Emergency Teacher (10 page)

Checking the clock, I realized Ms. Rohan's class would be pouring in here in ten minutes, and they spoke even less English than T61. Once again, there'd be no time to eat. I returned to class and began to erase the blackboard.

The situation continued to spiral for days, and then weeks, until I was on the brink of exhaustion: a drowning woman. I could not keep up with everything thrown at me, and each day became not a day to teach but a test to survive. The kids were tough, but it was the administration that was killing me. Every period of every day they interrupted my lesson with a new memo, a new requirement, a new form to be filled out. One morning I counted eight classroom interruptions before lunch. How were we supposed to focus on the kids when Mrs. G. had so many needs herself? Then, one stressful Sunday night, Eppy called to check up on me. I spilled out the situation—I had no idea how to teach or what to teach them. I had no control. No one at the school was helping me. Some of my students couldn't read or write. He laughed knowingly, which depressed me even more. He told me Julia de Burgos was considered the worst middle school in the city. Indeed, Julia de Burgos's school-performance score—which measures test scores, student attendance, dropout rate, and other factors—was the city's worst. We ranked last among the city's forty-two middle schools. In reading and math, eighty-five percent of our students scored in the lowest category, “below basic.” Translation? Almost nine out of ten students here couldn't read a book or do simple math problems.

He told me if the school didn't improve, the state would take it over. If that didn't solve the problem, then the city would completely disband the school and new teachers would be transferred in. Of course, no one would be fired, just spread out among different schools.

“You can't keep beating a dead horse,” he said. “And you can't change the kids, because it's not their fault.” He had tried to get me into a “better school,” he pointed out, but I had insisted on teaching there, he said. Remember?

That night I lay in bed and cried. Each chaotic school day reminded me that I had given up my previous career to make a difference, and so far I had only made a mess.

When I looked around me, I saw a handful of good teachers, a majority of average ones, and a dozen really bad teachers, like Mr. Jackson, the seventh-grade English teacher who just shouted all day long. His students regularly burst out of his room, gasping in laughter and running down the hallway. Once they left his room, they became Mrs. G.'s problem, and she was unsettled about that. Something needed to be done about his class, she said. But with so many other classes without any teacher at all, it was hard to hold Mr. Jackson to any type of standard. As for me, as long as I kept the students inside the room, I was teacher of the year.

But I didn't want just to be better than Mr. Jackson. I didn't want just to be “doing well for a new, untrained teacher,” because that low standard was why nine out of ten kids were failing. The students deserved a trained teacher like Mr. Rougeux, the sixth-grade teacher on the first floor. He was a twenty-threeyear-old who wore rumpled khakis and a white shirt and tie to work every day. He was an inspiration. His sixth-grade classroom was a playground of science projects and math games—and raised hands. Students behaved because they learned. I observed them cleaning up the classroom one day before filing out calmly to lunch. I wanted that kind of classroom.

My students deserved that kind of classroom. If they failed again this year, some might drop out of school forever. This was their last chance at an education. Who could blame these kids for acting out when I kept giving them assignments they couldn't do? My effort to teach Ronny to read had been immediately undercut by the fact that I didn't have a spare second in the day, and he worked after school. So I tried putting him on the back table with some kid's books and telling him to read silently—that was hardly teaching. I stuck Spanish-only Valerie back there, too, with a Walkman singing the alphabet. That helped her for a while, but then a student broke into the classroom and stole my Walkman, so I was stuck. I was realizing that teaching wasn't simply putting worksheets in front of students and telling them “go.” It was setting realistic goals, creating lessons, and guiding students to reach the goals. Who ever thought this could be done by any one person, and without any training?

“The thing is, I don't know what I'm supposed to be teaching,” I started.

On the day of our meeting, Mrs. G. was all business. We were crunched into two opposing kid desks in Room 216. It was 3:00 PM. Both of us were exhausted, hungry, and cranky; the determination with which I—spurred on in my talks with Ms. Rohan—planned to ask the administration for help waned once I was face-to-face with Mrs. G. She looked annoyed, as though I were complaining. The meeting felt confrontational, and she intimidated me.

Mrs. G. was a pretty Puerto Rican woman in her thirties, petite, and given to moments of warmth and
cariño
. Yet when things weren't as she liked them, she barked orders like a military sergeant and was the only administrator to actually type up an agenda for after-school meetings. She dressed in business suits and kept a spotless desk. She was high maintenance, a perfectionist, someone Pete would have described as a hard-ass. This had its pluses. When she marched into a classroom, back erect and nose in the air, the students shut up. She described this strict behavior as typical of teachers in Puerto Rico, where she had taught until she was twenty-six, before she was recruited to be a bilingual teacher for a Maryland school district. Although our students thought of themselves as Puerto Rican, Mrs. G. always made the distinction between our students, who “would never be accepted back on the island,” and real Puerto Rican students, who were neatly dressed, respectful of teachers, and would “never act crazy like these kids.” Most of the Puerto Rican—born teachers held this attitude and wielded it over the students, who very much wanted to be considered Puerto Rican. However, these same teachers also pushed Puerto Rican and Hispanic pride only when it suited them (in grant applications and in hiring) and were quick to use it to separate themselves from any behavior they didn't like. Having grown up with foreign parents myself, I understood my students' struggle for identity. Kids need to feel anchored and accepted.

It turned out Mrs. G. was not only bilingual, but also trilingual: She had mastered a language called upon by school-district administrators when they needed to appear to be addressing an issue but, in fact, were not. We would have many long, disjointed conversations in which answers only appeared to have anything to do with the original questions. I was always left playing along as though she had helped me, while feeling vaguely unsatisfied and not knowing why.

“Are we supposed to be teaching bilingual education? What's the deal?” I asked.

“This school offers a bilingual program in all the main subjects, including a class in ESOL reading. It's designed to promote awareness among students as to the importance of retaining their native language as well as adapting to their new community.”

“Well, do I get any books or anything?” I asked.

“The primary problem we face is that we don't have a bilingual teacher for the sixth grade.”

(She looks at me pointedly, as though this were my fault.)

“So, how do I know what to teach them in English? I don't have any books; some students don't speak English.”

“I gave you books,” she said. “There are also some workbooks in my office. They are to be used as aids.”

But I meant textbooks, real ones, and not one, but an entire classroom set of them. I wanted more than anything for her to crack, just a little, and tell me exactly what was going on, how it worked, and what I should do. But I received no concrete advice.

“You have to figure out what their needs are,” she said. “We have many different levels at this school. It's a challenging position.”

My frustration mounted. On paper, the designation “bilingual” required we follow all kinds of state and federal guidelines, and the main office kept harassing me to fill out the paperwork indicating that I was following them: Students were supposed to have a language test to determine if they needed bilingual placement. They were to be assigned to a level of 1 to 4 based on language mastery. They were supposed to get periodic language evaluations. They were supposed to eventually graduate from the bilingual program.

In practice, none of this happened. The main office secretary determined placement by asking, “Hablas Inglés?” None of my students were tested, and none of their files indicated a level. How could I give them one? Without tests, I could only guess.

Bilingual students were also supposed to receive special materials. In the spring I would learn that for each level a handful of textbook companies printed bilingual books and materials. None had been ordered for this year. The reason was not lack of money, but disorganization. Books had to be ordered in advance. At my sister's school, teachers met with their team in the spring or summer before the upcoming year, agreed on what everyone would teach, coordinated grade levels (so, for example, the seventh-grade teacher could build on what the sixth-grade teacher had taught), and created a budget for the principal. Supplies were then ordered accordingly, and the teacher began setting up the classroom and lesson plans in August. This was how it should work, and does, in many schools. That was impossible in our school because of teacher and principal turnover. With a new sixth-grade teacher every year, planning was impossible. Every September this school had to reinvent the wheel.

I would learn that our lack of a true bilingual program was considered a big problem—not because our students lacked the important services, but because Mrs. G. and others had millions in grant money from the Portal grant to account for. So, Mrs. G. couldn't acknowledge that we didn't offer a bilingual education program, either on paper or in meetings. She and the principal even forced Ms. Rohan and me to take time-wasting steps during the year to maintain the image that we did have a bilingual program, by meeting with a bilingual textbook salesman (to look at books I couldn't buy) and turning in weekly lesson plans that had stated goals of enhancing students' bilingual capabilities. One day someone even distributed a book titled
Arguments for Bilingual Education
. There was no advice for actual teaching. This was pure political propaganda. The duplicity was as exhausting as the teaching.

The night after our meeting, I called my sister, whose school was in one of the nation's most affluent areas, Potomac, a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. Given the real estate taxes, her school had more than twice the funding of Julia de Burgo. In her county school district, paid staffers spent years developing a curriculum based on state standards, educational trends, and pedagogical research. Updated textbooks were bought regularly and were ready in August. For example, the curriculum for my sister's government class was divided into units and posted online in June for teachers and parents to review. In August, my sister clicked on Unit One, and there were seventy pages of daily lesson plans, sample activities, and essay questions—specific goals and objectives and sample exam questions. All she had to do was print them out. Lessons were coordinated on a countywide level, like building blocks, based on what the students already knew, and prepared them for the next block. Tests and exams measured student mastery of content for promotion to the next grade. When I told Nikki I was making up lessons as I went along, based on whim, with no guidance whatsoever, she said, “No way! Get your curriculum from the vice principal.”