The Great Expectations School (23 page)

Then they couldn't wait to do it again next week.

After school, I swung by disconcerted Allie Bowers's kindergarten room. Before dismissal, Quashawn had stolen her crayons and called another five-year-old a “dumb slut.” I asked if she had a prep at 1:25 on Wednesdays, 4-217's usual gym time. “No, I'm painfully here,” she said.

“I'm bringing my B-team,” I proclaimed.

I experimented with the second wave of tutors, including in the crew Gladys Ferraro and Bernard, both of whom had been stirring up trouble lately. I hoped the experience, with the potential to be an ongoing weekly engagement, would be an incentive to behave themselves in 217. It worked for Gladys; Bernard didn't care. “Those little kids are boring,” he whined.

I also brought Epiphany and Seresa, although if I was serious about A- and B-teams, Seresa belonged with the top group. I decided to keep her with Epiphany since they seemed comfortable together. Gladys V. and Dennis, two mostly polite kids, rounded out the team.

Allie didn't have a plan as organized as Trish's for the tutors, but we improvised. The partner-reading was adorable, and the kinder-gartners were sad to see us go.

The intergrade reading-buddy project got me excited. The first-year teachers had a good idea, and we were making it happen. I decided to pay my first voluntary visit to Mrs. Boyd's office, just to let her in on the good news.

I found Boyd's door closed with muffled adult screaming going on behind it. Outside the office, Paul Bonn wore an I-just-ate-allthe-cookies grin. “Did you see it in time?” he asked.

“See what in time?”

“Oh my God, it's the best thing ever. Did you know Boyd got fired from the last school she was a principal at? I think P.S. 25, maybe? I'm not sure. Someone found an old article in some local newsletter about her getting the boot. They copied it and put one in everyone's box!”

“You're kidding.”

“They're all pulled out now. She's on the
warpath
! I didn't get to see it. Solloway did. I don't know who else.”

“Wow. Who did it? What a huge risk for some humiliation.”

“I don't know who. Nobody knows. No one can stand her, so everyone's a suspect!”

*    *    *

On January 26, I received a letter notifying me of my acceptance to the Kodak Student Filmmaker Program at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. After viewing a rough cut of my thesis film back in November, one of my NYU professors had encouraged me to submit it. Excited by his praise and mired in the lowest depths of my Sonandia-is-leaving depression, I sent off my application. Now I was in, complete with a screening of my film at the American Pavilion, an internship at the
Hollywood Reporter,
and full festival accreditation. The program lasted seventeen days in May, so attending would mean missing twelve school days, or eleven if I skipped the very end. A million scenarios flashed through my head, and all of them involved flying to the French Riviera.

The next day, I approached Wally Klein, P.S. 85's librarian and union rep, to feel out the possibilities. I had curried big favor with Wally early in the year when he learned about my enthusiasm for movies, and he once cornered me in a one-way conversation about Tyrone Power. He was also the only person at the school who called me “Danny.”

I asked about the school's policy on leaves of absence. “It's one hundred percent up to the Queen. What do you have in mind?”

I told Wally everything. He grimaced. “Ooh, that's iffy, Danny. I'm meeting with her this afternoon. I can broach the subject, but I don't know…”

He did seem to know. I ought to forget about it, I read. “That's all right, I'll just speak to her,” I said.

His voice got firm. “No. Trust me. I'll go first.” The next afternoon, I received a summons to the principal's office.

“Sit next to me,” Mrs. Boyd ordered. “What exactly is this, you're in the Cannes Film Festival?” I explained the Student Film-maker Program. “So this is something that you took upon yourself to apply to, even though you knew it directly interfered with your professional responsibilities? It's not my job to allow teachers to go on trips during the school year. You realize that, don't you?”

“Yes.” I bit down hard. Here comes the guillotine, I thought.

“I went to the first Sundance Festival in the eighties, back before Park City got all commercialized.” Her lips curled into a microscopic smile. “We went to a screening in a high school gymnasium with folding chairs, and I actually talked to Robert Redford for a couple minutes, the Sundance Kid himself.” She seemed to be looking right through me, as if the ghost of Jeremiah Johnson was just beyond my shoulder. “It's funny that you're bringing this to me now. Not too long ago, I made a list of things I want to do before I die. One of the top ten was to go to the Cannes Film Festival.” Now she looked directly at me. “You won't be paid for these days, you understand that. But how could I not let you go to this?”

I thought I would throw my chair in a volatile mix of surprise and jubilation. I thanked her. Mrs. Boyd went into a story about how she taught animation to students in the seventies and a project they made won a New York City award.

“Now talk to me about this,” Mrs. Boyd said, taking out my one-page proposal to start an after-school dramatics club. I had copied Trisha Pierson's format from her dance program proposal and submitted mine a week ago, but had not heard anything. I made a brief pitch about extending performing arts beyond the PAC classes, giving students a chance to express themselves through drama and putting on a culminating play.

Mrs. Boyd was skeptical. “Stacy Shanline tried to do the same thing last year with the third-graders. She wanted to put on
Our Town.
It went nowhere.” The principal looked straight at me. “You have skills in filmmaking. What do you think about starting a film club? We have lots of remedial intervention programs for struggling kids. This could be something for the more upper-tier students.”

I was thunderstruck by Mrs. Boyd's brilliant idea. It was true that the school offered no extracurricular opportunities for gifted children. Until now, P.S. 85's only after-school activity was a thrice-a-week basic skills math review. Trisha's lower-grade dance program launched soon, and if I could start this filmmaking club, maybe we could start a wave.

*   *   *

I finally met Asante's mother outside the office when she came to sign Asante permanently out of P.S. 85. At long last, Asante would be going to school in Queens. Mrs. Bell, a young mother, nodded in agreement when I said that this transfer would make things much better. She burst into tears. I scrambled to grab a tissue in the office but all they had were industrial brown paper towels. I gave her a few and Mrs. Bell buried her face. “Thank you, thank God for you, Mr. Brown… oh, Jesus, I don't know what to do…”

I hugged her, and she cried into my shoulder. “It's going to be okay, it's getting better,” I said. I had never felt more like a kid in a costume. “It's okay, it's going to be okay.” I had not been any kind of great teacher to Asante. My brief attempts at investigating her dire situation were quickly rebuffed, and I had let it drop in the face of a tidal wave of other problems. Now I was telling this woman that things are getting better?

“Your Rewards List,” Mrs. Bell said, wiping her eyes. “You made her so happy when she was on your Rewards List. Thank you so much for everything.”

I said good-bye to Mrs. Bell and Asante and walked back to 217, full of a feeling that escaped easy definition. Asante spent most of her time in class chatting, so her name rarely appeared on the Rewards List by the day's end. When it did, I never noticed any exceptional exuberance in her.

Until that moment, I didn't know I had had any impact on her at all. As Karen had foretold,
something comes across.

Who else had I unknowingly touched? As a student, what had I taken from my teachers, unconscious to them?

My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Tomasso, lost her husband the year I was in her class. The day after the funeral, she returned to school and explained her feelings and told us about her husband's life. At seven years old, I absorbed her grief and love. Did she have any idea how much I grew up in that hour?

My high school English teacher, Mr. Truitt, showed François
Truffaut's
The 400 Blows
to a class of sophomores. Then we had the most honest, far-reaching class discussion I have experienced. Before that week, had I ever considered the idea of poetry in failure? He shined a floodlight on unexplored regions in my brain. Can he know how much that class opened my mind?

In the moment that Asante and her mother turned to leave, the far-reaching influence of teachers upon children took tangible, heartbreaking form. This job was going to kill me.

Test stress reached a critical boil that week, despite the miraculous surprise of Wednesday's snow day. The zero hour was at hand, and the kids were terrified. Four students threw up. Dennis tapped his foot nervously and could not stop.

But they were well-behaved. Also, the repetitive, boring, scary, mandatory Test preparation required minimal exertion on my part. I liked being calm, sharing the room with quiet children. It was a frightening microcosm.

I
SHOWERED
L
AKIYA
R
AY WITH PRAISE
and Juicy Fruit gum for her docile new attitude. Before lunch on Monday, February 2, she handed me an ancient ziplock bag containing her thick dog-eared stack of prized Yu-Gi-Oh cards and asked me to hang on to them for safekeeping.

While finishing lunch with Karen in my otherwise empty classroom, I opened my bottom desk drawer to discover the cards were
gone.
My stomach dropped. Scouring the area, I broke into a sweat. I replayed our transaction over and over. Room 217 had been empty during the ten minutes when I shepherded the class to the cafeteria and stepped out to buy my lunch. No one that I knew of came in the room at odd times. The cards
should
be in the bottom drawer. After Deloris got the boot in December, though, thefts in the classroom had gone from constant to zero. I felt nauseous thinking about having to tell Lakiya what had happened, especially since we were finally making headway together.

When I picked up the class, I gushed apologies to Lakiya and offered to buy her a new deck. She shrugged and said, “Nah, that's okay. Forget it.” I detected no passive aggression in her. She immediately turned back to her conversation with Epiphany, as if my news was holding her up from important business. For five months I had been Lakiya Ray's teacher, and at that moment I understood her less than a stranger.

*    *    *

The Test is a three-day extravaganza. Part One is all multiple-choice questions regarding basic reading comprehension skills. It is graded by machines (I envisioned Terminator robots) and carries the most weight of all three sections. Part Two involves students listening to and taking notes about a long passage that is read to them in a monotone by their proctor. The students use their notes to answer essay questions. Part Three is all essay responses to passages in their Test booklets.

Before the Test commenced, I gave a brief speech about how I was confident and proud of them. Relax and do your best. I believe in you. I relinquished control to my coproctor, “Big” Mrs. Little, a tutor and twenty-year teaching veteran. Mrs. Little read instructions in the recommended monotone and sharply warned them not to begin an instant before the second hand hit the twelve. I could see Destiny Rivera's pencil shaking.

An hour later, we were claw-dancing the disappointment away. The Test seemed harder than any of the simulations or practice materials we had used. At our 11:30 common prep meeting, the fourth-grade teachers shared arched eyebrows that evinced knowledge of impending disaster. At least I was not alone in thinking that my students had just gotten hammered. Marnie Beck said, “Special ed kids should not be put through this.” I agreed, unsure any nine-year-olds should.

I thought the massive cram that led up to this abrupt pressure release on the days of the Test was like jamming ice cubes into a fever patient's mouth in hopes that by quickly checking the temperature, the reading would come out a normal, acceptable ninety-eight point six. The thermometer is not corrupt, but the hospital staff is. If P.S. 85 had more family outreach and year-round, small-group support services for kids struggling with literacy fundamentals, I believed the Test scores would be higher because the kids would be better readers, not savvier multiple-choice guessers.

In terms of support services beyond my instruction of 4-217, only six of my students were pulled out for fifty minutes daily in
September through January. All of that time was dedicated to studying Test-taking strategies. Eddie (who had been held back three times), Lito, and Lakiya received nothing. Keeping with the hospital analogy, this was akin to basing a sick patient's progress on periodic blood tests without substantive treatment between assessments. The hospital can claim without lying that it has the most expensive, state-of-the-art instruments for measuring one's health. However, the appropriation of enormous focus on diagnosis or assessment, not treatment, is disastrous for the voiceless, unwitting patients. Using standardized testing as the sole barometer of students' and schools' achievement is a deeply misguided practice. The sick system cannot get healthy through this means alone.

During Part Three on Thursday, I stood near Eric Ruiz, watching him leave his entire Test booklet blank. He was supposed to write a letter to the principal requesting permission to start a ham radio club, drawing ideas equally from a supplied article about ham radios and his own creativity. Several times I covertly kicked his desk, but he did not pick up my message of “Take the Test.” I felt deflated, knowing there was virtually nothing I could now do to move Eric up to fifth grade. He signed his holdover slip that day.