in fact, that there were English teachers I never formally met. As at Windsor, about 25% could be considered UFT "dead weight." As for Teaching Fellows, there were three first-years and one third-year besides myself. There was no buddy teacher system here, nor mandated observations.

Clinton was so overcrowded they had to resort to a three-bell schedule: periods 1 to 8, 2 to 9, and 3 to 10. Principal D'Ambrosio herself allowed her office to be converted into a badly needed classroom. My new AP had told me darkly at my interview that as a new teacher, I would most likely have to teach 3 to 10, as if that was some kind of hardship (arrive at school at 9:30? How awful), but of course my schedule ended up being 1 to 8, with a first period class. Thus, I would be on the front lines of Clinton's new "get tough" lateness policy (this would mean more work for me, in terms of write-ups, but if it curbed lateness, I felt it was worth it). I was given three sections of Regents juniors and two sections of Macy Sophomores. At last, I thought – motivated students. As at Taft and Windsor, I would be teaching in three separate rooms, a nomad yet again.

Two of my other character flaws: I tend to be selfish, and I bore easily. Part of teaching was always: what's in it for me? In other words, by teaching this, what will I get out of it? What will I learn? This usually led to me challenging myself. Since I didn't get a chance to teach Honors or AP at Windsor as I thought I'd be doing, I decided on the next best thing and show Myself who was boss: I would teach my Macy classes the way I would've taught my electives. Since there were no guidelines about this kind of thing at Clinton, I resolved to teach five books in the term, including Othello the first marking period. The others would be a linked Animal Farm – Lord of the Flies unit, and another linked unit involving the Odyssey and the Iliad (since the department had just received class sets of my favorite translation of the Odyssey, the one by Robert Fagles).

"Academic riguh mortis" it would be.

* * *

Liz and I wake up early enough to catch the televangelists; we watch hollow-eyed and sip our mugs of espresso. My favorite is TD Jakes, a fiery black preacher with a sense of humor; he dresses in sharp suits, and works himself up enough so that he needs to mop his brow. I keep hoping one of his earthy homilies will strike home. He reminds me a little of Charlie.

East 86th and Lexington is a dual-layered hub station, the major East Side intersection of trains heading south to midtown and Wall Street and north to the Bronx. The upper level is for the 6, the lower level for the 4 and 5. Going downtown, the 4 and 5 are express; there are no express trains going towards the Bronx in the morning. Standing on the platform with your dripping umbrella, looking across the tracks, you can see that the downtown crowd is a lot more upmarket than the teachers and medical personnel on the uptown side. The students going downtown are usually wearing private school uniforms. You'd think you'd be glad to be out of the rain, but it's the morning rush: with four lines of trains crashing in and out, every 3 minutes downtown and every 12 minutes uptown, the roar is deafening.

Once the uptown 4 train arrives, it's invariably packed: there won't be any seats until transfers at 125th Street, and those will be few and for some reason always at the other end of the car from where I'm standing. Besides the teachers, construction workers, and medical staff, the train is mostly crowded with students: Walton High School, Bronx Science, Clinton. The 4 emerges into the watery grey light of the Bronx seemingly deep in the center field of Yankee Stadium; the noise, already a steady hum, becomes harsh – as the Bronx Science kids, mostly Chinese, play cards, the chirp and squawk of cellphones on walkie-talkie mode becomes to my rattled nerves an avian chorus from hell. "Bah... tah... ree! One... doll...ahhh! Bah... tah ... ree...!" On the 6 train to Windsor, the battery lady had been Mexican, with her muezzin call of "Batteria! Batteria!" The battery lady hawking her wares on the 4 is Chinese, and she seems to feel obligated to have a gimmick by drawing out her monotonous words as far as they will go. The station for Clinton is Mosholu Parkway, the penultimate stop on the line. When the train empties, the platform becomes so densely packed with students it pays to wait until the worst of the crush manages to navigate down the two small staircases (you can tell the obsolete station was never designed to accommodate such numbers of people), people swirling as if down a clogged drain.

Approaching the school from the subway, you can get an idea of how huge the school is – you can believe the campus is 26 acres. The pseudo-gothic edifice is three stories high, capped with a classroom-filled spire known as the Tower – you half-expect Bach organ music to emanate from it and waft hauntingly down the stairwells. The building itself seems to stretch on and on – it seems hard to believe a school this large could become so overcrowded. But once inside, you'd better believe it. The hallways here are not just a solid river of shaded humanity in between bells (no more white kids here), they are utter chaos all day long; hallway roamers, students on the loose during classes, are at epidemic proportions at Clinton, banging on doors and windows. There are not nearly enough deans or SSA's to police such a huge place. The chaos is especially pronounced by the entrances on the first floor, where I teach three of my five classes. The deans and SSA's have taken to carrying whistles, the harsh trills of which bounce off the walls and ceilings of the corridors, and combined with the screams and shouts of the students they are attempting to clear out, the din is both ear-piercing and head-splitting. For the first time in my career, I begin to suffer from severe headaches.

I've worked at Taft, so I know I can control a class; I've worked at Windsor, so I know I can teach one. Now, as a third year teacher, I figure I can combine all my skills without the stress level. I've gone through my usual routine, handing out my revised rules that are now in the form of an Agreement. I've hinted of the dire consequences as I hand out the new school cellphone and lateness policy, but much hilarity ensues when I go over it; the students know far better than I do what all the administrative sturm und drang means. After we get through the initial weeding out of hard-core delinquents – those that realize that with this teacher they aren't going to get away with anything and so stop showing up – I'm disgusted to find that my Regents juniors are little better than Taft students (some in fact were Taft students the previous year, but as a result of NCLB were allowed to squeeze into better schools like Clinton). As for turning in work, forget it. Lateness first period is endemic; to show that I mean business, I dutifully submit a sheaf of write-ups for detention. I have the stack returned with this note from the Dean's Office:

To all teachers periods 1, 2 & 3 – Please be advised that students are not considered late for these periods until 20 minutes after the bell due to problems at student's entrance. Seal off for these periods does not happen until 15 minutes after the bell.

Apparently you're not late if you miss half the class, so needless to say, I stop bothering with the write-ups. Then I have a girl's cellphone go off in class; I step into the hallway to flag down a dean to have it confiscated. A sour-looking man with a radio shows up. "Did she actually answer it?"

"No, but –"

"Then just tell her to put it away."

I make a new rule for my classes: If I don't see your cellphone, it doesn't exist. And I drop the whole thing. The promised Detention Center never materializes.

By my third year, I am now able to design a syllabus for every book every marking period. When I hand them out to my Regents classes, Jon E. says, "What's this, AP English?" "No, it's a normal high school syllabus. You know, a course map? It tells you when everything is due." "What if we decide not to do all this work?" "Then," I say, "you will fail. But, and this is important, Jon, you learn from failure too."

My own get-tough policy is not popular, however – students complain vociferously and at length to the Guidance Department, where I learn they are assured of a sympathetic hearing. Whenever possible, their main counselor shuffles their programs so they don't have to take my class. When she can't do that, she calls to complain to my supervisor, who quickly makes it obvious that she has come to deeply regret hiring me. Her departmental nickname is Butterball, because a) her dumpling-shaped body resembles one, and b) she's as dense as a frozen turkey. She is also prone to nerves; her idea of a perfect job seems to be one in which she is never being bothered, and with me she finds herself bothered. So, I find myself frequently being called onto the linoleum in her office; the meetings quickly degenerate into the Hollywood pap of clichéd cop movies, the proverbial "loose cannon" detective who gets the job done on the street in an unorthodox manner and the harried precinct captain who wants it done "by the book." Half-listening to Butterball drone on in her nasal whine about my shortcomings – I'm too tough, the kids have to know I love them, blah blah blah – I think to myself: this is what comes from having all the wrong role models... You are like a tree in a gale with shallow roots. You must learn to bend like the reed, grasshopper...

I put my hope in the two sophomore classes of the Macy Program – these kids are very bright, as promised, and their attendance is practically perfect, but I quickly learn they are just as lazy in their way as the Regents juniors. They have been getting praise and high grades their whole lives for not doing very much, being patted on the head by teachers just grateful to have students with any kind of spark at all. So when I lay my work requirements on them, they react with outrage – the students organize a petition for my immediate removal: a mutiny, in effect. The guidance department for Macy lets me know they have managed to defuse the situation; I tell them, "They can get motivated to try and get rid of me, but not do their homework? What kind of academic program is this?" The guidance department feels I'm not being properly grateful for their diplomatic efforts. It's at this moment that I realize I'm not sure I really care anymore.

This is only reinforced when the first marking period grades come out and Parent-Teacher Night occurs. At Windsor, I had a decent amount of polite parents and guardians, including a few who just wanted to meet me because their kids liked me; at Clinton, I have to get a second sign-in sheet I have so many baffled and angry Macy parents. Parents, when it comes to their own children, are generally morons; very few of them can believe they are often completely different at school than they are at home. Thus, the tone of every conversation is the same: How dare I give out grades like this? The subtext of the evening quickly becomes clear: We don't think you're very intelligent, because if you were, you wouldn't be a teacher. If I could, I would send my kid to private school, but I can't afford it, so I'm going to take it out on you. I don't care that you have 33 other students in your class – my son/daughter is special, and needs your undivided attention. Here's what I want: I want you to do your best to give my kid enough of an education to get them out of here so they don't turn out like you...

One father uses my paper-grading rubric to point out that I'm being too strict. He's a college professor, he says, and even he doesn't grade like this. I explain to him as politely as I can that I didn't design the rubric – my College Prep students at Windsor did, which is not as advanced a program, and it's based on the Regents rubric, which his daughter will have to take next year. This flusters him somewhat, but not enough that he doesn't complain to Butterball anyway.

"Don't you know this is the Macy Program?" says one exasperated mother, finally.

"Certainly," I say in a moment of weakness. "Does your daughter?"

The Parent-Teacher Night complaints truly frazzle Butterball – parent complaints, especially Macy parents, are serious business to administrators, as she informs me the next day. I am only just barely able to hold my tongue: Why? Are they going to ask for their money back? I get a lecture: Parents have complained about my arrogance, which at this point Butterball is only too quick to agree with, she has to say blah blah blah Mr. Roston blah blah blah Mr. Roston... I look at her mouth moving and I think: Peanuts. Miss Othmar. I'm turning into a Clinton student.

It's at this point I resolve to quit in January.

* * *

I know I've evolved as a teacher when I stop leaving my water bottles everywhere – normally, I'd been so distracted, I forget where I'd put them down; now I hang on to the same one for weeks at a time. Also, I've gone from "Please take your hats off" to "Hats off" to "Hats." Since they aren't doing the assigned reading (again) in the Regents juniors classes, I decide to switch the emphasis in Regents juniors from Literature to Literacy, make it more like a GED class. Emphasis is on writing the paragraph properly. Boring isn't the word for it, but my consolation is that it's a skill they badly need. As a reaction to the teacher-centered Regents classes, I give the Macy kids more in-class group work to do. Despite their griping (less attitude, more gratitude!), if they thought I was going to do their work for them, they were out of their minds. However, I did have to admit that they were in general a lot more fun to teach, once I'd broken them in to my way of doing things. They were bright, often with intelligent things to say, and I could trust most of them to do independent work and present it.

Given my experience at Windsor (Trust Nobody), I opt to not take any chances and avoid every member of the faculty – I never use the English Teacher's Lounge except to make copies. My interactions are confined to a professional courtesy of polite monosyllables, if there is such a thing. I get the reputation as the departmental phantom, a private man who takes the job seriously – perhaps too seriously. I stop grading at home, and I only do a minimum of planning there; like my freshmen days at Brooklyn Tech, I do all my work in the library.

I did not get into Stuyvesant on my first try – I was an incoming sophomore there. First time around, I got into Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. Since Brooklyn Tech was far closer to my house, I chose to go there. Brooklyn Tech was the size of a small town, both in its sheer physical size and the number of students – over 6,000. It was located in Fort Greene, which in 1982 was still a ghetto (Spike Lee didn't move back and begin to gentrify it until the late 80's), and the student body was the toughest of the three competitive schools. As a 14-year-old freshman (and nerd) who could pass for 11, I was, as they say, easy prey. My first, and only, day in the chaotic student cafeteria ended abruptly when an upperclassman bumped into me and with a swift blow drove my denim-covered three-ring binder from my hands, scattering its contents across the floor. He sniggered, "Oops. Better watch where you're goin.'" I knew I didn't want to stay there and get harassed on a daily basis, so I needed a refuge: the library. The Tech library was big and quiet, and I spent my lunch periods at a table in the corner by the racks of paperbacks. You weren't allowed to eat in the library, so I hid my lunch under the table and ate in surreptitious bites, all the while reading some pulp story by Stephen King or some fantasy novel by Alan Dean Foster or Piers Anthony.

So, to transition this aside into the present, I spent all my free periods in the Clinton library, working. The Taft library had been a bad place, filled with angry teachers trying to control rowdy students (foolishly thinking the library would prove some kind of reprieve), and the Windsor library was in the basement, too far to travel between periods. The Clinton library was on the same floor as the English Department, so it was convenient. It wasn't terribly quiet, but it was certainly better than the hallways. I wasn't supposed to eat in the library here either, but since I was a teacher now, I didn't give a shit – rank and privilege and all that. While Windsor's library had a working computer lab, Clinton's was being "upgraded," meaning they didn't have any computers at all. One of the librarians told me that they'd have those computers up and running soon, any day now, just you wait. This was one lie even I didn't believe. (Sure enough, the computers wouldn't be installed and operational until June.).

Around Thanksgiving I had my one and only observation with Principal D'Ambrosio; they observed one of my Macy classes. In the post-observation conference, after admitting that, as a former math teacher, she didn't know much about English teaching, she said it had seemed to go well. The lesson had been: How are love and war related in Book 3 of the Iliad?

By drawing on students' prior knowledge and experiences, you were able to illuminate this challenging literary work for your students. In addition, the questions you posed and reworking of the dialogue into modern language also contributed to their understanding. The board notes were thorough and emphasized the important points in the lesson. You encouraged students to speak up so that everyone could hear their answers. However, students were put in a position where they were expected to agree with the quote, "All is fair in love and war." Since some might not agree with that philosophy, it would have been less confining to allow them to agree or disagree.

I agreed with that, and then D'Ambrosio said, "These are Macy kids, so they're good kids. Not as good as they used to be, mind. Standards are lower now."

"Why is that?" I asked, since I'd been told the same thing at Windsor about the College Prep and Honors kids. Ironically it was something even Woundwort had admitted to the Windsor school paper; he had been at a loss to explain the decline in academic quality over the past ten years.

"Well, a lot of the better kids are getting siphoned off. Bronx Science is accepting more, and these new small schools take the others (othuhs), like the High School of American Studies. But it's something about the scholarship in general too – it's not as good. It troubles me. That, I can't explain."

"Mr. Roston," chimed in Butterball. "I wanted to ask you. We don't have the Iliad in the bookroom, do we?"

"No. I made them buy it."

They looked at each other. "You made them buy it? And they did?" said Ambrosio.

"Yes."

"How did you get them to do that?" said Butterball.

"I told them their grade depended on it."

Butterball frowned. "Weren't you worried about financial hardship?"

"I said if it was a problem to see me. Otherwise, I told them I trusted their ability to prioritize."

"What does that mean?" said Butterball.

"Don't go to McDonald's one week."

Ambrosio nodded. "Good for you."

* * *

One of the literary terms for the Regents I had the students work on was personification. But many teachers used personification too – they tended to deify Poverty. Now Poverty was a terrible god, but teachers turned it into a false idol. Call it secular paganism. Poverty was personified by these teachers as a god that removed choice and free will; everything was preordained, and therefore students were nothing more than sacrificial victims. Therefore, we as high priests had to excuse students; we had to excuse everything. I never really grew into this role. It tended to excuse these kids right out of an education if you let it, and many of them did.

To maintain some sort of equilibrium, I devoted myself to writing a book. Since I often asked my students to reflect on their school experiences in their journals, it seemed only fair I do the same thing. It gave me the opportunity to do a lot of soul-searching. Also, given how little literacy seemed to be valued in the Bronx (and everywhere else, for that matter, despite lip-service), it put me in a weird position of rebelling against my own students, as if the act of writing was a form of both affirmation and refutation.

Most days on the job, there seemed definitely to be a poverty of ideas, a poverty of language, of thought, of interest, of curiosity. English was a subject that trafficked in ideas – if they didn't seem to have any most of the time, and they sure didn't want to discuss mine, then this bred frustration and contempt for the students themselves. The kids, the ghetto, it was all about respect – with a start, I realized that in that way I had become just like them. My teaching philosophy first year had become: Take No Shit. I wanted respect first, last, and always. Everything had become seconded to that. They had to earn respect in my class. What did they respect? Intelligence, that they respected; if you got angry about the right things (poor test scores, no homework, etc.) they knew you gave a shit; when you had a sense of humor; when you asked higher-order questions and they felt as if they were being treated like adults. And so I got work handed in. And students whom other teachers warned me about – "Oh, the mouth on that girl, you'd better watch her!" – well, not a peep. In fact, she came to me for extra help.

But despite my best efforts, the students seemed to improve only marginally, if at all, because they didn't do any work. Because they didn't remember a thing once they left the classroom, because they didn't want to remember it. They didn't do homework as reinforcement, so every day was brand new (Ooh, the castle! Ooh, the castle!). They didn't study for tests, they merely tried to remember what you said a couple of days ago during the review session. They didn't do any assigned reading. Why should they, when your job is to read aloud sections of the text you select and then ask them questions on that? There were some days, standing at the board, you felt like you were underwater – your voice sounded muffled, time slowed down, because you knew were up there talking to yourself, you could take your clothes off, light yourself on fire... and you get the tests and papers back with the same mistakes over and over again, the reading where they make the same pronunciation mistakes... You felt like you weren't accomplishing anything. Some teachers taught with hip-hop lyrics, but I didn't. It wasn't important that I learned to speak their language. If they wanted a decent job, it was important that they learned to speak mine.

They're just kids, teenagers, what did you expect? Your expectations are ridiculous. You're a racist. Because I never talked down to them, or assumed it couldn't be done if only they tried? No. Racism was exactly the opposite of that. What could you do about student's lack of interest and motivation? Teachers are, in many respects, just like stand-up comics. Not just because they do five shows a day, or that they use the same jokes over and over, but that the shows often bomb. When this happens, you begin to question your material. And part of the problem was that the curriculum as it stood was frozen in 1965. There were books scattered here and there that were more modern: Bodega Dreams, Krik Krak, In the Time of the Butterflies, The House on Mango Street, When I Was Puerto Rican. A few dealt with the modern black experience: The Color of Water, Antwone Fisher, Makes Me Wanna Holler. But it wasn't a literate culture. Oh, yes, some of them read (mostly the girls) – so-called "ghetto lit," such as The Coldest Winter Ever and True to the Game. But those books were poorly written pulp fiction –black Danielle Steele, ghetto Sidney Sheldon...

Was it just possible that our old DI from that now long-ago summer, Alison Stoker, might have had it right, but right for the wrong reasons? When she called us "cultural colonizers," though she meant it purely in the negative sense, that's exactly what we were. We weren't soldiers, we were missionaries. We were fucking Mormons. Except we didn't have the Bible, we had words for the Word; our Word was literature. And when we said literature, we meant the Western Tradition version – I mean, of course, "white" culture, which is what Stoker meant. And these students didn't want it: they didn't want the new God, they wanted to keep their old gods. Their attitude was: Hey, you've marginalized us, here we are out here on the ragged edge of America, we've developed our own thing, leave us the fuck alone. What gods did they worship? Hip-hop. Rap. Gun violence, knife violence, fist violence. Gangsta life. Television. Brutality in all its forms. Did we leave them with that? Did my frustration stem from a feeling of rejection...? That they didn't want what I had to offer...? That I hadn't been able to make them realize its importance? And was it important at all...? That had been the appeal of teaching, after all: the feeling of doing something important.

I had my crises of faith too, like any good preacher. Sitting on the subway, clutching my copy of Huck Finn, or Gatsby, gripping and staring at it like my students, as if I could pull out an answer with my magnetic eyeballs: What was the point? What was the use? I was trying to find relevance and interest not just for them, but for me. What had I wanted to accomplish as a teacher? I remembered my first days at Taft, trying to generate a revival-like atmosphere (with a bit of my tongue in my cheek): Does somebody back there want to testify? Can I get a witness? Can I get a amen? I said, can I get a AMEN...? Did I want to teach these kids how to live their lives right? Was that possible...?

Was it that we were so different? I remembered Raphael from my first Taft class, two years ago that seemed like twenty. He was one of the few students who had still been around the day before Christmas Break. There were only a few of us in the room, so we got to talking. Raphael explained he'd been in foster care ever since he'd come out of a psychiatric hospital; he'd been put there because he had attacked a teacher with a chair in sixth grade.

I'd been in trouble in sixth grade too. For reading in class. I'd been hiding my copy of the High King by Lloyd Alexander (the last book in the Taran Wanderer series – I told you, remember: nerd) under the desk until abruptly snapped out by Mrs. Katz. "Aaron, would you please read the role of Themistocles?" Busted – she wanted me to take a role in a mini-play about the Battle of Salamis from the textbook I wasn't reading. I had to stammer a confession, and my parents were notified.

And what kind of teacher had I wanted to be anyway? I went back and looked at my old statement of purpose; it made me cringe...

I'd like to be able to give the students an appreciation for writing that extends past the 5-paragraph essay – I'd like them to come to appreciate writing's multi-faceted power. I'd like the students to always be willing to ask the underlying 'Why?' Such as: Why do we study certain books and not others? Why is it important to know this? ... I'd like to teach a certain amount of ambition and hope, too, but I don't want to be spouting homilies all day – that stuff's not enough on its own, the students need hands-on 'How's.' I like the idea of being a motivational speaker or preacher of sorts, but with practical applications...Basically, I want them to understand that the mastery of literacy has definite 'real world' applications beyond writing a resume...

Vagueness... wasn't the word to describe it. What would my Stuyvesant teachers have made of all this, I wonder?

* * *

Stuyvesant High School was founded in 1904 as a "manual training school for boys" on East 15th Street in Manhattan, specifically for the children of immigrants. In 1992, the school moved to a massive complex near Battery Park City. It is one of the best public high schools in the world; its emphasis is on science, mathematics, and technology. And today, to gain admittance, 20,000 students compete annually for 800 spots. When somebody finally gets around to writing the long and distinguished history of Stuyvesant (and it will probably be an alumnus who does it), mention will have to be made of the fact that one of the most famous people associated with it was not a student, but a teacher: Frank McCourt.

What were the odds that someone mentioning their old high school English teacher would become an incident of name-dropping? In fact, you could make the argument that Mr. McCourt had made the transition from fame to brand, right down to his Green Peril corporation. Here I was teaching high school and my high school English teacher's book was in every book room in the city (I never got to use it, as it was never on the lists for the grades I was teaching at the time). When I let people know that he'd been a teacher of mine, the question that inevitably followed was, "How was he as a teacher?"

I took my entire sophomore and junior English classes with him, and in all honesty, and not in consideration of his fame, Mr. McCourt was one of my favorites. He was a mordantly witty raconteur, and his classes were always fun and interesting – loosely structured would be putting it mildly. He took some risks in the classroom to make a point that another teacher would be fired for doing today, and he certainly didn't use graphic organizers or magic markers. He got frustrated sometimes with what he felt was our sense of entitlement; we didn't seem to know how lucky we were in comparison with others, and his contempt could be withering. Aside from that, there isn't much I can say about being taught by him or what he was like as a teacher, but I do remember that he assigned us one of his favorite books to read in junior year: You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe. It was one of the great reading experiences of my youth.

In June of 1986, Mr. McCourt and I got to talking when I brought him my yearbook to sign, and we started talking about future plans, his and mine, and he mentioned he was going to retire soon (which he did, the following year, in 1987). I asked what he was going to do after that, and he said that he was going to finish a book he'd been wanting to finish for years. Now, I really admired and respected Mr. McCourt, but he gave the impression of being one of those people who spent a lot of time saying that, both to others and especially himself. So I ungenerously assumed nothing was ever going to come of it. Ten years later I noticed a story of his in The New Yorker; I though this was pretty impressive stuff ("Hey, he managed to get a story published. And in The New Yorker of all places!") I wrote him a letter congratulating him on the story and briefly bring him up to date as to what I'd been up to. Well, you can imagine my embarrassment when Angela's Ashes came out and started the memoir movement.

As for the teacher I had feared the most...? His name was Mr. Fisher, and he was a holy terror. He had a toothbrush mustache, wild eyebrows with eyes to match, and heavy black specs. He looked like a psychotic Groucho Marx. He wore a tie, unusual at Stuyvesant, and a jacket that hung on his bony shoulders. Everybody was afraid to take his class; he was legendarily mean (an epithet that was now commonly attached to me). Unfortunately, he was basically the only teacher of pre-calculus in the building; every year we heard he was going to retire, and every year he didn't. And then it happened. I had to take his class.

His favorite term for me was 'moron.' "Roston? What's the answer." "Uh, I don't know, Mr. Fisher." "Then you are a moron, Roston. A moron!" We had one kid stand up in class once – he'd seen one too many John Hughes movies – and try to lead a rebellion. "You can't talk to us like this!" Or words to that effect. Fisher went apoplectic – the rest of us tried to hunch as far down into our desks as we could, our faces burning in embarrassment and fear. Somebody whispered "Shut up, would ya? You're gonna make it harder on the rest of us!" This was Stuy: nobody wanted to jeopardize their grades anymore than was necessary. But the kid wouldn't be deterred until Fisher threw him out. Nowadays, of course, you'd have parents marching into the principal's office demanding the guy's head – "He called my Bobby a moron!" (I got news for you, lady. Bobby probably is a moron.) This was before people started viewing teaching as some branch of customer service (an impression principals are only too happy to foster). My best friend, who is still the smartest guy I know, even he had to get tutoring from a math genius to get through Fisher's class.

But that's the thing – Mr. Fisher, while hell at the time, he's one of those teachers everybody still tells stories about. You were proud to have survived. And if he's dead (and I hope he is, that bastard, he has to be – doesn't he...?), then he's down there laughing his ass off. "See, Roston? I told you so." Why was he laughing? Because to my horror, I realized that I had turned not into Mr. McCourt or Mr. Bellush, but rather into him. As Molly had promised long ago, I would see my teaching personality evolve of its own volition – and it would bear no relation to the kind of teacher I had envisioned myself becoming. I found that I, Mr. Anti-Authority, had become a martinet, one who ruled with an iron first in an iron glove. And the worst part, the absolute worst? I'd fucking enjoyed it...

But if I'd enjoyed it, then why was I planning on quitting...? I knew I didn't enjoy it because (despite what some of my students may have thought) I didn't get off lording it over teenagers. Oh sure, my first term, I'd enjoyed winning contests of will with the kinds of kids who had terrified me as a kid: You wanna see who I'm lookin' at now...? But that wore off quickly, once my ignorance of their reality was dispelled. No, I'd enjoyed it because no group of people I had ever met needed rigid structure and discipline more than the students I had been charged with teaching.

What, then, would I say to my students? I'd say: Hey, it isn't personal. It's not about like or dislike. This is business: I don't grade you on your worth as a person. Personally, I like most of you. I take it for granted that you are good people. A lot of you are funny, with a font of street wisdom and a colorful patois. I know that many of you work part-time. I know that many of you come from nightmarish family situations. I know that the day-to-day pressures of poverty can be overwhelming. But I hate your obnoxious attitude towards me, towards education, towards what I'm trying to offer you. I hate that you hate education, that you have nothing but contempt for it. I hate your apathy, I hate your unwillingness to try. I hate that you look for every easy out you can, that you're happy to allow the system to have no expectations for you. So, I have to be hard for your own good.

I cared, but without pity. Was that my form of love? Some (a few) students got me, of course – they'd see the small smirk that let them know a lot of my persona was an act. They saw me for what I was; that my harshness, my strictness, was because I had pegged the bar higher than most had ever pegged it before, or would ever peg it for them in high school, and I expected them to rise to the challenge. Some didn't want to bother. But some did, and those kids I praised. And when I said good job, it meant something. When they got a good grade on a paper or test, it meant something. They knew they'd worked hard for it; I hadn't allowed them to settle or weasel out of it. Those were the kids who thanked me. Not many, I grant you, but there were some. One of my first period juniors at Windsor had been a Special Education student; she was smart, she just had mild dyslexia, so I held her to the same standards. She did better than most of the "normal" kids in the class. When I was standing in my door in the spring, waiting in dread for my Ramp-Up students, she came up to me to say hello. I asked her who her new English teacher was, and she told me the name of one of the old ladies. "That must make you happy," I said. "She's supposed to be nice." She made a face. "Yeah, she's nice, I guess. And she's easy. But I would rather have you." I'll be that kind of teacher any day. But I felt I was coming to the end of my endurance.
I find that I am spending the Prime of my life at the farthest part of the World, without Credit, without... Profit, secluded from my Family,... my Connexions, from the World... All these Considerations induce me... to embrace the first Opportunity that offers of escaping from a Country that is nothing better than a Place of banishment for the Outcasts of Society. – David Collins, Royal Marines, writing to his father from the Botany Bay penal settlement, 1791 (quoted in The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes)

The Fellows

DESPITE the fact all her 8+ students passed English, Amberdawn was excessed from Roosevelt at the end of spring term. She was assigned to another dying and deeply overcrowded high school, Adlai E. Stevenson, eight stories of pure trouble. Upon arrival, she discovered there was no room for her there either; she was temporarily without a job until the principal took pity on her; there were five small schools opening in the building, somebody was bound to need her. She was hired at the Community for Research and Training (she wondered: research and training for what?) The school was a charter school partly funded by the Gates Foundation, one of the New Visions schools. They had a computer lab with 30 desktop computers and 75 laptops; there was hi-speed Internet in every room that worked most of the time. She was assigned 9th and 10th grades (which were the only grades they had). She was forced to design her entire curriculum on the fly in September. Again. The principal said, "This is my (new) vision. Now make it happen." So she turned her class into an interdisciplinary American Lit survey course. The school was supposed to select 75 students based on interviews and scores – some students actually specifically requested the school – but most of the students ended up being placed at the school at random. They weren't supposed to have Special Ed kids, so of course a third of them were. The students who'd applied, who actually wanted to go to the school, felt disappointed and let down; it was just like everywhere else, the same old shit – having to put up with disruptive 18-year-old 9th graders. The new school was a series of rooms organized around an open space known as "The Box." It was where the students congregated between classes – using up all four minutes despite all the classrooms being next to one another, so students were still late to class. It was also where all the fights took place – Amberdawn felt it should have been called "The Ring."

Liz began the year feeling ill-used – she had been proud of the kids she'd gotten into Honors, and she would have liked the opportunity to teach them. Instead, she was assigned two sections of Ramp-Up. Every other Teaching Fellow got to teach good classes except her, even second-year ones, which she deeply resented. A second-year Fellow who couldn't control her classes first year got Honors classes because she wouldn't be able to control Ramp-Up! Liz got coldly angry – she told AP Najmi, "I got those kids into Honors, I deserve the chance to teach them. I'm being punished for having done a good job the year before." Amber hotly denied it. "Teachers are always unhappy when the year begins, you'll learn to like it." Later, after both of them had time to cool off, Amber privately admitted that yes, Liz had been assigned Ramp-Up because she was the best classroom manager in the Department. That's when Liz knew third year was her last year.

Amberdawn's new commute was insane – she had to take two buses from Inwood to arrive at Stevenson by 7:45, so she had to be up at 5am, even before her infant son. She used to go to work with Martin; they'd gotten to ride the bus together, drop off Dante together; now she was lonely. She was one of only two white teachers on staff, both English teachers. The black and Hispanic teachers made them feel unwelcome and uncomfortable: their attitude was – what you doing up here, Casper? The other white teacher was a Jewish Yale graduate who had unwisely told her students that her grandfather was a Holocaust survivor. So, she got swastikas drawn on her tests and papers; not from anti-Semitism you understand, merely because the students knew it upset her. Amberdawn found herself becoming one of those 'lunchroom veterans' they'd warned her about first year. She found herself constantly telling the new teachers to find another job, to get out while they could. She began to drink a lot more than she used to, half a bottle of wine becoming mandatory after work. On a really bad day, you could add a glass or two of port. By November, she felt she was beginning to suffer from a nervous breakdown.

Liz discovered the only good thing about Ramp-Up was there was very little work to do, since they almost never handed in anything. She kept her planning to a minimum; she threw out the canned curriculum, but she got lesson plans from others whenever possible. The one useful activity that Ramp-Up provided, namely cross-age tutoring, couldn't be done because the grade school in the neighborhood didn't want Brandeis students there. This was a shame: Liz had found that cross-age tutoring helped a lot with normally disruptive students, it focused them and made them feel valuable. Liz was much looser her third year – she had the classes broken by October, and so she was able to be a lot more casual. She only had to look at them and they shut up. But her classes were on the 4th floor, a wild floor – there was always a fight, usually between girls, you could see a sea of heads out there in the hallway through the classroom porthole. Afterwards there would be clumps of hair drifting down the corridor, a phenomenon Liz nicknamed "tumbleweave." The Social Studies Department was very helpful and proactive when the shit went down, they didn't cower in their rooms like other departments (maybe because it was mostly male). She discovered the joy of the guest speaker – the Leadership Program, which came every Thursday for one period; she had the RAPP lady in, Peer Mediation & Conflict Resolution workshops, anything to get a break.

Amberdawn's principal was a Bronx native, Irish-American, a rebel type who hated politics, but he was never in school because he was always at meetings off-site. When he'd return, he would try to exert his authority in a haphazard and short-tempered manner (much like a father who was always on the road for business). Working in a small school, they had more professional development and staff meetings than she was accustomed to; they didn't meet in departments, but as a whole school, around twenty teachers at a time. Every staff meeting began and ended with comments about "loving students." Teachers were encouraged to share information they had learned about students – "I spoke to George's mother. They entered a homeless shelter on Tuesday. That's why he hasn't had his homework." She had to keep mental files on student's sensitive spots – "Have to be careful with this lesson about mothers with Joseph because his mother died six months ago," or "Esther might have problems with this scene in the book because she was beaten by her stepfather." The intensity of this approach began to leave her numb from emotional overload. During a private meeting with the principal, he suggested that if she wasn't able to give enough of herself to the job, then maybe she would be better off working in a school in the suburbs where "students don't need as much personal attention." Give more of myself? How much more am I going to be expected to give? For the first time, she began to seriously debate quitting.

Sine Labor Nihil – Without work, nothing: Clinton school motto

Spring: Season of Paradox

SO was I really going to quit after the fall semester? I had to decide over Christmas Break. My third year was the first year that I went back to compulsively reading for pleasure – I finally refused to read anything school-related on the train or at home. I found the more the students rebelled against reading and writing, it drove me to seek solace in both activities that much more. I found myself identifying more with the characters I was trying to teach them than with the students themselves. Randle McMurphy and his struggle against Nurse Ratched and the Combine – I could substitute Heinz and Woundwort for Ratched, the system for the Combine... Doomed dreamers like Blanche DuBois, depending on the kindness of strangers, or Jay Gatz: "Can't change the past? Why, of course you can!"

There was no question I had taken the job seriously, perhaps too seriously, but that was because I felt the job deserved to be treated in that fashion. However, I also had to admit by now that, at the age of 36, there were no longer any magical jobs waiting out there for me – so I'd dug in, put my back to the wall, and hung on for dear life because it was teaching, or the abyss. In the end, I decided to stick it out until the end of the year. I'd wanted to do at least three full years, get off probation, so that's what I'd do. There were other reasons I decided to stay one more term: one was the money. I needed the steady income (partially due to alimony), and I didn't want to worry about having to find a job. The other reason came from the writer in me: I wanted to see how the story ended.

I began the spring term teaching five classes of juniors – three Regents, one Honors, and one College Bound. Again, in three separate rooms. All the classes except the Honors class would be taking the Regents exam in June. My directive? Pass them. That Butterball had taken Macy away from me came as a surprise to absolutely no one. However, one of my internal conditions for sticking out one more term was this: Take no more shit from administrators.

My first-week activities had evolved into a getting-to-know you exercise called Classmate Biographies. On the first day, after Delaney cards were dealt out, every student was put in pairs, given a set of sample questions, and told to interview their classmate. Then, the students went home and wrote a 1-page typed biography of their interviewee, and read it aloud in class. To ensure that the students paid attention during the oral presentations, I let them know there would be a quiz on their classmates (the third day of class – day two was assigned seating).

Again, some of the students found this too hard-core – they complained to guidance and directly to Butterball, who in weary ceremony once again called me into her office. "Close the door. Now, is it true that you gave a quiz the first week of school?"

"Absolutely."

"You mind telling me about it? What was this quiz?"

So I explained, and then she said, "Why."

"Why? Why what – why give a quiz?"

"Yes."

I paused for a moment. Was this a trick question? "Because... it's my job?" I ventured.

"I don't think you should be giving quizzes the first week of school. You should be giving them something fun to do."

"I think quizzes are fun. They're part of Clinton's 'covenant of scholarship and honor.'"

"What are you talking about?"

"The 'covenant of scholarship and honor.' You know, in the school mission statement?"

She just stared at me. You can see what a pain in the ass I can be when I really put my mind to it. I thought back to what Charlie told me my first days on the job: If you ever want an administrator to back down over anything, especially something stupid, have them put it in writing. "Let me see if I can get this straight. You don't want me giving quizzes the first week of school because...?"

"You're setting the wrong tone for the term. Kids need to know you care about them."

"Right. That's fine. I just need that in writing."

She made the face you make when you remember cooking sherry's all that's left in the liquor cabinet at home. "Excuse me?"

"I just want it in writing that you ordered me not to give quizzes the first week of school."

She got flustered at this. "I'm not ordering you not to give quizzes, I'm just advising that I think it's a bad idea. The first week of class, I mean."

"Oh, so I should just take it under advisement then?"

"Correct."

"Got it. Consider me advised."

That was the last conversation outside of observations we ever had.

My next step was to go down to Guidance and have a sit-down with the guidance counselor (something I should have done months before), a timid-looking woman in a frock and oversized glasses. Her office was typical of the breed: draped in slogan-heavy posters, a coffee cup with hearts on it. I politely declined to sit down as I explained to her that my supervisor, Ms. Butterball, was a nervous person who didn't like to be bothered. I let her understand that Butterball's nerves had become a matter of concern for me. I put it rather strongly and succinctly that if another problem came up with one of my students, then she was to go through channels and talk to me first before calling Butterball. If she didn't, I told her that she would leave me no choice but to make a formal complaint to the principal about it. As I spoke to this counselor, who was becoming more upset the longer I spoke, I felt a little sorry for her: she was a nice person, nice and gullible, who believed everything she was told by the students. But frankly I was tired of dealing with her soft-headed bullshit. The complaints to Butterball stopped, never to resume.

Next, somebody got the bright idea of putting a hard drive into a shock-proof case in order to play compressed music files, so I bought one to make my commute bearable. Along with the laptop, the iPod was possibly the greatest invention ever. I was able to put in my ear buds and tune out the worst of the noise on the subway car. Another resolution was to get friendlier with some of the staff, who as a rule were far more collegial than those at Windsor, despite my own rectitude. That's when I learned there didn't always have to be a choice in the system between the brain-dead lifers and Fellows; there were a lot of good non-Fellows teachers out there. In fact, a point could be made that the real unsung heroes of the whole sorry DOE were those high-quality veteran teachers who came back year after year. Clinton had a high percentage of these.

I fell in with the pirates, one of whom was the Junior AP teacher, a husky-voiced guy from Arkansas named Jed. He was tall, with a shaven head and big art school geek glasses, and he had a silver tooth (or was it teeth?) that glittered when he smiled. He had been teaching at Clinton for four years, and had an office in the Tower, which was where most of his classes were. According to RateMyTeacher.com, the students considered him one of the coolest teachers in the building. Butterball certainly thought the sun shone out of his ass. He reminded me a bit of Phil Shapiro – he would have fit in great under Charlie. He told me that he had requested me as a co-teacher for AP the following year, but Butterball had said no.

I tried to be something of a help to a couple of the first-year Teaching Fellows, dispensing a little advice here and there when asked. I learned that they had been exhaustively trained in classroom management during their summer training at Lehman College, so perhaps the program was beginning to learn something. This did not help one of the Fellows who had been issued Ramp-Up, however, which was breaking her down. Seemingly nothing could de-fang Ramp-Up. She frequently ended up a shaking, crying mess in the teacher's lounge. "They tell me to go fuck myself!" she wailed. I had to cover my smile. I told her what I had learned – that she was not expected to teach them anything past learning how to behave.

The spring of 2005 became the season of paradoxes (This had been one of my favorite questions when I had taught Cuckoo's Nest: How can something be true even if it didn't happen...?). First, there was the Great Myth of Class Size. One of the salient gripes of teachers is overcrowded classrooms. Granted, this can sometimes be the case. However, I have only ever noticed this to be true in situations where the classes contain reasonably motivated students (such as Macy). Try to grade papers from five classes of 34 students, like Mr. McCourt did. I had to do it with only two, and trust me, it takes a while. Normally, however, wander down the halls of Clinton like your average truant, and look in the classrooms. How many in there, you figure? Twenty? Fifteen? Less? How could this be true – the hallways were absolutely packed between bells. Why then were the classrooms so empty – could it be the teachers? Were they all too tough? I ran into a junior I'd had first semester who had moved to the Bronx from California, one of my better students, a bright kid named Tyler, and he had a class with one of the nicer veteran ladies. He was enjoying her class, he said, because basically it was a tutoring session – most days, he was the only student in there. If she was so nice, why was the class empty? Because most of the students wouldn't hand in any work until near the end of the final marking period and pass anyway.

Clinton was jammed well beyond capacity, so they said – shouldn't every class be overflowing? They weren't, so where were the students? Well, the students were here, alright, in a manner of speaking. They were in the stairwells. In the hallways. In the cafeteria. Up on Jerome Avenue. They were everywhere but class – everywhere, and yet nowhere.

Teachable moment: "Mr. Roston, you are my favorite teacher." Chris B. was a nice kid, a Regents junior, and I liked him (he was, after all, an aspiring rock musician); he was on time every day and was never absent. But this was his second semester in my class and he'd yet to hand in a single assignment. "Then why," I say, "do you not do any work? You're going to end up doing at least an extra year of high school. Maybe more." "Oh, no, I do my work in my other classes. I'm doing fine." This gives me pause. "Then I don't understand. What makes me so special?" "I just hate to read, that's all. I'll take summer school, and next year another English teacher will pass me. You worry too much, Mr. Roston."

I have my lowest overall attendance, and yet would have my highest Regents pass rate (I'd made a promise to my classes at the beginning of the term – those students who stuck it out and did the work would pass the Regents; if they didn't, I would double their money back. "Oh, that's cool. Wait a minute...!" In any case, I kept my promise). By contrast, I had an Honors class with less than a 70% pass rate; I recommended three girls in junior Honors for Senior AP, all of whom turned it down citing that it would be "too much work."

Without Macy parents, Parent-Teacher Night was much better. I'd had my laptop and its files of computerized grades for purposes of irrefutability, and all went smoothly. I had a couple of fun moments, when a few parents dragged a student in front of me: "'Scuse me. You seen this girl before?" "No, I can't say that I have." "Well, she's in your class." "You don't say. Nice to meet you." "Don't worry, she's in big trouble." "Oh, I'm not worried." Another mother sat her son down in front of me and asked, with a withering look at the boy, what the entrance requirements to clown college were. I refrained from giving her Stoker's number at CCNY.

I took the train home with Jed, and we got to chatting. I learned that I had a reputation as one of the toughest teachers in the building; borderline psychotic, in fact. He told me when they'd handed out programs at the beginning of the term, when students saw my name other students started laughing and pointing at the unfortunate victim – "You got Roston? Yo, that nigga is crazy." "Oh, man, nigga – you in trouble now!" "He be mad strict!" Jed told me that one truant told him I was also worthy of respect, because I wasn't afraid to tell students they were wrong in an English class (normally English teachers will semantically bend over backwards to try to make a student's answer relevant or even sensical – I was a big believer in the fact that sometimes answers were just plain wrong). When the train pulled into 125th I bade him a good night and got off to transfer for the 6 train to East 96th – I did this coming home instead of riding express down to 86th – and a middle-aged white woman dressed mostly in black de-trained with me. As I leaned against a column, I noticed that she chose to linger near me on the platform; after a moment she walked over to me. "Excuse me, but are you and your friend teachers?"

What to say? Say yes, and she's going to whip out a Magnum... Ah, what the hell. "Yes."

"Where do you teach?"

"Clinton."

That's when she launched into her own story: she had just come from parent-teacher night at Bronx Science, and none of the teachers she'd spoken to apparently had our spark or lively intelligence (or dashing good looks, I wanted to add). They were mostly drones over there, to hear her tell it. She told me that she'd had to pull little Johnny (or whatever his name was, it got lost in the sound of the arriving 6 train) out of a tony private school after the divorce, a magical place from the sounds of it, the staff laden with PhD's, as we rode the 6 train, me listening to all this wonder (this is New York City, remember, total strangers will do this if you give them the chance), but in any case the long and the short of it was that she wished that little Johnny could've had a person like myself as a teacher. I thanked her for the compliment, but as I got off at 96th Street, what I thought was: Sure you do, lady. First time I'd give little Johnny a 75 you'd be on the phone screaming at my boss to put my head on a pike... But hey, at least I'm not bitter...

The girl handed me the scribbled note, which purported to be from her father. The note claimed that the girl had been kept home with a fever and vomiting. For several weeks. She looked her rested and chubby self, so I guess she'd built in plenty of recovery time. I handed the note back to her. "No dice," I said. She was taken aback. "Whatchoo mean? I was sick! You can call my house! Axe my father!" "You make me call your house, I'll call ACS instead and they can find out why your old man didn't take you to a hospital." She got sullen now that I'd called her bluff. "So how'm I gonna pass?" "You aren't. You're going to summer school. Don't come back." Then there were the students who sat there, not taking notes, never raising their hands, just staring blankly at me. "You want to try and answer this question? Because if you don't say something I swear I'm going to come over there and water you." Oh yes, it was definitely getting to be time to go.

On the day of my last observation with Butterball, I almost put my fist through a window. It was one of the hallway wanderers that nobody did anything about, coming to the classroom windows and look inside like tourists at an aquarium – Look, what are those? Students? Oooh, hey, they've got their books open! Somebody take a picture! The kid pressed his face to the glass and grinned, and I happened to be standing there, so I banged with my fist on the window with the intention of just scaring him off – but there was a crack, and the glass starred. The kid flew back from the window, eyes wide, and took off. My class was totally silent for a moment – then Lance turned to his friend in the next seat and said, "Yo, that shit was hot." There was blood dripping from the side of my fist – I licked it before it became noticeable. The bell rang, the students filing out as Butterball filed in. She looked at the window, the glass ready to fall out of the door. "What happened here?" "Oh, I closed the door too hard by accident." "Well, call a custodian. It's dangerous." While I taught during the observation, word spread like wildfire on the third floor: Yo, Roston busted a window! It seemed like every hallway wanderer in the school had to roll by to take a look at it; some shook their heads, others laughed. But after that day, hallway roamers became scarce around my doors. I didn't like to think what would've happened to me if my fist had gone through the window, covering the little punk with glass splinters. I might have really gotten hurt.

* * *

Teacher: Mr. Roston

Date of Observation: 5/23/05

Date of Post-Observation: 5/23/05

Class: E6ER08 – Period 4

Register: 30

Attendance: 19

Topic: To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Aim: How is the title of To Kill A Mockingbird related to central themes of the novel?

Do Now: Pick something (anything) that you think best represents who you are – an animal, a book, etc. Why did you pick that? What do you think it reveals about you? Explain.

HWK: Journals will be collected tomorrow.

Students began working on the "Do Now," which was written on the board along with the Aim of the lesson. When time was called, Mr. Roston asked for volunteers to discuss their responses. Three students spoke about a particular thing that best represented who they are, why it represents them, and what it reveals about them. They gave interesting answers and thoughtful reasons why they chose this symbol and what it might convey about the type of person they are or what they value, etc.

Mr. Roston made a transition to the function of symbols in literary works and wrote a definition of symbolism on the board. He asked the class, "What is a mockingbird?" Students responded that it was a beautiful songbird. Mr. Roston added that it does no harm and its songs bring pure joy. Students were asked what the mockingbird symbolizes in the novel. Some responses were: kindness, innocence, vulnerability, etc.

In the next stage of the lesson, students opened to p. 235 to read about Tom's death as he tries to break out of prison. Some issues raised were Tom's lack of faith in "white justice," the fact that Tom was shot 17 times, and how the killing of Tom is symbolic of the Jim Crow laws. Mr. Roston then asked the class to write a few sentences to explain why the novel is called To Kill A Mockingbird. Several students discussed their responses. With some assistance from Mr. Roston, students came to understand that the title relates to the injustice of any society that victimizes the innocent.

In the last phase of the lesson, Mr. Roston asked students to reflect on what Harper Lee meant when she said that she considered this novel to be "a simple love story." Students discussed examples of various love relationships in the novel. Mr. Roston ended the lesson by stating that the author's message is that "You have to love everyone." Students wrote the answer to the Aim in their journals.

I would like to make the following commendations:

1. This was a well-planned lesson on symbolism in literature that had a logical progression and incorporated reading and writing activities. You engaged students in a thoughtful, in-depth analysis of the text that was achieved through your higher level questioning techniques.

2. You had students write a response to key questions, which was an effective way to allow students time to think through their answers before the class discussion.

3. You presented the novel in the context of historical events that unfold in the story. This background information is essential to their understanding of the plot and themes in the novel.

During our post-observation conference we discussed the following:

There was a substantial number of absentees. Please continue to call parents and seek the help of guidance counselors to get these students back to class.

This lesson is rated satisfactory.

I didn't like the fact that I'd appeared to dictate the "author's message" singular, but we'd run out of time. It did point out that I still had an annoying habit I still couldn't shake, namely that of sometimes unable to refrain from being Answer Man. Butterball didn't seem to overly mind. After our post-observation conference, I told her I was leaving. To her credit, she tried not to look too relieved. Then, to my surprise, she told me she was retiring; she would be the second AP I'd take with me. In the end, Clinton would have the lowest turnover rate at any school I worked at: only four teachers were leaving, and two others were going to guidance.

I'd tried contacting Charlie the year before, while I'd been at Windsor; we'd always meant to get together for dinner, but between one thing and another it never happened. He was so busy setting up his new school, and me... I don't know, I guess I didn't want to feel dependent on him; I wanted to know that I could make it on my own. But now that I'd made the decision to leave, I wanted to see him one last time. Besides, I'd lost a bet.

Back in the spring of my year at Taft, the day of parent-teacher night, when teachers have hours to kill between their last class and the arrival of the parents (or in the case of Taft, non-arrival of the parents), Charlie had to run down to Columbia Teacher's College to drop off his final paper. He took me along so we could go to dinner, and on the way back to the Bronx we got stuck in traffic. As has been mentioned, I am not by nature a spiritual person, but Charlie of course was soaked in the blood of the lamb. And this is what Charlie and I began to discuss in the car. I said that there was no way we would make it back to school in time. Charlie said we would, and he bet me: If we got back on time, I would have to come one Sunday to his church to see what he was talking about. He stopped short of asking me to admit that returning to Taft on time was proof of God's existence, so I agreed to the wager.

Well, we made it back with time to spare. But I had never gone to church as I had promised. And it seemed like it would be fitting end to whatever this had been. I imagined how it would be: I'd go see Charlie, and he would renew my faith, stir hope within my breast. And we'd go to his church on some Sunday afternoon, sun streaming through the stained glass, listen to the organ thunder, be held in rapture as his minister filled the sacristy with inspirational oratory, and I'd leave on a high note. That would be, as Charlie had often said to close a conversation, the whole banana.

Charlie was a principal now, of course, at one of the new schools in the old Morris High School (again, once one of the preeminent schools in the Bronx and due to be shut down in the spring of 2005) – the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies. Charlie had spent the academic year 2003 – 4 putting the school together. In the fall of 2004, the school had opened for business; one of Charlie's two English teachers was none other than Glen Rogers.

I tracked down the phone number of Charlie's school and called to talk to Principal Osewalt. The big bear growled in pleasure to hear from me – he agreed to meet for dinner at a diner near where I lived.

On a rainy weeknight, I discovered Charlie hadn't changed a bit – rotund, still with his scholar's glasses, his graying beard, his wide smile with his tongue protruding between his teeth. He was dressed in an oversized Giants jersey this time. He ordered a massive plate of the greasiest food they sold. Charlie was disgusted to learn that I had been forced out of Windsor – "I warned you about that guy" – and was sad to learn that I was leaving the system entirely. He wanted to know why – so I told him I had burned out, and described the process.

"I told you, Aaron, it's a marathon, not a sprint. You were obviously working too hard – you needed to ease up. You needed to stop taking it all so seriously, assigning so much work. Look what it's gotten you. The gratitude of your superiors? You used to box, right? How many times you wanna get put on the canvas?"

Then I told him I was writing a book on why my class was leaving the system. "Let me guess what you're finding out: number one reason, lack of administrative support."

"Actually, it's more like an actively hostile administration, but yeah, it's a major factor."

He grinned. "'There is nothing new under the sun.' You remember that Camus essay I gave you, the Myth of Sisyphus? In the end, what did Camus realize?"

"That despite everything, Sisyphus was happy in his work."

"Why?"

"The labor he performed in hell reminded him of his life on earth, and because of that he did not give into despair. He defeated the punishment of the gods."

"Teaching itself has to serve as its own reward, Aaron, and for a lot of people, it's not enough. It's all about the small victories."

Charlie knew whereof he spoke: his new job was getting to him. His new school was supposed to be capped at 108 students, but he had been given 138 instead. In addition, they were all basically criminals, kids who instead of being shipped to Spofford were being sent to him. He was grateful for the opportunity to be the boss, but even he was becoming disillusioned. He was even making vague noises about leaving the system in a couple of years.

"Do you think this small school movement can work?" I asked.

"It can, if it's done right. As it stands now? I don't know."

I was disquieted – this wasn't how I imagined our conversation was going to go. But I told him that I wanted to make good on my bet, which pleased him.

I got the whole church thing wrong too. Charlie's church, the Redeemer Presbyterian Church, did not have a permanent home. Rather, it was more like a traveling meeting that went from location to location all over Manhattan. The Sunday I went to see the service, Redeemer were at the disused First Baptist Church on Broadway and 79th Street (right down the street from the pink neon harp of the Dublin House, an old haunt of mine, the closest to a house of worship I normally ever got, quaffing my communion Guinness). Inside, the church was falling apart, the carpeting old and fraying, the paint fading, and since it was evening service there was no light streaming in through the windows (they looked too dirty to let in light anyway). Around the roof was an inscription from Romans: Burned in Baptism wherein also you are risen with him...

I was surprised to see that the place was packed – I never considered New York a particularly religious place, at least not for Christians. Several members of the congregation were opera singers, and they performed an abridged version of Puccini's La Boheme, using the major arias. As I sat there, listening to the singing, I wanted to have a transcendent experience, feel something profound, receive some sort of epiphany. But I guess you can't will that kind of thing; the service was merely interesting. The preacher got up and gave his sermon, which truth be told wasn't very memorable. I think he was trying to equate the love of God with the love experienced by the bohemians in the opera, but I wasn't really convinced. I found my mind wandering: baptism of fire... Dublin House... I remembered that back at Windsor I'd had fantasies of putting together a school boxing team – they used to have them back in the day. Now there's a movie, I thought. White teacher teaches his ghetto charges to box, brings them to the Gloves... I was told they would never be able to get the insurance... And that's when I realized what part of the trouble was: my story didn't follow the Hollywood storyline. If I'd been through what I'd been through, and then the crusty cynic became a starry-eyed idealist, still teaching in the worst schools, like my old boss, I could've told that story and retired. But it didn't happen. And you can't will that to happen either.

At the end of the evening, out on the sidewalk, Charlie and I hugged. I didn't know what to say to this man, the one person who had taken such an active role in making me a better teacher, who ensured I'd stayed on the job, who had helped keep me sane. "You know, Charlie, when I get a lesson wrong, or miss a teachable moment, it's your voice I hear. Thanks. For everything."

He smiled and hugged me again. "Good luck with the book," he said. "You can even use my name if you want. Think you're still going to teach wherever you're going?"

"I don't know."

"You should. Just take it a bit easier next time, okay?"

I smiled. "Okay. I'll try."

"Love you, man."

"...Me too, Charlie."

And that's the last time I saw him, my Virgil, walking back to his car down Broadway, arm in arm with his wife. Heading back to the good fight. Heading back to the Bronx.

* * *

In the fall of 2005, Mayor Bloomberg was up for re-election. He had wanted to be judged on his handling of the schools, and to that end the DOE and his creature Klein obliged him: they released statistics that showed standardized test scores for grades 3 – 7 were the highest they had been in a decade. Despite the fact that for the most part teachers were responsible for the gains, Bloomberg still refused to negotiate a contract with the UFT without changes to the "work rules" – for instance, he wanted teachers to work an extra period a day. He proposed (if that's the word you use for a take-it-or-leave-it offer) a five-percent pay raise over three years, which was less than a cost-of-living increase. The UFT decided to submit its case for state arbitration (though the arbitration would be non-binding). Instead of threatening a strike, Weingarten squandered money that could have been used for a strike fund by launching a PR campaign on television, trying to state the UFT's case to a public that had no control over whether or not teachers got a contract.

I realized I hadn't received a raise in the three years I'd been on the job – I wondered what employee of Bloomberg News or Bertelsmann AG would still be working under those conditions. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Klein espoused the perfection of the business model as a way of running the DOE. Normally, if a business wants to retain an employee, they offer to pay them more money. But they didn't want to treat teachers like business professionals, like doctors or lawyers. They wanted change, but they weren't interested in paying for it: teachers were the exception to this particular business model.

Rather than filthy lucre, as a token of his esteem, I did get a photocopied memo in my mailbox from the Chancellor, telling me what a good job I was doing (I was on a private mailing list of only 78,000 others). It had all the intimacy and sincerity of a letter from Publisher's Clearing House. And like me, I discovered our Chancellor had a philosophy that involved pillars as well (great minds do think alike, you know). He announced his Three Pillars of Teaching Mediocrity that would were standing in the way of student achievement (and hence a fair contract): seniority, tenure, and "lock-step" pay. To briefly mention that inchoate barometer known as "teacher morale," I never worked in a school where it wasn't at rock-bottom. Teachers' anger over their situation, caught between the DOE and the UFT, stems from powerlessness. Another similarity they share with their charges. Why weren't we going on strike? Everybody knew it was the only language City Hall and the DOE understood...

I also found out through a flyer in my mailbox that Clinton was declared a "Breakthrough School" by the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Their report gushed, "Our initial impression of the school was 'Wow!' Entering the building is like entering a protective cocoon. Then a visitor may go on sensory overload. Energetic adults and engaged students are everywhere." A protective cocoon? Perhaps if you were being escorted around the building by administrators and a security team. The energetic adults they were referring to had to be the deans and security guards, trying futilely to clear the hallways of students "engaged" in their social lives. The disconnect between fantasy and reality amongst administrators turned out to be more profound than even I had imagined – if you want to see something badly enough, then that's what you see (I'm sure they'd say the same of you, Mr. Negative!). As far as breakthroughs went, Clinton was to be declared a SURR school beginning in the fall of 2005 (making it one of the worst in the state); they would be installing metal detectors and surveillance cameras; and they would initiate a 'captive lunch,' meaning students would no longer be allowed to go to Jerome avenue on their free periods. What a breakthrough. The incident and noise level was bound to rise exponentially, and I was glad that I was leaving.

Wasn't I...?

... Now, as then, the school system is strangulated by its own red tape. Now, as then, it is mired in rigidity and befogged by empty rhetoric. Now, as then, teachers are overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated... A recent article in the New York Times speaks of teachers' "monumental frustrations over lack of authority and working conditions." My book could have been written today; perhaps that is why it has endured. – Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase, in her new introduction to the Harper Perennial edition, January 1991(it should also be noted that Bel Kaufman was denied a license to teach in New York City).

The Fellows

LIZ started using computers in the classroom in the spring – they'd always had computer rooms, but it had been more trouble than it was worth to get the class to the room through the hallways, too dangerous. The classrooms were finally wired for hi-speed that worked, so once a week she got the laptop cart and the kids loved it. It was time-consuming to learn, but in the end it was worth it. She used the computers in conjunction with one of the Ramp-Up books, A Family Apart ("Part of the Orphan Train Adventure Series!"). Students hated the book, they thought it was stupid, an Irish family and the orphan trains; but when they used the Internet to do research about the period they actually got into it. It gave them a visual, which was important. The one thing that was good administratively turned out to be the cluster meetings. All the 9th grade teachers in the Law House sat down and talked about the problem students. It was nice to talk and work with other teachers, as opposed to being isolated.

In January, Amberdawn was physically assaulted by an 18-year-old student. Extremely late for class, the student wanted into the room; Amberdawn was standing in the doorway, trying to explain to the student that she needed a late pass, when the student said "Fuck this shit," and forced her way into the classroom, slamming the door into Amberdawn's shoulder and throwing her back from the door. It would turn out that she had a muscle torn in the line of duty. There was a suspension hearing scheduled, one of three Amberdawn would attend at Stevenson. The hearing took place in a room at Regional Headquarters. At one end of a long table sat the person sent from Tweed who acted as judge; a recorder; and the Dean of Security from the school in question. The teacher, Amberdawn, still in her sling, sat across the table from the accused. Procedure is, after the charge is read, the accused and her parent can ask any question of the teacher, but the teacher, who has no representation at the table, cannot ask questions in return. The parent yelled, over and over again, "Why you telling lies on my daughter?" It was like getting assaulted again. The judge, who seemed totally disinterested, said in a bored manner, "That's not a question, that's an accusation. Move on." In the end, the student got a 90-day suspension. Later, at another hearing she had to appear as a witness for the principal, when a student said "I want to stick a broken bottle in your guts and watch you bleed."

As spring wore on, Liz finally ran out of steam. She got really lazy about lesson planning (there was very little need to bother, she cooked something up on the bus), but management never suffered. When the AP and principal visited her Ramp-Up class, they couldn't believe it – seated and working, quiet as mice. Nobody else could do that. "Nice rapport," they said. Third year was also, apparently, the Year of the Lesbian – lots of girls who were lesbians or thinking of becoming lesbians; there was lots of talk about hot lesbian sex. Weird. It was very accepted, completely uncloseted, girls walking down the hall hand-in-hand, nobody made fun of them (no boys would dare). Maybe it was because the girls were finally becoming sick of how useless the boys were? It was true for so many of them: abusive as boyfriends, absent as fathers, unemployably lazy, happy just to hang out on the corner and wait for jail...

Amberdawn noticed that her classroom monologue had solidified in the course of three years: You need to answer question three in a complete sentence... Don't throw paper wads... Sign the late sheet before you sit down... Wow, Erica, this creative writing piece about slavery is amazing. I almost cried at the end... I know you can do better than this. I need you to work up to your potential... Roberto, I know you're upset because Alicia broke up with you, but you need to lift your head up and participate in class like every one else... Yasmine, you need to stop smoking pot before you come to class – you can't focus now...Sit down and stop wasting my time. If you don't care about your education, how can you expect me to...? Neidia, it doesn't matter if all your weaves fell out; how are your weaves going to help you pass this test tomorrow? She had the most trouble with the Black Muslims. One of these girls wouldn't write Miss Collier on the papers, she'd write Miss White Ass Bitch. However, this same student called Amberdawn 'Mom' by accident near the end of the term.

She'd always liked most of her students; she liked it when the kids felt they could come to her with their problems; she liked to bond with them. But after three years, it had gotten harder and harder to do. She watched their lives falling apart right in front of her and she couldn't do anything about it. The student who attacked her stepfather with a butcher knife to keep him from beating her mother. The student whose mother had pushed her hand onto a hot stove. The student whose father raped her. Aside from holding their hands and reporting it, what could you do...? So much of what went on in the classroom was dictated by what the students were feeling at that particular moment – there was very little stability or consistency, especially when what most of them felt was hopeless. There were too many moments on the edge, constant thoughts of: Will I make it? Will I live through this? She got into this terrible place where she started viewing her students as this hostile, faceless mass, "the enemy." When she wasn't in near despair, she found herself becoming more and more confrontational; she didn't like being angry at children all the time. She knew it was time to quit.

* * *

Martin and Amberdawn were living together in Inwood, so I went up there and took Martin out for a beer. Martin had returned to the Belmont school on the Roosevelt campus, teaching 10th and 11th grades, finally getting to teach books that he didn't despise. On the one hand, he was happier than he had been the previous year: it was good to come back to the same place two years running – he knew staff and students, it was nice to see some familiar faces.

"This was the first year I could consider myself 'teaching,' but most of the time was still spent on management. But I changed my management strategy this year: I no longer screamed, yelled, or imposed, I just waited. And it worked, though a lot of time got wasted that way – I felt a little guilty about the few good kids who lost class time as a result. I know Roosevelt's a fucking Impact School, but I didn't notice after it started – the hallways were still pure chaos. We were, however, receiving more Superintendent visits, why I don't know. Shit, I don't even know the fucking Supe's name. The principal, of course, was a total bastard. The staff wanted him killed. Literally. He treated his AP's like recalcitrant students and his teachers even worse. His tone was always accusatory and confrontational.

"My license is expiring, and good fucking riddance. The job really began to get me down. I should be preparing kids for college, but in reality, I'm preparing them for daily living outside of high school: letters, memos, being able to read the paper; in other words, the minimal citizenship requirements. I became ever more irritable and grumpy, more like an old man; I was depressed all the time. I've learned to curse more than I thought was possible. As time went on, I gave less and less of a shit about what I said in class. My mockery of the disruptive students became pronounced. Sometimes curse words would just slip out here and there, and I didn't care. I had a harder and harder time maintaining my professionalism – I mean, who fucking cares? It's not like I was being treated like a professional or anything. Oh, I suppose I might miss the independence of the job, but mostly I'm filled with an enormous sense of relief that it's over."

"Given what you were been put through, why didn't you quit the way some others did?"

"Some days I'm not sure why. I guess it's because I realized that if I did, it would make everything that much worse, both for the kids and the next teacher. This would have made the school itself worse. I didn't want to make it somebody else's problem."

When I saw Bobby, at a corporate coffee shop equidistant from our apartments on the Upper East Side, things seemed to have come full circle. His first child had been born when I first met him, and his second child was born as I was leaving – a daughter, three months old. Robert, as he had promised himself, got out of Roosevelt. He applied for SBO transfers to five schools and interviewed at three. His new school was Eleanor Roosevelt High School (he'd moved from Teddy to Ellie); it was on 76th between 1st and York Aves. The school, also one of the new schools, was like Robert, in its 3rd year. He was a five-minute bike ride to work now. The school held 375 students, up to juniors. Next year they would be adding seniors.

The first difference between the new Roosevelt and the old Roosevelt was the technology: every room had overhead projectors and was wired with high-speed Internet access, there were five carts of brand-new Apple laptops with six LCD projectors (so you could use PowerPoint), and even the boards were electronic – you used a light pen to write on them. He was using DV in his drama class, and next year they'd have Final Cut Express to edit student shorts. He was at a well-run, well-organized school. The student body was much more of a mix. The school was so small they didn't need AP's yet; he was one of only three English teachers.

"So is this it for you? Is this the gig?"

"Yeah, I'm going to stay on as a teacher, this is my permanent gig – but my wages are so low that I'm going to have to tutor on the side. I get per-session for staging shows, currently I'm doing Twelfth Night, but it isn't enough, not with two kids." He took a sip from his coffee. "So, how's the book coming?"

"Slowly."

"Scribble scribble, eh? I brought something you might be able to use. It's a poem about my time at Roosevelt." He took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me.

I unfolded and read it. "You know, I might at that. Thanks."

"No problem. All I want is the credit."

"Ah, you poets and your immortality." We shook hands. "Good luck, Bobby."

"Thanks. And to you. Let me know what happens."

Amberdawn came over for dinner with me and Liz one night, leaving Martin in charge of Dante; she was moving back home to Ohio with them. "Hopefully I'll get to teach English at one of the rural high schools in the area, since they don't usually hire until August. Otherwise, I'm prepared to sub if I have to. Martin doesn't know what he wants to do, so long as it's not teaching – my dad might hire him as a woodworker. I want to go back and get my PhD in English (that's one thing I haven't lost the faith for – books) starting next year. The experience has made me want to get it more than ever."

She found the experience had changed her outlook on life. "I'm asking bigger questions: What is literacy? What is reading? What is necessary to be considered literate in our society?" She chuckled when she remembered how outraged we'd all been that first summer, when the court had said you'd only needed an 8th grade education. "Well, I've got news for you: 'functional literacy' is not such a bad thing. Ideally, of course, we should be reading stories together, they should be engaged and critical, be able to express themselves. When I started, I admittedly tried to teach with a 'political' agenda. Getting them to see television somewhat critically, I felt, was the biggest impact I could possibly have on their lives. But that didn't turn out to be the case: it turned out to be the parts of the job a lot of teachers dislike the most – being a social worker."

"Did you learn anything from the program?"

"The program taught me how to deal with stress, how to deal with people under adverse conditions. But this is the important part: it wasn't a positive experience. It wasn't learned in a positive way. It's like combat, I would imagine, in that sense – you learn a lot about yourself and others, but you're scared all the time... And In the end, I don't want to raise Dante in New York on a two-teacher salary. We pay $800 a month for day care, and $1200 a month for rent. We live paycheck to paycheck, and we don't want to live like that anymore."

"Any parting advice?"

"You cannot rely on anybody to take care of the class but you. To preserve your sanity, leave as much work at work as you can, and don't feel obliged to mother the behavior of students. You are not their parent; you will always lose that battle. Instead of nurturing, stay focused on your professional goals – helping students to become better readers, writers and critical thinkers." Then she laughed. "And use protection!"

We were sipping pints at my Irish local when CJ said he would have done it all over again – a great experience, despite everything. "I learned the most from learning the hardest way there was to learn – I'm a lot tougher for it, I feel I can handle almost any situation now."

CJ was now teaching at MS/HS 141, or The David A. Stein Riverdale-Kingsbridge Academy (a combination middle and high school of about 1200 students, 800 of which were high school). The kids in his new school were primarily from the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx – Latino, Dominican. The kids from Riverdale are 'old-school' Bronx; that is Jews, Irish, and Italians. In the fall he'd had a part-time gig at a Yeshiva, getting paid $100 an hour, but he'd made the mistake of using a car ad in a lesson, one that had a female model showing skin above the knee. One of the students complained, the parents called the school, and CJ was fired.

"A teenage boy complaining about seeing some skin?"

He shrugged. "They're Orthodox."

As for his regular teaching, he had a lot more confidence now, though conversely he still had enormous classroom management problems. "I just can't bring myself to get tough. I'm still too nice. A kid tells me to go fuck myself, which happens almost every day, I forget about it ten minutes later because I get too engrossed in my teaching."

"CJ, you can't let them do that!"

He gave a sheepish smile, and shrugged. "What I consider my strengths as a person become my flaws as a teacher. I have a selective memory. I always remember that these kids come from extenuating circumstances – the ghetto. Maybe I shouldn't. But I have no frame of reference – I was always a good kid, a straight arrow, I knew what to do and what not to do. These kids don't have anyone around to show them that, they don't have much going for them in general. So I can't get tough enough."

He sighed. "And as usual, the administration sucks. We have a very young principal who doesn't support the teachers, merely carries out the whims of the Region." The AP of English, a former teacher at Windsor, as it happened, had picked up her former master's tricks: she lied to the faces of the people in her department, and reported her people to the principal constantly instead of talking to the teachers first. "The school is micromanaged. They treat the staff like crap, like misbehaving students. But even still, and this is the weird part, I find myself totally happy at the end of the day. Next year, I'm considering becoming the literacy coach for the school, and I have designs on becoming an AP (a good one, like Charlie). I'm a planning mentor for the new teachers (though at 28 I'm the youngest teacher in the building). I still spend half my time managing the class, though, so what kind of example am I?"

"A good one, CJ."

He smiled. "Thanks. I have to say I'm very happy with my decision to become a teacher. I could've done things that made more money, that were less stressful, but then again I'm not living at home with my parents like some of my friends still are either. I love the kids, love them: I see the good in them. I have faith they will do well in class eventually, that they are basically good. I'm just not much of a complainer, I guess. I'm proud of myself that I followed through on what I wanted to do, that I was able to stick it out through some pretty tough times.

"As for the system itself, it suffers from a lack of uniformity of vision – no two schools, no two teachers, can agree on the same way to do things. You get 100 doctors in a room with a patient, they'll all diagnose the patient the same, most of them. You get 100 teachers in a room with a student, you'll get 100 different ways to teach the kid."

"Well, wait a second there CJ. The doctor analogy doesn't quite work. You can't 'interpret' a disease. It presents with certain symptoms, so this is what it is, unless it's a misdiagnosis. With doctors, it's right or wrong. Teaching's not like that – that's part of its appeal. As long as you tie it into what the standards are, what's wrong with teaching a different way from somebody else? That's why standardized curriculums are so awful."

He nodded. "Point taken. I guess what I mean is that teachers are too isolated, they need to focus more on collaborative teaching, teamwork, and to attempt some sort of uniformity that makes sense in that particular teaching situation. I'm not talking about that ridiculous Ramp-Up thing – Klein is going about it all wrong. You can't reform the system with no input from the rank and file. And the first step to improve teaching has to be raising the salaries. Given what I have to deal with on a daily basis, the pay is too low comparative to the workload."

In April, Liz was granted five-year doctoral fellowships at both Vanderbilt University and the University of California at Irvine. She chose Vanderbilt, and would be moving to Nashville in July. I would be joining her.

She was pretty easy to interview; I picked the kitchen counter for a location. "While part of me is happy that I'll get to teach college students, it's not the main reason I'm going for my PhD. I crave intellectual stimulation, and I was very surprised how unintellectual the high school experience was – surprised and saddened. As a high school teacher, I was being challenged every way but intellectually, and on a certain level felt I was becoming dumber. I had one 'Hm, that's interesting, I never noticed that' moment in three years.

"I decided that my problem as a teacher is that I have great ideas, but I lack the organizational ability to follow them through – I get too tired halfway through and give up. My class ended up being the best behaved 9th graders, but it took a lot of work to get there. I knew far more about their personal lives than I could deal with; it was nothing I could do anything about, like the student who used a razor blade to cut herself in the lunchroom because she had a physically abusive stepfather. Interestingly, I had more students that I was fond of and who were fond of me my last semester: we all felt like we had gotten through something together. I even spit some rhyme – I performed Sir Mix-A-Lot's 'Baby Got Back' for them, brought in a boombox and everything. It was worth it for the look on their faces alone. During my tenure, I've had one student say I was an inspiration, that I inspired him to become a poet; and my first year, I got a note from a student named Crystal that read 'You're the only teacher who cared what I did.' Those things meant a lot.

"The books I was given to use were designed merely to foster the discussion of issues and introduce certain genres of writing; they had minimal literary value. I don't think you do the students a service by giving them a work like Monster. Catering to students by giving them only what is familiar is wrong. Maybe it's snobbish, or elitist – but you can't only be interested in things that are just like you... The emotional strains of teaching are the toughest – the natural state of these students is anger, and as a teacher you are constantly being made angry; the exhaustion comes from constantly having to suppress yours while they indulge theirs. Becoming tactically angry is physically tiring, but being really really angry is totally draining. I coped with this by turning it into mockery, which isn't the nicest thing in the world sometimes but the only way I could handle it. It's better than going into a rage.

"The worst part of the job, hands down, by a mile, was the administration. I didn't get health insurance for a year. I was never given enough time to hand in grades. The retarded faculty meetings, with the endless sign-in sheets to prevent you from 'getting away with something,' the same idea behind limiting use of the VCR to 20 minutes per class. I hated the hypocritical principal always looking to get the teachers in trouble as a way of deflecting from her own incompetence. The minions from the Region always coming in – I mean, why couldn't we be just left alone to teach? This mania for supervision, everybody trying to justify their own existence as it relates to teaching – it doesn't accomplish anything."

"Parting advice?"

"You can only teach if the management is in place. Rely on 'good planning' by itself and you're fucked. I got more teaching done in the long run because of my management skills despite often being poorly prepared. This was a thought I'd also had, though – as far as management went, were we really teaching them anything? What I mean is, we taught them how to obey us, personally. But they still abused substitutes and other teachers they didn't like or respect. So what exactly did they learn...?"

"Not that you've said that, I have to wonder about it too. Students learned to obey me personally, but even my best classes didn't internalize it as a way to treat all teachers. Do you have any advice for neophytes?"

"If you choose to teach in New York, be aware that things will always be a lot worse than you expect. Be aware that this is a six-day workweek, and could be seven if you allow it. Don't allow it. And while it's not PC to say this, students are stupid in a lot of ways: they refuse to see what's good for them or realize that school is hard work – don't do their work for them. Your job as an English teacher in this system, at the high school level, is to get the students to pass the Regents exam, period. But ideally, in my heart of hearts, I would still like them to get to know 'the other' through literature, something outside their own narrow experience, so that they can learn to care about others and make a better world."

"Any last thoughts?"

She smiled sadly. "The Winter's Tale: Exit, pursued by bear."
We have met the enemy, and he is us. – Walt Kelly

What's In A Name, Part II

I had an unusual experience in Riverside Park just before I left New York. I was sitting on a park bench by the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, reading (of course), when I heard, "Yo, that bitch best get my name out her mouth." "She a mad hater." "True that." I looked up and saw two white girls in private school uniforms. I thought: Huh. Cultural diffusion. Then the smile passed from my face and I got angry. I thought: You haven't earned the right to speak like that. Liz told me she felt the same taking the 96th Street cross town bus – students from one of the fanciest private schools in the city used this bus. They were incredibly rude and obnoxious, and made a big show of talking ghetto. She thought: If I could just bring a couple of kids from one of my classes with me, have them stomp the living shit out of these spoiled white punks. That'd give them a real taste of what it's all about. See how they like it...True that.

That's when I realized it was merely another paradox: ghetto kids considered education a form of "acting white," while at the same time their "ghetto fabulous" behavior was adopted because it impressed white kids. This attitude gave the ghetto kids a feeling of empowerment, when it reality it was exactly the opposite – it was not a case of cultural diffusion so much as it was one of cultural blowback.

* * *

The final paradox: despite being a burnt-out case, I also had my best class in three years, my College Bound juniors class. I wish I could tell you there was something magical or special about the reason for this, that it was due to my incredible skills as a teacher. But it wasn't anything sexier than fertile ground. It was merely 28 well-behaved teenagers who came to class every day on time, having done the work (well, most of them), who were eager to learn something, and knew that for the most part I could deliver the goods. A prime example would be Atanu, from Bangladesh, who had been in the country less than two years and here I was recommending him for AP English in his senior year (which he accepted with alacrity). When he heard I was leaving, he asked me to write a college recommendation letter for him, the only one I'd ever get to write. He didn't believe me when I told him I'd never written one before. "Why ever not?" he asked. "Kid," I said with a laugh, "I could write a book."

It was in this class that I found myself standing on a chair to make a point, and I found to my bemusement that I flashed on Dead Poets Society. So, students who did all the work for the semester ended up writing 100 pages in their journals. Since I could not control the insanity that occurred in the hallways, which proved among other things a major distraction during exams, I made a point of grading their journals in class while they took their tests. No matter how noisy it got in the hallway, I made a point of calmly doing my own work; this modeling provided the focus they needed to finish. 26 out of 28 would pass the Regents, most of them with a score over 75 (as I'd promised). And I'd gone to City College and received my official state teaching certification – my Transitional B transitioned – and so I'd gotten what I'd come for. Hadn't I...?

On the last day of class, we had a bullshit session, and I missed my last Teachable Moment. I wished instead of just letting them hang out I had given them one more in-class writing assignment (what a way it would've been to solidify my rep – "Yo, Roston gave an assignment on the last day of class!"), spending five or ten minutes describing the most memorable moment in the class this term. It didn't have to be academic, it didn't even have to be positive – you could vent if you wanted to (politely, of course). But I didn't. Like so many other times as a teacher, I didn't think of it until much later.

"Yo, Mistuh Roston be O.G..."

"No, I'm O.T."

"O.T.? What's that?"

"Original Teacher."

"Aww, nah, nah..."

"Yo, Mistuh Roston, why you become a teacher?

"Condition of my parole. It was this or the Army."

"Nah, nah..."

"Yo, Mistuh Roston, what's your first name?"

"I told you, it's Mister."

"Aww, come on, Mistuh Roston."

This, my last day of teaching school in the Bronx, was a beautiful June day; it hadn't gotten hot yet, and the tall windows in the classroom showed nothing but clear blue sky. Was this, the light streaming in, the cathedral that I had dreamed about all along? Was it time for one last sermon, maybe something that related to my own experience when I had been a high school student...? The only sermon I could think of from those days began: Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called Life. An electric word, Life, it means forever, and that's a mighty long time... So did I go out as I came in? Well, who on earth could do that? And after all, what was in a name?

"My name? ...It's Aaron."

Those who do not pass history are condemned to repeat it. – Old high school proverb

Epilogue: The Lesson of Fire

I don't know what you know about the American West, with its mountains and prairies and all, but it's big. Really big. And back in the late 40's, it was even bigger than it is now. This was about the time when the Forest Service felt it needed to find a way to put out wilderness fires before they raged out of control and burned millions of acres. Problem was, the Forest Service was small, and the West, well, as has been noted, the West was pretty damn large. Not to mention the fact that when a fire did break out on some hilltop or canyon in the middle of nowhere, it was almost impossible to get to, let alone quickly. That's when somebody thought of putting a group of brave and vigorous young men into a C-47 Dakota, dropping them by parachute right near the fire, and getting them to put it out before it had a chance to spread. Thus the Smokejumpers were born. I'd like to think my group of Fellows had some measure of that kind of grit. However, there is one thing I think I should mention: On August 5th, 1949, lightning began a brush fire in a Montana canyon named Mann Gulch; the Forest Service dropped 16 Smokejumpers there. While digging in to fight the fire, the wind shifted in a treacherous and unforeseen manner and 13 of the Smokejumpers were incinerated.

* * *

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said, "The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons." I think it's just as revealing to look at its public schools (though it's true that while all societies have prisons, they don't all have public school systems). While prisons exist merely to maintain a reasonable society, public schools are funded by a society that is interested in improving the status quo – it stems from an idea that all citizens can and should be made informed, literate, and critical participants in their own governance. The underlying assumption of public education is that it is only in this manner that society can evolve and in turn render prisons obsolete. This is doubly true in the case of high-needs at-risk populations, which leads to a further question: what is society's duty to its poorest, least-advantaged citizens? Thus, public education often attracts the passionate, the altruist. My class of Fellows surely proved this to be true. But I think it is unwise to rely on this attitude, as we have for decades, to revitalize the teaching profession, especially in the schools that need them the most – altruists all too often crash and burn out. By the fall of 2006, the achievement gap that NCLB was supposed to start closing had barely budged. It's an issue that is far more complex than teacher accountability.

Despite its faults, I was proud to be a member of the Teaching Fellows program; I even use their key chain (conversely, I was often embarrassed, and sometimes even ashamed, to admit I was part of the DOE and the UFT). One of its primary accomplishments was fostering a sense of esprit de corps, being a member of an elite unit, which goes a long way to helping morale and self-respect. I was also fiercely proud to have been a public school teacher in the Bronx, and proud of my accomplishments, however few or dubious, as I was proud of some of my students in their persistence in the face of enormous odds. The cocktail party mileage you can get out of such an experience is, however, ambiguous in nature. "What was that like?" is a fairly common question; you find yourself, not puffing up, but rather retreating into laconic generalities. After all, how could they possibly understand unless they had been there? Where did you begin...? "Tough" is the best I've been able to manage so far.

The Fellows program began as a "quick fix," or a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. Now, 10% of the current teaching force consists of Fellows, but around half will have quit before their fifth year. From 2001 to 2004, the DOE had to replace some 20,000 teachers. In less than five years, they'll have to replace some 10,000 of those replacements. What is the Department of Education doing about this situation? In the fall of 2003 the DOE established an Office of New Teachers, in which all first-year teachers were to be mentored in groups of 17. They claim success in reducing the first year attrition rate. However, losing first-year teachers isn't the real problem – for the most part, first-year teachers don't know very much and are more easily replaced. Losing third, fourth, or fifth year teachers is a disaster – the teachers who know their way around, who finally know their stuff. And just as they are getting good at their job, they take their talents elsewhere or leave the profession entirely.

With regards to teacher retention, the best the DOE can come up with is the "standard curriculum." With a standardized curriculum, new teachers can merely be fitted into the system as old ones leave like so many cogs, without an interruption of continuity. That's part of the theory, anyway. The other part of the theory is that it installs a "floor" to ostensibly prevent atrocious teaching. It's what sound engineers call compression – the thing about compression is, it doesn't just cut out the lows, it cuts out the highs. Mostly what the curriculum does is install a "ceiling" instead, stifling innovation, independence, and creativity (three of the main reasons to do the job). However, at bottom the motivation for all this is monetary: First-year teachers are cheap.

It's true that the UFT must reform – it is every bit as moribund as the DOE. A good example would be the issue of teacher seniority. Why do all the worst classes go to the teachers least equipped to handle them? If you teach an AP class, you should have to balance that with teaching a Ramp-Up class. But this, as it's important to note, is never going to happen. The union will do nothing of major import until there is movement from the other side. The union is a reactive, not a proactive, organization (though a necessary one, in the end, if for no other reason than to stand in the way of administrative predations done in the guise of reform). It's fair to say that in this adversarial atmosphere, both organizations richly deserve each other, in the same manner that two scorpions fighting in a pit do.

And it's hard to work for a company that doesn't like you. This, in a nutshell, is the DOE attitude towards its teachers: We don't care what you think about anything. We don't believe you possess professional judgment of any kind – ergo, we have to treat you like a recalcitrant child. You are expendable – you are nothing but a cog in our machine, interchangeable, like a ball bearing. Do what we order you to do so that our numbers look good – if you don't, we'll make your life hell. We want you to work as long and hard as possible for the least amount of money we can possibly provide. This attitude is one of the prime reasons that make it impossible to retain many of the best people who make the system run, the teachers; the salient irony is that massive teacher attrition affects one group more than any other: the students themselves. If teaching is to be held accountable for student achievement based on test scores, how can test results be maintained over the long haul in a system that treats good teachers the way it does? Currently, they're on track to doing nothing more than shuttling new teachers through in two or three-year tours. It would seem impossible for the DOE to improve their beloved numbers over the long haul.

One last statistic: Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City in Westchester County, is one of the best school systems in the country. Their test results are consistently high over a long period of time, without the wild fluctuations that occur in the city itself. They have an 82% five-year teacher retention rate to the city's 54%. The median salary in Scarsdale for teachers, in the fall of 2005, was $90,000. New York City's? $47,000. In 2005, a book was published called Teachers Have It Easy, a policy book that argues the solution to the teaching crisis lies primarily in dramatically pumping up teacher's salaries. The argument has some merit, since in America salary also translates into status (remember Gatsby...?), something that public school teachers sorely lack. However, I don't believe that salary alone is the magic bullet. My discontent, for instance, did not have its origins in money.

* * *

I wish I could tell you that Principal Woundwort was an exception, but alas, he is the rule: petty tyrants abound. There was one question about principals I was left with: what suddenly occurred that principals in high school, who are required to observe all teachers in their schools, are now experts in every field of endeavor? This is a result of one of the many things that the DOE and the UFT have in common – they're both run by grammar school people (Deputy Chancellor Carmen Farina used to teach 4th grade – I know, I was there). In grammar school, where teachers are required to know a little about a lot of subjects, principals can observe every teacher and know what they're talking about. In high school, teachers are required to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject; I only had one principal admit that she didn't know much about English teaching. I have no idea if Heinz ever taught anything. Woundwort was, once upon a time, apparently a Spanish teacher. The primary feedback came from the AP's, with principals chiming in to shape the observation for ratings purposes.

It would seem to me that principals need to focus on their true job – being administrators, that is administering the day-to-day running of the school. This is something that Woundwort was excellent at; it's something that Heinz and D'Ambrosio were not. Principals in high school need to be relieved of observation duties, and the responsibility of Ratings Officer should devolve to the Assistant Principals of the respective departments, who ostensibly know their subjects. This way, you could also streamline the bureaucracy by eliminating the position of APO. But you know what? That is never going to happen.

In the end, I was left with nothing more than this: You can teach without principals, but you can't teach without principles.

Are the lamps being re-lit in the Bronx, thanks to the small schools movement? Nothing would make me happier than to be able to say it's all in the past; thank god it's not like this anymore; this was the last gasp of the bad old days before the glorious Renaissance that is the new public schools system in New York City. I am certainly not here to defend a system that was, in many ways, so obviously a disgrace. However, I'm not an optimist by nature. In 2006, the DOE initiated a report card system for every school to increase accountability, but its grades are often controversial. And the DOE sent out satisfaction surveys to parents, teachers, and administrators in 2007 and 2008. While not enough people responded in 2007 for clear results, the 2008 surveys were overwhelmingly positive. So maybe they're starting to do something right. When the Smokejumpers died in Mann Gulch on that windblown August day in 1949, their sacrifice ended up serving a purpose: the Forest Service began to rethink their fire fighting methods, and they came to understand they didn't have to put out every fire, that controlled burning was actually good for the forests. Perhaps that is the purpose I and my colleagues in 5CC10 can aspire to. The message to new teachers should be clear: You are expendable. Be okay with that if you want to be a teacher. That doesn't mean you have to go quietly, however.

The system claims it wants to recruit the "Brightest," but in my experience, the system doesn't want the "Brightest" at all. The DOE is threatened by the "Brightest," and feels that instead of cultivating them they must intimidate them to keep them from stirring up trouble. Those who survive, who thrive, like CJ and Robert, are those who love the job enough to put up with the horrors of the system and the misbehavior of the students. It's not sexy, and for that reason will never be adopted, but this is the real recruiting motto of the Department of Education: "Become a New York City Teacher – Join Those Who Can Put Up With It!"

My students knew where I stood: no bullshit. And on a certain level, I think most kids respected that; they knew, if nothing else, that my class was the place where complaints and excuses went to die. And I always assumed the potential for excellence, not the other way around. And while some may not have enjoyed that approach, I feel those who passed or did well in my class will take a perverse pride in having had me as a teacher. "You think that guy's tough? Yo, I had Roston. You don't know what tough is."

While I did often fancy myself Gary Cooper in High Noon, I made mistakes, a lot of them. Regrets? Sure, I've had my share. But given the situations I was placed in, I don't know how I could have handled it any differently. Given my circumstances, and my personality, I don't think I could have done it any other way; I would have had to be a different person. If I'd gotten a chance to relax into a school for two consecutive years, if I'd had the same program two consecutive terms, who knows? But I never got my feet under me, and I resolved first and foremost to survive intact as a person and a teacher – therefore I had to adopt a certain rigidity for my own protection, since I saw what was happening to so many others. If I'd come back for a fourth year, I would've taken Charlie's advice, loosened up more, not expected so much or done so much.

Adults, like students, want to be given answers to tough questions instead of working them out, thus there are those who will continue to serve as teachers in the inner city, despite the way they are run, for all manner of reasons – the impulse is still noble. There's a possibility that their experience will be quite the opposite of the experiences that are portrayed – it happens. But for those who might need a helping hand in the middle of the night – Am I normal? Am I a bad teacher? A bad person...? – I've enclosed the advice my colleagues and I can provide to new teachers.

No supervisor ever asked me what I thought about anything, ever, and no supervisor ever will. But, what would I say to the Chancellor on the truly nonexistent chance he asked me, a teacher, what I thought should be done? I'd tell him that one of my favorite teaching tools was the parable.

Chancellor, I'd say, while I'm only a casual student of the Greek classics, my favorite Greek school of thought is not the Stoics; it's that of the Cynics. The Cynics held that the ills of civilization stem from the fact the desires engendered by civilization itself are artificial (i.e. the need for a new car or designer clothes), and should be held in contempt; they advocated self-sufficiency and the return to a simple, natural life. Adherents, I should mention, were renowned for both their eccentricity and their insolence. Anyway, the head of this school was one Diogenes of Sinope, a scholar and philosopher renowned for undertaking a special quest. He wandered the hills and pathways of ancient Greece with a lantern, where he would shine its light into the faces of those he met, searching for one truly honest man. He never found him, and retired permanently to an outdoor bathtub. However, it was assumed he must have learned something of value – the conqueror Alexander the Great heard about Diogenes, and wanted to consult with such a wise man and drink from his well of knowledge. So Alexander set off, and after a long journey found the philosopher in his bath. "Tell me, master," implored the tired and dusty young general, his form silhouetted by the setting sun. "Share with me the wisdom you acquired in your travels!" Squinting up at him, Diogenes replied "You're standing in my light."

Here endeth the lesson.

CODA

Nashville Skyline

The past is never dead. It's not even past. – William Faulkner

THE movie term "inspired by a true story" is meant to simultaneously legitimize the events portrayed (this really happened!) while indemnifying the filmmakers against playing footsie with the facts (sort of!). Case in point, the Antonio Banderas vehicle Take the Lead, released in the spring of 2006. "Inspired by a true story," it purported to be based on a real-life dance instructor Pierre Dulaine, who taught ballroom dancing in a New York inner-city elementary school (which was the subject of the previous year's documentary "Mad Hot Ballroom"). The filmmakers of Take the Lead felt the need to transpose the story to a crumbling Harlem high school (situated in Toronto). Enter Antonio Banderas as Dulaine's stand-in, a dance teacher who volunteers to help the school's most problematic students, those in after-school detention. Of course, since real troubled students don't attend after-school tutoring, the idea of after-school detention in an actual Harlem high school would have caused hysterics (since there would be no consequences for you if you didn't go). In real life, Antonio Banderas wouldn't have a single student to teach.

Take the Lead had a lot in common with 2001's Music of the Heart (also "inspired by a true story," in which a recent divorcee played by Meryl Streep teaches violin in a crumbling New York City public school and – Christ). In these two movies, it is not the principal who is the bad guy (which makes it a fantasy right there). No, the villain in both these movies, who don't think the kids should be taught violin or to "cha-cha-cha" in the face of their poverty, are subject teachers. In Music of the Heart, the naysayer is an English teacher. In Take the Lead, it's a math teacher; with his glasses and beatnik beard and concern for the kids who are scoring in the 96th percentile, he is a heretical apostate: he doesn't believe in the troublemakers.

Does learning to dance turn the kids around in Take the Lead? Of course – the formula has to come out right. But in the movie's one surprise, Antonio Banderas never has a doubt or a soul-searching moment – he leaves the climactic school dance competition in triumph, ready to return. The tagline for Take the Lead was "Never follow." The irony in ballroom dancing, however, is that if no one follows, you can't perform the dance. Or put another way, you get left behind.

Mike Abernethy is finishing his sixth year teaching in Maine – he teaches Advanced Placement English now. In a pointed rebuke to the system that screwed him over, he was named his school's Teacher of the Year in 2007. Amberdawn Collier-Brooks was a substitute teacher in Ohio and wrote a romance novel. She now works in the county clerk's office. Martin Brooks is now a Chillicothe sheriff's deputy.

As for me, life's a funny old thing, so the old saw says. I sure never thought I would be in the basement of the head of the English Department of Vanderbilt University, looking at his library while it was my girlfriend who schmoozed away, cocktail in hand, at a faculty party. Imagine. Me, the eye candy. I found it was nice to hear the crickets at night; I even debated raising a few chickens.

Around December of 2005, as I put the finishing touches on an early draft of this book, I began missing Clinton High School. I was perplexed, until I found a similar feeling in memoirs by combat veterans (still the history buff, looking for ideas). The war, no matter which one it was, might be a sham and a waste, but when these men were home on leave, they wanted to go back; they could no longer relate to the civilians at home, who had no idea about what was really happening over there. I thought of those students of mine back in the Bronx, shivering metaphorically in the muck and the mire, and while part of me still thought it'd be hopeless, part of me still wanted to go back and try to lead them over the top. Just when you think you know a guy... So, full of rosy nostalgia, I decided to go back to teaching in Nashville a semester earlier than I had planned.

Unfortunately, what I didn't know, because I'm only a casual Classics student, is that the original use of nostalgia was once a diagnosis for a serious medical condition – a type of brain disorder.

Now certified (and "highly qualified" to boot – a requirement of NCLB – though there were plenty of ways to squirm around what that meant if you were a veteran), I got a job teaching in one of the worst high schools in town, Maplewood Comprehensive (I learned all the comprehensive schools, that is non-magnet, are terrible – this in a town that just built a $150 million symphony space; Tennessee has no income tax). Maplewood, in heavily black East Nashville, was on the Tennessee equivalent of the SURR list, a school so awful that the state was about to take it over (which it did in the fall of 2007) – though given that Tennessee ranks 50th in the nation in public school funding, it's hard to see what good that was going to do.

I was given 5 classes of 9th grade, who had been taught by a black woman who had been from the 'hood, talked street, and who gave almost no work. The single teaching resource I was given, a dog-eared anthology, was awful. I could barely understand the Nashville dialect of the students – what I did understand turned out to be mostly abuse. The day after the principal hired me with much fanfare – wow, a teacher from the Bronx! – and after being given another speech about "special children," I never saw him again. On the plus side I did have a working phone that could even dial out, and a working computer with Internet. Also, still without television, this was my first exposure to students wearing "the grill" – a set of false gold teeth affixed to the uppers.

I had first period planning, meaning that I taught second through sixth period with a single 20-minute lunch break. There were no hallway deans doing patrol, despite the school gang problem. The major surprise was that when you wrote a referral for a student (which I did several times a day, usually the same students, to the complaints of the 9th grade office, to which I paid no attention whatsoever) they actually went to the office unescorted most of the time. The students' favorite expression, especially after I wrote them up, was a weary, contemptuous "What's the point?" Subtext: Why are you bothering? Nothing's going to happen to us. I said, "The point is, it doesn't matter whether anything happens to you. I take it for granted nothing will. However, and this is important, you won't be back in this room until tomorrow."

When report cards needed to be done, I was pulled aside by a teacher to warn me not to fail too many students. However, the administration had a way of helping ensure this: for every student that was failed, a teacher had to write what was known as a "failure report;" that is you would have to explain in detail why that student failed and exactly what pedagogical steps were being taken to rectify the situation. Merely stating that the student would not do the work, which was true in every single case, was not considered sufficient. I failed most of the students anyway, and as predicted it got their attention. I had no intention of writing up reports to the administration explaining why.

But one day, as I stood in my class doorway watching a showdown between Crips and Bloods take place in the hallway, and the teacher across the hall complimented me by saying she'd never seen those classes sitting in their seats doing work before, it all seemed so horribly, dreadfully familiar; and I realized my heart wasn't in it anymore. I knew I was in trouble when I nearly wept upon getting unlooked-for two snow days (in Nashville, if there's a forecast for a snowflake or two, people scurry home to fill their bathtubs). Finally, a gang member threatened to beat me up because I made him stop text-messaging his gang buddies in another classroom, something that had never happened in New York; as he stood up and whipped out his colors, throwing signs at me, and telling me to "Come on, come on, Bronx mothahfuckah!" I thought: I'm either going to deck this shithead, or I'm going to quit. The next day I went to the AP's office (the first time I formally met her) and gave my notice. I'd made it six weeks. I think part of the problem stemmed from the fact that I was even more of an alien in Nashville – I didn't feel the sense of connection I did as a New Yorker with my Bronx students, however tenuous.

After that, I was a substitute in Metro, and in three local private schools. That was definitely an experience of a different order. First of all, you can't refer to private schools as "private" schools – they like to be known as "independent" schools; that is, presumably, independent of outside interference (and that saying "private" smacks of exclusion). They are of course merely "independent" of people without the money to attend. The schools, unsurprisingly, were beautiful, their facilities lavish – one of them even had a class called Rock Band – and the students were polite, respectful, and after they got to know me, even glad to see me when I showed up. I would look out at these clusters of white faces, sense my relief, and feel vaguely unclean. The current President has a pet project involving school vouchers, using public money to allow poor students to attend private – sorry, I mean independent – schools, but these schools are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Substitute teaching, however, was basically babysitting, something I never liked, and you were paid accordingly (and independent schools pay thirty to fifty per cent less what Metro does for them). Luckily, Liz and I had a son, Nicolas, who was born in July of 2006 (a refutation to that occasional student who'd ask me if I had kids, and when I said no, would say with a grin, gesturing to an unruly class, "You'll never want 'em after this, right?"). I decided that a) I didn't want to return to teaching in the fall, and b) we didn't want to send Nicolas to daycare his first year. I became a bartender so I could work at night; I was a daytime babysitter while Liz attended class, but this time I didn't mind. I even learned how to grill in our backyard properly.

I continued to think about my students back in New York, el Bronx remembered: the kids I liked (more than I realized at the time), the ones I was sure would be successful, and others that I hoped would be. But at night, I still had teaching dreams. Sometimes they were nightmares: the kid tells me he won't work and he's misbehaving because his cousin got shot in the face, and I say what do you want me to do, stop giving homework? It was in my sleep that I could see the kids most clearly I couldn't reach, the ones that slipped away. Could I have reached out more? Was there something else I could have done...? In my dreams it is these kids that are finally listening to me: I'm teaching, I'm reaching... and then I wake up.

But if a story aspires to a kind of inspiration, something should die and be reborn. When my son was ready for daycare, my nightmares stopped (though I still occasionally have to stop myself from saying "Take that hat off!" to kids in the mall). And I went back to teaching. I accepted a position at Tennessee State University, teaching Developmental Writing (a euphemism for remediation meant to take the sting out of the term – it doesn't). An HBCU (Historically Black College or University), TSU is a land-grant college founded in 1912 in a desperate attempt to rectify gross educational inequities in the Jim Crow South. It's evolved from a school with a concentration in agriculture to an open admissions university that caters primarily to inner-city kids who would be known as at-risk if they were still back in high school. These are the ones who made it out, and TSU still has a six-year graduation rate of only 45%, so you can imagine the dropout figures. They're still at-risk. The school claims that their enrollment is 22% white, but in the fall I taught some 104 students: 2 of them were white. The rest were historically black. However, I did create the school boxing team, and I'm both the faculty advisor and the head coach. Call it "The Return of El Blanco." I harbor fantasies of taking my rag-tag group of oddballs to the collegiate boxing championships in Reno, Nevada. I've traded one myth for another; the new movie I'm living isn't a teaching movie about a Hero Teacher: it's Rocky. But then, perhaps they aren't that different after all.

Nashville 2007

APPENDIX

From Master's Thesis Entitled The Professional English Teacher: The Troubled Intersection of Teaching English and Nurturing Students by Amberdawn Collier, 5CC10, May 2005:

...We are now in an educational era where the majority of people believe you must engage a student's heart before you can engage her mind... [so] my extreme emotional investment in my students and their growing attachment to me was praised by all the teachers and administrators around me. Even though I arrived home at four in the afternoon only to collapse on my bed and nap until seven or eight. When I returned to a group of 90 students after giving birth to my son, I had the epiphany: I was not expected to be a teacher in my inner city high-needs school. For all the masking talk of standards, motivations, and mini-lessons, my true job was to be a surrogate mother to angry, troubled teens...

When I was spending time nurturing the minds of students, acting as a mentor, a more knowledgeable human guiding a younger human through the intricacies of language and emotion, I was at my best as a teacher. The bitterness, negativity and impatience settled in when I was required to take the place of a mother disciplining her child. The lessons where I felt frustrated were the ones where I spent most of my class time teaching students appropriate behavior and scolding them in a motherly fashion about respecting others' personal space. In classes such as these, I could not focus on student work because student behavior prevented it. I resented having to deal with classroom behavior issues that I felt should have been resolved in fifth or sixth grade. It was appalling to me that sixteen year olds could think it was in any way appropriate to run around a classroom with another student's book bag, or to throw textbooks out of windows...

Caught in this emotional hurricane, and truly wanting to help my students, it was easy to lose sight of what my job was – to teach them to be better writers, readers, and critical thinkers. I was reminded of this goal when I figured student grades. The students in the classes where I spent less time nurturing student work had much lower grades than those in classes where I was able to respond in a nurturing, mentor-like way to student work. In the end, I made a concerted effort to spend more time on student work, to ignore as much minor behavioral issues as I could without jeopardizing my control of the classroom. This has improved my attitude toward my classes, and I am relaxed and more responsive to my students...

Responding in a positive, emotional way to student risk-taking in creative writing, journals and oral presentations is helpful. Even something as small as a teacher's appreciative smile as she reads over a student's shoulder is an encouragement – perhaps the only kind personal interaction that student may have for the whole day. This is not to imply that we English teachers are responsible for the emotional well-being of our students. Yet, in order to reach our goal of helping students to become better readers and writers, we will explore emotional topics with students, and when we do, we must be prepared to give of ourselves when students so obviously give of themselves. This giving, however, must focus on student work if it is to help them.

"Not Doing Anything"

By Robert Gladding, 5CC10

I didn't do anything

all I did was talk about jock itch and head and everyone's mama

I didn't do anything

except put Joel in a headlock, go in and out both the front and back classroom doors 8 ½ times in 10 minutes, tackle Waldimer when he came in from the bathroom, sing, make spitting noises, circle the room five times, and threaten to kill Mr. Gladding.

I didn't do anything

except bear hug and chest butt Mr. Ralston saying 'oh yeah you did me a favor' laugh hysterically five times, say 'yo you ugly' and try out three different desks for 30 seconds, tell Davin he smell like old onions then write his name on the board with the word 'STINK,' take Angelica's notebook, sign the bathroom pass out for a half hour and kick it down the hall like a hockey puck, come back and hump the independent reading library, say 'you stink' and 'ugly' and 'ew' and 'mad grimy' a hundred times a day, curl up my nose and smirk, scowl, then sing falsetto rap again for a half-hour straight about anything that came into my mind, sit by an open window and call out to people, without ever opening a book or ever using a pen all day long.

See, I didn't do anything

but get everyone's goat all day long every day

like it was a professional calling

you got a goat I can get

cause I'll get that goat

and I'll do it

without doing anything

Yo, get out of my face

I'll take you, yo

Yo, this fuckers dead

I didn't say that

He got your back

I didn't do that

My dad, sister, niece and aunt and great aunt are cops

So I'm not stressing

go ahead, write it up

Yeah Yo, Yeah

Hard to hold in a room

He's back in class

What are you gonna do with him?

Passed him on, dropped the case

I don't know

We're working on it

Doing all we can do

Yeah Yo

An e-mail from Lincoln, Maine – May, 2006:

I have to finish my certification by taking some awful course called "Teaching the Exceptional Child in the Regular Classroom", not "Teaching the Exceptionally Retarded Child" or "Teaching the Drooling Howler Monkeys" or "These are the kids that pick their noses and throw poo" so I'm already pissed due to false advertising. I have to take two Praxis exams, including one for teaching practices. The good news here is I don't have to get any minimum score on that exam if I take it this year (the state hasn't decided on one yet), so all of my answers can be "Don't touch little boys where they pee" and "Keep fingers out small girls' buh-ginas."

Some notes about the class:

1. Teaching seems to attract a greater number of dumbasses than any other profession. Not just stupid, but clueless, naive, oblivious, misguided, or just plain out of touch. You had a kid show up to class stoned? I am shocked! Shocked!

2. People who are genuinely excited about children's literature are morons. One of the few good things about teaching English is talking about books that are actually worth a shit. Why you would get a chubby for something called Alexander McPoopypants' Super-Awful Terrible No-Good Day at the Spooky-tastic Ice Cream Fun Factory is beyond me. Just the awkward multi-cultural shoehorning in these books is cringe-worthy. Thank you, condescending author for giving Alexander a Native American friend named Quetzl/Patty who is only in the book so children can learn how the fucking Navajo made Chunky Monkey out of maize (you call it corn). Furthermore, how much literary merit can a genre have when every celeb from John Lithgow to Dick Cheney to Pia Zadora seems to fart out a kid's book every two weeks? I mean, come on – the title of the fucking book generally has more words than the actual text.

3. Old 60's relic hippie ladies who wear chunky third world earrings and clothes made out of burlap should be hit in the face with a fucking axe handle. Nothing like a fine piece of hickory.

4. All art teachers are exactly the same: Overall-wearers who think they're superpopular with the kids because they're the faculty "rebels". You know, because they have the Philco boombox in their classroom and occasionally play Joni Mitchell at a louder than background music level. They don't care what the rules are, because it just interferes with creativity! And the kids can't do that perspective drawing of the road going off into nowhere if their creativity is stifled! I'd like to see the reactions of any of these Jane Deans if they heard Mr. Roston tell a kid that his mom sucks the glass dick or Mr. Abernethy tell a lad that he'll be destined to toss some guy's salad in a bus station john if he doesn't listen to what Heart of Darkness is about.

I think we have less than 30 days left. School needs to end.

Mike
ENGLISH CLASS AGREEMENT: MR. ROSTON

# [Used beginning spring 2004]

This is an agreement between myself (the student), and the teacher, hereafter referred to as Mr. Roston.

  1. RESPECT: I understand that I am to address the teacher as Mr. Roston, NEVER 'Mistuh.' He takes the trouble to learn my name, so I will return the favor. I realize that he will not respond if addressed in this manner. I also understand I will not be recognized unless I raise my hand.

  2. SCHOOL POLICIES: I have been informed, both orally and in writing, of the school and class rules and will obey them. I will remove my hat, headscarf, or do-rag BEFORE entering the classroom. I will turn off and hide my walkman and/or cell phone BEFORE entering the class. I also understand that there is to be no eating or drinking in the classroom aside from water.

  3. PREPARATION: I am aware that I need the following items every day: 2 pens of blue or black ink, a binder with an English section or a spiral notebook with a pocket only for English, a journal, and whatever book is being studied. I realize that if I do not have these things I am UNPREPARED, with grade repercussions. Also, I realize that Mr. Roston is NOT Staples: he will NOT have spare pens, paper, or books in the event I forget mine at home.

  4. SCHOLARSHIP: I am aware that Mr. Roston goes through a lot of trouble to make handouts, and that I must keep them in an organized manner so that I don't lose them. I will bring ALL of them to class EVERY day. I realize that if I lose a handout, I will not be issued another. I also realize that I will have written homework almost every night.

  5. ABSENCE: I am aware that Mr. Roston NEVER cares why I am absent. He takes it for granted that it was for a good reason. However, I realize that in order to make up an exam, I must bring a note for him to sign within 24 hours or I will not be allowed to take a make-up. I understand, however, that there are no make-up quizzes.

  6. RESPONSIBILITY: I am fully cognizant (aware) that no matter what reason I have for being absent, be it illness or cutting, I am solely and 100% responsible for finding out any work I missed from a classmate and making sure I get any handouts from Mr. Roston. I am also aware that all marking periods count and are CUMULATIVE.

  7. ACCOUNTABILITY: Finally and most importantly, since I am agreeing to the above conditions, (which I know are non-negotiable), I am cognizant of the fact that Mr. Roston NEVER wants to hear the words "But Mr. Roston, I wasn't here." I am VERY aware that he does not consider this an excuse for ANYTHING, and that I will lose 2 points off my FINAL GRADE every time I make the mistake of trying to use this for an excuse.

I hereby agree to abide by the rules of this class, and that I will keep this agreement in my binder or English folder at all times.

Signed,

Date:
Author's Note & Acknowledgments

My class of Teaching Fellows in Cohort 5 (CC10), that is all new teachers hired to teach English in failing high schools beginning in the summer of 2002, was actually 25 in number including myself. Of that other 24, I interviewed 20 (and our Fellow Advisor). Of the 20 that I did interview, I ended up using 8 accounts, and I tried for a representative cross-section (though women are under-represented, as half our class was female). I narrowed my focus to include only those Fellows who started teaching at Taft and Roosevelt high schools. Additionally, after three years, only 7 members of our class were still teaching in New York (only two of them women). We lost five members in the first year, two in the second, and an astonishing eleven in the third year. This is a three-year attrition rate of 72%; I tried to mirror that as closely I could to capture the feeling of that number, but the attrition rate in the book is a little higher, 78%. Nothing in this narrative has been made up, but certain conversations had to be re-created, and certain thoughts of the participants were "embroidered" by me because their ideas bore something in common with my own (but always based on what they told me). The names of all administrators and non-Fellows have been changed with the exception of Charlie Osewalt and names in the public sphere (Klein, Levy, etc.). Anthony Wheeler and Richard Smith are pseudonyms.

When I discovered that neither the Teaching Fellows nor the New York City Department of Education conducted exit interviews, I realized that my book would serve as my classmates' only formal debriefing. This then led me to want to use their stories as a form of memorial of their unappreciated hard work, since it was our collective experience in the system that nobody cared what teachers said, thought, or did. I got the title for the book from a colleague who said, "The Fellows program felt like a solidarity of soldiers, because honestly, most days, it felt like a war... Outsiders don't understand this – it's so easy to criticize. All I can say is: you have to have been there to grasp it. That's what I mean about a war-like experience between Fellows." Thus the title does not refer to arms in terms of weapons, but rather appeals to the idea of teachers linking arms in fellowship against a hostile world.

Thanks to: All the members of 5CC10 who took the time out of their busy schedules to talk to me. Above-and-beyond goes to Alex Shakar and Chris McKenna for reading and commenting on the manuscript (twice). Alex gets a second mention for helping steer me through the agent maze. Bill Clegg for further editing and initial professional help. And especially PJ Mark, for trying his best to place this book with a publisher. Special thanks to Liz, Nico, and of course, mom and dad.

About the Author

Aaron Roston is from Brooklyn, New York, and is a product of the New York City public schools (including Stuyvesant High School). He holds an M.A. from the City College Writing Program. He joined the New York City Teaching Fellows and worked as an English teacher in the Bronx from 2002 to 2005. He received an M.A. in Secondary Education (English), also from City College, at that time. He is currently an Instructor of Developmental Writing and coach of the boxing team at Tennessee State University in Nashville, TN. He can be reached (sigh) at Facebook.

Some further reading of relevance that wasn't mentioned explicitly in the text:

Arum, Richard, Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority

Braithwaite, E.R., To Sir, With Love

Conroy, Pat, The Water Is Wide

Denby, David, Great Books

Gold, Elizabeth, Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity

Goodnough, Abby, Miss Moffett's First Year: Becoming a Teacher in America

LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole, Random Family

Lipsky, David, Absolutely American

Salzman, Mark, True Notebooks

Suskind, Ron, A Hope In The Unseen

Traub, James, City On A Hill

The text of this book was laid out by the author in Word 2007. The font is Garamond.

 During summer training, I got to watch a professional development video done on classroom management by a traumatized Houston teacher who said, "They call the first two weeks of class the 'honeymoon' because that's when you're going to get fucked."

 William Howard Taft (1857-1930) of Cincinnati, Ohio, was both the 27th president of the United States (1909-1913) and tenth chief justice of the Supreme Court (1921-1930). He is the only person in U.S. history to have held both offices. A notorious conservative, he was renowned for his extreme pro-business views and policies.

 Full disclosure: I was actually born in Philadelphia, but moved to New York 10 months later. My parents followed soon after.

 At this time, NYC high schools were separated into three tiers; the top tier contained the four competitive academic high schools, in which to gain entry you have to sit for an exam: Hunter High School, Stuyvesant High School, Bronx Science High School, and Brooklyn Technical High School. Then, there were second-tier schools, the so-called "ed op" (educational option) or "magnet," to which you had to apply for admission. The remaining 40-odd were the third tier: zoned, or local, schools, where you went if you were unable to get in anywhere else – the schools of last resort.

 It was in this sense that I would later come to identify with Jay Gatsby when I would teach The Great Gatsby. Like me, he had been unsuccessful at making money in a "legitimate" way, and so had re-invented himself, as I ended up doing. But by being unwilling to acknowledge reality, that among other things money acquired by violating the social compact wasn't the same as other money – that is, bootlegging as opposed to inherited wealth or bond trading – he had the temerity to point out the hypocrisy inherent in the American Dream. Or so I like to tell myself.

 In a tiny cubicle at 65 Court Street, I'd sat before a small, fist-faced woman with cropped white hair and glasses on a chain, whose clenched look bespoke someone who'd been hit hard by the smoking ban in public buildings; with a sound of grinding stones she'd asked me what I wanted to teach. High school English, I'd said, and she'd grunted, "Good luck." Miffed, I told her I'd been informed there was a serious teacher shortage – hadn't the city been so desperate they'd just recruited Austrians? And so there was, she said, but not for high school English teachers. Special Ed, ESL, science, math – if I taught any of these, I could get a job tomorrow. However, there would definitely be vacancies. There were always vacancies, she added darkly. How then, I asked, did one apply for these vacancies once they occurred? Was there a list of schools that had them? "No."

 Levin's mother became a teacher in the system after his death.

 While on the surface it sounded innovative, it turned out it was merely the latest revision (in a long string) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), first enacted in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. ESEA encompasses Title I, the federal government's aid program for disadvantaged students (all SURR schools are Title I). The Board of Ed – sorry, DOE – had its own companion program, Children First. The DOE website claimed that Children First "pursued the spirit and letter of the [NCLB] law through changes in school curriculum, teacher and principal hiring and training, and 'streamlining' of the bureaucracy." The mandate did not specify what it meant by "highly qualified teachers," though teacher "accountability" was a cornerstone of the law (and a term that would be increasingly bandied about by the DOE) – teachers were to be held accountable through student's standardized test scores. The tragicomic part of all this was that NCLB was unfunded, meaning that it was mostly a cosmetic series of guidelines rather than constructive assistance – the states were on their own in figuring out how to find the money so they could adhere to the law. George Bush Sr. launched a similar program, called America 2000, in 1991. With its six "Education Goals," it was to be a "nine-year crusade" to radically reform the nation's schools by the year 2000. That plan was a revision of one proposed under Reagan in 1983 (based on the famous A Nation At Risk report of 1982, which warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" engulfing the school system). For a further elaboration on hypocritical societal mandates, see under: "Conservatism (Compassionate)," and "Burden, White Man's." By the fall of 2006, not a single state would meet the "highly qualified" teacher criteria. For the reason why, read on.

 With the cost of higher education growing exponentially, CUNY is increasingly becoming a choice of New York's middle-class.

 Military metaphors, of course, abound in a civilian society increasingly distant from its own actual military – any form of abbreviated, intense training about anything, from wine tasting to shoe sales, is now referred to as "boot camp." This is also true when people refer to any story involving their profession as a "war story." These should not be confused with actual stories about war, of course. Only one member of 5CC10 had actually spent four years in the Army.

 In fairness, the Fellows had grossly underestimated the number of classes they would need, and only informed Matika of this at the last minute. She found herself in a mad scramble to find extra adjuncts. This incident, however, pointed to an ominous lack of communication that was never rectified: the Teaching Fellows and the college were never to be in close contact. This led to Matika's increasing unwillingness to provide relevant information or even behave politely, holding us all in some way to blame for the situation.

 By the fall of 2004, official complaints by Teaching Fellows against her had piled up to the point that City College was forced to convene a formal hearing. She resigned at the end of the spring 2005 semester; the official explanation given was that she wanted to spend more time with her family.

 An interesting selection from the ruling of Justice J.P. Thomas in this case: "...Administrators may come and go. But it strikes me as being beyond serious dispute that the quality of the teachers will necessarily and directly affect the educational process and whether educational standards can be satisfied... Undoubtedly, at some point, the functioning of an unhealthy system spirals downward as desirable personnel, facing increasing responsibilities but decreasing satisfaction, continue to leave in response to their work environment. It does not take extraordinary imagination to conclude that such a system at some point cannot provide even a basic education... It may be an ironic result that, as the state and BOE, commendably, move to enforce higher standards on teacher hiring and retention, the numbers of qualified teachers in the system may shrink proportionally, unless some missing variable provides a solution." Source: CFE.org.

 "The zone of proximal development is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers." (Vygotsky, Educational Psychology) John Venn was an English logician, 1834 – 1923. His circles represent logical sets that may or may not intersect depending on whether they do or do not have elements in common. The most commonly used diagram of his in English is two intersecting circles, for the purpose of comparing and contrasting ideas. This is to provide a graphic representation of what their similarities and differences might be. Ex:   The KWL chart is a three column table written on the board thusly – First column: What is Known? Second column: What do you Want to learn? Third column: What has been Learned? I can't tell you how helpful all this was to me in September. The use of the Venn diagram is generational – while I had only known it briefly in math class, by the 90's its use had become ubiquitous in every discipline. Why I do not know.

 Speaking of my father, he is perhaps the only straight man I know who loves musicals, having staged many in his day. His vinyl collection of musical soundtracks was immense. The only one I had any time for was "Bye-Bye Birdie," still beloved of high school productions. One of the songs is called "An English Teacher," in which Chita Rivera upbraids Dick Van Dyke for being a music business impresario instead of getting his master's and teaching so they could live in an apartment in Queens. In the classroom I would sometimes find myself cast in the Paul Lynde role, in which he sings "Kids! What's the matter with kids today? Why can't they be like we were? Perfect in every way!"

 One of the original premises for this book was dramatizing the answer to the question: "Why do so many public school teachers quit?" I'm using "multiple perspectives" to address this idea because the experience of a single teacher can be dismissed as an anomaly. The experiences of a group are harder to refute (though social scientists tend to debunk "anecdotal accounts").

 Not in Texas, of course – New York. Mike lived in a studio apartment in Spanish Harlem on East 116th Street. His first summer in the city, he went to the corner bodega for a pack of cigarettes. There had been a popping noise, the sound of tinkling glass, people hunching down to the floor. Mike looked around, shrugged, got his smokes, and went home. When he went to the bathroom and turned on the light he was met with the horror-movie sight of himself in the mirror: his entire torso was soaked in blood. A bullet had grazed his chest just above his stomach. The injury was minor – he got some gauze and iodine, smoked the cig he took a bullet for, drank some beer, and went to bed.

 For an example of a Forlorn Hope in action, read Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe's Siege, in his series that follows British soldier Richard Sharpe through the Napoleonic Wars. If Hope soldiers somehow survived their mission, they became heroes laden with honors. It didn't happen often.

 In the fall, Molly would teach freshmen at Van Arsdale HS in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. After the semester ended, she'd take a leave of absence, which became permanent. Later, by phone, she said, "I just couldn't take it anymore. I burned out." She moved back to Ohio with her husband and had a baby boy. "I miss NYC like crazy, but I've discovered there is something about me that is fit to plant a garden and tend chickens."

 A three-ring binder that holds Delaney cards, a small white card with student information in it, that goes in slots in the Delaney book that correspond to the seating arrangement of the class. In use for decades, I was unable to find any information about the aforementioned Mr. Delaney (if it's a person at all) or when his system was adopted by the NYC educational system.

 Just prior to his appointment, Klein (also a corporate attorney like Levy) had been CEO of Bertelsmann, Inc., the American offshoot of Bertelsmann AG, the German media conglomerate. Chancellors are not supposed to be non-educators – he had to receive a waiver from the state.

 Pivotal Questions are based on the techniques of Socrates (469 – 399 BC), teacher and veteran of the Peloponnesian War (cited for valor) who "teased out" answers through the use of a dialogue, designed to force one to examine one's own beliefs and the beliefs of others (otherwise known as the Socratic method). He believed that all vice was the result of ignorance, and thus virtue was achieved through knowledge. Accused of corrupting the youth of Athens through his teaching, he was given the choice between exile and execution. Denying any wrong-doing, insisting he was only performing his civic duty, he opted to commit suicide by drinking hemlock-laced wine. His most famous students were Plato and Xenophon.

 I learned later that this beloved (and inaccurate) mantra is an encapsulation of the theories of John Dewey, patron saint of progressive liberal education, who maintained that students would develop internal self-discipline if school curricula engaged students' interest as "active learners."

 Under the UFT contract (that was set to expire May 31st, 2003), all high school teachers were responsible for teaching five academic classes a day, with a maximum of three 'preps' (different levels of lesson planning preparation) – in other words, your schedule could contain 9, 10, and 11th grade at the same time but not 12th as well. Union regulations also stated that you could not teach more than three classes in a row, and you had to be assigned a lunch period. The other two periods in the day were 'prep' (prepatory) periods, in which you tried to catch up on the mountainous tasks of grading, planning, and administrative paperwork. Before the teacher's contract, teachers had to fill their prep periods with other administrative duties, such as lunchroom monitor, meaning more work at home. As English teachers, we were expected to teach one book a marking period, for a total of three (advanced classes did more, but we didn't need to worry about that). One of these had to be a work of Shakespeare, unless the class was made up of juniors, because that was the year that emphasized American Literature.

 I had organized a mock trial in conjunction with Frankenstein: was the monster guilty of murder, or were the conditions of his life mitigating circumstances? The jury had been unable to come to a verdict.

 The name brand is spelled du-rag, but it's actually short for hairdo rag. Back in the day, black men used pantyhose to protect their hair when they straightened it. At some point, someone had the bright idea of inventing an actual product for the purpose. Hair-straightening having lost its luster, now it is merely a fashion statement. The du-rag is a sheer swath of a material that still resembles pantyhose, and is wrapped around the skull of a male student like a swimming cap and often topped with a baseball hat tilted at a rakish angle. Along with jeans that hang below the hips, and a t-shirt that drapes to the knees, this is the uniform of the male inner-city high school student. Girls usually dress in paint-on jeans and half-shirts, no matter the weather or the weight.

 I'd always assumed the title of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (subtitled A Triumph, it's Lawrence of Arabia's own telling of his role in the events in Arabia 1914 - 1921) referred to an aphorism from the Koran, or some idea garnered from Sufi mysticism, given Lawrence's desert experiences, but Charlie pointed out that it referred to a passage in the Book of Proverbs: "Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out its seven pillars." Why there are seven pillars, and what each of them stand for, is never explained.

 A phenomenon true for all non-competitive schools in the city, most of Taft's students wouldn't actually be officially registered at the school until the first couple of weeks had passed; this is what made it particularly difficult to plan ahead, because you could only estimate what the size of the roster was going to be in the fall. The reasons why this occurred were legion, from parental apathy to the kid had only just arrived from the Dominican Republic, or the kid had been holding out hope that he or she had gotten into another school. The first two weeks would be chaos – schedules couldn't be finalized until the rosters got sorted out. Students programs' would be changing constantly, especially the freshmen; they'd be in and out of rooms, shunted from one class to another.

 Two degrees of separation: Hector would later go on to train actress Hilary Swank for her role in the film "Million Dollar Baby"; she would also go on to make a teaching movie, "Freedom Writers," released in the fall of 2007. By then I couldn't bear to see it.

Apparently my methods, had I known it, were Jesuitical. Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish discusses the Jesuits "micro-physics of power" and their emphasis on "little things" as the foundation of scholarship. Sweat the small stuff, in other words. The Jesuits (or Society of Jesus) were founded by soldier-turned-priest Inigo Lopez de Loyola in 1534. Two of their better pedagogical innovations: It is not the quantity of course material covered that is important but rather a solid, profound, and basic formation (non multa, sed multum), and repetitio est mater studiorum - repetition is the mother of learning. In addition, the Jesuit idea of improving practice through self-reflection is a mainstay of secular graduate education programs, as has been seen.

 Gum would be a constant bugbear – it was everywhere, and it got on everything, not just shoes: clothes, bags, you name it. Despite my precautions, I got a permanent glob of it on a new jacket. It was an especially pernicious brand, bright blue in color, and you needed a blowtorch to get it off if it dried. The students of a colleague at Brandeis would fling theirs onto the ceiling whenever her back was turned; she soon had a planetarium-like diagram of the Milky Way up there.

 In a Clockwork Orange twist, many SSA's had been students at or dropouts from the very same school once upon a time.

 This was one of the few times in my life that I got to sample a taste of academic elitism. Since I was a local boy who was teaching high school in New York, the fact that I had gone to Stuyvesant meant as much as if I had gone to Harvard.

 Teddy Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) was the 26th President of the United States, 1901 to 1909. Taft was his protégé, though they later had a falling out and became bitter enemies.

 Similar to the position held by the Executive Officer on a ship; it's the Number Two administrative position. The APO's office is charged with the actual day-to-day running of the school, from bell schedules to substitute teacher assignments.

 Walkie-talkie conversations were not immediately direct. The person who needed assistance had to call the dispatcher at the base (located where I do not know), who then contacted the person. This was true even if the two people were down the hall from one another.

 The use of sarcasm is also considered corporal punishment. If that's true, I should have been given the death penalty. I preferred corporeal punishment in any case – I tried to haunt the student's dreams.

 Another inquiry led me to what this meant: G-Unit is a group of rappers gathered around the rap artist 50 Cent, like Florentine painters who might belong to the Botticelli school. I assumed G stood for gangsta, but a student, Felix, set me straight. "It stands for gorilla." "You mean guerrilla, like the jungle fighters?" "Nah. That's what I thought too, but come to find out, it's the animal." "Why?" Shrug.

 Roland G. Fryer, a Harvard economist, released a paper to Education Next in the winter of 2006 examining this phenomenon (Barack Obama also alluded to "acting white" in his 2004 keynote speech that set him on the path to the presidency): "In an achievement-based society where two groups, for historical reasons, achieve at noticeably different levels, the group with lower achievement levels is at risk of losing its most successful members... To forestall such erosion, groups may try to reinforce their identity by penalizing members for differentiating themselves from the group." Thus: "A positive relationship between academic achievement and peer-group acceptance (popularity) will erode and turn negative whenever the group as a whole has lower levels of achievement." Fryer became the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard; he was hired by the BloomKlein machine to oversee a controversial program in which at-risk students were paid to achieve better grades. Initial results have not been encouraging. Talking point: Should any student be paid to study? Discuss.

 It may seem strange to give a class, the majority of whom spoke Spanish in the home, Spanish. It wasn't to give them an easy subject to pass. There were two reasons: Spanish teachers were the one group of language teachers they had in abundance, and the students didn't know how to read or write Spanish properly either; they were functionally illiterate in two languages. Part of the problem they had with the teacher lay in the fact that the teacher spoke formal, or Castilian, Spanish, while the students spoke "gutter" Spanish: Dominican, or bachate (chopped-up, butchered) Spanish. They thus considered the teacher a snob.

 For a few weeks this term confused me. It sounded like beastin', so I assumed it meant calm down, you're acting like some kind of beast. But when I asked my class for clarification, they said no, it was bee-sting. Thus, "Why you bee-stin'?" meant: Why are you getting so aggravated (and by extension, aggravating me) over something so trivial?

 Part of the hallway chaos was a result of Roosevelt's haphazard dean's system: The Dean's Office had a Situation Board that dictated the placement of the 12 deans for the day. However, dean's assignments were rotated (at random, like roulette) on a daily basis, meaning that they did not man the same section on consecutive days. This lead immediately to confusion, because a student who was in trouble with a dean the day before could very well find the new dean was not as strict, and the same behavior that got the student in trouble the day before could find that the next day this same behavior would go unreported. It also made it very difficult for teachers to get to know the deans. And it led to a "Not my problem" attitude on the part of the deans, since they were never in the same place twice; they made themselves scarce when it came to following up on incident reports or referrals.

 Every new small school had its own principal, adding yet more chiefs to the tribe, chefs to the soup, etc. Not to mention cutting down on available classroom space, since they each needed an office.

 A traditionally light attendance day, it is for all intents and purposes a holiday in the ghetto. Many parents don't even allow their kids to leave the house on Halloween. The streets become more dangerous than usual, with masked thugs prowling the street with cartons of eggs (some with their innards replaced with Nair, a depilatory), fireworks, and a taste for ever more violent mischief.

 Auxiliary Teacher Reserve, basically an on-site substitute.

 Official class is what most people would know as homeroom. It's when the 'official' attendance (blue ATS sheet) for the day is taken (as opposed to the salmon-colored ATS sheets required for classroom attendance), and when the official announcements are made over the PA system (normally, PA announcements during the day are limited to "Please disregard the bells," since fire alarms are routinely set off by hall-wandering students). It's not a class in and of itself, it occurs during an academic subject class. School officials are obsessed with official attendance (really absentee tally) – teachers need to turn their blue sheets in right away so they can get the day's tally zapped right over to the DOE. Why this is of the utmost importance is beyond me. We should care so much about the students that are actually there. Salmon-colored sheets are turned in at the end of the week.

 All teachers are "mandated reporters." This means they are legally obligated to report any sign of abuse, mental or emotional trouble of a destructive nature, etc. Failure to do so can not only cost you your job, it can lead to criminal prosecution.

 Unlike every other profession, such as business, law, or medicine, where you cannot get in to see the person without an appointment, parents or guardians feel that teachers aren't worthy of the same consideration. They routinely show up in schools unannounced, demanding on-the-spot meetings. Principals, in fact, are only too happy to encourage this behavior: it makes them look "responsive to the needs of the community."

 If you have received one 'U' during the year, you can then be rated 'D', for 'Doubtful,' meaning you are not being recommended to be kept on, but it stops just short of firing you. However, as I was to learn later, even one 'U' from a Principal can get you fired after just one semester.

 It turned out that Heinz was gunning for any Fellow she could get her paws on; Fellows in other departments, notably Science, also reported getting surprise observations. She was not alone – the UFT hated the Fellows, and still does, as a merit-based teaching organization.

 Every teacher has a personnel file at their school. Everything that happens to you professionally, good or bad, goes into it. If a principal is unsure about you, they may look in your file to decide what kind of year-end rating to give you. It's the adult version of "I hope you know this will go down on your permanent record." Under union regs, you are supposed to able to see your file any time you request it. Not always the case.

 One of our summer training sessions from the Board of Ed – sorry, DOE – had involved being taught from the "business classic" Who Moved My Cheese? for reasons that to this day are still unclear.

 The teacher's contract with the city stipulates, in so many words: "Teachers may not, under any circumstances, leave their classrooms unattended if there are any students present." Teachers are legally responsible for the students during the school day (in loco parentis), though I don't think Anthony cared much by this point.

 It had finally become abundantly clear that Principal Heinz didn't have the Oxford Blues in mind when she was referring to rowing; rather, she was Jack Hawkins in Ben-Hur walking down the line of galley slaves, getting to Charlton Heston and saying: "Row well and live, 41."

 Normally, you are not allowed to penalize a student for chronic lateness or behavior issues. Their failure must be tied into some sort of academic malfeasance; for instance, you can fail a student because their constant lateness caused them to miss quizzes that you give at the beginning of class (that's right, their misbehavior means more work for you, not them). In addition, no matter how late a student is to class, you are not allowed to deny them entry into the classroom, despite the fact that most of these students invariably enter the class in either a disruptive or talkative manner, costing yet more class time. Later, I was to circumvent this restriction by sending students I knew were trouble to get a 'late pass' from the Dean's Office; it was not a condition for entrance, but the students didn't know that. Add it to the list.

 Heinz never observed me again, nor did my 'conditional' 'S' observation ever appear in my file.

 This incident highlights one of the reasons the UFT is justly criticized. This teacher, who was also the coach of the baseball and basketball teams, had tenure – this made him, technically, very hard to discipline. He didn't even bother to call in to say he wasn't coming back in for a while. He merely filed his claim with the UFT office and stayed home, getting paid. He was attached to the English Department because that was what his license was in, not because he could actually teach the subject. Charlie told me that some veterans in the worst schools try to take as much advantage as they can. Why? Because they know there's nobody to replace them. This teacher was nearing retirement, so he wanted to work as little as possible until he got his pension. It's teachers like this one who get every member of the UFT tarred with the same brush; it's the same method of stigma attached to the poor, in the tradition of the 'welfare queen' myth.

 Poor Leugim, how she hated her name. I asked why, figuring her name was Spanish for something like a legume, but no, her father had wanted a boy so badly that when she was born, she named her after himself anyway: Leugim is Miguel spelled backwards. She was later suspended for shoving Zakaluk.

 The lone white Taft student was an urban legend, though I found myself searching the hallways on occasion during my in-school travels; I nicknamed this phantom Moby.

 One of the things I found curious was that students hated it when you called them by their last name, or even worse by their full name. "Yo, why you got to use my full name like that?" I was never able to obtain a satisfactory answer as to why this was so; I think it had something to do with run-ins with law enforcement.

 In The Blackboard Jungle, this moment appears as "The Fifty-First Dragon," when Dadier gets the kids to understand the figurative meaning of a children's story. In the film "Dangerous Minds," it's when Michelle Pfeiffer uses Bob Dylan lyrics – she gets them to understand that "Mr. Tambourine Man" is about a drug dealer. I wonder if it's true.

 It was right around this time that I truly began to have some sympathy for the "old" Taft kids (I'd always had empathy). They had started the term with one teacher who was more of the same old same old; then they had a second teacher they couldn't beat, and as a result they were actually learning something, which they began to appreciate, only to have that teacher replaced by a third teacher who was more of the same old same old. In a SURR school this sort of staff musical chairs is not uncommon; I think this is one of the reasons students have to take refuge behind 'Mistuh,' since they are only too well aware it doesn't pay to get attached to a teacher.

 For the fall of 2004, the DOE's office of Food Service hired a new head chef to begin creating nutritional meals for the school system (what had they been before?), including cutting back on fried food. I never saw any examples of this food during the 2004 – 5 academic year. Perhaps it took a while to reach the Bronx.

 The hostility between teaching cadres goes back to the beginnings of the movement. The high school teachers have long argued that, as they are generally far more academically qualified than their counterparts in the other branches, and as a consequence their paperwork load is commensurately larger, they should be paid more. Talking point: Do you agree or disagree?

 On the 4th floor, classes decimated by no-shows, discipline suspensions, and transfers had been broken up in January and dispersed to other classes (Roston's Reprobates being one of them, I'm happy to say – it also transpired that at least a third of my first semester students had been ESL). After numerous requests, which were more like outright pleading, the worst discipline problems from all classes on the 4th floor were herded together in one class: XO1, nicknamed The Cooler. While in theory the "lockdown" room was a good idea, it didn't really work; their behavior problems only got worse. This came as no surprise to Charlie, who hadn't liked the idea in the first place. "If you put all the worst kids in the same room, so they're basically told they're the worst kids, how do you expect them to behave?" I disagreed – "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, Charlie. Or the one." Mr. Spock allusion aside, I felt it was better for the XO1 kids to make each other miserable as opposed to poisoning a half-dozen other classes. Basically, it was a divergence in philosophy: try to save them all, or try to save those you could. It conflicted a bit with Charlie's reassurance to me – it was a victory if you reached just one kid. I translated this into a mantra for my classes: "The lifeboat isn't big enough – it can't hold those who want to tip it over." Throughout the spring, students from X01 would escape on a daily basis (including my favorites from the fall, Patrick and Jamell) to roam the halls and cause trouble. This later included an assault on an SSA.

 This was not an uncommon occurrence. One of my 5CC10 compatriots, a Yale ABD and Miller scholar who quit in November, described the grading process at Wadleigh High School to me as follows: "I was called into the principal's office when the second marking period grades were due. The principal hadn't liked my grades for the first marking period, so he wanted to know what the story was going to be for the second. He told me to write the number of students I planned on passing down on a piece of paper; I did so and pushed it across the desk to the principal. The principal looked down at the piece of paper like it was his hole card; he scribbled another number on it, the counter-offer, and pushed it back across to me. It was like buying a used car. I did as I was told without actually being told – that way the principal could claim, 'I never told you to do that. Did you ever hear me tell you to do that?'"

 Just before his execution, in an attempt at sanguinity, he says: "I've had a good run. And, well, they do say if you need a couple of stiff brandies before you climb up on a wild horse, you're finished."

 There were several kinds of transfers available. First was administrative, when you weren't being fired but the principal wants to get rid of you, or you were placed in excess. Then there was the UFT seniority transfer, in which any member of the union not on probation can transfer to any school they want ahead of any other candidate (including displacing less experienced teachers already there). An SBO transfer means that the participating school has the option to pick and choose candidates (and non-vetted seniority transfers are not allowed). In the fall of 2005, the BloomKlein machine got the Union to drop seniority transfers in exchange for a salary bump. See Coda.

 Not the school's real name – there is no Windsor in the Bronx, or anywhere in New York for that matter. I've opted to change the name for reasons that will become clear.

 As I discovered once upon a time, when you're unemployed time doesn't mean very much ("Is this a weekday...?"). However, as a teacher, time means everything, and you have to keep your own. Second year, I took to wearing my watch with the face on the inside of my wrist, military style. Normally used to prevent glare, it turned out to be a lot easier to flick my wrist up – it got so you couldn't even tell when I was looking at it. This sets a good example – ostentatiously flipping your arm over to consult the time encourages everyone to do so. I got this idea, by the way, from Captain John Miller in Saving Private Ryan, the man I would end up trying to model myself after as a teacher.

 During my initial research, I also discovered a disquieting statistic not covered by insideschools.org. With enrollment steady at around 3,700, in the fall of 2001, there had been 185 teachers on the faculty; in the fall of 2002, 170. By 2003, there were 166. The number of administrators had stayed constant at 40. Windsor, despite being a Medium-Needs school (not a High-Needs Title I), was still considered hard-to-staff; this was why Teaching Fellows were allowed to work there.

 Windsor was not alone in its overcrowded misery. The NCLB Act caused utter chaos in the fall of 2003; students who had spent the previous year in a "failing school" were allowed to transfer to "better" schools (a provision in the Act known as school choice), so certain Bronx high schools had to find room at the last minute for some 7,000 transfer students. Other schools in the Bronx that had more than 4,000 students that fall were Clinton, Truman, Kennedy, Columbus, and Stevenson.

 She had been so unpopular as schools superintendent in San Antonio the city had bought out her contract rather than keep her around. Her Ramp-Up curriculum had been a fiasco in the previous city she had tried to implement in – Providence, Rhode Island. Currently, she was the highest-paid member of the New York City payroll after the Chancellor.

 This numbers-fixing is common to all schools. According to Jonathan Kozol in his 2005 book Shame of the Nation, principals in New York City whose schools showed numbers improvement by the end of the year would receive a $15,000 pay bonus (later increased to $25,000). Teachers, of course, received nothing. You can see how this might leave the door open for all kinds of corruption. Rumors, in fact, abounded at Windsor that Woundwort was going to retire a very rich man.

 Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856 – 1941) was one of the great American legal minds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the first Jew to sit on the Supreme Court. As a practicing lawyer in Boston he was known as the "people's attorney," because he often worked for causes in the public interest. He was known as a dissenter as a Justice, a liberal at odds with the conservative establishment personified by Chief Justice Taft. What the "people's attorney" would make, however, of the high school that has appropriated his name is another matter.

 Due to its numbers-based philosophy, these tests are as "high-stakes" for the administration as they are for the students.

 Up to this point, school districts offered students the option of a "local" (or non-Regents) diploma, whose requirements were not nearly as strict. For one thing, you didn't have to take any comprehensive Regents exams. This was the overwhelming choice of students in non-competitive high schools. Competitive high schools only issued Regents diplomas. For instance, I had to take Regents exams in: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, French, English, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, American History, European History, and Economics. As noted, though, the English Regents at that time was all multiple-choice; the new Regents exam is harder. Math is no longer taught in the manner I was; it is no longer taught sequentially, it is now "integrated." This practice is currently under review. The last local diplomas to be issued were supposed to be for the Class of 2003 (those students who entered grade nine in fall 2000). This was later amended – local diplomas were still being issued in 2005.

 Its efficacy is deeply debatable; a much more effective idea would merely to have teachers from one school proctor exams in another school, and mark those papers there. It would entail teachers going to a different school for a few days twice a year, but it would eliminate most cheating incentives.

 In the spring of 2005, a couple of Regents scandals appeared, one at Kennedy High School (on the English Regents) and another at the Cobble Hill High School of American Studies (on the American History Regents). In both cases, administrators either doctored or forced teachers to doctor exams. Luckily, an internal investigation by the DOE in the spring of 2006 absolved itself of wrongdoing in the Cobble Hill case.

 The program's inceptor, Deputy Chancellor Lam, was fired on March 10th from the DOE when she tried to use her influence to obtain a sinecure at the DOE for her husband. She also brought down the DOE's general counsel, Chad Vignola, with her. Lam's replacement was my 4th grade teacher from P.S. 29, Carmen Farina.

 An idea that tied in with the latest fad from Region, or Tweed, or wherever it had originated – we were supposed to start concentrating on "academic rigor," or "riguh," as Mazzilli pronounced it, later changed to "academic riguh mortis." It was nice to have an AP with a sense of humor again, however slight. We even had to watch a video on just what was meant by "academic rigor," done by the same people who had written Understanding by Design. Apparently "academic rigor" was tied in with "high expectations." Of course what the administration said they wanted and what they actually wanted were two completely separate things. In 2007, the people who administer the ACT issued a report labeled Rigor At Risk: "ACT's national college readiness indicators, the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, show that three out of four ACT-tested 2006 high school graduates who take a core curriculum are not prepared to take credit bearing entry-level college courses with a reasonable chance of succeeding in those courses." And: "Many students are receiving high grades in their high school courses, leading them to believe they are ready for college. But nearly half of ACT-tested 2005 high school graduates who earned a grade of A or B in high school Algebra II did not meet the ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Mathematics, and more than half of the graduates who earned a grade of A or B in high school Physics did not meet the ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Science."

 A constant source of student hatred was people they considered "two-faced." Thus, given just about all of my students' grand propensities for lying, the fact that I concentrated on getting them to understand the concept of irony can perhaps be understood.

 This wasn't supposed to be the case. In the spring of 2004, a Teaching Fellow who had been 'U'd out by a vindictive principal filed a class action lawsuit, charging that both the DOE and the UFT were in violation of the Teaching Fellows contract with the city. The Fellow was correct, for amongst other things, it turned out that Fellows were never supposed to get surprise observations. The UFT was cited because of its hostility to the Teaching Fellows as a "merit-based" teaching program (illustrated by the UFT's reluctance to protect Fellows from administrators). The suit was later dropped.

 Spofford Hall is the Bronx juvenile detention facility, where teenagers can be held for up to one year.

 In December of 2000, then-Chancellor Harold Levy oversaw the creation of The New Century High Schools Consortium. This was an organization established by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Institute. They made a five-year, $30 million investment to implement small schools for 76,000 students (out of a total of 267,000) in the poorest performing high schools in the city.

 The Rebbe had an infant child and another on the way – he was going to teach in Westchester because he needed better money. Like many teachers, he already had a second full-time job, teaching at a Yeshiva, and taught AP beginning zero period. He was exhausted; his one wish was to work only one job. I was amazed at the process he went through, an 11-year veteran, to get the job up there – he had to teach a demo lesson, interview with the principal, the district supervisor, and the local school board, traveling back and forth from the Bronx to Westchester four times. He was going to be teaching 9th grade instead of AP, but the money was at least $20,000 a year more than his job at Windsor.

 If I make no other contribution to the teaching profession, let it be this: if you ever become a teacher in a public school, your first purchase, before school supplies, should be some kind of mini tape-recorder so that you can record every conversation you have with an administrator. Don't wait for scheduled meetings – frequently, you will be ambushed, as I was. Never leave home without it, and keep it hidden on your person at all times.

 On November 16th, 2004, the New York Post printed the revelation that the DOE had created and handed out to its principals a 61-page "firing manual" in order to circumvent the UFT grievance procedure (how to break the intent of the contract without violating its literal terms). I'd like to think Woundwort was called in as a consultant.

 If a teacher gets a job in a school that is outside their current Region, they must be released from their current school by the principal and have the release approved by the Superintendent (again, a rubber stamp). If a principal decides not to release the teacher (they don't have to give a reason), then that teacher has to either stay at the school or quit.

 I was one of seven teachers to leave the department that spring, though I was the only "forced" out. Including the three who were fired or pushed out in January, this was a turnover rate of around 35%. Mazzilli, in our last meeting in her office just before I left, said there had been times that hiring problems at Windsor had been so acute, Woundwort had had to resort to recruiting firms to find teachers (out of the school budget, no doubt). And why didn't I blow the whistle at Windsor? The thought honestly never even crossed my mind. First of all, what was there to report? I had no proof, and the teachers in question would deny it, and be backed up by their boss. I had heard of ominous things happening to teachers who tried to stir up trouble.

 De Witt Clinton (1769-1828) was Mayor of New York City from 1803 to 1815, and is credited with establishing the New York City public school system itself. His other great claim to fame was getting the Erie Canal built; it opened for navigation in the first year of his third term as governor of the state in 1825.

 See Appendix.

 I discovered that these incidents were examples of what sociologist John Devine termed, in his 1996 study of New York City lower-tier schools, the Marshmallow Effect. To whit, "wherever students pushed a rule, the system, like a marshmallow, gave way."(109) Cellphones were finally banned in schools for the fall of 2006. The single greatest protest came from one group: Parents. This is the only nice thing I will say about the Chancellor: It's a job in which you can please nobody.

 The presumption is that the teacher is always in the wrong, no matter what student makes the complaint. I discovered this to be especially true at Clinton – on my own, I found out who a few of the kids who complained to Butterball and the counselor were, and I discovered most of them were truants. I thought: wouldn't it make sense to vet these complainants? Especially since teachers are never allowed to know the identities of their student accusers.

 In June of 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report labeled Reading at Risk, which found among other things that in the American adult population at large, 46.7% read literature in 2002, down from 56.9% in 1982 – and the decline appeared to be accelerating. The steepest decline was in the 18 – 34 age bracket. All of this foreshadowed "an erosion in cultural and civic participation." However, in 2008, the rate went back up to 50.2%, and Barack Obama was elected president that year, so who knows? (The depressing monotony of these report titles rests with A Nation at Risk.)

 The school is named for the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant (1610 – 1672). While a soldier in the Dutch Caribbean colonies, he lost his leg in 1644 and was fitted with a peg; he became governor in 1647. He was so hated for his despotic rule that the Dutch colonists surrendered to the British in 1664 without firing a shot.

 Even other teachers. Mr. McCourt published his third book, Teacher Man, the account of his 30-year sojourn as a teacher in New York City, in November of 2005. He also knew Mr. Fisher: "If you struggled with the subject or showed little interest, he roared, Every time you open your mouth you add to the sum total of human ignorance, Every time you open your mouth you detract from the sum total of human wisdom... He wondered why the stupid little bastards could not apprehend the elegant simplicity of it all. At the end of the term, his stupid little bastards flaunted passing grades from him and bragged of their achievement. You could not be indifferent to Phil Fisher."

 Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1900-1965). Liberal Chicago lawyer who became the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for the presidency not once but twice: he got stomped by Eisenhower in 1952 and again in 1956. His claim to fame was being noble in a lost cause: in both campaigns his speeches were praised for their "eloquent idealism."

 I'm not the only teacher who had to put up with this level of stupidity. One of the best teachers in the department, a man beloved by his students, had a letter put in his file by Butterball. Why? He showed The Lion King to his Macy students as a way of illustrating the class discussion on Freudian literary criticism. She wrote him up because he was showing a cartoon to high school students.

 In the spring, just like the Rebbe at Windsor, he also got a second full-time job teaching at a Yeshiva. I don't know where these guys found the energy.

 The Teaching Fellows Guidebook had also ballooned to 413 pages from 150. My suggestion that they write "Don't Panic!" on the cover in large, friendly letters was not implemented. Classroom management was still the smallest section, and buried at the back.

 He was fond of the truants and delinquents – like a lot of good high school English teachers, he'd been a high school fuckup himself.

 This does not include the members of the department that were going to some of the numerous SLC's that would be open for business in the fall of 2005; the themes of these schools included JROTC, Veterinary Science, and moving the entire Macy Program to its own school. In the Clinton English Teacher's Lounge, just before I left, I got into a discussion with a non-Fellow fellow teacher who was going to one of these new schools. She was a young woman right out of Hunter College, and a former Clinton Macy student (despite which, she said, she got slaughtered her first year at Hunter, struggling mightily to maintain a C average); she had come right back after college to teach at Clinton (inspired by one of the insipid veterans). She was also a neighborhood kid, and I asked her why the students didn't work. Didn't they want to get out of their five-block confinement? She said on the contrary, most of the students wanted to be "ghetto fabulous;" they wanted to be big shots in their own little world, spending their money on clothes and jewelry instead of saving it for college, acting gangsta because it impressed white kids. It was more important than getting out, especially for the boys.

 Charlie was also making an allusion to another teaching book entitled Small Victories, written by a Times reporter who spent the 1987 – 8 academic year following around an English teacher at Seward Park High School. The teacher quit at the end of that year.

 There were a few reasons for this: social promotion in grammar school had been ended (long overdue) – if you didn't pass the test, you didn't advance, so students had gotten tutoring (how come nobody came down on the DOE for negative reinforcement...?); teachers had spent the entire year teaching to the tests; and ESL students were excluded. The following year, scores would show no significant change.

 I also received a key chain from the Teaching Fellows in recognition of my three years of service.

 As a result of the 1967 Taylor Law, in exchange for being granted mandated collective bargaining, it became illegal for teachers to strike. To put teeth into this law, teachers are penalized two days of pay for every day they spend on strike. Since the UFT had not assembled a strike fund, there were precious few teachers who could afford to break the law. Veterans spoke of a strike, in fact, as something that could very well break the union.

 In the fall of 2005, some Clinton students would organize a one-day school walkout over these measures. A New York Times reporter quoted several of these students; I recognized a couple of them as either truants or LTA's of mine.

 The twelve schools with the highest crime rates, nicknamed the 'Dirty Dozen' by the tabs, were labeled Impact Schools by the DOE for the fall of 2004. The security administration of these schools was basically turned over to the NYPD and the hallways were flooded with cops. Needless to say, crime plummeted at these schools. Roosevelt was taken off the Impact list beginning fall of 2005, and the police presence was withdrawn. It remains to be seen whether or not this strategy works in the long-term, or whether Impact is merely a short-term solution of stomping out the flames while leaving the embers smoldering.

 In the spring of 2005, all the 5CC10 Teaching Fellows, and three second year English Fellows, left Brandeis, wiping out more than half the English department. At the farewell cocktail party, the AP told me she was no longer going to hire new teachers, including Fellows, if she could possibly help it. "They take too long to train and develop, and just as that time and effort begin to pay off, they quit."

 An absurd thought, I know – white appropriation of black vernacular and culture is centuries old. I think it's fairly obvious to say that in the black slang of another era, I'm a square, daddy-o. But in my own defense, I will say this. Back in 1991, when I had hair past my shoulders, I played bass in a Stooges-like band that was fronted by a white rapper, before that sort of thing became commonplace. We auditioned for a small label with a single called "I Might Be White (But I Ain't No Honky)".

 For the account of this incident, read Young Men and Fire, by Norman Maclean.

 During the election of 2005, Mayor Bloomberg finally came to terms with the UFT in October. Why? They threatened to strike, a circumstance that might have tarnished his re-election campaign. The union ratified the deal: a pay raise of 15% spread over four years, four months and 12 days (part of the deal included ending seniority transfers). Mayor Bloomberg went on to win a landslide victory over his opponent Fernando Ferrer by a 20-point margin of humiliation, even though Ferrer was endorsed by the Principals Union. Oh, wait a minute – did I neglect to mention that the single largest group of UFT haters, the principals, themselves have a union? Again, please understand why I was interested in instilling a sense of the ironic absurd into my charges. In the fall of 2006 the Mayor and the UFT agreed "in principle" to a 7% pay raise with no strings attached. This was later amended by Bloomberg: now, teachers face stiffer and more rigorous review before they can receive tenure. However, the median pay is now around $57,000. An interesting side-note to this footnote: In the fall of 2007, citing that teacher quality was the single greatest factor in educational equity, The Equity Project, a charter school in Washington Heights, began an experiment to pay its teachers $125,000 base salary. The teachers make more than the principal, something the principal's union has derided as sheer craziness. My prediction: This will be one of the few schools with long-term improvement and not short-term statistical massage.

 She retired in the spring of 2006, after 40 years of service. Her successor, appointed by Klein, had no educational credentials to speak of.

 In 2006, we got "Half-Nelson," an indie lauded for its gritty realism with regards to inner-city teaching. It was mostly a story of drug addiction as seen through a failed idealist. Apparently you were supposed to feel sympathy for a crack-addicted middle-school teacher because he was dispensing with the curriculum and teaching dialectics to 7th graders.

 After six years, Metro still cannot pass minimum NCLB standards, and they have a teacher shortage. Metro is taking their cues from the New York City system – they are breaking their big comprehensive schools down into SLC's, they have a Children First mantra, and they started a Teaching Fellows program to begin in the fall of 2009.

