Losing My Faculties: A Teacher's Story Page 12
Every day Devon and Tashina go out on a sweep. Every day they come back empty-handed. I guess the word got out not to go to the store between eight and ten in the morning.
And yet Jorge comes every day. He comes early—sometimes he’s there before the custodians even enter the building. He has missed something like fifty of the first ninety days of school, but now he is here with bells on every morning at eight. He tells us how he was in a self-contained special-ed class and hated it. I’ve been to three trainings telling me that self-contained special ed is now basically illegal in Massachusetts. Go figure.
Teaching only one student can be stressful because it’s a lot more intense than I’m used to. Luckily Jorge and I get along really well—he is good at math (which is one up on me), and he genuinely seems to enjoy all the work I give him. I never get any work from his school. I do eventually get through on the phone, and the liaison tells me she will ask his teachers for three weeks’ worth of work for him.
Having worked in big schools, I know this means that I’m never going to see any work at all. And I don’t really blame the teachers—they have more than a hundred students each, and now somebody is asking them to put in an extra half hour at least to put together a bunch of work that probably won’t ever get done for a kid who misses every other day of school. You can see why it’s not a top priority. Eventually his English teacher sends over a couple of books with no assignments, but it’s okay—it does give us some focus.
And then we start getting bad news.
The Boston Public Schools has instituted a pretty draconian attendance policy whereby you can’t get promoted if you miss a certain number of days in a year. Jorge is way over the limit, and so we start asking the BPS through Tashina, whom we see every morning, whether Jorge’s attendance here will help him get promoted.
No way, she tells us. Jorge is repeating the seventh grade no matter what.
But, but, but then we have nothing to offer him! Whether he stays here or goes home, he will be in the seventh grade next year. If he comes early here every day and then successfully transitions back to his school, which is our stated goal, he will be in the seventh grade next year. If he gets high and plays video games and never shows his face in here again, he will be in the seventh grade next year.
So he really has no incentive to come in here except for entertainment and “enrichment.” Which is enough for now—hell, I’ve watched enough daytime TV to know that even looking at my short pasty self is an improvement over studying the nuances in your twelfth viewing of the Ab Blaster commercial. Still, I am amazed at the stupidity behind this—this program was created to try to get kids back into school, and now we’re telling them that their year is a washout.
Tashina is infuriating as she parrots the party line about how Jorge has gotten himself into a situation, and our goal here is to get him back into school, and whether he gets promoted or not is not our decision or our concern.
Well, of course it’s our concern—we all love this kid. I spend all day with him pretty much one-on-one (needless to say, there’s not a whole lot for Sandra, my aide, to do here), and I’m not sick of him—that’s saying something. He is fundamentally a really sweet, kindhearted kid, and those are incredibly rare traits in a fourteen-year-old boy.
Some days I give Devon a ride home, and he complains bitterly about the whole policy. “This is bullshit,” he says. “I got into this to help kids, and if I feel like we’re screwing them over, I am gone.”
He stays, and so does Jorge. What the hell, he has the best adult-to-student ratio in the history of education, as all four of us have nothing to do but pay attention to him all day. (The sweeps still have not found any frostbitten truants huddled on corners.)
We debate whether to tell Jorge that he can’t be promoted. Eventually we give him some sort of sugarcoated version of the truth. Tashina allows as how somebody—principal or superintendent or deputy superintendent—can grant waivers to the attendance policy and may be willing to do so, but there are no guarantees and it has never actually been done. We play up the slim hope in our conversations with him, but, as I said, Jorge seems to enjoy coming here, and we seem a lot more pissed off about the attendance thing than he is.
And then we get a call from Jorge’s special-ed advocate. Because Jorge was in special ed, his grandmother got an outside advocate to help her negotiate the Byzantine world of special ed in Boston and make sure his individualized education plan was being followed. (Every special-ed student gets an IEP detailing the services and modifications they’re entitled to, but making sure all the administrators and teachers actually follow the plan requires a certain amount of vigilance in any school system, and more so in a gigantic urban one.) Now the advocate wants to know if I am special-ed—certified.
I’m not.
Well, he says, then we are in violation of Jorge’s ed plan, and this whole thing is illegal, and we’d better get his ass back into the self-contained special-ed class he hated so much he never went.
Apparently the possibility that some of the kids who skip school might be kids with ed plans never crossed the minds of the geniuses who set this program up. So that was stupid, but the advocate is stupid too. I feel like screaming at him, but I scream at my coworkers instead. “He wasn’t going. How is it advocating for a kid to insist that he be placed back into a situation that he hates, a situation that wasn’t working at all? He’s here early every day!”
Stupid.
Eventually Tashina comes to tell Jorge that he has to go back to his middle school. He starts to cry. And then he starts to beg. “Please don’t make me go back there,” he says. “I hate it there. I like it here, I wanna stay here.”
The sight of this kid with a tough façade crying and begging to be allowed to stay in this half-assed program in this stupid basement with an English teacher trying to teach him math and science with no materials or curriculum just crushes me.
“I’m sorry,” Tashina says, but what she means—you can just hear it in her voice—is “I don’t give a shit.”
“I’m sorry,” the rest of us say, and what we mean is “I’m so sorry to send you back there. This is one of the stupidest, most counterproductive things I’ve ever seen and I am sick to be part of it and I’m sorry, Jorge, please don’t cry, I wish you could stay, I’m sorry.”
34
A few days after Jorge leaves, Tashina comes in and announces that they will be bringing us a new crop of kids from our partner schools, and that these kids came up in their “roundtables.” I don’t really understand what the roundtables are, except that a bunch of people, including Tashina’s pinky-ring-wearing bosses, get together and talk about kids who are missing a lot of school. Or something.
Anyway, they bring us about ten of these kids, and they shock me. I am expecting the worst, a bunch of hard, really rowdy kids, and what I find is that they are just kids, really very similar to most of the other kids I’ve taught. I mean, sure, Ken is kind of scarily sullen, but what the hell, I’ve had kids like that before. Mostly they seem to me like normal kids with just one aspect of their lives gone nuts. In most cases they have parents who are absent or ill or for some reason just unable or unwilling to clamp down when little Johnny decides he’d rather play PlayStation games in his underwear on the couch all day than go to school, or little Tina decides she’d rather hang out on the corner getting high with boys eight years older than she is. You get the idea.
They are in the seventh and eighth grade, and they range in age from thirteen to fifteen. When they reach sixteen, they have no legal obligation to be in school, so they become somebody else’s problem.
Tashina informs us that they will be bringing us work to do from our partner schools, no, really, they mean it this time. “You are not to do any new work with them,” she says (this sentence comes out of her mouth with exactly that strange syntax, which is one of the things that annoy me about Tashina—she can’t say, “They don’t want you to start any projects with them,” s
he has to assert her authority over me, which is dubious, since I don’t work for the Boston Public Schools).
So, I’m not to start any new work with the kids, but there are ten of them sitting in front of me for three and a half hours, and what exactly am I supposed to do with them?
I call over to the schools, and, of course, never get my phone calls returned. So I improvise my own curriculum. Later Tashina will ask me for copies of my curriculum so she can show it to people from the partner schools at our roundtable. “You mean the curriculum you told me not to create?” I will answer. So it’s that kind of operation.
I have English fairly well covered with the stacks of young-adult books I bought when Jorge first arrived, and Famous Athlete has provided us with some three-year-old computers on which to do word processing, so I am pretty well set for writing too.
Jorge seemed to like the stock-market game, so I do that as well and these kids like it too. All the boys use at least part of their imaginary money to buy stock in Playboy Enterprises, which they like. Unfortunately for them, though, not everybody buying stocks has the fourteen-year-old boy’s appetite for a piece of a soft-porn empire, and the stock doesn’t really move much. This is during the Internet boom, and they are agog when they see how much Yahoo stock is up over where it was a year ago. It takes us entire mornings sometimes to check the stocks and graph their earnings, because the fractions and the graphing are very hard for them. But they do it.
I feel like the kids are a little light on science, and I decide that if I were a science teacher, which I guess I am, the thing I’d really want them to know would be the scientific method, so I set up an experiment with a lab write-up in which they have to figure out which room in our wildly unevenly climate-controlled basement is the hottest. (It’s still way too freezing for truants to be standing on street corners—not that anybody is looking anymore—but the rooms in this basement range from subtropical to inferno. The bathroom, as we will see shortly, is the hottest, which, coupled with the digestive emissions of the maintenance guys, who seem to live in there, gives it a real fire-and-brimstone kind of atmosphere.)
We don’t have thermometers, or any kind of science equipment at all, but every day we get cartons of milk with the kids’ lunches, and since nobody drinks them, I convince the kids to use half-pints of milk as measuring devices. I am proceeding from the assumption that milk will spoil faster in a hotter room than a cool one, which I think is probably pretty scientifically sound. We discuss why it’s important for them to use milks with the same date, and why they can’t mix the whole milk and the chocolate, which is the best we do in terms of calibrating the equipment.
The kids spend the morning running around the basement sniffing milk, and after about an hour and a half they bring a revolting-smelling, already-curdling milk out of the infernal men’s room, thus concluding that it is, in fact, the hottest room in the basement.
They need some social studies too, and one of them actually has a textbook—one of these deadly-dull intro-to-civics-type volumes: Our American System or some such thing. I decide that they might better learn about Our American System by doing rather than reading, so I make the PlayStation-in-his-underwear kid president and divide the rest of the kids into a bicameral legislature. The House introduces a bill allowing students to quit school after the completion of the sixth grade, but the Senate, ever more measured, offers the eighth grade as a compromise, and this is how the bill goes to the president. The president, who is currently enrolled in the eighth grade, announces that any bill that requires students to go to school after the seventh grade is unacceptable and vetoes the measure. Representative Ken, who has been reprimanded on several previous days for his habit of calling everybody in the room “hump” (typically in the statement “Shut up, hump!” after the distinguished gentleman hears something he disagrees with), introduces a bill that reads, in its entirety, “I get to call everybody a hump.” The Senate is unimpressed, and the measure dies in committee.
So this is the kind of stuff that I do. And let me say what is undoubtedly on some of your minds, which is that the fact that I am teaching kids in a large, prosperous city in the richest country on earth in this dingy basement with no equipment or textbooks or curriculum like some frontier one-room schoolhouse is a disgrace.
And yet I am really proud of these few weeks. This is the point when this place most resembles a real school. Yes, my curriculum is half-assed, and no, it’s not like I spend endless hours trying to design a multidisciplinary curriculum in areas I have no expertise in, but the kids come in, and they learn how to do fractions, they understand the scientific method, they know how their government works. Now, I know this is a really dangerous trap—when you have no expectations at all, anything seems like a success—but fuck it. The fact is, on my own, I taught these kids something. Not enough, but something.
35
So while our first class is in attendance, here is what a typical day at Famous Athlete Youth Programs looks like. Devon and I arrive at eight. About half the time the building is locked up tight. Nobody from Famous Athlete Youth Programs has a key, so sometimes we’ll all be standing there—me, Devon, Sandra, Edward, the director of education, and Clinton, the executive director, waiting on the stoop in the cold for a maintenance guy to come and open the building. Sometimes a student or two will join us—usually it’s Alan, a super nice kid who does good work and seems to enjoy it.
Alan and I attack the stack of newspapers that Famous Athlete Youth Programs gets for free, and typically discuss the Celtics, who are no good this year but who have an exciting new rookie. “Paul Pierce is Nasty!” Alan says appreciatively after checking the box score almost every day.
Devon calls the houses of all the kids who aren’t there, then gets in the van and goes to get them. (This is how I know about John playing PlayStation in his underwear—Devon catches him at it more than once.)
Sometime about midmorning, Mariette rolls in. She later disappears, ostensibly to do the home visits, which are supposed to precede the kids getting services. She just barely gets to all ten kids in the four weeks we have them. The appropriate forms are filled out, but the kids never end up getting any services.
Eventually Devon and the kids return, and we have class from nine till about twelve, when Devon takes a couple of them over to a nearby elementary school to pick up the school lunch. They always give us too many. I end up eating a lot of Tater Tots.
After lunch we do a little more work, typically writing at the computers, and then we have “community meeting,” at which Devon tries to get the kids to see the error of their ways by having a conversation or showing a movie or something. One day he brings in a really nice young man who talks to the kids about how low he sank in his drug addiction—how he used to laugh at the crackheads until he became one. The entire staff notes that Jomo, one of our favorite students, has tears in his eyes during this part. The crackhead is a nice guy—we talk about Jackie Chan at lunch. This kind of thing is the most the kids ever get in the way of counseling.
On Fridays we have field trips. Sometimes we try to make them educational—science museum, aquarium, et cetera—and sometimes Devon takes them to the movies. I get to see Tarzan for free this way.
This all goes along swimmingly until one day at lunch when Ken, Jomo, and Tina all head over to Tina’s house, which is nearby and free of adults, and get baked out of their gourds. Well, at least Ken and Jomo are baked out of their gourds. They reek of weed, their eyes are bloodshot, and their eyelids look like they’re made of lead. It’s kind of cute, in a way—they seem to think we are either idiots or incredibly unobservant.
So they walk in totally baked, and Tashina just happens to be standing there, even though she’s usually never around at lunchtime, because she and Mariette are going out to lunch. Sandra, Devon, Marietta, and I all just kind of look at each other trying to figure out what to do, and we can’t ask Edward because he’s out (he tends to take prolonged lunches), and so is Clinton,
so Tashina takes over.
She gets Ken and Jomo in a room and starts yelling at them about how stupid and irresponsible they are, and how they have a lot of nerve coming in to her school high on drugs, and how they need to show her more respect, blah blah blah, and they are dismissed from the program. Go ahead and leave right now, she tells them, because you are gone.
Ken and Jomo stumble out, Tashina leaves, and the rest of us just stand there, slack-jawed. Okay, yes, they came to class high, but what are we proving by kicking them out? And what the hell did Tashina mean calling this her school? We don’t work for her. So Devon and Sandra and I have this discussion, and Mariette stands there taking mental notes, because she is going to run back and tell Tashina everything we say.
I know this because Tashina comes in the next day and tries to smooth things over and says how she said “my school” the same way she refers to “my apartment” even though she doesn’t own the building, it’s just how she refers to places where she spends time. She disappears into Edward’s office and has this long meeting with Edward and Clinton, which I guess develops into a pissing contest over who’s in charge. Which is not clear. These kids are BPS students, we get lunch from the BPS, we are funded with BPS money, but Famous Athlete signs all my paychecks.
After the meeting, Tashina, apparently defeated, disappears and Edward comes in to tell us that Ken and Jomo are reinstated.