The Great Expectations School (22 page)

I treaded slowly around room 1M8, sniffing and weaving my way through the intensely curious seven-year-olds. The stench was dense and powerful, but I could not detect its point of origin. I apologized for being of little help and left. Then I had an idea and came back.

“Ms. Pierson, what are you doing Mondays at 11:30?”

“Teaching.”

“No prep or anything? I think that's the time to launch Plan X,” I said.

“Excellent. I'll get my things ready. Next Monday. How many have you got?”

“Depends on how many you want. Six?”

“Six is perfect.”

“I'll bring my A-team,” I said, and walked out.

When Ms. Croom showed up on time the following week, I announced, “Evley, Athena, Sonandia, Jennifer, Tiffany, and Destiny, get your coats. We're taking a little trip.”

The children breezed down the hall, breathless with excitement. Athena Page clapped her hands and grinned.
“Where are we going?”
she asked. We walked outside into the frigid January air, crossed the blacktop, and entered the minischool lobby.

“We're going to Ms. Pierson's class. You are going to be tutors and help the little kids with reading.”

“Oh, boy,” Sonandia said, as if she had just turned on a scary movie and couldn't wait to watch it.

The tiny first-graders stared in awe as the towering Big Kids entered their realm. My students looked to me for directions. They were not used to being stars.

Trisha calmed nerves by dishing out instructions in a welcoming and organized manner. She paired one preselected student of hers with one of mine and gave each duo a book, a pencil, and a specially labeled Tutor Notebook. The first-graders would read the book to their fourth-grader helpers. If the reader stumbled on a word, the tutor would jot the difficult word in the notebook. At the end of the story, they would review the story content and the tricky vocabulary words together. The first-grader would make up a meaningful sentence with the tough word and print the word five times. Trisha taught a math lesson on the carpet to the other three-quarters of her class, and I strolled around the room, witnessing magic.

We had conceived Plan X, our intergrade reading buddy plan, at the semester's final Thursday-night Mercy class back in December, when the group discussion snowballed into a galloping gripe session on overwhelming academic and emotional deficiencies in our students.

Trisha had curbed the negativity by offering, “Almost all of my first-graders get picked up at dismissal by their older siblings in eighty-five. I know a lot of kids have to look after their younger brothers and sisters. These kids are definitely screwed in a lot of ways, but one area where they probably have an accelerated amount of expertise is in taking care of little kids.”

Now, here in 1M8, Athena Page had her arm around little Dustin, helping him sound out “where.” Evley gave William S. a high-five when he finished his first sentence. Big Jennifer and Little Jennifer giggled as they read a book about turtles. I ran down the hall and grabbed Barbara Chatton to show her the scene.

Too soon, I had to drag my students, and myself, away from this cooperative, stress-free learning haven. The promise that we would do this every week for the rest of the year finally coaxed the fourth-graders to the door. Trisha gave Hershey's Kisses to all of the participants. Athena tugged on my sleeve and said, “I think I want to be a teacher when I grow up.”

I asked Trisha under my breath if she had ever solved the case of the horrendous smell.

“William S. took a dump in his pants and sat in it all day,” she said. “Gotta love first grade.” I glanced at William S. absently smearing his chocolate kiss on his forehead.

My happy campers and I returned to room 217 to find Ms. Croom reading from Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
to an audience of three. The rest of the class was playing with blocks in the back or just marauding around. “It's so much easier with less of them,” she said.

The Test proved to be the ultimate trump card. By fourth grade, the kids had endured so many threatening speeches that the Test's fearsome reputation well preceded me. Lakiya Ray sat up straight. Dennis's face went solemn at the mere mention of it.

Following our division assessment, I dropped math from my planner for January. I thought this was an extreme move, but the veteran teachers were dead serious about it. Wilson Tejera taught the bilingual class only English Language Arts from September to January, and then only math from February to May.

Four-two-seventeen quickly developed a dry daily routine centered on mammoth stacks of Test preparation materials. We practiced identifying and explaining main idea, setting, sequence, note-taking, scanning for details, making inferences, drawing conclusions, main and supporting characters, conflict and resolution, cause and effect, fact and opinion, context clues for vocabulary words, making predictions, parts of speech, and author's purpose. These concepts are important, but I thought framing them so intensely within the
context of the multiple-choice Test worked menacingly against enduring comprehension.

I never revealed to my students any inkling that I thought the weight of the Test was overemphasized. (During a prep period, Adele Hafner actually barked, “These scores go on your permanent record, which will follow you for the
rest of your life
!”) We practiced, practiced, practiced. I brought out the “Thriller” claw-dance almost every day as a reward for getting through the skills activities.

Marge told us, “The scores are going to be low. Try not to get too disappointed or take it personally.”

“They're clueless,” Catherine Fiore seconded. “And don't look at their papers when they take the real Test. It will only make you want to jump out the window.”

Proctoring the Test was super-serious business. I taped blank newsprint paper over all in-class posters, charts, signs, and anything else containing words. Teachers were not permitted to sit during the Test, but we could not stand still either. We “casually circulate.” No communication with kids was allowed. No one can enter or leave during Testing Conditions. A signal meaning “I need a tissue” is acceptable only as long as no words are spoken. The State would be watching.

At a common prep meeting, we heard a horror story about a teacher who noticed a student had accidentally skipped a question on her answer sheet and was bubbling in the answers for all the wrong questions. A State Monitor happened by the door as the well-meaning teacher alerted her student to the mistake. Loyal to his oath, the State Monitor invalidated all of the Tests for the entire grade and placed the school on long-term high-surveillance probation. The teacher was outcast and, I think the story went, her pay was docked. At the end of the tale, I hoped everyone would laugh and snap out of what seemed to me like an Orwellian trance, but it didn't happen. Only Karen and I shot each other a quick look.

After the meeting, Karen asked if she could vent to me.

“Without venting, we'd all be dead.”

“Okay. But it's Deloris. I don't know what to do with her. She's single-handedly destroying my Test prep, destroying everything. She cornered Marilee at lunch, told her she's a lesbian, and asked if she could kiss her. Marilee of course had a conniption and couldn't stop crying. Deloris yelled out that Marilee tried to touch her boob, and everyone believed her. I had to basically call Deloris a liar in front of my kids, even though I wasn't there when all of this happened. I'm falling apart.”

“Holy shit.”

“She's a wrecking ball. And the worst thing is, as annoying as it is for me to have her in my class, it's nothing compared to how fucked she is for the rest of her life. I don't know if you know about this, but I've heard a rumor that her father…”

“MC Onyx.”

“Right. I don't even know if I can bring myself to believe this. Apparently, MC Onyx has… sex with his daughters when they hit puberty. Deloris just found out.”

Midway through her freshman year as an elementary education student at Muhlenberg College, my sister, Amanda, finally agreed to come to work with me. I had been trying for months to persuade her to hop a bus from Allentown to New York to experience an inner-city classroom, but I think my Fausto stories had scared her.

The night she stayed in my apartment, the heat went out at 3:30 a.m. I woke up shivering, and staggered into the common room to find Amanda frozen in the fetal position on the pleather futon. When we hit the street at 6:15, the sky was pitch black. The cutting wind chill dipped to -17? F, the coldest New York City weather in ten years.

P.S. 85 was a ghost town. Fifteen minutes before lineup, two-thirds of the faculty was unaccounted for. Fourteen of my twenty-five students showed up, and I got another five from Pat Cartwright's
class. I introduced the kids to “Ms. Brown,” my lovely and talented sister, who would be with us for a one-day-only special engagement.

Amanda was understandably timid with them at first. Athena asked her, “Why does he call you ‘Ms. Brown'? Shouldn't he call you
sista
?” Lakiya kept throwing Amanda crazy looks, and the whole day was an abnormal mess anyway with half of the class missing. Together, we ran a made-up activity called “Lost in the Jungle,” involving a Venn diagram and a writing piece.

Lakiya and Lito started kicking the legs of their desks. Testing the new authority figure in the room, Lakiya shouted out, “Ms. Brown, Lito's bothering me! Lito, you
touch
too much!”

Amanda was sharp. “I don't know, you're sitting pretty close together. It looks like you like each other, not like you're bothering each other. Do you have a crush on him?”

“Eww!” And that was the end of that.

Midway through “Lost in the Jungle,” Ms. Devereaux appeared at my door, holding an unhappy kid by the wrist. “This one was giving Ms. Fiore a problem,” she fumed.

I nodded and in my best cop voice, assured, “He won't be a problem in here.” I sternly led the pouting boy to a back-corner desk, quietly thrown by the supreme role reversal. I was glad Amanda saw that.

Every 4-217 kid wanted to hug Amanda at the day's end. Later, over chocolate-and-banana milkshakes at the Waverly Restaurant in the West Village, she said, “I'm not sure the Bronx is for me.”

I lived in a converted tenement on the corner of Rivington and Allen streets in the Lower East Side. The pizzeria on the ground floor had been gutted for renovations over Christmas week. When I got back to my apartment building after dropping Amanda off at Port Authority, trouble awaited.

Six or seven men in rubber pants stomped around a shallow pool of freezing water, where the pizza place's seating area used to be.
They looked at the exposed pipes and wires in the ceiling, shaking their heads in bewilderment and dismay.

“What's going on?” I asked.

One worker shook his head sympathetically. “Muchas problemas,” he replied.

Upstairs in my frigid apartment, the kitchen faucet did not work. The toilet refused to flush. The restaurant renovators had accidentally cut the heat to the whole building. Attempting to fix their blunder, they burst the pipe insulation, causing a minor flood in the pizzeria and, more importantly, exposing the water pipes to the icy air and freezing up the works.

Greg and I had no running water for the next five days. I showered at night at my friend Kadi's fifth-floor apartment in a walk-up down the street. I used bottled water to brush my teeth and high-tailed it over to Angel Bar on Orchard Street, two blocks away, when I needed a toilet. My clothes were ice cold when I dressed in the dark morning. I was going crazy.

I forced Marvin Winslow to wear his second pair of glasses. My Christmas bestowal of the Courage Bear earned some extra traction with him, and I used it. He lasted one full day before Julissa again whispered something right before a Test simulation. Crying, he lunged to punch Julissa, but I got between them.

“Calm the fuck down, four eyes!” Tayshaun contributed. I went nuts on Tayshaun, slamming his name on the Detention List. “I don't care,” he mumbled. Angry, I took the power-struggle bait, exploding on him again.

Al Conway walked by. “Mr. Brown, everything okay?” he inquired with concern. “We're about to start a
simulation.
”

Tayshaun and Marvin doodled all over their sample Tests, occasionally giving me reason to sharply shush them.

At lunch, I escorted Tayshaun to the detention table. He took out his batch of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, and I immediately confiscated
them. His face changed completely as I pocketed the deck. “Can I keep them, please?” he asked.

“No! Prove you can behave like a decent human being, like you did last week, and
maybe
you'll see them again!”

Then something unexpected happened. Rock-hard Tayshaun Jackson fell to pieces, wailing in deep, snotty belly-sobs. His sudden breakdown was scary to watch. Maybe I should just give him the cards, I thought. This kid has
serious
emotional problems.

I did not give him the cards. I turned and left the room.

Gym class was a singular phenomenon. On Wednesdays, I took class 4-217 directly from lunch to the upstairs gymnasium for their once-a-week in-school exercise. The schedule lumped my class with Ms. Cartwright's group (Fausto included), a double dose of excitement for Mr. Zweben and Ms. Friedberg, the two whistle-toting gym teachers.

Gym was hugely popular with my kids, the boys especially, so I occasionally hung around to witness what it was all about. The period generally consisted of twenty minutes of calming everyone down, modeling one athletic move like a volleyball set or soccer pass, and giving lengthy instructions for how to partner up and where to go. The remaining measure of class time inexorably devolved into run-and-tackle free-for-all. Boys from Ms. Cartwright's class usually started the fracas by throwing whatever balls were around that day, and my boys eagerly followed suit. Playtime got whistled short, and it all ended with a disappointed harangue.