The Great Expectations School (24 page)

It did not take long after the final booklet was collected for the relative tranquility of Testmania to explode. Midway through our first math activity back on the normal schedule, Epiphany approached me on the verge of tears. “Mr. Brown… Cwasey just…” She started whimpering.

I gave her a tissue and put my hand on her shoulder, unsure what else to do. “It's okay,” I said. “What happened?”

“Cwasey said, ‘Bend over and make me money.'”

My mouth fell open as my mind raced to decipher this unfathomably lurid command. Cwasey looked up, infuriated. “She lie!”

“No I don't!” Epiphany wailed.

“Cwasey! Shut your mouth and get out of our classroom! Stand right here in the hall!” I threw the door open.

Cwasey shoved his chair in disgust as he stood up and walked
toward the hall. As he passed Epiphany's group, he loudly proclaimed, “Your
mother's
a liar.”

Epiphany broke out in tears. She bolted from the room, her face in her hands. Mr. Randazzo was not around, so I couldn't toss Cwasey in his office. Instead of letting Epiphany and Cwasey be out in the hall together, I grabbed Cwasey and yanked him back in the room.

Lakiya whooped, mimicking, “Your mother's a liar!” When Marvin and Joseph saw Lakiya laughing, they cracked up too. The Pandora's box of “your mother” insults was blown open.

At lunch I told Mr. Daly what Cwasey had said and asked for advice on how to handle it. “He's probably repeating something he heard,” Daly surmised. “I'll make him say he's sorry. We'll leave the parents out of this one.”

At that moment, I spotted Bernard hyperventilating at the table, wearing his I'm-about-to-have-a-rage-attack face. I sat down next to him. “Bernard, what's up?”

Instead of answering, Bernard lunged across the table at Tayshaun. I pulled him back. “He talkin' about my mother!” Bernard screamed.

“No I didn't! Stop lying!” Tayshaun retorted, now walking around the table, toward us. He waved a taunting hand in Bernard's face.

Bernard snapped. I had him in my arms, but he struggled and writhed against me, reaching again and again to punch Tayshaun. Mr. Daly was now at the far end of the room breaking up another fight. “Bernard! He doesn't know your mother! What he says means nothing! You still have a choice to do the right thing and calm down. Take a deep breath!”

Bernard continued pushing against me, but my grip was firm. Finally, he got tired. I sent Tayshaun to fifth-grade lunch detention in the other cafeteria. I gave Bernard to Mr. Daly with instructions to deliver the fuming kid to Ms. Devereaux's room for the afternoon.
After the progress he had been making in controlling his temper, I couldn't let this outburst go unpunished.

The air went out of me when Bernard returned to 217 a few minutes before dismissal, grinning and wearing his forbidden-in-school Yankees hat. “I had mad fun!” he gushed. “I went on the Internet with Mr. Daly and played games!”

That night I racked my brain for a new game plan. I had no choice but to go it alone with discipline. The administration could not be relied upon, and the other fourth-grade teachers were swamped. I had already withheld parties, candy rewards, points, and stickers from the problem causers. I called homes over and over again. They still did not behave for prep teachers or guests. I had sent kids to Mr. Randazzo, Mr. Daly, Ms. Devereaux, and Ms. Guiterrez. (Catherine Fiore had even sent
me
a misbehaving kid on that icy January day.) Nothing worked for the long term. It was like putting Band-Aids on a sucking chest wound. I called Karen.

After venting, I felt a little less crazy and decided to break up the mandated group-seating scheme. Early on the morning of February 6, I rearranged the desks to make individual rows. Maybe if the kids weren't bunched in so tightly, they would stop picking on each other's mothers.

In the hall, before sending the students inside to find their new desk location, I announced, “Anyone who makes a comment about someone else's family is talking about something they know nothing about. That is wimpy and cowardly.
Anyone
who talks about someone else's family is automatically on lunch detention, banned from the Rewards List, and has lost my respect, probably forever! This is
the end of it
!”

Twenty minutes later, Lakiya said to Marvin, “Fuck your fat mother!” Everybody heard. Marvin, despite his significant disadvantage in size, flew at Lakiya with his head down and fists flying. I tore them apart, banishing each to opposite corners of the room. When the dust cleared from the sudden fisticuffs, I noticed something very strange. Tiffany had left her desk and was standing still at the front of
the room, right in my usual spot for blackboard-writing. She stared at the floor, no clear expression on her face.

Tiffany was the class space cadet, but she was smart. She was quiet and did well on her practice Tests, so I gave her leeway, particularly in her using our spare bookcase as her personal storage space. Her voice was extremely high-pitched, and she often snuck toys in her desk. She doodled more often than she did her work, but usually had the right answer when I spontaneously called on her. Also, she loved my stuffed blue “Mr. Lizard” more than anybody else, and jumped for joy when I occasionally brought him out of his home in the top closet shelf.

“Tiffany, go back to your seat.” She made no acknowledgment of hearing me, so I repeated myself. Nothing. “Tiffany, are you okay?” She looked catatonic. Some kids started snickering, and I immediately shushed them. Tiffany's hands stayed at her sides, completely still. “Do you want to go to the library with Destiny?” No response. Was this a trance? “Tiffany, you
have
to get back in your…”

“DON'T TOUCH ME!”
Tiffany shrieked, yanking herself away the moment I touched her forearm.

“Tiffany. You must answer me. Who do you want to talk to? If you tell me what you want to do, I can help you.” She resumed her original standing position and said nothing. She seemed to be having a psychological meltdown, and I had no idea why.

I called Mr. Randazzo and Ms. Guiterrez, but neither answered the phone. I rang Ms. Devereaux, who showed up in a huff. “What's this, she doesn't wanna sit down?” Devereaux observed, reaching for Tiffany's arm.

“NO!” Tiffany responded with another piercing screech.

“You have to move! This is your last chance!” Ms. Devereaux shouted in her stentorian I-am-serious voice. Still nothing. “I'm getting security.” She left and reappeared a minute later with campus patrolman Mr. Joe.

“Are we taking her out?” Mr. Joe asked.

“I don't know. She won't move or talk,” I said.

“Let's take her,” Mr. Joe decided. He and Ms. Devereaux grabbed Tiffany, who went limp and redoubled her wild screams as the two adults dragged her across the dusty tile and out the door, slamming it shut behind them. In 217, we could hear Tiffany's wrenching cries fading farther and farther away before cutting off altogether. How was I going to teach after that?

Sick to my stomach, I sat down in Tiffany's chair. None of the kids seemed fazed by the episode we had all just witnessed. I remember when I was in fifth grade and Ilene Lambert's knee locked up during our class trip to the Philadelphia Zoo. She cried hysterically in front of all of us, and the rest of the day was creepy and sad. Everyone seemed to feel guilty enjoying themselves if Ilene was laid up in the bus with a chaperone.

I visited Tiffany in the office during my prep. Guzzling a cup of Sprite, she showed no indication of having thrown an apoplectic fit a few hours earlier. I felt like I was walking on eggshells, telling her we were looking forward to having her back in 4-217. I never found out the exact cause of her meltdown, but later in the day, Stacy Shan-line, Tiffany's third-grade teacher, told me that Tiffany had had the same kind of episode last year at approximately this time on the calendar.

Just before dismissal, I noticed Seresa sniffling as I called students over to the closet to get their coats. I brought her out in the hall, where she started sobbing hard. “I'm not used to this, Mr. Brown… in Antigua, we don't treat the teachers like this. They're so mean to you.” She blew her nose.

“I'm okay,” I said. “That stuff doesn't bother me.”

“But Lakiya was saying you're a bad teacher. She said you don't know how to make the kids act right.”

“What Lakiya says means nothing. She's not in charge of your year in fourth grade. You're considerate to think of me, and it shows that you're a good and generous person, and I appreciate that. What
I care about is that I've got students like you and Jennifer and Sonandia and Evley and some of the others. I don't let kids who act mean bug me. You don't have to worry about me, I'm all right. All that yelling is acting anyway. How are you doing?”

Seresa shrugged. “You're still good friends with Jennifer, right?” I asked. Now she started tearing up again.

“I don't know. Sometimes she follows Lakiya, and she says things to me like ‘Why don't you have a man?' and they laugh at me.”

“Jennifer asks you why you don't have a man?”

“Yes.”

“Wow, that's ludicrous.”

“Ludicrous?” she asked.

“Ludicrous. It means ridiculous. Silly. Absolutely crazy.”

“Ludicrous,” Seresa repeated.

“Exactly. Completely ludicrous for Jennifer to say that. She knows you're her real friend. I'll talk to her. You're in fourth grade. None of you have, or
should have,
a boyfriend. Okay? You're a wonderful girl, and I'm very happy that you're in my class.”

“Okay. Thank you, Mr. Brown.”

Our conversation ended when I saw Bernard and Hamisi near the closet, punching each other in the face. My instinct was to rush in and wrench them apart, but I checked myself, remembering that Bernard's flailing at Tayshaun in the lunchroom had increased when I restrained him. In a kind of surprise at my nonintervention, the two fighters stopped hitting and went their separate ways. In the line two minutes later, they were chatting about
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
like old pals.

I know that many children reach out for attention and love in strange ways, but after that day, I was thoroughly baffled as to what goes through some of their heads.

Seth Owings, an old college friend of Greg's, came to our apartment on Sunday to watch basketball and shoot the breeze. He was in his
second year of teaching freshman English at Central High School in Newark with Teach for America. With each Pabst Blue Ribbon we drank, I became more entranced by his stories.

“My principal doesn't know how to talk to people,” he said. “He's always on some weird power trip and is totally out of touch with how it is to try to teach these kids day in and day out. The administration is always having meetings and sending out things about standards and bulletin boards and that kind of crap: basically everything that's cosmetic. But we have no solid curriculum. I just have a vague construct in my head of what we're kind of supposed to teach. It's nice in a way, because no one will ever call me out on giving any kind of unorthodox assignment, but it doesn't matter because almost none of them can write a real paragraph anyway.

“Your expectations go so low that you start praising the shit out of your kids who can just get through something, not 'cause they're really producing anything of any quality. The math teachers have it a little easier, because just by nature math is a little more black and white. You either get it or you don't, and the kids like that. But a lot of them just throw dice in the hall and eat the free lunch.” This reminded me of my week of seventh-grade summer school at M.S. 399, when one of the seemingly brightest boys in the class told me candidly, “Seventh grade was out in the hall, man.”

Seth went on about gang colors and receiving writing assignments from Crips with gang-mark slashes on every “c” and cross-outs through every “b” or “p,” since the latter is an upside-down version of the former. The writer would not want anyone looking at the paper—from any angle—to mistake him for exhibiting sympathy for the letter “b,” representing his rival gang, the Bloods.

Seth's stories were a little comforting in that I wasn't alone in my desperation, but his comment about lowering expectations made me worry. I absolutely had lowered my expectations from the first day of school when I delivered my “We Are a Team” speech. Now my priority seemed to be eking through the day without anyone bleeding. I didn't even think about great expectations anymore.

Was Sonandia really an exceptional student, or had I attributed so many wonderful qualities to her because I needed something to hold on to? Would other teachers in other schools share my enthusiasm about her? My Sunday-night sleeplessness was worse than usual.

On Monday, February 9, I turned twenty-three. In celebration, I received a new student, Christian Salerno. I also got a note from Ms. Guiterrez about collecting my planbook tomorrow morning, and my name appeared at the top of the list of classes Mrs. Boyd's team would inspect on Friday's upcoming Learning Walk. All interior and exterior bulletin boards needed to be changed for the benefit of Friday's visitors. I received eight handmade birthday cards from my kids, most of them including drawings of flowers and lists of school subjects. Then I taught all day and went to Professional Development.

Mrs. Boyd adjourned our monthly whole-school faculty meeting in the auditorium with the hollow encouragement, “Failure is not an option.” Filing out in the aisle, Ethel May Brick, P.S. 85's longest-tenured teacher, tapped me on the shoulder. “I heard it's your birthday. Happy birthday!” Her voice always quivered in a jolly grandma kind of way.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It's so nice, just so nice, that young and intelligent people like you come to work at a school like this.” Her face saddened. “It's a shame you can't stay.”

“Why can't I stay?”

“Oh come on, Dan. This school is a hell. And right now it's the worst it's ever been. This neighborhood is collapsing. I know the area looks bad, but it's really much worse than it seems. You wouldn't believe how drug-infested it is. Do you know the projects next to the firehouse?”