The Great Expectations School (38 page)

Yelling and scaring students have ephemeral benefits—you'll achieve quiet for a moment—but negative long-term returns. I hadn't grasped that as a rookie. With a renewed opportunity at DeWitt Clinton, I wanted these students to
want
to impress me. I also knew that, at five-foot-eight, I had no shot of intimidating them.

I also weighed the advantages I had going in; these kids had applied for the Macy Honors program, so their grades mattered to them. When kids bring intrinsic motivation for academics, they are far less likely to antagonize the teacher. While my ultimate goal was to engender a love of reading and learning and all that good stuff, it was
comforting to know that I could, if absolutely necessary, dangle grades over them to further my ends.

My opening gambit was a syllabus review complete with an anti-plagiarism speech modeled after a TC professor's style. The students actually seemed to perk up during my amateur psychoanalytic probe into why people plagiarize. (They've procrastinated and they're freaked out.) I think some bells were ringing. I liked feeling the focused attention of the group, and the speech had the added benefit of making it sound like I had experience teaching high school students.

Next I handed out a personal letter; their first assignment was to respond in kind.

Dear Students,

Hello, I'm Mr. Brown, your English 6 teacher. Although we will get to know each other pretty well in person in our five periods per week together, I wanted to introduce myself to you in black and white as well.

I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1981, which makes me a lifetime Philly sports fan. Every year, the Eagles break my heart. (I'm pulling for the Giants over the Patriots in the Super Bowl, though.)

I attended public school in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. As a high school student, I became obsessed with movies. There was an elective course in the school called “Film Appreciation,” where Mr. Truitt, a teacher who had been there for thirty years, showed all kinds of movies on an old-school 16 mm projector. I had never seen a foreign movie, or a silent film, or really very much besides Hollywood stuff like
Indiana Jones
movies. Mr. Truitt showed films from all over the world, and we had amazing—and often heated—discussions picking them apart. He introduced me to artists that I came to love and never would have found on my own.

One film that Mr. Truitt showed that stands out in my mind is
The 400 Blows
, a French movie from 1959. It's a low-budget, semi-autobiographical work by Francois Truffaut,
about himself as a fourteen-year-old in a working-class Paris neighborhood. I was used to movies where the main character is heroic, but Antoine, the main character of
The 400 Blows
, is not heroic in any normal way. He lies, steals, and ultimately gets disowned by his parents and sent to a reform school. There's no happy ending.

At the end of
The 400 Blows
, I didn't quite know what to think about it. Everyone in the class had different opinions. Some dismissed Antoine as a worthless troublemaker; others thought he was a Jesus-like martyr. My classmates' opinions were all over the place, and Mr. Truitt forced each student to back up his argument. We never came to a consensus about one correct way to interpret
The 400 Blows
, and we eventually realized that wasn't the point. The valuable part was the exploration. This was a revelation to me.

After graduating from high school, I moved to New York to attend New York University. In 2003, I became a teacher. I am excited about the journey we will take together this semester. We will explore a wide range of material, and I look forward to picking it apart with you. My goal is for you to feel that when you walk into English class, you are walking into a place where ideas matter and everybody has a voice.

Sincerely,
Mr. Brown

This worked well. The next day I received thoughtful replies filled with admirable goals—ones that I could leverage in one-on-ones if their behavior or work ever strayed. I was happy. So I drowned them in homework.

I didn't mean to. Our first unit was on the Harlem Renaissance, so I'd decided to set it up with some essays by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois to provide some historical context. Our second class together, my students followed me into—and then took over—a
nuanced analysis of Washington's “cast down your bucket” brand of self-help as public policy. We were on fire!

From the back of the room, Jim signaled discreetly that we had two minutes left before the bell. Snapped out of my reverie, I responded by sweeping up several manila folders I'd laid out containing future assignments and, in an irrational rush, handed out the next three nights' work. I dumped on them the challenging
The Souls of Black Folk
excerpt with an accompanying written response, a T-chart comparing/contrasting Washington and DuBois's ideas, and then a prompt to write a newspaper election editorial endorsing one of the candidates, Washington or DuBois over the other, for the mantle of Chief African American Spokesman. For models on editorial writing, I threw them the
New York Post
presidential primary endorsement of Barack Obama and the
New York Times
piece supporting Hillary Clinton. In the final minute of class, each of the thirty-three students received five different sheets of instructions. Of course, the bell sounded in the midst of my frantic paper-passing, and immediately around me a huddle of kids materialized. They were eager to get all the papers and get jogging to their next honors class across the massive building. A physics teacher waited for me to get out so he could use the classroom.

I regretted overloading the kids, and I gave lighter assignments over the next few days, including a generous extra credit opportunity for memorizing twelve more lines of Langston Hughes's poetry. But I never indicated to the students that I thought I had screwed up. Almost all handed in the work, and the quality was surprisingly good.

I worked on memorizing my sixty-six kids' names quickly; this went a long way. A week into the semester, when during a discussion I aimed my gaze at a reticent student and said, “What do you think, Sierra Divina Shaneequa Lee?” Sierra looked a little startled and then responded thoughtfully. She participated regularly for the rest of semester, and later told me that my remembering her name surprised her in a really positive way. I was glad for this; in my previous classes, I had felt the invisible cost of students' alienation. For Sierra, a small
gesture was enough to activate her participation and engagement; for others, I couldn't crack the code.

During my first year at P.S. 85, I had a small clutch of students led by my star, Sonandia, whom I could usually count on to participate, and responded by relying heavily on them to keep lessons alive. I later decided that those kids were likely to speak up and share with or without Mr. Brown at the front of the room. It was the less inclined students that I needed to coax out of their shells if I was going to be a truly successful teacher.

I sought to account for the quieter contingent by assigning a handful of presentations and group projects throughout the semester with checks to make sure each student participated. Under Jim's guidance, I fashioned a literary criticism project that involved groups of students becoming experts on a critical lens and then applying it to
The Great Gatsby
. Groups re-imagined
Gatsby
as a Hollywood film that emphasized their critical lens. The groups wrote a movie pitch and designed a poster to show their new vision, then presented to their peers, who had a hand in grading them. One group using the Freudian psychoanalytic lens transformed all of the characters into animals. Tom Buchanan was a grizzly bear; Meyer Wolfsheim's lupine likeness was self-evident.

Most days, the forty-five minute lesson whizzed by. The kids were reading closely and chomping on ideas in the texts. Our Langston Hughes poetry celebration featuring students' original, Hughes-inspired works alongside the classics got ink in the school newspaper. Our culminating project involving in-character monologues based on
To Kill a Mockingbird
—inspired by a TC professor—was a hit. The assistant principal for the English department, Maggie O'Dowd, observed me twice and offered encouragement.

Jim helped me immeasurably through our daily conferences. During classes, he sat in the back of the room, let me run the show entirely, and composed longhand letters on a yellow notepad. His notes helped me focus on the nuts and bolts of good teaching. The gathered wisdom in his words leapt off the page. Some excerpts:

On your “Elements and Expectations of This Course” handout, I am especially impressed by your presentation of “original work” by trying first to understand the motivation for plagiarism. Yes, students get overwhelmed and some feel inadequate and yearn for the kind of recognition that becomes available through handing in “good writing” that they may be incapable of achieving on their own. Perhaps you could invite them to share their stress or anxiety with you in constructive ways—that's vital to establishing a sense of trust that I think will go a long way.

You gave out the Zora Neale Hurston reading and asked for a notebook response for HW. One of the systems I've developed is to set up a kind of form for students to label each entry in a unit as, for instance with the Harlem Renaissance, HH #1, HR #2, etc. (with dates). It's helped students to organize and it's helped me when evaluating notebooks. Consider adopting the system—it's up to you.

Good choice to have today available for students to express some of their anxiety about Locke's difficult text—it worked to just have students express their understanding and for others to hear these interpretations. It was almost therapeutic in a psychoanalytic sense for students to voice their anxiety as a way to dispel it.

I think your approach and the tone you've maintained about plagiarism are constant and fair. You seem honestly irritated by the circumstances of the four cases and baffled by the phenomenon, meanwhile making it clear and certain that you will not tolerate the act. It still might be interesting to explore the psychological aspect as further reinforcement.
Not plagiarizing isn't just a rule (like so many in school), but a moral issue.