The Great Expectations School (15 page)

Halloween approached. I shut off the lights during Success for All and read from a Mom-supplied
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
book, complete with sufficiently creepy charcoal illustrations. I had more leeway for antics with my SFA group, since they were a manageable bunch of half the size and one-tenth the volatility of 4-217. With a whoosh and a leap out of my reading seat at each story's terrible revelation, I drew delighted screams from Kelsie Williams, a polite girl from Ms. Mulvehill's homeroom, and the others. Switching the lights back on brought a chorus of disappointed moans as we beamed back to P.S. 85.

First-year Fellow Trisha Pierson brought in twenty-six pumpkins, one for each of her little first-graders to carve. She said it was the cutest thing she'd ever seen, and the children treated their personal pumpkins like gold. I imagined Lakiya Ray chucking Destiny's
hypothetical pumpkin out the window, cackling as it splattered on the asphalt.

Several days before Halloween, I announced that our “Team Effort” board indicated the requisite number of stars over strikes. “Congratulations, we're going to have our first class party on Halloween, this Friday.” Unanimous cheers. “
But
I am now creating a list called the ‘Not Invited to Party' list. If your name gets on there with two strikes next to it, we will be partying without you!”

The class had in fact not earned a party. My hope, though, was that through some good Halloween cheer and a fun 4-217 party, we could take a step forward as the originally hoped-for “team.”

The “Not Invited to Party” list was an effective misbehavior deterrent. Lakiya still did not do her work, but she was quiet all day. Daniel, who obsessed over being on the “Good List,” sat with folded hands, which influenced Marvin.

Wild card Eric, however, could not resist pushing Joseph down the steps (a favorite pastime), and Tayshaun slapped Athena in the face, landing the offending pair on the unfortunate list. Tayshaun slammed his fist on his desk and buried his face when he got the final strike. Eric looked totally unmoved.

I could not figure out Eric Ruiz. I was unconvinced his expression would change if I slid bamboo shoots under his fingernails or handed him a suitcase full of cash. Every year his teachers recommended that he be held back, but somehow he always got promoted.

I was sixty-one dollars lighter after arranging a junk food super-buffet, complete with precious Domino's pizza, which greeted the 217 kids when they returned from lunch on Friday. Lined up outside the room, Athena and Cwasey literally jumped for joy. I sent Lakiya to escort Eric and Tayshaun to Mr. Randazzo's office. (Lakiya displayed mirthful diligence in accompanying her peers to meet their disciplinary consequences.)

I had cleared the idea of stashing Eric and Tayshaun in his office with Mr. Randazzo the day before but now his door was locked and
he was nowhere to be found. Ms. Devereaux could not be tracked down either, and all of the other rooms were having their own parties. I had ranted all week about excluding disrespectful kids from the party; now my threats proved empty.

I tried to spin my allowing Tayshaun and Eric's presence as a beau geste for better teamwork and class spirit for the coming months. The kids were dead silent during my awkward speech, their eyes fixed on the pizza and sweets.

For the next twenty minutes, everything was aces. I played
Rubber Soul
on Al Conway's borrowed boom box while the kids scarfed the candy and cupcakes with shocking alacrity. Marvin and Daniel found they could mix in happily when everyone was guzzling generic-brand orange soda. Hamisi said it was the best party of his life. Dennis nodded in vigorous agreement. When Lito and Joseph saw Dennis do that, they jumped in to affirm the motion.

Thank you, Mr. Brown, thank you, Mr. Brown. The party was a hit, and now I could use it as a tangible, long-term class goal. Nobody has a great first two months, I thought. But now I'm on track. We're all in this together. I can lead this team of struggling, beautiful kids.

Then the house of cards toppled. Tayshaun, on party probation, reasoned that it was a good idea to take the ice cubes out of his drink, sneak behind Julissa, and jam one in her eye. This happened while I was running a trivia game with some girls to determine who would take home the Domino's leaflet coupons, and by the time I was across the room, Julissa was clutching her face and crying. Lakiya poured her soda on the floor and pushed Verdad over it, causing him to slip. Mr. Randazzo came on the loudspeaker (there he was!) and announced that we were now having a “rapid dismissal,” and everyone needed to go directly home to minimize the risk of being hit by flying eggs. The announcement sent the class into a tizzy, scrambling for their coats and belongings. The floor turned into an instant morass of syrupy puddles of wet dirt.

I yelled my head off, but the scene had disintegrated into a wild derby of whirling dervishes. My previous reverie disintegrated like
dead roses, and a sober thought passed through my brain:
I have been kidding myself. They were right about me. I have no management, no control. I am a failure. My kids are crying and injured and dirty and screaming, and I can't stop it.
I looked up and saw Principal Boyd in the doorway, deep disgust on her face.

O
N HALLOWEEN
, I took Jess to a roof party in Brooklyn, but we weren't there more than twenty minutes before I lost track of her. A text message some hours later informed me that she had gone home with Lowell Eldridge, a disc jockey who had come to the party dressed as George W. Bush, the Crawford ranch edition. I spent the weekend throwing up.

A few minutes after midnight on Sunday, my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number on the caller ID. “Dan, it's Karen! Are you asleep?”

“I'm dead awake.” I was beautifully surprised to get her call. We effortlessly bitched about P.S. 85 for the next forty minutes. Our profanity-laced gripes were pretty comprehensive: Randazzo, Boyd, Guiterrez, lunchroom fiascos, petty but vicious fights, lack of student interest in academic achievement. She told me about her student Dequan's rubbing his penis against a female classmate's jacket during their Halloween party.

A brief silence passed. “You looked pretty dark leaving on Friday,” she said.

“Yeah. I think I might be going under.”

“I felt the same way all last year. What the hell are we supposed to do when they just won't cooperate?”

“I don't know.”

“I try to think about something, and I hope you don't think I'm some kind of asshole trying to give you cheesy advice,” she said.

“No, of course not. I need it.”

“This is the thing. You might be the
only
good person in their lives. Some of them just go home and fight and have no space and see terrible things and everything is fucked up. The only time all day, or all year even—because summer is horrible—that they're with someone who is generous and good to them could be when they're with you. Something comes across just by being there, even if they're too young or immature or emotionally crippled to express it. They do appreciate you. It's a long year, and something will come across. It
has
to.”

I still called in sick on Monday.

Tuesday, November 4, was election day, and a full day of Professional Development for all teachers. I still felt ill, but I was incredibly thankful for this fourth day of respite from my students, following the Halloween disaster.

I received a predictably terrible report from my Monday substitute, Ms. Richardson, a tall, middle-aged Nigerian woman who had been bouncing around P.S. 85 as a floating sub the past few weeks. “That mean girl is
so
fresh, that—”

“Lakiya,” I finished for her.

“Yes! Lakiya. Terrible attitude. And we had a problem in the front with—”

“Deloris.”

“Exactly right. She is
mean.
And the boys don't care about their work one bit. No respect for school or themselves.
Quite
a class you've got. This is your first year? Unbelievable.”

The focus of our Professional Development day was encouraging nonfiction reading and writing. Almost immediately, a heated grievance-venting session ignited, centered on the question of how teachers are expected to squeeze in extra time for literacy skills, when we do not even teach our own homeroom students during the ninety-minute SFA block. Everyone seemed to agree that achievement plateaus out in the second half of the teacher-proof Success for All program, but we were handcuffed to this time-eating literacy curriculum.

The faculty's points were strong but I stayed out of the discussion, not because I was a rookie but because I secretly and selfishly relished Success for All. For those ninety minutes every day, my regular twenty-six left, and only fifteen plus Fran Baker entered. The new personalities were cut from a similar cloth as my homeroom kids, but the smaller number made life exponentially easier. I could deal with a momentary distraction from sneaky Dequan or talkative Victoria without losing the whole group. Also, I got to meet perpetually sunny Kelsie, Maria, and David, and they were joys.

I got excited when literacy coach Marge Foley talked about walking field trips to the neighborhood public library on Bainbridge Avenue. I also hatched an idea to take the class to nearby St. Barnabas Hospital to learn about health and nursing. Gladys Ferraro and Tiffany wanted to work in medicine, something I learned from their autobiographies. Lakiya did not write an autobiography, but I had her specifically in mind for the hospital trip. She showed surprising compassion for sick or injured classmates. When Fausto strangled Eric back in the first week of school, I entered the lunchroom to find Lakiya's arm protectively around Eric while he retched. I also remembered her rubbing Dennis's back and keeping gapers away when Dennis got upset over an insult Cwasey cracked about his old-looking clothes. Lakiya Ray might hate elementary school, but maybe she could be happier if she had some educational experiences outside the iron-barred windows of P.S. 85.

Later, Marge Foley politely told me to put the field trip ideas out of my head. “I wouldn't risk it with your group,” she said. “It's just not safe.” She was right.

In the search for ways to break the cycle of misbehavior through more stimulating in-class activities, my hands were not tied but lopped off. No trips. No games, because all of my boys, except timid Evley, were incredibly sore losers. No hands-on work, because of inevitable throwing or destroying. If I cut independent work time short, kids would not finish and would get discouraged. If I gave extra independent time, the lag produced shiftlessness and loss of interest.
I could not be humorous or affable because a light moment was license to make noise and, unfailingly, the class subverters leapt on it. My rewards seemed ineffective, and my punishments were so limited and so often undermined that I looked like a chump dealing out empty threats.

Hope existed only if I could get them to behave themselves. My bathroom mirror was getting an earful these days. “It's a long year.
Something gets across
!”

I thought Cat Samuels could use a bit of Karen Adler's verbal medicine. Cat taught a prep lesson in Karen's room on Mondays, but they had never had a conversation about anything outside schoolwork. I suggested the three of us go out for a drink. We rode the Manhattan-bound D train south, traveling from the country's poorest congressional district to one of the wealthiest in just twenty minutes.

We walked into Kennedy's, an Irish old-timer haunt on West 57th Street, with big mahogany tables and a record player more likely to turn the Chieftains than U2. Karen and Cat hit it off, and Morris, the white-haired barkeep, put several rounds on the house. We cursed our jobs and laughed, munching on the complimentary onion-and-potato pancakes.

I got a call from a friend who was with some girls at a bar on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side. They were talking about me, and he encouraged me to get down there despite it being a school night. Of course I'll be there! I was twenty-two and tired of feeling dead.

Soon I was guzzling Jack Daniel's and emphatically recounting the inflammatory exploits of Fausto Mason to a rapt audience when the room started to bend. For some reason, the ancient antiseptic smell of the P.S. 85 second-floor faculty bathroom floated into my head and stuck there. After a second round of kamikaze shots, I stood up, intoxication rushing against my eyeballs with unanticipated pressure. I abruptly excused myself and rushed out of the bar, peeling the corner onto Essex Street to revisit my onion latkes.

Reeling on the sidewalk, I remembered that it was election day, and damned if I wasn't going to cast my ballot! I stumbled three avenue blocks to my polling place at the corner of Allen and Stanton streets.

Inside at the table, I gave my name and address and was directed to a booth. Behind the privacy curtain, I felt sudden tranquility. Just for a moment, I allowed my eyes to relax. I don't know if ten seconds or ten minutes passed, but, from outside, an impatient slap to the metal wall of the booth jolted me back into the world.
“Buddy!”

I flipped a few switches, then walked straight out of the building, staring at my shoes. I leaned against a parking meter, spit, and wiped my watering eyes. At 8 a.m., I would have twenty-six children expecting me to teach them, and I had gotten smashed the night before to forget about it all. I fell into bed. This was dangerous.

I hit the snooze bar four times before rolling out of bed at 5:36. I couldn't discern whether my nausea was a hangover or just the usual dread, exacerbated by returning after a four-day break from the students.

My kids cheered when I appeared for lineup, but this time I barely heard them.

“Mr. Brown's here. Yay!”

“We had a mean African lady!”

“I hate subs!”

“Mr. Brown, how are you?” Jennifer asked.

I rubbed my eyes with my palm. “Sick, and I'm still sick.”