Relentless Pursuit (16 page)

Taylor knew exactly what Hrag meant. She woke each morning feeling like a warrior about to go into battle. But she also felt soldier-strong. So much of the job was about finding that toughness inside that you didn't know you had, that part of you strong enough to take a beating and get up and do it again. She felt so good about what she was doing that she would have taught at Locke High School without pay.
This is the biggest accomplishment I've ever had—maybe the biggest I ever will have.

She was amazed at herself—and so was her family and everyone else who knew her. People had probably thought that because she came from money, she would never do something like teach. Now, when they found out that she was working in a classroom in Watts, they were blown away. “You do WHAT?” they would say. And from the way they said it she could tell they thought she was either crazy or a miracle worker. Taylor realized she could never have a normal conversation at a cocktail party again. At one boozy affair in Hollywood, a glassy-eyed aging boomer effused: “Wow! You're changing lives!” Then, without skipping a beat: “Do you know where the rest of the soda is?”

She felt that her own life was changing, in ways big and small. For one thing, she couldn't go shopping anymore. She used to be frivolous with her money, going out and buying things she didn't need. Now, when she went shopping for herself, it weighed on her conscience. Her parents helped pay the rent (they told her they would think of her stint with Teach For America as the equivalent of two years of graduate school and subsidize her accordingly), but Taylor put herself on a budget. When her father gave her fifty dollars in spending money, she used it to buy books for her kids.

I've grown up overnight. I was in college; now I'm in a classroom, learning by doing, and getting a master's degree. It's happened so fast. I want it to slow down.

Though Taylor had been a sorority girl at USC, she had never really felt comfortable in groups. But now she was in this gigantic fraternity called TFA, and it felt right. She had never before met people like these. They were all so smart, so hardworking and capable. She loved them.

Some of them were really fun, too. Like Dan Ehrenfeld. Dan also taught English at Locke, and he had been in her teaching collaborative during summer institute. Raised in San Diego and a graduate of Wesleyan University, he was cool and laid-back. He made Taylor think, and he always made her laugh. On Friday afternoons he'd come to Taylor's bungalow and listen to music while she swept the classroom floor. Some nights they would get together to plan lessons; most times they'd just hang out. Taylor was afraid to see Dan teach. She imagined that with his freewheeling style, the kids probably ran roughshod over him. But his laissez-faire approach was the perfect foil to Taylor's perfectionism. Whenever she got down on herself and remembered that she really didn't know what she was doing, she just called Dan. “Don't worry about it,” he'd say. “You couldn't be worse than me. No one's worse than me.”

TFA was all-consuming. Her boyfriend lived in another city, and the distance and the job began to take a toll on the relationship. She found herself relating more to her fellow teachers than to him. When she heard that Hrag Hamalian was about to get a new class of repeating biology students—halfway through the first semester—she brought him a donut to cheer him up. He looked like he was on the verge of hysterical laughter. She had heard from others that he went out every night. He was kind of cute.

One day Hrag called her about a project they were working on.

“You sound upset,” he said.

“I am,” she replied. “This job is overwhelming.”

“Taylor, you're one of the strong ones,” said Hrag. “You can't break. We'll all break. You have to hold it together. It's not a competition. Are you still here? Then you have to give yourself credit. We all do.”

He calmed her down.
Nice guy,
she thought.

Her feelings about Samir were more complicated. She dreaded his visits to her classroom, but she needed him. “Rip me apart,” she told him. “I want to get better.” Samir was pleasantly surprised. Taylor, the CM he had worried most about meeting, had turned out to be the one most receptive to Co-Investigation. Every time he gave her a “delta”—TFA jargon for something she could improve upon—she got to work. By his next visit, the change would be made. When Samir wasn't available, Taylor reached out to others, stealing ideas and strategies and adapting them to her classes. She became the darling of the literacy coaches from UCLA who helped the new English teachers at Locke. Mrs. Jauregui, the Locke assistant principal in charge of the ninth grade, took notice, too. She declared Taylor a “natural,” a potential master teacher.

Taylor looked upon Chad, the former TFAer turned administrator, as a god. In the real world, his abilities would probably be taken for granted. In a place like Locke, where the sands were always shifting and the administration was long on promises and short on follow-through, Chad's straightforward approach earned him genius status. He ran the once-a-month TFA Saturday-morning professional development sessions for the Locke English teachers. At his meetings, Taylor actually learned stuff. At the larger faculty meetings, she usually pulled out her laptop and worked on lesson plans as speaker after speaker droned on.

But Taylor paid attention when Chad was in charge. He had been an ace English teacher, and he happily shared his best practices with the new recruits. He also took his job as administrator very seriously. Dr. Wells had decreed that each department give regular benchmark assessments to track student and teacher performance throughout the year. Chad thought Wells's idea was a good one, and he worked with the young English teachers to help them develop a common curriculum and rigorous assessments. To ensure buy-in, he paid them for their planning time.

Many teachers regarded the assessments as just another ill-considered drain on their time, especially since they were already required to give the district's own periodic assessments. So they ignored Wells's directive. Behind closed doors, they were free to teach whatever they wanted, and they also felt free to create their own assessments. If they didn't have time or the inclination to grade them all, they estimated the average scores and just submitted those. The benchmarks were a bust.

Still, Taylor took them seriously. She began to teach to the tests that she and a few other ninth-grade English teachers had coauthored with Chad's guidance. And her kids' scores started to climb. But instead of making her happy, the results worried her.
Are they really learning? Do they understand the concepts? Am I placing too much emphasis on test results and not enough on the fact that these kids can't read?

She shifted gears. Instead of focusing so much on testing, she decided her priority would be reading. She wanted her students to be able to compete in society. That couldn't happen unless they could read. Somebody had remarked that the achievement gap was really a literacy gap. She agreed. She would see seniors struggling over words and think:
How did this happen?
If she could get her kids hooked on books, she would have done her job.

So she cast about for reading strategies. She got some help from Jessica Miller, a second-year TFA English teacher at Locke. Miller wasn't the warm-and-fuzzy type, but she had managed to get her kids' reading levels up by two years. Taylor picked her brain. Following Miller's lead, Taylor began to build structure into her classes. Now, she started each day with a grammar “warm-up,” a simple ten-minute review of a single grammatical rule, like subject-verb agreement or the possessive case. The warm-up was a way to get kids settled in their seats and working on something as Taylor took care of administrative tasks like attendance. Twice a week, she gave students a twenty-minute block for silent sustained reading (SSR) and tips to aid comprehension. She distributed Post-its so that kids could flag important passages as they read. And she taught them to look for clues—like foreshadowing—in the narratives to enhance understanding.

In the beginning of the year, she often led “guided practice” in essay writing, standing at the whiteboard and modeling exactly what she wanted to see her students do. Samir urged her to let her kids do more of the work themselves. That was hard—she didn't want them to mess up—but she slowly, slowly began to let them discover for themselves what worked and what didn't. When they were learning to write persuasive essays, Taylor chose the newly announced NBA dress code as a topic. She made the kids pull information from texts like the NBA website and the
Los Angeles Times
sports pages to support their positions. Some fell on their faces, but many of them astonished her with the complexity of their thoughts and writing.

Taylor refused to wage the battle over homework. She thought that if she drove them hard in class, that was enough. It was unrealistic to expect these kids to go home, find a safe, quiet spot, do their homework, and get help from a responsible adult if they were stuck. Equally unrealistic was the expectation that she would grade one hundred papers a night! So she tried to cover everything in fifty-minute periods, and if her students weren't finished by the time the bell rang, she held them until they were. Without the homework issue, she got less resistance and more engagement in class.

Her teacher personality began to change as well. She put aside her uniform of black trousers and black shoes and began to wear different outfits. She was still plenty tough; she had no compunction about ejecting a student for the tiniest infraction. But she found herself letting her guard down sometimes, too. She got nicer, and the kids responded. Some did total turnarounds when she was supersweet. Soon they began to come to her classroom after school just to hang out. One day, Taylor confided that she had lost a friend to a drug overdose, precipitating a flood of empathy from students who had also lost loved ones. One of her more vexing students, Marisa, told Taylor that her father had killed her mother when she was just two years old. “I love you, Miss Rifkin,” she said, hugging her like a child. Taylor hugged her back and thought:
I love you, too.

         

Rachelle had a dream about the kids. She was in her classroom and a bad guy was trying to get in. She ran to the door to try to stop him. She was halfway there when she woke up.

The dream was strange, because in waking life, Rachelle never really felt unsafe at Locke—or in the neighborhood. She didn't think twice about leaving campus, crossing Avalon, and stopping at a bodega to buy spicy chips for the girls on the soccer team before practice. The bars on the cashier's booth didn't bother her; neither did the run-down store-front. She didn't know that the Crips headquarters was rumored to be just doors away; and if she had known it, that probably wouldn't have stopped her. There were intimations of danger all around her; she just chose to ignore them.

During the first week of school, Raúl had scared her with his drawing of a rooftop gunman. After Rachelle alerted the office, sessions were set up with the school's psychiatric social worker, and the family was summoned to school for a meeting. Raúl lived with his grandparents; he said his father was in the hospital because he drank too much. It was clear that there was some pathology in the home and Raúl was socially maladjusted—though his IEP, the instructional road map required by law for every student assigned to special ed, mentioned nothing about emotional issues. Raúl didn't participate in class and turned his head to avoid eye contact with Rachelle. When she gave the kids a test, his paper came back with an F scribbled at the top with the words “think I need a F because I very bad in class I don't went I'm going to be good any more I'm sorry. I will not get a good grade because I'm stupid. I don't know if I like this class any more.”

As the weeks passed and Rachelle got to know her students better, she thought it unlikely that Raúl would ever live out his murderous fantasies. The little guy worked hard—probably harder than anyone else in the class. And Rachelle worked hard to draw him out. She offered to accompany him to his therapy sessions, and in her loud, chaotic classroom, where it would have been easy for him to get lost, she made a point of acknowledging his presence. Eventually, someone figured out that Raúl was enrolled in two biology classes, and he was transferred out of Rachelle's fourth period. But not before Rachelle was rewarded with a small victory. One day, Raúl raised his hand in class!

It took a few months before Rachelle could get a code from the special ed office to access her kids' IEPs. The documents were supposed to be based on an in-depth assessment of each kid's specific learning disability. Preparing a proper IEP was an involved process that could take weeks, requiring meetings with parents and input from general ed teachers. If done correctly, they were invaluable tools for a special ed teacher. Not the IEPs Rachelle was handed. Many were hopelessly out of date, and most were incomplete or had obviously been slapped together at the eleventh hour. Based on what she was learning in graduate school about disability law, most of Locke's IEPs were out of compliance. When she was finally able to access them, most read: “specific learning disability.”
What the hell does “specific learning disability” mean?

What it ended up meaning for Rachelle was that in her first year of teaching special ed, she didn't know much at all about any of her kids. She had no idea what was impeding their ability to achieve—and causing the out-of-control behavior she often witnessed. No doubt some of the kids were acting out simply because they were frustrated by their learning disabilities, but others seemed handicapped by severe emotional issues.

Many appeared to be meeting expectations; they were stuck in the special ed ghetto, which was a real stigma among an already marginalized student population. One day, midway through the first semester, one of Rachelle's hardest-working students came to see her at lunch. “Miss Snyder,” she said, sobbing. “You didn't tell me this was special ed!” Little wonder she was upset. It didn't take Rachelle long to realize that the special ed kids at Locke routinely got the shaft.