The Great Expectations School Read online

  My grandma was going to come visit my family and me in December, but the ticket costs a lot. I can still talk to her on some Sundays and write letters to her. When I talk to her, I get happy happy happy!

  From the floor to the moon, I love you grandma!

  I gave Jimmarie her two copies along with a hardcover of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, thinking that she could identify with the author's inner-city Latina heritage, and we read the first two vignettes together. While we sat by her desk looking at her new books, Jimmarie gave me a tight hug, pressing her forehead into my shoulder, and whispered, “Thank you, Mr. Brown.”

  * * *

  As summer training neared its finish (the Fellows’ last day was August 1, preceding a two-week break), I was agonizing over having no placement for the fall. Would I be teaching kindergarten math enrichment or a fifth-grade homeroom next month? Would I end up as a roving substitute? Many other Fellows were in the same powerless boat.

  In the summer of 2003, the public school system in New York City was in a state of change. Even the name of the Board of Education was altered to the Department of Education, with its headquarters moving from 111 Livingston Street to 65 Court Street in Brooklyn. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had made education reform his keystone municipal issue, and newly appointed chancellor Joel I. Klein was his man for the task.

  In addition to implementing overhauls in curriculum and testing (largely inspired by the No Child Left Behind Act), Bloomberg and Klein revamped zoning lines. The old system of thirty-two districts was scrapped and consolidated into ten larger regions. District 9, which previously covered the South Bronx and was also the setting for Jonathan Kozol's required Fellow reading Amazing Grace, and District 10, which contained the Mid- to North Bronx, became Region One. To me, this meant that my Mummy Returns pal Susan Atero from the placement fair disappeared and my signed District 10 commitment form became worthless.

  The sweeping administrative changes led to communication breakdowns. Teacher vacancies were out there, but no one knew where. The placement fairs had been such a shooting gallery that deep into summer training almost a third of the new Teaching Fellows still did not know where they would be teaching in September. Two Fellows in Sarah Gerson's advisory group got suddenly “excessed” by schools that had overhired during placement fairs. Fellow Advisors, who had virtually no contact with the Region One office, encouraged us to cold-call schools.

  The Fellows also learned that the $4,750 Americorps education grants were suspended indefinitely, so despite the promise of total subsidization made during the application and orientation phases, ninety-five dollars would be deducted from each semimonthly paycheck to cover Mercy College classes. Sarah Gerson's room became a sea of bewildered head-shaking, like a bus tour group whose driver hasn't shown. That day was the first time I heard public education in New York described as “organized irresponsibility.”

  On Tuesday, July 29, Mr. Rose's class received an unannounced visit from Ms. Sonia Guiterrez, P.S. 85’s no-nonsense assistant principal with wild, frizzy orange locks who always dressed in tight black suits. She stormed the corridors in a perpetual power walk, often shouting commands in open classroom doors in the half moment she passed by. I had just begun leading the daily math period when Guiterrez entered. She sat in the back and observed with an inscrutable expression, leaving immediately at the lesson's end.

  Two days later, on my last day at summer school, the principal, Mrs. Boyd, entered the room like Ms. Guiterrez, just after I'd commenced the math lesson. She took notes for the entire forty minutes and left the room. Several minutes later, I was summoned to the principal's office, where Mrs. Boyd held my résumé.

  “Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown, Mr. Brown. Tell me about yourself. You went to NYU film school, I see. Is that Tisch?”

  “Yes.”

  “That's a very famous school. But now you want to be a teacher?”

  “Yes,” I said, and let a beat pass. My monosyllabic answers were not enough. “My long-long-term dreams are in writing and making movies, but my mother's a reading specialist and I spent some time working with kids at her school and that experience really made me believe that I have something to contribute as a teacher. I'm really excited about it. I've signed on with the Fellows for two years and I'm very committed to that. I want to help kids.”

  Mrs. Boyd nodded slightly. “Good, because I can tell you have the teaching gene. Ms. Guiterrez told me about the lesson she saw you do. She was actually supposed to observe Mr. Rose, but this worked out quite fortuitously. She said your communication skills with the children are exemplary. I went to see for myself and I must say I agree.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How do you feel about science, Mr. Brown?”

  “Clueless,” I wanted to respond. Despite science's indisputable importance to the world, I had generally avoided it as a student. I thought of handling wet dirt during my “Soil and Percolation” unit in elementary school.

  My hesitation was noticeable. I was being offered a job as a science cluster teacher. A teacher on wheels. I didn't want that. I wanted my own classroom and my own students: Mr. Brown's class.

  “Mr. Brown?”

  “I'm interested to be part of the P.S. 85 community wherever I can help,” I said.

  “Good, because I think you have the teaching gene.”

  “Thank you.” Here it comes.

  “We need an upper-grade science cluster teacher. Do you want the job?”

  “Yes… although I think I could really bring the most to the table as a classroom teacher. I think my ability to form relationships with students could create a very positive classroom culture across all subjects for the whole year, particularly with the school's older, more mature students.”

  “You make relationships as a cluster too,” Mrs. Boyd countered.

  “That's true, but an hour or less per week isn't the same as all day every day. Also, I think I could serve as a role model for a set group of kids, being a younger male teacher.”

  “Our roster is full right now for classrooms. All I have to offer you is this science position. This is it. Do you want to sign a commitment form?”

  The terrified uncertainty of many of my placementless colleagues and Susan Atero's vanishing made the decision for me.

  “Yes.” I signed the form and we shook hands. Mrs. Boyd left the room to photocopy the form for my records. In the few seconds that she was gone, I realized that I had been holding my copy of From the Floor to the Moon. Jimmarie and I had been looking at it again when Mrs. Boyd called me into the office, and I had taken the book with me.

  When my new principal returned, I asked if I could show her a project I had worked on with a student in Mr. Rose's class. Mrs. Boyd thumbed through the book.

  “This is beautiful. This is fantastic work, Mr. Brown. Hmm. Jimmarie Moreno-Bonilla. Can I keep this and show it off?” She clutched the book eagerly.

  It was my only copy. “Okay,” I said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Brown. This is terrific.”

  Later that day, I was congratulated by several teachers and administrators like a scout who had earned his stripes. Marianne Renfro, the veteran special ed coordinator and jack-of-all-trades administrator, gave me particularly warm wishes. I greatly appreciated the gesture from Ms. Renfro, since I knew her as a husky-voiced intimidator, feared and respected by students and faculty. “You're gonna make a helluva science teacher, Brown,” she nodded, extracting a Winston from her metallic case.

  I thanked her and mentioned that I was hoping for a classroom to open up.

  “So you want to be the main man straightaway, huh? I respect that. Maybe I can say something to the Queen.”

  A week later, I got the call I had been hoping for. Mrs. Boyd offered me a position teaching a fourth-grade classroom.

  Mr. Brown's class.

  August

  What Do You Want Us to Do?

  ON MONDAY, AUGUST 18, the Fellows returned for the long haul, although the first
day of school wasn't until September 8 (later than usual to compensate for the sweeping citywide administrative changes). I spent the two weeks off as a recluse, feverishly editing my NYU thesis film after an ill-planned Alaska-bound road trip fell through at the last minute.

  Every summer since high school graduation, I had set a week aside with my buddies Greg and McKenzie to drive the byways of America. We had diamond-mined in Arkansas, danced on the Las Vegas Boulevard median at dawn, performed “Stand by Me” a capella in Virgin Records's Nashville office lobby, romped around Robot World in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, and tramped across every state (except North Dakota) on the mainland. The cancellation of Road Trip V meant everything was changing.

  Like many twenty-two-year-olds, I interpreted occurrences around me as cryptic signposts pointed toward my approaching moment of importance. All roads had led me to this strange adventure. I took the August 14, 2003, blackout as an omen, a silent message with a significant meaning that I couldn't grasp. Three months earlier, I was a college student directing and acting in my first 35mm film. Two months ago, a Los Angeles beach bum on a last-gasp vacation. Last month, a clueless young professional in the company of children named Phaedra and Cochise. Now I surveyed the dark city from my Lower East Side rooftop and sipped orange Vitamin Water, content for the moment to observe the crisis from above, with no idea of what was coming for me at eye level.

  New Teacher Week opened with a near-melee inside Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. The auditorium probably held about a thousand people, but it looked to me like more than double that number wanted in for the morning session of “Identification and Reporting of Child Abuse and Maltreatment.” People started pushing and one new teacher screamed, “I need to get into ‘Abuse’ now!” I caught the afternoon session.

  The speaker, a bearded administrative veteran, launched into a speech about keeping our distance. “Our job, our responsibility as teachers, is to refer. As teachers, we do not treat the heartbreaking situations that can and will walk into our classrooms. We refer! There are trained professionals, contracted by the Department of Education, for counseling, physical therapy, and social work. We are not them. We are not their psychologists, social workers, nurses, parents, or friends. We are trained professionals in teaching and teaching only!”

  Opened in 1931, formidable, brick Public School 85: The Great Expectations School rests on a steep concrete slope in the square between Marion and Webster avenues. One long, broad corridor built up six stories from the bottom of the hill, its length spans three blocks from 184th to 187th streets. The school stands in the center of the Fordham neighborhood in New York's 16th congressional district, which the 2000 Census reported to have a median household income of $19,311, ranking 436th out of 436 districts in the fifty states. And P.S. 85’s district was deep in last place. Residents of the districts in 434th and 435th place respectively earn on average over $6,300 (32.6 percent more) and $2,600 (13.4 percent more) over the average 16th district resident. Also, those two districts are in West Virginia and Kentucky, where the cost of living is lower than in New York City. The P.S. 85 community lives in the very bottom of the economic barrel in America.

  The main entrance is on the first of four floors of classrooms, although the stairwell descends to a basement that houses special ed classes as well as the cafeteria. Below lies the subbasement that leads to the blacktop schoolyard, which serves primarily as the faculty parking lot. Exterior metal grates adorn all windows. The Great Expectations School looks like a prison.

  At an opening faculty assembly, each of the eleven new teachers (all Fellows) stood when introduced. I saw Allie Bowers and Elizabeth Camaraza, my two lunch buddies from summer school. Allie, just a year out of Bard College, was kindergarten-bound, and I thought she would be a perfect fit with the little kiddies.

  I admired raven-haired Elizabeth, who cursed and laughed and had made me feel legitimized in my summer exhaustion, confusion, and fear. She had gone from welfare lines to first class, raised two kids with her wonderfully nutty extended family in the Kearny, New Jersey, home where she grew up, and could sing both “London Calling” and “You Make Me Feel Brand New” at the top of her lungs. She was a natural-born leader.

  Mrs. Boyd introduced Marnie Beck, the new fourth-grade special ed teacher. Marnie was a hard-nosed, forearm-tattooed Long Islander whom I had seen around at Mercy, usually puffing a Kool below her dark sunglasses. At first, I thought hiring gruff Marnie as the grade's sole special ed teacher was proof positive that New York City public schools were truly in the drink. I quickly learned that the woman had more love and expertise with tough kids than anyone else I would meet at P.S. 85. Marnie was a soldier, and she became one of my heroes.

  I sat in a wooden auditorium seat amidst a clutch of young rookies, nervously eyeing the backs of incoming first-grade teacher Trisha Pierson and nebbishy computer guru David de la O. Next to me sat pretty, hipsterish Cat Samuels, the only new teacher who had not been at P.S. 85 for summer school. She would be a fourth- and fifth-grade literacy prep teacher, with my class slotted for Tuesday mornings. I asked what was playing in the headphones she was putting away. “Mission of Burma,” she said. “I'm in a big Matador Records phase.”

  “Awesome. Pavement is one of my favorite bands,” I offered, dropping the name of a Matador Records act with an accompanying thrill of credibility. I had an indie-rock ally!

  After the schoolwide faculty meeting, Mr. Bob Randazzo held his own opening powwow for fourth- and fifth-grade teachers. A mustachioed, mousey man with an affable demeanor and singsong cadence in his speech, Mr. R. was the upper-grade assistant principal and my direct supervisor. Randazzo had been at P.S. 85 for over thirty years, most of them as an administrator. After calling the room to order, he said, “Welcome back everybody. First order of business: Marianne Renfro… is gone.”

  “YES!” A rousing sweep of applause broke out. I was stunned. Summer school had been an administrator love-in, with special ed coordinator Ms. Renfro at the center. “Thank God!”

  Randazzo waved his hand to reclaim the floor. “And it's looking about ninety-five percent that I'll be retiring at the end of this year.”

  “Awwwww, Bobby…” The room now sounded like a sitcom audience track for a stray-puppy scene. “But I just want to remind everyone right off the bat that here in fourth and fifth grade, we take care of our own. If anyone at any point has any concerns, questions, tiffs, grievances, problems, successes, stock market tips (har har), you know you can always come to me. We don't have to go over each other's heads, because in fourth and fifth grade we do our own laundry.”

  “That's right!” It was like a political rally. “Absolutely, Bob!”

  My class was 4-217, pronounced “four-two-seventeen.” The numbers felt like an awkward juxtaposition at first, but I got used to them quickly. The pale lime room looked giant and bare. It had airconditioning, though, a blessing. I sat for a few silent minutes at my teacher's desk in the back, holding my classroom key. Ms. Vuong and Ms. Smith, two paraprofessionals assigned to help me organize my room, arrived. Ms. Vuong was in her third trimester and Ms. Smith had to be in her late sixties. They opened the coat closet's bulky sliding doors to reveal mountains of dusty textbooks resting on unsteady shelves.

  “What do you want us to do?” Ms. Smith asked me.

  I had no idea what anyone was supposed to do. In the opening meeting, Mrs. Boyd had announced her credo for teachers—“Your classroom is your résumé”—but I was blank on how to begin. Feeling like the greenest rookie in the world, I aimlessly rearranged stacks of textbooks until the magical arrival of Fran Baker, a kind and soft-spoken twenty-year teaching veteran. Mrs. Baker went to work expeditiously, bringing in her own magic markers and confidently assigning the helpers to make specific signs. I fashioned a Weekly Trivia Corner, my embellishment on the bare requirements. My first two questions were, “Who is the governor of New York State?” and “Who is the all-time NBA leader in assists?” Mrs. Baker half opened
several hardcover picture books and placed them on the tall, protruding heater vent near the front of the classroom. She said, “The kids probably won't read these anyway. All they [the administrators] care about is that it looks pretty. In case Dilla Zane comes.”

  The mysterious name of Dilla Zane echoed in my head. It sounded like it belonged to a swamp beast. Who was that?

  P.S. 85 received a special pass from the city to continue with Success for All (SFA), a scripted, “teacher-proof “literacy curriculum that the rest of the city had scrapped the previous June. The veteran teachers apparently hated SFA (“Slowly Fading Away” or “So Fucking Annoying,” take your pick) but were stuck with it for ninety minutes every day, which, in the past year, had driven a deep wedge between the faculty and the administration.

  Orientation meetings ran like doomsayer conventions, punctuated with gallows humor. During one particularly baleful meeting, the math and literacy coaches, Al Conway and Marge Foley, worried me when they both guffawed while slamming Region One; the “half-retired administrator,” Mr. Randazzo; and “the Queen,” Mrs. Boyd, for alienating teachers by insisting on sticking with poor curricula. Al and Marge also explained that the PA announcement “The red passes are in the office” means to close your door and allow no students to leave the room because of a security breach. However, when you hear “The green passes are in the office,” you know the threat has been neutralized.

  Apparently our Math Trailblazers was a confusing, “jumpy” text. Everyday Math, used by kindergarten through third grade, was more fluid and kid-friendly, but a bureaucratic tie-up prevented using it in grades four and five. There was no science textbook. For social studies, New York was supposedly a great text, but there were not enough copies to go around. I was lucky to find a class set in my closet. For science and social studies, we received pacing calendars with two or three lines dedicated to monthly focus concepts. Nobody got a full set of supplemental workbooks for any subject, and teachers had to bring in their own paper for photocopies.