Emergency Teacher (8 page)

Leaning back in my desk chair, my plan was to chip away at the piles of paperwork the main office needed. I was swamped with all the forms that accumulated between 8:20 AM and 2:57 PM each day: attendance sheets, emergency phone numbers, emergency lesson plans, special education forms, weekly lesson goals. The main office constantly had more paperwork for me to fill out, and I never had time to do it. I knew they needed it to organize the school, but I needed to organize my classroom. I imagined the confusion I was causing, multiplied by the dozens of new teachers, multiplied by the fact that this happened every year, and I began to understand why the system was so disorganized.

Quickly, my mind drifted to the lessons of the upcoming week. Actual teaching was even harder than I had anticipated. A quarter of the class spoke no English and a quarter no Spanish. How did I get everyone to understand the assignments? The other stumbling block: My class contained close to forty students, and it was a fluid bunch, with new arrivals and departures each day. My class list was never more than 50 percent correct, and any student I sent to the main office was bounced back with a “looking into this” note. I had spent the first week reviewing class rules, only to have half the class turn over and a dozen new kids who needed to learn from scratch. I had lost track. To whom had I taught what? I had four Juans, two Marias, two Vanessas, two Miguels, and a Yahaira, whose name I still couldn't pronounce correctly. I tried to sort them out with HI, MY NAME IS stickers for their shirts, but they tore them off at lunch. There was no sign of my team teacher yet, either.

I also had to teach a procedure for every little thing: how to walk into the classroom (slowly, directly to seats), put their books away (under desk, not on floor), sharpen their pencils (before class begins), throw things away (no basketball shots), speak to the teacher (soft voice), speak to each other (never). And that was only the beginning. After figuring out what to teach, I was confronted with the problem of how to teach. I'd tell them. Blank stare. They forgot. I'd tell them again. They said they forgot, again. How could I make information stick in their little heads so they didn't turn the room upside down with forty different approaches to things? This was frustrating, as I was anxious to start teaching reading and writing. Not that I had any books yet.

Instead of the administrative paperwork, my hands drifted over to a stack of cream-colored journals we had begun writing in that week. Pete recommended journal writing, and so I asked Mrs. G., and she sent fifty small notebooks to my room. They were the first items I had gotten from her.

The students had already decorated the covers with hearts and stars, their names in bubble letters and scribbles. Some had applied the names of famous wrestlers, like THE ROCK. The girls tended toward loopy, curly writing, punctuating each line with circles and squiggly lines. The boys mostly scrawled sticklike letters, and generally wrote fewer words. Most chose print instead of cursive, neatly following the blue lines. It appeared as though they had made an effort. Reflecting on their first week of school, most eked out just a paragraph.

How should I handle their mistakes? I tried to be positive and not criticize, so I marked, “WOW! You remembered a lot of rules.” I crossed out his mistakes and rewrote the words correctly in big letters above. I smiled at the paper. On Monday, they would rewrite the entries.

Next, I opened Melinda's journal. She had spent the morning designing her name in several styles on the first few pages until I stood over her desk. Her entry explained everything.

I read it over and over but couldn't even decide if this was English or Spanish. She was twelve and had moved to Philadelphia from Puerto Rico when she was eight years old, which meant four years in the city's public schools. It also meant four teachers had passed her through, despite her illiteracy. Not me, I thought. My students would be held accountable. I struggled to think of something constructive to note. “I'm excited for all you will learn this year!” I wrote. Then I repeated it in Spanish, just in case.

The next journal belonged to Vanessa, the kind of girl, even at twelve, who got noticed. With long black hair and a dimpled smile, her beauty had already earned her unwanted attention throughout Julia de Burgos. Either the boys would harass her with catcalls or the girls would sneer and make catty comments. Most likely out of fear, Vanessa stuck to my side, asking to eat lunch in the classroom and insisting on sitting in the front row. We got along. She was also intelligent. Instead of journal writing, I'd given her an essay question for a competition I'd found in a teen magazine.

“Write a 150-word essay about what your mother means to you.” The prize was a $5,000 scholarship toward college.

Underneath, I wrote: “Great job. I will send this in. Keep up the good work.”

An hour had passed, and I had only corrected a handful of journals. The sun was setting. I had better hurry. The next journal was already bent up and torn a little. Most students wrote their names boldly across the front. But Jovani didn't take up much space, on the journal or in the classroom. In the top corner, penciled in tiny letters, was “jovani.”

The boys called Jovani “LD,” which I thought was a nickname and almost used myself until I overheard the special education teacher, Mrs. Q., say it. LD meant learning disabled. Jovani barely noticed. Skinny with floppy arms, he didn't walk as much as trip across the room. He had a wandering eye, and a needy, guileless way. When students in the class waved their hands, Jovani practically jumped out of his seat to wave his, too. Once, I called on him.

“Yes, Jovani?”

He stared at me, startled. I waited. He waited. I called on someone else.

He looked about ten years old. In his journal, he had drawn a row house. Nothing fancy, just a rectangle, topped by a triangle, with six squares for windows, a rectangle for a door, a sun, and some squiggly lines, which appeared to be birds. On the roof, he wrote, “Jovani adn Ms Asauith.” On the second page, he had answered only my second essay question. I suspected someone had helped him. “What are some of the problems in the world?”

The rest of the journals fell somewhere between Jovani's and Vanessa's. These students didn't seem to belong in the same classroom. I didn't know how to assess any students because I had no clue what sixth-graders were expected to know. I shoved their journals in my canvas teacher bag and turned the flimsy lock on my door. Room 217 next door remained dark.

That weekend, panic set in. I still had nothing to teach. My class was still behaving okay, but the hallways were getting out of control. A whirlwind of student mobs had stampeded down the hallway on a recent day. I peeked my head out to see what was wrong and saw them leap into the air and smack their binders against the hallway wall. I didn't see any other teachers intervening, but weren't we the authority here? There were some hall monitors, called NTAs (non-teaching assistants), but students had begun to ignore them, and there didn't seem to be any consequences. I thought the principal was supposed to patrol the halls, but she was never around.

Looking for materials to teach, Pete and I hit the bookstore with a vengeance. Who knew when Mrs. G. would deliver textbooks to my class? She told me to teach school rules and procedures. And she kept reminding me that mine was a bilingual classroom, “Because, after all, we are a bilingual magnet school.” I didn't know what the hell bilingual education looked like in practice. At a weekly teachers' meeting, the veterans all talked about September being Puerto Rican History Month, when we'd teach activities about the Taino Indians, the original natives of Puerto Rico. But I had no materials about how to do that, and everyone was out the door the minute the meeting ended. The veterans seemed annoyed with me, and everyone had their own set of emergencies. When I asked my mentor for help, she gave me a stack of various workbooks on the Taino Indians. Then she told me to sign her pay sheet. Later in the year, her other efforts to “mentor” me included stapling some colored cardboard in decorative patterns around my blackboard, and a quick lesson on how to fill in the grades for bilingual instruction listed on my students' report cards, even though I wasn't actually teaching it.

Left to my own devices, I turned to Pete.

Pete's idea was to draw up a week's worth of lesson plans. From my own pocket, I bought
The Elements of Style
, by Strunk and White, for English class; several workbooks; and
Chicken Soup for the Kid's Soul
, for reading class. We couldn't find anything for social studies.

At home I typed up my first worksheet. The Worksheet—that ancient teaching relic. Every pedagogue knew the Worksheet was a rote-learning teaching technique of the 1970s. In today's classrooms, teachers did activities and projects that had goals and objectives. I would get to that stage, I promised myself. The Worksheet was just a stopgap measure.

That night we went downtown for dinner and then to our favorite hangout, The Pen and Pencil Club, a late-night journalists' haunt. At that point, if anyone were to have asked me what I did for a living, I would have said, “I'm a journalist, teaching for a year.” Yet, already, I felt strangely distant from my old profession. Dinner was strained. Pete was leaving for a few weeks for a medical rotation in western Pennsylvania. As usual, we talked about teaching and my students. We were tired. He felt I was stretching myself too thin trying to make assignments for each individual child. I said I thought I had no choice. He thought Mrs. G. and the veterans sounded like bitches, and I should steer clear of her and do my own thing. At the bar we drank Yuenglings and smoked a few cigarettes, and as we got drunk we chatted with the bartender and people at the jukebox.

“Chris,” Pete said later, “you're being too easy on the students.” In the swarm of advice of recent weeks, it was easy to focus on the pieces I liked and ignore the rest. This one I ignored. He had also mentioned something about how the really bad kids wait to show up during the third or fourth weeks. He had said I should be stricter because this was only the beginning. Only the good kids show up in the first weeks.