The Great Expectations School (6 page)

After deflecting questions about my age, family size, and marital status, I launched into an even-tempered sermon about how 4-217 would succeed or fail as a group. “On the Yankees, either everyone wins or no one wins. If Derek Jeter has a great hitting game but doesn't back up his pitcher at shortstop, the team suffers. The Yankees are a strong team because they back each other up. They win because they work together. We need to help each other out for us all to do well. All I want to do is help you get smarter and have fun while it's happening. I'm very interested in trips, rewards, and games, but only if we work together. Does this sound fair?”

“Yes, Mr. Brown,” the choral response resounded. The speech felt firm, and the kids sat silently with their eyes on me for every word.

“Excellent! Since we're a team, I thought it would be fair if we all made our class rules
together.
Who has an idea for a good rule for our team?”

Myriad hands shot up. I called on Cwasey, a shrimpy, bespectacled black boy with squinty eyes and a freshly shaved head.

“You should respect everyone. Like teachers and students and the principal.”

“
Outstanding, Cwasey
! Brilliant! Respect for teachers and students and the principal. An outstanding first rule.” I jotted it on the board. “What exactly is ‘respect,' Cwasey?”

“Respect means you should treat everybody good, like you want to be treated.”

I had a star. Cwasey Bartrum!

I called next on Sonandia, my line leader. “You should do all your work the best you can all the time.”

Deloris said, “Nobody should steal nobody's stuff and treat everything like it's important.”

Bernard piped up. “You should not fight in school cause there's better ways to…like… solve your problems.”

“You should respect everyone,” Dennis reiterated.

Lakiya prompted several giggles when she shouted in her bassy tone, “Do your homework!”

I ignored the chuckles because she had hit one of the key points. This wasn't going to be so lawless after all. These children were moral authorities! I consolidated their input into two broad rules regarding respect, effort, and honesty (rules I had of course planned from the beginning) and moved them to the “reading rug,” a giant panther design I had bought on the Grand Concourse.

For the two weeks before the Success for All schedule began (when students would change rooms for their skill-level groups), teachers followed an introductory curriculum called
Getting Along Together.
For the first lesson, I had to read
Crow Boy,
an Eastern fairy tale about an outcast child who finds self-reliance. Introducing the story, I wrote the word “unique” on my chart paper, which Sonandia, my wordsmith, defined as “one of a kind.” I told them we all have secret talents that we ourselves might not even know about yet. “Some of you on the carpet right now might be brilliant comic strip artists, creative writers, question-askers, room-organizers, or things we haven't even thought of. This year we will work together to discover those hidden gifts.”

Two pages into my
Crow Boy
read-aloud, Fausto stood up and ambled leisurely toward the door, drawing the attention of the whole class. “Fausto. Fausto.
Fausto
!” I shouted. Fausto turned back toward the class.

“THAT STORY'S WACK, YO!”

I kept a straight face, but a majority of the class erupted in crazed laughter at Fausto's apparently genius comedic line. Fausto beamed while fifteen kids cracked up, Lakiya the loudest of all. She bellowed a forced, open-mouthed cackle, swaying violently in her seated position, knocking into classmates.

Ten seconds ago, we were all on the same page. Now it looked like a different class.

As the overwrought giggles receded, Fausto, now a superstar, still had not returned to his seat. I had to take this kid down. In dead-pan, I said, “The story's not wack. Are you ready to stop acting like a kinder —”

“DAAAAAA! Mr. Brown talkin' gangsta, yo!”

“Mr. Brown said ‘wack'!”

Destiny, Athena, Sonandia, and three others whose names I had not yet memorized sat patiently waiting for the story to continue. Everyone else was going bonkers.

“He say ‘the story not wack'!”

Beads of sweat formed all over me. I looked at the clock: 8:43. Three hours and forty-seven minutes until lunch.

“Silence. Silence. Fausto! Sit!” I yelled at him as I would a wayward mutt.

Deloris piped up with a grin, “Mr. Brown, you turning red.”

Bernard jumped in on my behalf. “Be quiet, yo! Let Mr. Brown read
Crow Boy
!”

Lakiya, still grinning, echoed Bernard's plea. “Shut up! Shut up y'all!” Suddenly, Fausto's face changed and he sat.

I had set myself against allowing “shut up” into the 4-217 vernacular, but my temperature was skyrocketing and at that moment I could handle the kids shutting each other up if it worked. And did Lakiya, a famous attitude-problem child, hold sway over other kids' behavior?

I battled through reading and discussing
Crow Boy,
often stopping mid-page because of rude laughter. One time, Fausto slapped
Destiny on the shoulder, a minuscule harbinger of the intergender aggression to come.

When I sent them back to their groups to write a story retell, or regurgitation of the plot, I felt like I had scaled a mountain in simply getting through the short book. Sonandia and several of her pals seemed to enjoy the story. In fifteen minutes, though, I was back to the beginning of another new lesson and new fight. I calculated that I would teach at least seven hundred lessons this year; they could not all be like this stop-and-start scrape job.

Our opening math lesson regarding bar graphs yielded slightly better results. I made a model graph, polling the kids and charting their favorite TV shows in a data table and spelling out my procedure on the board. They copied everything in their math notebooks or blank loose-leaf sheets I provided.

P.S. 85 draws its students from one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Bronx, but almost all of the kids had cable television to watch their favorite shows:
That's So Raven, Spongebob Squarepants, Kim Possible.
I soon learned that most of my students also owned state-of-the-art video-game systems. One teacher explained, “It's an investment in a twenty-four-hour babysitter.”

Fausto got out of his seat eleven times during the twenty-minute math lesson. I tried to keep him at bay by calling on him when his hand was not raised. To my surprise, he had the correct answer every time.

After the kids answered the worksheet questions from the
Math Trailblazers
textbook and we had discussed them (although only ten of the twenty-one present completed the work), it was time for the Baseline Writing Sample. This would be a “before” example to compare with June work. The prompt was, “What would make a good teacher for me?”

Despite my coaxing, Lakiya, Deloris, and “weird” Eric again wrote nothing. Maimouna, my prolific student whose blue card warned about her tendency to “get lost by writing pages and pages,” dutifully filled four pieces of loose-leaf with neon-purple ink.

One more lesson to go before the now direly needed lunch respite. Using a template devised during my summer training at Mercy College, I had created a “biography/autobiography” unit as an introductory meet-each-other literacy endeavor. For a model, I had a great kid-friendly biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I decided on the spot that rather than read the whole book (an invitation for disruption), we would crawl one page at a time, charting the important elements of a biography.

PAGE 1: Birth date and place. Family background.

PAGE 2: Life before age 5.

PAGE 3: Life in elementary school. Friends, interests.

PAGE 4: An important experience or adventure as a young person. This may be a hint for something important the person does as an adult!

I stopped in the middle because after four and a half hours in the room together, we had made it to lunchtime. The kids jumped and pushed en route to the cafeteria. The mood was frantic and hungry and bore no resemblance to the beginning of the morning.

A phenomenon that lives only in our military, prisons, and elementary schools is the crucially serious transit
line.
I hated walking in line as a kid. I thought that if I could show I trusted my students to walk calmly and decently together, they would respect my trust and respect each other. Trust begets good teamwork.

When I reflected on the first hour of my first day, I realized everything I had done in that brief honeymoon period would come back to haunt me. My “team” spiel and my desire to offer everyone an evenhanded shake and social contract of respect were disasters of nuclear proportions. With my good-faith gesture, I had put myself in a position to be defied by one charismatic rebel, which of course happened immediately, opening the floodgates. Before I had won the
respect and command of the class, I had allowed myself to be drawn into a graceless power struggle with the attention-seeking subverter.
From the Floor to the Moon
felt miles away.

Counter to my hopes, my lack of stern watchfulness during the first lineup enabled them to loudly screw off during future hall-walking time, since I had sent an initial impression that I was not fatally serious about our line. This resulted in a constant public fracas of shouting and shepherding the noncompliers during those formative first weeks. The disorder in the hall spilled wildly into the classroom, turning each morning, each return from lunch, gym, and computers, and each dismissal into an unwieldy and dangerous mess. I had been
too nice.

The first day finished with forty minutes of doling out jobs—sweeper, dustpan holder, boys' line leader, girls' line leader, botanist, three librarians, two popularly demanded assistant librarians—and cleaning the floor, which had somehow become a cyclone scene of shredded papers, tissues, and pencil shavings. I handed out an exuberant welcome letter and supply list to parents that I had revised endlessly over the previous week.

I dismissed the kids out onto the subbasement-level blacktop as a gallery of legal guardians watched and waited behind the chain-link fence above. Seeing the adults waiting for us, my mood changed on a dime. I suddenly felt proud to be a leader in this procession of children, the first nip of excitement since my stairwell descent before the day even started.

The kids scattered immediately, and I headed back into school for the weekly eighty-minute Professional Development session. As soon as I hit the steps, I felt a shot of dull fatigue in my knees, as if they were about to give out. My heart throbbed and I felt a steely pounding in my wrists and forearms.

Barbara Chatton, my in-school mentor, advised me, “It's never as good as you think it is, and it's never as bad as you think it is. The day's over. Think of it as one door closing and another door opening.”

That night I recounted the fiasco to everyone I knew. My roommate, Greg, and my neighbor Kadi wanted to rip Fausto apart. Their rage was contagious, and I started to feel worse. I called Jess.

I had only known Jess for nine days, but they were memorable ones. We had met while cavorting like fiends to Billy Idol's “Dancing with Myself “at a mutual friend's rooftop party in Brooklyn and had been more or less inseparable since. Meshing the stomach-tickling excitement of new romance with the annual end-of-summer dash for kicks, my feelings about Jess had quickly planted her very near to the center of my universe.

During the school day I thought I radiated failure, but Jess told me it's impossible to juggle so many flaming bowling pins of responsibility at once. I psyched myself up that this was a battle that I had asked for, and one that I was going to win. Now I knew their faces.

I decided two things. First, the kids would be disinclined to act out if there was a consistent reward system in place. This was something I had underestimated and thus had not implemented immediately on day one. Second, pleading with the collective for silence was exhausting and ineffective. I needed signals that could work efficiently and save my voice.

I made a “TEAM EFFORT” poster and divided it into halves for stars and strikes. If I counted to three, my newly hatched silent signal, and the room was still noisy, strike city! If they achieved quiet, star stickers all around. When the class accrued forty more stars than strikes (circa Halloween, I planned), we would have a 4-217 party.

I did not feel like smiling on my way downstairs for the second day.

Outside the 4-217 door, I sternly announced our new system to the line, translating their blank, tired looks as understanding. In the middle of my speech, a secretary tapped me on the shoulder and handed me three orange paper strips from the office, meaning I should expect three new students to arrive in my room in the next sixty seconds. Jennifer Taylor, Joseph Castanon, and Evley Castro dutifully
appeared. Tall, mature-looking Jennifer shook my hand and said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Brown.” Evley had a sensitive face and shyly stared at his sneakers when I shook his limp hand. Joseph had a bowl haircut and an empty look in his eyes.

When chatter materialized during our bar graph lesson activity, I shook my head with slow intensity and boomed, “One…two…
I still hear talking
…
THREE
! That's a strike!” I felt like a jerk.

The kids reacted with spasms of disappointment, as if their final lotto number had failed to come up. They called out names of the offenders with twangy irritation. “Ber-NARD!” “Cwa-SEY!” “De-LOR-is!”

We had five strikes and one star when I realized I needed to doctor this whole operation. I started giving out spontaneous stars for strong individual efforts until we got the board even. Once the class received several stars, the kids started to like it.

Teachers are supposed to keep anecdotal records of misbehavior for documentation's sake. Mine quickly piled up.