Emergency Teacher (11 page)

The next day I went straight to the vice principal, Mrs. Jimenez. She was in her fifties. That year, the teachers celebrated her ten-year anniversary at the school. If she had particular feelings about the state of our school, she kept them to herself. Mrs. Jimenez believed in keeping a positive outlook, even in the most dire circumstances. She was warm and supportive, and in a properly functioning school probably would have been effective. Here, the students either treated her warmly, like a grandmother, or ignored her. After some pleasantries, I leveled with her.

“I don't know what to teach. Do I get a, um, curriculum?”

She smiled. “Oh yes, Ms. Asquith. Don't you worry. You should have a curriculum. I will look into that.” She began lifting up papers on her desk like she might find it there. I knew the answer was no.

As a former
Philadelphia Inquirer
reporter, I'd been privy to the inner workings of the school administration. This led me to believe that I knew which levers to pull to get things done. One afternoon, after I had exhausted all other avenues and was beset with fear over what the next morning would bring, I dialed the Pennsylvania State Department of Education in Harrisburg and informed them of my situation. I was passed around until I ended up on the line with the top dog—the head of the state's Department of Bilingual Education.

I had interviewed this woman before as a reporter. While she had been high-handed and grandstanding during the
Inquirer
interview, faced with the practical questions of a new teacher she seemed at a complete loss. Worse, she was uninterested. She spoke harshly and sounded annoyed to be bothered by a new teacher with nothing to teach. When she asked the name of my school, I felt like I was a traitor, ratting on Mrs. G. by admitting I hadn't been given anything to teach. She suggested I call Hispanic organizations, such as NABE, the National Association of Bilingual Education. I had already tried them, and they had told me they were primarily a lobbying organization. She sighed audibly. “Wait just a minute.”

She put me on hold. Then her secretary came back on. She gave me a phone number, which I dialed.

“Hello, Philadelphia School District.” It was for the switchboard of the Philadelphia School District. They passed me back to the North Philadelphia cluster office, and guess who they suggested I talk to? Mrs. G.! Several months later, in a rare friendly moment between Mrs. G. and me, she told me all this had been reported back to her, in the vein of “Control your teacher.”

“You go over their heads again, and they'll blackball your career, and you'll be stuck at this school forever,” Mrs. G. warned.

In the end, Ms. Rohan stuck to English, and I taught in a weird hybrid of English sprinkled with Spanish directions. Sometimes I used both languages to make my point. The students soon starting writing in whichever language they felt comfortable with, and I didn't stop them. At first the students liked the classroom chaos, but soon became frustrated. They wanted a sense of accomplishment. No matter what assignment I drew up, at least half the class was always left behind.

Aside from the students, I began to worry that I was going to get in trouble. The principal kept threatening us with memos about her new policy that we turn in weekly lesson plans and write daily objectives on the board—or else. Clearly everyone preferred to pretend the students were doing okay instead of confronting the honest truth about the problem and the steps needed to solve it. Requests for support were stonewalled, and anyone who stepped out of line was threatened with disciplinary action. (No one would ever be fired, of course. But a bad review on file could block a teacher's efforts to transfer or rise into administration.) This corruption led many teachers to cut corners, give in to cynicism, or leave the system.

Thus far, I had had no relationship at all with the principal. To me and the other new teachers she was a faceless voice, barking demands on the loudspeaker. I had not yet seen the principal interact with the students, either. I only heard her voice. Each afternoon she bellowed her mantra over the airwaves: “Failure is not an option.” “We will be the number-one school in Philadelphia,” she'd announce (by late autumn, we were still dead last at forty-second). Did she really believe she could take students who were illiterate in English and Spanish and teach them to read and write in English at a sixth-grade level in just one year? Apparently not only teachers can experience “the Fantasy Stage.” Not only did we lack the time and staff, but there didn't even seem to be a recognition among the administration of the absence of basic skills among our students. In my opinion, we ought to back up and teach basic, elementary skills to these students. Instead, we just plowed ahead with esoteric lessons about indigenous Puerto Rican Indians and the four types of sentences. In terms of student achievement, the principal didn't believe in slow and steady wins the race, but came from the shoot-for-the-stars camp. “Test scores will skyrocket.” “Teacher absences will be cut in half.” “Not one student will fail. Not one!” As for that final promise, it was indeed a pledge she intended to keep.

M
ost Philadelphians called it The Badlands, a four-square-mile neighborhood of crumbling row houses and abandoned factories with the highest homicide rate in the city. The deteriorating factories sat on every corner—Quaker Lace Company, the Stetson Hat company, and numerous carpet and paint companies. These days, the only legal industries were fast food and check cashing.

The Badlands's informal borders were Broad Street to the west and the Delaware River to the east. To the north lay Route 1. This linked wealthy suburban teenagers with The Badlands's open-air heroin corners run by Puerto Rican kids. In 1999, a
Philadelphia Inquirer
investigation studied police records and court documents to determine that The Badlands was the heroin capital of the East Coast. The
Inquirer
also documented how police and courts harshly prosecuted the Puerto Rican dealers. Their suburban buyers—the white kids—were left alone.

Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School sat in the heart of The Badlands. There were two other middle schools and a smattering of elementary schools also in the neighborhood. Serving the community was one high school, Edison, a five-minute drive from Julia de Burgos. It was considered the city's most dangerous and violent high school. From my tidy, manicured apartment building in downtown Philadelphia, I could be at my school parking lot in exactly eight minutes, a time I calculated precisely in order to maximize the number of times I could hit the snooze button in the morning. Driving up Broad Street, as City Hall slipped into the distance behind me, I would automatically push down the locks of my car doors. I lived only two miles away, but I should have needed a passport to get to work. The Badlands was like a foreign country. For two years I had lived in Philadelphia and could list every coffee shop, bookstore, and martini bar in Center City. This was “my world,” and it was built to fulfill the hopes, desires, and expectations of people who had grown up like me. Most of us came from middle- to upper-class families, were raised in the suburbs, and spoke English.

Indeed, I had never strayed outside downtown Philadelphia into the neighborhoods before I began teaching. Few of my friends had crossed those invisible borders between downtown and the neighborhoods either. Why would we? Crime, heroin, stolen cars, graffiti—those were the images called to mind at the mention of The Badlands. Police suspected white people in North Philadelphia of buying drugs—why else would they be there?

Similarly, my students thought my downtown world was like another planet, and I would realize this much later on when I pushed them to think of colleges like Villanova and the University of Pennsylvania. All the best colleges were in “my world”—a world built for me that they simply didn't know. Inevitably, with my arrival, the two worlds began to crisscross, and when I projected onto them the same expectations projected onto me, these worlds began to collide.

The three most popular students in my class were Vanessa, Pedro, and Luis, and they all shared one characteristic: They were second-generation Americans.

I was learning, to my surprise, that class popularity was based not so much on money, looks, athletic ability, or personality, as it had been when I was eleven and twelve. Those characteristics factored in, but the strongest determinant for groupings was immigration. Where you were born and how long your family had been in the neighborhood were critical distinctions among the students: The more Americanized you were, the more popular you were.

Vanessa, Pedro, and Luis all hailed from families that had settled in Philadelphia as early as the 1940s. (A few families settled first in New York and then moved to Philadelphia for a more affordable cost of living.) Vanessa's grandma was one of the early pioneers to North Philly, following in the footsteps of the Polish and Eastern European immigrants before her, drawn by the jobs in textiles, hosiery, and shipping. She was part of a tiny migration of Puerto Ricans that trickled in throughout the '50s, '60s, and '70s, a small community alongside the much larger number of African Americans migrating up from the South. Vanessa's grandma spoke only Spanish, but Vanessa spoke only English, snubbing her nose at both speaking Spanish and most things Puerto Rican. Kids like Vanessa considered themselves Puerto Rican, but they barely understood Spanish. They spoke it occasionally to their grandmas and to bodega shopkeepers. Vanessa had never even been to Puerto Rico. She and the other second-generation students were raised speaking English and listening to hip-hop and rap, not salsa. They wore baseball caps, football jerseys, and Timberland boots. Essentially, they had adopted the style and accent of inner-city blacks. This group made up about one-third of my students, but their power over the class was overwhelming.

After them came first-generation students. They were either born in Philadelphia in the 1980s to recently immigrated parents or moved to Philadelphia when they were very young. This group was the largest because Puerto Rican immigration to Philadelphia surged in the 1980s when the neighborhood officially became a barrio. From 1980 to 1990, the number of white households in the neighborhoods surrounding Julia de Burgos dropped from 6,170 to 3,233, while the number of Hispanic households doubled from 3,922 to 7,336, according to census figures. These first-generation students walked a tightrope between both cultures. Their ties to Puerto Rico were still strong. They were raised speaking Spanish in the home and neighborhood, but had picked up some English in the schools. Many could not read or write properly in either language. Those who were schooled under Spanish-speaking teachers were really lost. Rather than bilingual, they were nonlingual—fluent in neither language.

Ronny, from the Dominican Republic, was like this. He arrived when he was nine years old, too young to have learned Spanish perfectly and too late to easily absorb English. He spoke Spanish at home, and also to most of his teachers at Julia de Burgos. Several times a year these kids returned to Puerto Rico for a month or more and constantly lived with the possibility that they'd move again. One of my best students, Iris, would go home to Puerto Rico at Christmas and not return to Philadelphia until late February—missing weeks of school.

The remaining third of my class, about a dozen kids, were the most recent arrivals; they were at the bottom of the class hierarchy. Students derogatorily called them hicks or FOBs for “fresh off the boat.” They had been born in Puerto Rico and had arrived in Philadelphia within the past year. Kids like Valerie, Yomari, Ernesto, and several others had arrived only in the months prior to the start of school. They spoke only Spanish and were the least Americanized; they came from the Puerto Rican countryside and dressed more conservatively, without the brand-name sneakers, skullcaps, and basketball-player shirts. They didn't speak slang. They were shy and very well behaved. They deferred to teachers and rarely raised their voices. Mrs. G. and the other Puerto Rican teachers regularly pointed these students out as typical Puerto Rican children, who were much better behaved than inner-city black kids and the second-generation Puerto Rican students who mimicked them. Throughout the year, I would watch some “hicks” succumb to peer pressure and change the way they dressed, spoke, and gestured to fit into the neighborhood norm. Others couldn't adapt, hanging out with Spanish-speaking students and teachers all day. In the year I was there, these kids didn't learn English. Instead, they lived in the tiny microcosm of Puerto Rican life that was recreated in North Philadelphia—a world of Spanish-only speakers.

I'd come to realize that the main reason bilingual education was such a flop at Julia de Burgos was lack of organization. There was another reason, though: the popular kids associated speaking Spanish with backwardness. It was the language of their grandmas and so-called “hicks” in the neighborhood. While they celebrated Puerto Rican pride, they also wanted to assimilate into their new country as quickly as possible. They viewed speaking English as cool. Every time I tried to teach a lesson in Spanish, Vanessa would roll her eyes, and many others in the class did the same.

In late September the city hosted its annual Puerto Rican Day Parade in which ten thousand flag-waving spectators lined the Benjamin Franklin Parkway downtown to dance salsa and sing “Puerto Rico, Mi Isla Encantada.” The city's Puerto Rican power structure—primarily made up of City Councilor Angel Ortiz and school board member Benjamin Ramos—led pride parades and gave speeches. The aim was to present a positive image of an ethnic group more often associated with heroin busts and homicides, not that many Puerto Ricans from North Philly actually attended the downtown parade.

I was attending the parade this year for the first time and bringing students who'd also never been. I'd invited Vanessa, Pedro, and Luis on the pretext of rewarding them for good behavior. I also thought the downtown parade might give them Puerto Rican role models. In reality, it was mostly a tactical decision. They represented the class power structure, that is, they were the popular kids, and I wanted to win them over. My invitation was more like a bribe.

Class queen Vanessa had real pull over the students. Girls measured their own popularity by their proximity to her at the lunch table. Boys didn't even bother talking to her—at twelve years of age they wouldn't have a chance in her world for another five years, if ever. Only Big Bird openly stared at her, much to her annoyance. Vanessa was pretty, but what helped propel her to goddess status was that she was also a year older. (She had been left back twice.) The seventh- and eighth-grade boys liked her, too, which counted for a lot. She ignored them. For most of the year, she remained steadfastly disinterested. Vanessa was not the bitchy popular girl who marked the elite girl clique in my middle school. She was likeable. She giggled a lot and spoke in a soft, lilting voice that made everything she said sound like she was teasing. She also was the teacher's pet. She pleaded to sit in the front, and she finished every assignment. She'd decided that she wanted to eventually attend CAPA, the creative and performing arts school, Philadelphia's premier arts high school. Only a select number of eighth-grade graduates across the city were allowed in. I had promised to help her get there.

She climbed into the car with her silky black hair pulled into a high bun, wearing a red V-neck T-shirt, a gold
Vanessa
necklace, jeans, and Timberland boots. Pedro and Luis immediately shifted uncomfortably, as though aware of being in the presence of someone important.

I knew less about the boys. Pedro's parents were divorced, and he lived with his grandmother and his sister in North Philadelphia. His mother lived with her new husband in the suburbs. He was clever, easily distracted, and needy in a vulnerable way that made me think he didn't get enough attention from his mother. He would spend the morning angling to stick a “kick me” sign on my back, then sulk all afternoon if I didn't let him sit with me during lunch.

Luis was bespectacled and diligent. He had owlish eyeglasses, and when he knew an answer he'd shoot his hand in the air and slowly turn beet red from holding his breath until I called on someone. He was from North Philly, but he'd spent the prior five years in a public school in suburban Florida, where his dad had been transferred temporarily. This taste of life outside The Badlands gave him a perspective on Julia de Burgos similar to mine. He knew what a functioning school was supposed to look like and would say things to me like, “This school,” and shake his head.

The sunshine gleamed on the pavement as Luis Rollerbladed to the front of the procession and snapped a picture with the mayor of Philadelphia. A halfdozen schools participated in a cheerleading competition, and we lined the concourse to watch the Julia de Burgos cheerleaders march past with a salsa step. Our principal held half of our school banner and marched up front, wearing a Julia de Burgos T-shirt. Teachers had stayed late into the evening the night before, stitching Puerto Rican flags onto their pleated skirts. Our girls had won in the past, but this year they would come in second.