Emergency Teacher (6 page)

Despite Eppy's foot-dragging, my persistence paid off, and I landed a processing date before school started. Processing took four hours, during which I received a speech from the union, an explanation of all benefits, an official teacher ID card with photo, and—most important—my pick of school.

When they called us up, more than one-third of the group didn't have proper documentation (such as an original copy of our college diploma), and were sent home.

I imagined the thirty-three kids who would now have to start school without a teacher—and only because some teachers had brought photocopies of their college diplomas. The only reason I knew to bring the original (which my parents had sent by FedEx) was because I called Eppy so frequently that he finally happened to mention it.

Then the big moment: They handed us a computer printout of all the open positions and began calling our names. “Pick the school you want,” we were told ... and nothing more. How completely random. We didn't even interview with the principal? Teachers all around me were mumbling, “I have no idea .. .” And the union workers circled us, saying things like “Don't go there!” and “That school is outta control.”

I scanned the sheet and recognized a lot of the schools' names. These schools routinely made the evening news for shootings, arson, and violence against teachers. The veterans steered clear of these schools and left them for the new, untrained teachers, who were given last pick. I quickly found Julia de Burgos and saw two openings for sixth grade. That was what I wanted. Forty-five minutes passed and they still hadn't called me. What if someone else requested that position?

A librarian sat next to me. “I was going to pick Olney High School, but the union lady said it was one of those bad schools, you know?”

I wanted to tell her that I planned on picking a so-called bad school, because I was going to turn around a classroom, and then take what I'd learned and change education policy so schools everywhere could be improved. But something held me back. Perhaps a realization that, one day, I might not feel so holier than thou.

Finally, my name was called. No one else wanted Julia de Burgos. I got it!

When I got to school, I raced down the hallway with my good news. I couldn't wait to tell my team their vacancy was filled.

About sixty teachers sat in the library and there were some leftover doughnuts and orange juice during a break between meetings. I saw Marjorie Soto, the ESOL teacher who had introduced me the other day. She used to work in finance in Manhattan and still had a hardened-chic look, with her short, spiky hair, and a rainbow-colored ring on her finger. I rushed over to tell them my good news.

As I sat down, Marjorie Soto looked up, bemused.

“Oh, you're back?” she smirked. The conversation stopped.

“You're here?” asked another.

“We thought you transferred somewhere else,” said a third.

“What? I called to say I was being processed this morning,” I said weakly.

Marjorie Soto turned to her friends: “No, that's the rumor you all started. You said, ‘Oh, I bet she bailed. She doesn't belong here.'” They laughed together and went back to their conversation.

She doesn't belong here? I slipped my teacher card into my bag. Why not? Maybe I asked a lot of really dumb questions, but it was for the right reasons.

Afterward, the head of the Bilingual Team, Mrs. G., approached me. She asked if I wanted to be the sixth-grade bilingual teacher. I would teach English, social studies, and reading to my class in the morning. Then, after lunch, I would send my class next door to the team teacher, who also had a class of sixth-graders. She taught science and math. She would send me her students.

The team teacher would teach in Spanish, and I would teach in English, but use my Spanish when necessary.

“I can tell you're not aggressive,” Mrs. G. said. “I'm posting someone outside your door for the first day.”

“Can I see my room?” I asked, but Mrs. G. said she was busy. Mr. Marr, the seventh-grade social studies teacher, who was on a different team, must have felt sorry for me, because he offered to take me when no one else would. We headed up the stairs.

On the way up to the second floor, we bumped into Danyelle, a young teacher starting her second year. She was taping a poster to her door.

“I thought you were leaving?” Mr. Marr asked her.

“Nah. I couldn't get into another school, so, oh well,” she trailed off, and returned to her room.

At the end of the hallway, toward the back of the school, he showed me Room 216, your standard classroom in that it had a big teacher's desk at the front near the blackboard, and dozens of small desks attached to chairs. The dim space creaked even when we stood still. It was spacious, with three blackboards and only a few cracks in the ceiling panels, although it had uneven wooden floors. There were twenty-three desks. Mr. Marr was already lugging in from next door what eventually added up to ten more desks.

“You'll need these,” he said.

The teacher's desk was wooden, like an antique from Laura Ingalls' oneroom schoolhouse. I stood behind it, and then knocked on it for no reason. “What happened to the teacher who taught here last year?”

“He left. He refused to ask for help. He thought he was Jaime Escalante or something,” he said, referring to the famous teacher from the movie
Stand and Deliver
. “The teacher before him left, too. A lot of teachers hate coming to work here,” he said in a soft voice. “The kids know the teachers who hate them, and they hate them back.”

Mr. Marr left me alone. The few signs around Room 216 looked like splotches of bright paint splattered on a gray board. As I lay down my bag of supplies, the breadth of what I'd undertaken was like a massive storm cloud that suddenly broke open and drenched me. Tears welled in my eyes. What had I done? This was crazy. I don't know how to teach! I fought off panic and reached into my bag for some supplies.

Four giant READ! signs went up over the doorway. My nameplate belonged on the inside of the door window, facing outward. The back wall would be perfect for my world map. By the door, where I'd line up students, I planned on making a “college board” with information about different universities. For myself, I posted one wrinkled page behind the desk. It was a list of advice my mom, whose dream had been to finish high school, had given me years ago: “Go for It.” “See Things as They Really Are.” “Hang onto Your Dreams.”

My parents were immigrants from England. My dad came from an upper-class British family. My granddad ran a refinery during World War II and had received the Order of the British Empire from the queen. He later sent my dad to boarding school and eventually on to Harvard University. My mom, on the other hand, had dirt-poor, working-class roots. Her father was a electrician, and she had five siblings. When my mom was fifteen, she came home from school one day to discover she wouldn't be going back. She had to find a secretary's position in an office. She was devastated, and even now, thirty-five years later, the memory brings tears to her eyes. The message to me was simple: Missing out on an education was the world's worst injustice. Everyone deserves a good education and a chance in life.

A few years later, my mom left home for London, where she met my dad at a dance. Their marriage was unusual in that it crossed class lines in a very class-obsessed society, and perhaps for that reason they were thrilled to leave England so my father could enter Harvard University Business School in 1964. They sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and past the Statue of Liberty, arriving as immigrants with a strong belief that if you worked hard you could get ahead in America. My mom worked as a secretary while my dad finished business school and went to work on Wall Street. They bought a four-bedroom house in the New Jersey suburbs, where my brother and sister and I were raised. My parents love their adopted country and believe in the classlessness of America. They taught me to look beyond income and race. They believe in the power of education as a vehicle of social mobility and a great equalizer.

“Hang onto your Dreams.” That cliché jumped off my mother's quote page with relevance and meaning. For hours I doted on my classroom. The last rays of sunlight strained through dirty windows when I finally picked up my bag to leave. It was my twenty-sixth birthday, and Pete had something planned to celebrate. I flicked off the lights and stepped into the hallway, surprised at how late it had gotten. The assistant principal's office door was shut tight, and the dimming sky cast a few shadowy fingers down the hall. Next door were the blackened windows of Room 217. Shouldn't my team teacher be preparing her room, too? Alone in this spooky castle, I crept down the stairs, and then ran down the hallway to the fire-escape door. A heavy chain hung from one side, but had no padlock. Panting, I flung the door open, realizing the next time I came back here the building would be filled with kids.

The liquid-black stretch of asphalt where I parked my car looked miles away. I kept one foot propped in the door, huddled my shoulder bag to my chest, and purposely averted my eyes from the outside stairwell. A few years back, I'd been told, a man dragged a thirteen-year-old girl across this parking lot, into that stairwell, hit her over the head with a gun, and raped her. Teachers warned me to stay away from the rear of the school, where heroin dealers stalked the corners. I felt scared, but there was little choice at this point. I had decided to come to North Philly, and I couldn't be afraid of the parking lot. I had to be brave. I hurried toward my lone car, my legs lurching forward, still thinking about the first day of school, worrying about one simple question:

What was I going to teach?

I
t was 7:30 AM on the first day of school. A yellow bus pulled up to the curb of Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School. I idled in the car, fervently rereading papers a last time and watching fellow teachers carry crates and poster boards into the school. In the school alcoves, dead autumn leaves blew into circles with discarded plastic bags from the corner store. Pairs of ratty sneakers dangled from a telephone wire. Kids were swarming in front of the shiny blue front doors in groups that doubled, then tripled, in size. I couldn't believe an entire classroom for which I had no preparation awaited me, full of students expecting me to teach them.

The night before, I'd driven myself crazy sharpening pencils, scratching out name tags, and writing a welcome message to parents and students translated into Spanish. I finally collapsed in tears. Pete comforted me into a fitful sleep. “You'll be great, don't worry.” Now I had to get out of the car. Time to open the door or drive away.

My bulging shoulder bag knocked into students as I made my way through the crowd. I pushed inside, passing two security guards setting up their table. In the main office, teachers rushed around and pointed at papers. “Good morning,” I said to no one in particular, and no one answered. Quietly, I removed my class list from the top mailbox, disappointed the secretary hadn't labeled it with my name yet. Seeing my class list for the first time was jarring: Juan Jimenez, Ernesto Gutierrez, Vanessa Pena ... who were these strangers? The scent of brewing coffee wafted out from the guidance counselor's office. I looked for a familiar face—Mrs. Jimenez, anyone. I searched up and down the halls, but I recognized no one. The stairs to the second floor were empty, too.

The door handle of my classroom rattled as I pulled on it, and the yellowed windows shook in their frames. I stepped in cautiously, as a child might climb into the cobwebbed attic of his home for the first time. Room 216 was not cozy, but wide and sparse with a musty, abandoned smell. Inside my classroom, I was crushed to see most of my signs had peeled off and drifted to the floor. Later, teachers would introduce me to a blue, gummy substance that held up against the humidity, but for now I had to shut the signs away in the closet. Five rows of little desks, erasers filled with chalk dust, bulletin boards for student work, the teacher's filing cabinet—everything was here. I crossed the room and gazed out onto the roof where a wet sneaker lay like a dead rat. I flipped on the bluish overhead lights and half expected a student to jump out at me. Except for the uneven floorboards and dangling wires, Room 216 looked almost pretty—better than I had remembered.

I dropped everything onto my wobbly desk and faced the thirty-three empty chairs. For a moment, my idealism and excitement faltered. Everything in the room seemed to sigh wearily: another new teacher. I'd read up on the vicious circle of poverty that trapped kids like these, and wondered if the same went for new teachers. Given the few resources and meager training, were we, too, just climbing on a merry-go-round, in for a wild ride but always pinioned on the same circle? I couldn't bear the thought, so I pushed it out of my mind. There was so much to do. I began copying names from my class list onto index cards and taping them to desks. The clock read 8:00 AM; I picked up my class list and left for the auditorium.

Rather than meet in the classroom, as I had done on my first day as a sixth-grader, students met in the auditorium, and teachers went to collect them. The hallways were filled with kids, running in different directions and asking for certain rooms. No one seemed to know where to go, not even the teachers. They say that students need security on the first day. More than anything, they want routine, and to know “Am I safe?” Yet our school didn't seem safe at all. It felt completely disorganized and unprepared for the eight hundred students who had just poured out of the buses. It felt like we were a cast of actors rehearsing for a Broadway play, when suddenly the curtain opened to a packed audience. No one had their scripts or stage directions, and a quarter of the actors hadn't even shown up.

The auditorium sloped downward in rows of wooden seats to a stage enclosed by velvet curtains. Dozens of kids scattered among those chairs turned to eye me as I hurried down the aisle and sat down. Many kids had parents sitting beside them. Onstage was the principal, holding a clipboard, along with two other teachers. They were looking at me. I jumped up and joined them.

For weeks I'd been preparing for this moment. I'd done everything from sharpen pencils to reread new-teacher guidebooks. I'd read all the materials the school district gave me on the Big Issues. Race—how would I be culturally sensitive to students' Hispanic and African American origins? Self-esteem—how would I be encouraging and never make them feel bad? Bilingual education—how would I teach everything in both languages, so the Spanish speakers wouldn't feel left out? Even though they were sixth-graders, I prepped a speech inspiring them to attend college, and not local colleges but Ivy League ones, where—in my mind—admission directors would be sympathetic to underprivileged minority kids and offer them scholarships. Later, I would discover that it was statistically unlikely that more than half of the students would even graduate from high school, let alone make it to higher education. In his book,
The First Days of School
, Dr. Wong says many new teachers have grandiose ambitions, and he calls this “the Fantasy Stage.” (It is replaced, apparently, by “the Survival Stage.” Great.) These dreamy goals reflected my own biases and unrealistic expectations, and showed how I carried the snobberies from my world into theirs—a move I would pay for later on. Another self-imposed goal was that every one of my students would learn to read at grade level by June—a Herculean feat, I would later realize. But back then I simply didn't know better.

“Ms. Asquith?” The principal looked at me expectantly. My hand trembled as I lifted up my student list.

“Good morning. Buenos días,” I shouted. “Alvarado, Chanta. Antonetti, Ivetteliz. Byers, Sharmaine. Castillo, Iris.” I choked on that second name and on this one too: “Colon, Yahaira.” My group pooled by the wall. The girls carried black-and-white composition notebooks. The boys stood empty-handed.

I thought back to my own first day in sixth grade—my mom put me in a gray dress with white tights and penny loafers (it was 1984). My blond hair was tucked behind my ears, which bore tiny pearl earrings. I was flat-chested, makeup-free, and barely combed my hair unless my mom made me. The boys all wore ties and jackets.

Here at Julia de Burgos, the girls had jet-black hair, shiny and slicked straight back into high buns, or parted, swept across their foreheads, and pinned behind the right ear. They wore dark fitted jeans that tapered down to Timberland boots. Gold or silver hoops dangled from their earlobes and matched several overlapping chains and necklaces. Some girls had glitter painted across their eyelids. They looked polished, confident, and tough. I barely got a look at the boys, but they wore baggy, low-riding pants and had buzz cuts. A few had the beginnings of a moustache, but most were baby-cheeked and clear skinned. I thought sixth-graders were eleven. Some kids here were pushing thirteen.

“Get in line, please,” I said. I straightened them out and started walking. The only line I'd led before this was a conga line; I never realized how hard it would be. Students veered all over the place. They were tight-lipped and shy, yet wandered off like curious ducklings. Some slid ahead of me, and some dragged their feet in the back. They touched everything—the fire extinguisher, the bulletin boards, doorknobs. Instead of stopping them immediately and making my first lesson how to walk in a line, I continued. After all, I was the English teacher, not the how-to-walk-straight teacher. To accommodate, I tried to walk backward to keep an eye on them. I stumbled. A few giggles. Outside Room 216, I stopped them and perfected the line before entering the class, as I had read I should.

“Look for your name on the desk,” I said, as they snaked in quietly and sat down.

There were some teacher basics I had picked up: A good teacher has a “procedure” for every classroom activity. For example, lining up, using the bathroom, asking questions, and being dismissed. Students as young as eleven and twelve like procedures because they provide order, which helps them avoid doing the wrong thing and being laughed at by their friends. Kids laugh at each other for every little thing, from mispronouncing the teacher's name to sitting in the wrong desk. Students will do whatever it takes to avoid being laughed at. Another situation that strikes terror into the hearts of eleven-year-olds is not being able to find their classroom. A sixth-grader lost in the hallway is a sixth-grader vulnerable to running into a seventh- or eighth-grader and getting beaten up. These painful possibilities keep students awake the night before the first day of school, and procedures help them avoid these nightmares. I had come across the concept of procedures in my studies, but not recalling what it was like to be eleven years old, I had brushed it off for broader, weightier theories that interested a twenty-six-year-old. Later, when I reintroduced myself to procedures, it would serve as the turning point for my classroom. At the moment, though, this oversight was about to spark my unraveling.

With an uncertain hand, I put chalk to chalkboard and wrote, “Ms. Asquith.” When I stood back and looked at it, the handwriting was light and slanted downward. Quickly, I erased it and tried again, pressing harder and writing each letter hugely. The last three letters still slanted downward.

As I turned around and saw everyone watching me, I felt like the emperor with no clothes. I was a big faker, down to the starched pinstriped blouse intended to make me look serious. My shoulder-length blond hair, which I preferred loose and curled, was blown straight and restricted into a no-nonsense ponytail. My lipstick of choice was matte brick, which I never wore, but had specifically selected over softer, shimmery shades to create the impression that I was mature and purposeful. The veterans had even told me to lie and say I'd had years of experience. But I couldn't fool anyone, and it felt wrong to start off the school year with a lie when my success would depend on creating a trusting and mutually rewarding relationship with these kids.

“Hey everyone, I'm Ms. Asquith. And I'm a new teacher, so, uh, I'm extra strict.”

A silence hung over us as the classroom waited for me to say something. I stood behind my desk. Good teachers never sat at their desks, I'd read, so I merely clung to mine.

“Um, I, uh, grew up in New Jersey, and I went to college, and wrote for newspapers for six years. My parents are from England.” With that, I walked back to the front of the room and pulled down the map and pointed at the small island across the Atlantic. “I also lived in Chile for a year. I'm not from Chile, that is. I just worked there for a year ... as a journalist ....”

Over the loudspeaker, the assistant principal announced it was time for the Pledge of Allegiance. Several students didn't want to stand up. “C'mon,” I insisted, even though I wondered if people from a commonwealth had to pledge allegiance to the United States. There was no flag. I drew one on the board. Only half the kids recited it, and some barely stood up. The solemn stillness returned.

“Hablo Español. Is there anyone who speaks only Spanish?” I said in Spanish. Several students raised their hands. I said in Spanish: “Our goal is to learn English this year. I expect you to speak English to me most of the time.”

Then I repeated it in English. For a few minutes I proceeded in both languages. This took twice as long. It also made everything I said stilted and incoherent. The kids looked confused. Was this bilingual education? I made a mental note to look into exactly how bilingual education worked. I switched into English.

“Um, okay. Let's go around the room and say your name, age, and the street you live on,” I suggested, hopefully.

The chubby boy with spiky hair in the first row looked up at me, pleading with not-me-first eyes. Desperation made me ruthless. “You. C'mon,” I pushed.

I took a couple of deep breaths. So far, so good. No one was eating me alive. In fact, they seemed intimidated. My door opened softly, and my supervisor, Mrs. G., peeked her head in. She quickly counted my students and left. Mrs. G. didn't teach. She was head of the Bilingual Team in addition to being my direct supervisor, just under the principal. I pretended to be too involved to notice her, but I was pleased she saw my controlled classroom, after she had said I was “not aggressive enough.”

“Time to take roll,” I announced, admiring my use of such a classic teacher phrase. As I ran through every name, slowly and methodically, the students gazed off into the distance, bored. A few fidgeted. To my horror, only fifteen students from my list of twenty-seven were present. Five other students sitting in desks weren't on my list. My eyes met those of one nameless boy, and he looked down. That was strange. I didn't say anything. I made a mental note to ask the main office. A half-hour or so into instruction and no fights had broken out. I thought I must be doing very well. A swell of good feeling ran through me, and I eagerly shared this accomplishment with my students.