Fellows In Arms
A 21st Century Teaching Saga
Aaron Roston
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Aaron Roston
All rights reserved
There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, hate into love, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is absolute ambiguity. – Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell A True War Story”
The United States enters the 21st century as an undisputed world leader… But our nation is at a crossroads. We will not continue to lead if we persist in viewing teaching—the profession that makes all other professions possible—as a second-rate occupation. Nothing is more vital to our future than ensuring that we attract and retain the best teachers in our public schools. Over the next decade, we will need to bring two million new teachers into our nation’s public schools—700,000 in urban areas alone. — Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Chairman of The Teaching Commission and former Chairman of IBM, in The Teaching Commission Report titled Teaching At Risk: A Call to Action (spring 2004)
All bad writers are in love with the epic. – Ernest Hemingway
Prologue: A Shock to the System
WHEN I was training for a possible novice shot at the Golden Gloves out at Gleason’s Gym, at the improbable age of 29, I used to go during the late morning, after the guys who trained super-early had gone to work at UPS or wherever. I was the only white guy there at that hour; my nickname became “El Blanco.” After the mirror work and the sparring, after the rope, the bags, the mitts, Hector would point to me and say “Now you run, Blanco.” That’s when I would run across the Brooklyn Bridge for stamina. This is the unacknowledged secret weapon of all demanding endeavors: endurance. With my shirt already glued to my body, I would head off from the gym to run across the Bridge, there and back, twice, a Calvary of almost five miles. The Brooklyn side rises more steeply than the back end, the Manhattan side, which has a long slow slope upwards. I say back end because I’m from Brooklyn myself, and so the Brooklyn side will always be the front to me.
If Brooklyn can be said to have a seat of power, then the forum surrounding and including Borough Hall would have to be it. The pedestrian route from City Hall in Manhattan to its opposite number in Downtown Brooklyn hasn’t changed since 1885. I never ran the Bridge after the summer of ’98, when I got injured in a sparring accident and my amateur career came to a close, but I know from past experience that the middle of winter is not the best of times to take this scenic stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge; the wind will come howling up from the Narrows and froth the grey surface of the sluggish East River white, scouring the skin from your cheeks. But if on a whim you decide that the relative solitude of such a walk outweighs the concerns of streaming eyes, runny nose, and chapped lips, then the pedestrian walkway’s first exit is a down staircase leading to Cadman Plaza. Take a right, and you’ll pass the Brooklyn War Memorial; go past the Memorial and cross Tillary Street – you’ll find a cluster of official buildings laagered around the Korean War Veterans Plaza and Columbus Park, amongst them the imposing columns of Borough Hall itself. The entrance to the headquarters of the old Board of Education is right around the corner at 65 Court Street (though the Board of Ed’s official address was 110 Livingston Street). I used to walk past it all the time when I was growing up, on my way to the subway, but I would never set foot inside it until the fall of 1999, in my first failed attempt at becoming a teacher. I never paid any attention to it before; it was just there, like the Brooklyn House of Detention (which I also never visited). But it was in this building that the newly appointed Chancellor of the Board of Education, Harold Levy, would be installed a few months after my first visit, in the winter of the infancy of the year 2000.
Levy did not know much about education, true; he was a businessman (recently a corporate attorney for financial powerhouse Citigroup, in fact). What he did understand were numbers, and he knew how to read the numerical auguries in the reports and spreadsheets being piled daily onto his desk by various aides, advisors, and viziers. The numbers were little short of alarming. Of the Board of Education’s 78,000 teachers in its 1,100 schools, since 1999 some 8,000 a year were new hires; the shortage of certified teachers was becoming acute. This shortage hit the worst schools in the system the hardest, those known as “hard to staff,” especially those on what was cryptically known as the SURR list: Schools Under Registration Review. This indicated a school that had consistently failed minimum state standards for so long that it was now under a state mandate to improve within two years or be shut down. New teachers took two years of graduate school, including a semester of student teaching, in order to become state certified. Levy didn’t have that kind of time: something had to be done. Hired as a problem-solver, he knew drastic measures were needed. The result became the New York City Teaching Fellows program, which I would join in the summer of 2002.
Alternative-certification programs already existed to some extent in other cities (notably Boston and Los Angeles), and on the Federal level with Teach for America. Designed in conjunction with a non-profit organization called The New Teacher Project, Levy’s idea was to attract bright, highly qualified career-changers, those (like Levy himself) with no background in education (in other words, those with no taint of the traditional educational establishment). Once accepted, the candidate was committed to teach for two years. They would receive one summer of intensive training and temporary (or more accurately “emergency”) state certification; then the Fellows would be stuck as educational shock troops into the SURR and “hard to staff” schools. Levy wanted the program to start that summer of 2000. It was a bold, even audacious, plan to try and turn the worst schools in the system around; it was a risky (not to mention expensive) experiment: including graduate school, training each Fellow would be estimated to cost $25,000 apiece. It bore more than a passing similarity to Army recruiting: the appeal to the idealistic, with its notion of service, combined with the mercenarial, in the manner of the G.I. Bill. But it was the quickest way to both infuse the plasma of change and boost the badly needed certified teacher numbers.
What happened to the numbers when we got there, of course, hadn’t been included in the plan.
CANTO I
Légion Étrangère
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill
What’s In A Name, Part I
EVERYONE’S a nigga. “That nigga mad lazy” refers to anyone who’s very lazy. It’s not about skin color, since the Dominicans are niggas too. No, it was: “Yo, Mr. Roston, you got youself a bunch a Special Ed niggas in here,” said pithy Jessica S. to the class at large (which is half Dominican) before she was suspended (and you’ll be missed!). Glen Rogers, second-year Teaching Fellow, was made an “honorary nigga” in his class at the end of last year, despite being extremely white. For a guy like Rogers, though, this is the highest compliment, the ultimate badge of honor, since being called a nigga is not a pejorative even if used in conjunction with an insult; it merely means “one of us” – it’s the stamp of student approval and acceptance. Normally, though, teachers are ‘Mister’ or ‘Miss.’ There’s a certain kind of anonymity to the term I don’t like – to them we’re all the same (just one more white authority figure, just another white face). I don’t like being just a symbol, so I insist they use my name. My rationale, which I explain to them, is that I take the trouble to learn theirs, so they should learn mine. It’s common courtesy, a matter of respect, blah blah blah… In reality what I mean (and which they understand, no fools they) is: I’m the boss.
“Yo, Mistuh.”
“Mister Roston.”
“Mistuh Roston.”
“Raise your hand to be recognized, Nestor.” Eyes roll heavenward, but the hand follows. In a room where the average age is 16, Nestor looks young even by those standards. He’s 14 but he’s small and mouse-like and looks 10.
“Yes, Nestor.”
“How big a house you live in?”
“Why do you ask?”
“’Cause all white people live in big houses.”
“And they all own cars,” adds Raphael, who as usual has one foot in his lap and is playing with the sole of his sneaker.
This comment gives me pause. Once, my wife and I went on a road trip from New York City to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We drove all the way up to the very top of the island in a Ford Explorer, to a place called Meat Cove, a cliffside campground overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. When we got out, I beeped the truck with the remote to unlock the trunk. The car made its chirping sound, the lights flashed, and the locks popped up. Behind me I heard a chorus of giggles. I turned around, and standing there were a pack of urchins, the kids of the people who owned the place, their hair so blonde they were practically albinos. One of them, a boy, said, “Do it again.” Do what again? I asked. He pointed at the remote in my hand. So I re-beeped the truck, which dutifully chirped, the lights flashed again, and the locks shot down. The kids giggled again. They had never seen a car alarm before. It has come as a surprise to me that, in their way, my students at Taft have turned out to be startlingly similar. It was like Salomon told me at the job fair, that when he took a class trip to Manhattan his students clung to him in unfamiliar terror. “Assume they have no a priori knowledge about anything,” he’d said. That, and at any given time, one in ten of these kids is homeless. And I’m not one to talk: until a few months ago, I’d never been to this part of the Bronx either.
“What kind of car you got, Mistuh?” someone calls out.
“I don’t own a car.”
A puzzled look. “Then how you get to school?”
“Limo. But it’s in the shop this week.” Get those hands up! I feel like a bank robber, but my boss, Charlie, has been firm on this point. If I am to accomplish nothing else, I am to make sure they raise their hands to speak.
A snort of derision as Laquisha says, “He take the subway. I seen him on the platform.”
“Where you live, Mistuh Roston? Manhattan?”
“I live in the greater metropolitan area, yes.” I’m working hard on maintaining my ‘air of mystery.’ The less they know about me, the better. The hands!
“You gotta go to college to be a teacher?”
“Raise your hand, Ricardo.” Ricardo, like Nestor, is also Dominican, but he’s pale while Nestor is dark; that Caribbean island has a wide range of pigments. Kid’s also got an incipient pencil-thin mustache. Teeth get sucked, but the hand goes up in an exaggerated manner. “Yes?”
“You gotta go to college to be a teacher, Mistuh Roston?”
“Yes.”
“Man, when I get to college I ain’t never bein’ no teacher. I’m gonna make me some real money.”
“Good for you.”
A hand! “Mistuh Roston.”
“Yes, Isabel?”
“What’s your first name?”
“Mister. Does this question have to do with the assignment, Nestor?”
“No.”
“Then – “
“One more, one more. What’d you do this weekend?” The class smiles. This they want to hear.
I sigh. We’re in what is termed “the honeymoon” period, the second week or so of class, after the roster has finally stabilized. It’s the period when the students are on their best behavior as they suss you out, watching your every move and gesture, probing for weaknesses they can exploit later.1 This has become a standard September strategy so far: ask all about the teacher in lieu of doing any work. There I stand in my tie, collared shirt (chalk on the cuffs), pressed slacks (chalk around the pockets), black lace-up shoes (rubber soles). I am the very image of what they feel a teacher should look like (or the living embodiment of The Other, as they might have said in summer training) – not dirty jeans, like Charlie, or stained polyester and greasy collar like their history teacher. So, in my best authoritarian voice (my “whitest” voice), I say, “Well, Nestor, I do what I do every weekend. I went rolling with my homies in the stretch limo (which is why it's in the shop), and we were sipping on some Cristal. Then we went to the club, where we picked up some bitches and ho’s. Or was it ho’s and bitches? Anyway, we brought them back to my crib and we all got our freak on.”
It takes me ten minutes to calm the class down.
* * *
Later, I would be one of those teachers it was impossible to imagine had a personal life. I cultivated the impression that after the day was done, I returned to my pod in the school basement, there to await the morning bell that would cause me to emerge again. Or that I spent the night hanging from my ankles in the book room, like a giant teaching bat… Was I a little out of touch? Perhaps. This may have stemmed from the fact that I didn’t watch much television – I only rarely watched what few channels I got through my building’s cable system. I viewed cable television much the same way I did prostitution – while I enjoyed both services that were provided, I didn’t enjoy them enough to pay for them.
* * *
Good works, great deeds, are meant to be their own reward. Most strivers need incentive, though; imply some gesture for posterity and they might end up splitting the atom. In the past, a victorious general would be given a statue, a monument to his triumph in stone or bronze. A successful artist might rate a street. The more modern idea is naming a highway or even an airport after you. Or in this case, a high school. I didn’t know what William Howard Taft’s claim to fame was aside from being the fattest President in history (it is said he had a special tub made and installed in the White House to soak his bulk), but simply because he was a President he got this school in the South Bronx named after him.2 And he wasn’t alone; a lot of dead Presidents got their names carved on schools around here: Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, JFK. Naming an educational edifice after you was supposed to confer immortality: Yes, the star of your accomplishments will shine in the firmament of a grateful society forever, a perpetual reminder of possibilities to the countless generations who stride through its halls. But just as people die, just as ideas wither, buildings die too. And Taft was dying. The entire Hall of Presidents in the Bronx was dying. In the cosmos of the Bronx educational system, their stars were flickering and going out, leaving nothing more than a burnt-out constellation.
On my first visit to the school in the spring of 2002, I realized there was a good reason I’d never ventured into this part of the Bronx before: I’m white. I’m a native New Yorker,3 specifically brownstone Brooklyn, who grew up during the crack epidemic years of the 80’s, when it seemed it wasn’t worth your life to travel above 96th Street. From there on, the map was a blank drawn by medieval cartographers: Here be dragons… The biggest mistake you could ever make was making eye contact with black or Hispanic kids your own age: Whatchoo lookin’ at…? What the fuck you lookin’ at, white boy…? As I took the rickety B train from the Upper West Side, I didn’t have to hear the announcements to know we were in the Bronx. The farther north you went on the subway, the darker and more run-down the stations became; actually, the same might’ve been said for the passengers. All sorts of childhood demons were jostling for position in my head. What the hell did I know about the Bronx? I was from Brooklyn – to me the Bronx was the Zoo, the Botanical Gardens, Yankee Stadium. And you caught I-95 to New England there. That was about it. Taft was going to be The Bronx, like that movie Fort Apache: The Bronx with Paul Newman. I had visions of bombed-out and boarded-up buildings, rabid packs of feral dogs, menacing locals gathered around oil-drum fires in fingerless gloves, Snake Plisskin asking for directions… But when I got to the station, things weren’t anything like that. In the daylight, the streets didn’t appear particularly menacing or desolate. The Grand Concourse, once the Champs Elysee (on which it was modeled) of the Bronx, a magnificent old-world boulevard, still maintained an air of its former grandness. On the corner of 172nd Street sat a bodega, in front of which a group of Hispanic kids lounged against cars, their baggy jeans billowing around their ankles. They didn’t even look my way. Just east of the Concourse along 172nd Street sat Taft.
Taft High School was built just before the Second World War to serve the children of a neighborhood burgeoning with the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. A family friend and former resident of the area at that time told me, “Taft used to be the best school around. You had to be smart to go there. Taft was ‘across the Concourse’ – the area that was more well-to-do.” Needless to say, times had changed somewhat, but from the outside Taft didn’t look forbidding. Many have described New York schools as blockhouses or prisons, but I didn’t feel that way. Having gone to New York public schools all my life, I guess I was used to it. In fact, the building was nicer than the dilapidated one I’d gone to high school in: Stuyvesant, on Manhattan’s East 15th Street.4 Taft even had a baseball diamond, named Jonathan Levin Field (I’d discovered what his claim to fame was: a Taft teacher who had been murdered in his own home by his own students in a botched kidnapping in the spring of 1998 – he had unwisely let it slip that he was the son of the chairman of Time-Warner). The school had a manicured lawn in front of the main entrance; you walked past the flagpole with the Stars and Stripes flapping in the breeze, through the doors and, just like the airport, ran smack into the scanning area with its two huge metal detectors. After that, you got your ID checked at the security desk, and then directed to the English Department, Room 153.
The hallways of the school were tall and wide, giving a sense of space, and it was here that I discovered that like many another striver, Taft High School had an image of its own permanence once, too. This was symbolized by the Honor Roll, a series of heavy wooden panels that wrapped around the first floor. The years and names rolled by on it, carefully inscribed in gold lettering: 1947, 1951, 1954. The names were all Jewish until the Jews begin their northern migration in the 60’s (first to Yonkers and then to Westchester); the Jewish names began to give way to Hispanic (presumably Puerto Rican) names. By the mid-60’s the list of names under the years began to diminish. By the 70’s they’d dropped below five names a year. Taft finally stopped keeping an Honor Roll in 1983. There seemed to have been a half-hearted effort to revive it in 1998, but the few names were sloppily done, as if the craft of inscribing them had been lost.
I was here to meet the man, my new boss presumptive: Charlie Osewalt. I’d been told he was an ordained minister and had a PhD from Oxford; what the hell was he doing here? For that matter, what the hell was I doing here…? At the riot masquerading as a Teaching Fellows job fair, with queues of prospective teachers snaking crazily across the room, I’d looked over at a sign that said “Chancellor’s District.” There were two high schools there, and the line was both short and moving fast, so that’s where I decided to make my stand. The guy in front of me went to the table marked Roosevelt, so I sat down at the one marked Taft.
My interviewers were a Neil Salomon and a Mr. Januzzi. Salomon was a puckish 40’s with a boyish haircut, friendly eyes framed by massive black specs and dressed in a black polo shirt; he airily waved a hand from the wrist of which dangled a gold bracelet. Next to him, in studied contrast, looking for all the world like Salomon’ consigliore, sat immaculate Mr. Januzzi (who reminded me a bit of a lizard – he had a disturbing habit of not blinking), his blue-black slick-backed hair ashine, dressed crisply in a tan Italian suit, pink collared shirt, and silk tie with gold clasp. As far as accessories went, he favored the gold pinky ring and sported a massive watch. I would smell his aftershave (or was it cologne? and what was the difference?) on my hand hours after the interview. “Howyadoin,” he said. “Nicetameetcha.” Salomon explained that Chancellor’s District schools were schools that had performed so poorly for so long they were under the direct supervision of the Chancellor’s Office. The worst schools in the city, in other words. Then he said: “I would hire you on the spot, but I want you to visit the school and meet the AP of English first. I want you to be aware of what you’re getting into, so you can’t say you weren’t warned. I don’t want you quitting your first week.” Startled, I’d said, “Does that happen often?” Januzzi had swiveled his unblinking orbs upon me. “Every fall.”
Where do teachers come from? To answer this question, I have to go even further back: I was at the job fair because I was a sinner. A sinner, however, who did not violate the social compact in the typically anti-social manner: I was neither a criminal nor an alcoholic, nor one who abused drugs. No, I was a sinner of a peculiarly American stripe, in a particularly American mold: I was unsuccessful at making money.5
From an early age, I’ve always loved history. It started with an avid interest in military history, as it does with so many boys – battles and generals and maneuvers and such, but my interest later expanded to include all kinds of historical areas (and eras). So, when I’d gone to high school, I’d assumed that I was going to be a history teacher of some kind; I figured there wasn’t much else you could do with a history degree. In college, I became diverted into becoming a rock musician (I just wanted to be the bass player), which then diverted me into getting expelled from the University of Virginia (or as the Dean of Academic Affairs put it, it was time to “expand my horizons outside the restrictive confines of a university setting”) – so I moved to London with bass in case, living in a room in Brent Cross with three guys from New Zealand, to see what developed.
Nothing did, so I came back to the States and finished college at Hunter (where my focus switched from history to literature). Then, I was off again – life became a series of meandering side roads and abrupt cul-de-sacs in my 20’s; I was a sort of itinerant aspirant. My chimerical pursuits included trying to become a screenwriter (an unproductive if enlightening year in Hollywood, where I lived in a furnished apartment complete with Murphy bed, close enough to the on-ramp for the 101 that if I left my window open my walls became covered in soot), a novelist (when I moved back to Brooklyn), a journalist (my sojourn in New Orleans, a romantic French Quarter garret on Royal Street that I shared with my girlfriend, who would become my wife in 1997), and a rock and roll songwriter (back to Manhattan). I got briefly swept up in the Internet madness, until I figured out that the demands for unpaid overtime in exchange for mythical stock options wasn’t a fair trade. So I worked a series of very uninteresting day jobs in the interim; the idea of teaching always lurked in the background as a fallback should my other interests “not work out” (or, alternately, when I opted to “grow up”). After all, since I considered teaching my eventual destiny, why rush it?
By 1999, my parents had retired to Florida, and all my childhood friends had similarly scattered to places like Chicago and Montreal. It felt like a major transition period, so I flirted with the idea of teaching, but was put off by the Board of Education’s infamous Byzantine bureaucracy.6 Thus, I continued to haphazardly troll the white-collar world. I went to the odd networking event; I even went to job fairs, handing out a deeply fictional resume for jobs I didn’t really want to strangers I would never meet again. It was a shock, considering the booming Internet job market; I’d assumed that when I finally decided to “go straight,” that is, when I finally settled on getting a real job, that one would be there waiting for me. What job that would be exactly, of course, I had only the vaguest idea. The mystery was resolved in the spring of 2001; the great economic bubble finally became the Hindenburg, seemingly taking all professional and entry-level careers down with it. This caused me to make the transition from sporadically employed to nearly unemployable. I began to second-guess almost every decision I had ever made. I had wanted to live my life a certain way, so that I could look back and say I had done what I wanted – but now I started to question the wisdom of this approach. This period also placed hairline fractures in my marriage, cracks beneath the ice of our shared floe: sensed but not seen. Once, then, two paths (at least) had diverged in the woods, and I had chosen the ones less traveled by; but by now, those same woods had become savage, dark, and tangled, and I had become lost.
“Should I come home?” My wife was on the phone, calling from the kitchen at work. “Nah, I don’t think you need to. Apparently a plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center. I don’t think it’s serious.” About 20 minutes later, I called her back. “Come home,” I said. “But don’t take the subway.” The World Trade Center was gone; Windows On the World, where we’d had our rehearsal dinner, was gone. I walked over to Amsterdam, and I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing: A sea of people filled the entire width of the avenue, underground commuters converted to pedestrians, making the long march past me to their homes. There was a dazed stillness about them, as there was about me. Where were they all going? Were they going to walk back to Westchester…? That night, my wife and I huddled in front of the TV (as we would be for three days). The whole city got quiet that night, quiet as it will ever be again – for the first time in my life, I didn’t hear traffic, I didn’t hear the constant sound of planes, only a rare pass from one of the Combat Air Patrols.
After the shock wore off, I felt galvanized to do something for the first time in a long time. So I followed the sign I saw in the subway, 212-RECRUIT, and took the exam to join the NYPD – having just turned 33, I was still eligible for one more year. But upon further reflection, I wasn’t sure being a cop was for me. I felt I could do the job, at least I was pretty sure I could, but I’d be working nights for at least my first year, and I was married; my wife wasn’t happy about the idea, but she knew I needed something, a focus. But given my pathological aversion to authority, neither of us was sure I was paramilitary material.
One day, during what would turn out to be one of the last of my temporary midtown commuting days before being laid off a final time, as I blearily rose to my feet with my stick of fellow straphangers, preparing for the red jump light to detrain at 42nd Street, I saw another sign in black and white: Because your spreadsheets don’t grow up to be doctors and lawyers. Become a New York City Teaching Fellow… Leaving aside the dubious value of having a hand in creating yet more lawyers, I was intrigued. Not to say desperate – I think part of me wanted to do something radical as a form of clearing the slate, starting over, reinventing myself. In any case, it beat joining the circus.
I looked up the Teaching Fellows website at one of my many lulls at work in yet another glassine tower. The Teaching Fellows gave you eight weeks of summer training and placed you in certain schools located in the Bronx and eastern Brooklyn, thus circumventing the red tape snafu I had been subjected to. You didn’t have to read between the lines to know what kind of schools they were referring to. The starting salary was $39,000; with a Master’s it was $44,000. That was still a lot more money than the cops, whose base pay still hadn’t changed from a paltry $27,000 in years. As a further incentive, the Fellows were throwing in a free Master’s degree in education. I sent in my resume and cover letter (as I’d been doing unsuccessfully for months attempting to secure a variety of other jobs); I learned 12,000 people were doing the same for less than 2,000 spots. Happily, after making it through an all-day interview process, I was accepted in February, the same day I was told to report for my police physical.
So here I was. When I got to Taft’s room 153, I don’t know what I expected – I mean, it sure wasn’t a fastidious Oxford don – but it certainly wasn’t the Falstaff in an oversized Rangers jersey and faded jeans who came bustling out of his office, apparently delighted to see me. He was a burly, hirsute figure in his mid-to-late 40’s: overweight, sweaty despite the fact it was a cool day in April, with small academic spectacles underneath a head of salt and pepper hair. His graying beard hugged his neck and disappeared into the depths of his jersey. I felt ludicrously overdressed in The Suit, my sole remaining nod to professional life: a careworn brown linen suit I’d procured in a New Orleans boutique years before. I glanced into his office: it was spectacularly disorganized – papers, folders, and books were stacked on every available surface.
“You must be Aaron.”
“Mr. Osewalt?”
“Call me Charlie. I really enjoyed your resume, it was very well written. Most of them aren’t.” His Bronx accent was thicker than his unseen back hair. And no one, to my knowledge, had ever enjoyed a resume, mine or anyone else’s.
One of my character flaws (one of many, according to some) is that I have a problem with authority, and this has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years, because I’m also not a very good dissembler. But it’s fair to say I liked Charlie right off – he inspired instant trust and confidence; he fairly exuded brain power, and he had what I can only term as charisma. I wasn’t sure, since I hadn’t had much exposure to charisma in my working life, but I felt instantly that I would have no trouble obeying whatever directives came from his office.
He had me tag along to watch him teach. He and a Fellow already at the school, Glen Rogers, taught a class of Advanced Placement English, and I was impressed; Charlie also had stage presence – when he walked into the classroom, all eyes were on him as his booming voice carried to every corner of the room. It was obvious he was a damn good teacher (not that I knew anything about teaching, of course, but I had certainly been taught by my fair share). He took me to the basement to see the department’s computer lab, the Jonathan Levin Media Center. It was a large, well-lit room filled with old refurbished PowerMacs. There was a bulletin board with Levin’s picture on it, as well as letters and poems from his students: he had been popular. I turned to Charlie. “Salomon told me what happened to him at the job fair.”
He sighed heavily, shaking his head. “Truly tragic. Great guy. Great teacher. And that’s why we get money from Time-Warner to help us out here.” I took another look around the room, and thought: Levin’s dad had to be worth tens of millions; you’d think he’d offer to rebuild the entire school, not donate a few crappy old computers. But I suppose the vagaries of the super-rich will forever remain a mystery to me.7
Back in the office, I noticed a well-thumbed King James Bible on the corner of his desk. “You read that a lot?” I asked.
“Every day. Know what my favorite book is?”
Which one was the Teacher again...? I took a stab. “Ecclesiastes?”
Charlie smiled. “Very good.”
“’There is no new thing under the sun. Vanity of vanities, sayeth the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’” He looked pleased. I don’t think I’d ever quoted Scripture to get a job before. “But don’t get too excited,” I felt compelled to add. “I’m an atheist.”
He smiled and shrugged, as if to say: “All kinds.” Then, using his steepled hands to point, he gave me the hard sell. “There’s something I want you to understand. My primary goal is to make sure all my new teachers become good teachers. I place a priority emphasis on professional development. Most other schools aren’t gonna do that. I haven’t had anyone quit while I’ve been AP, Aaron, and I want to keep the streak going. I’m gonna be hiring a whole bunch of Fellows, and it’s an opportunity for me to finally shape the department the way I want. I’d like you to be a part of it. Now, do you have any questions for me?”
I thought of the kids lounging on the corner. “Do you have a gang problem here?”
“We’ve got gangs, but most of the time they keep their activities outside the building. Why I don’t know, they just do.”
I couldn’t really think of anything else off hand, so I asked him if he wanted to see a demonstration lesson before hiring me. He smiled and spread his hands. “Why? I already know you can’t teach.”
So I signed on.
...You do not, strictly speaking, have to teach anything new, anything that is not already as familiar to you as it is to all good people. And when we speak to you of your mission and apostolate, you should not misunderstand us. You are not the apostles of a new gospel. The legislator did not wish to transform you into philosophers or makeshift theologians. He asks of you what one may ask of any man of heart and sense… But, once you are thus loyally confined to the humble and secure role of everyday morality, what do we ask of you? Speeches? Wise explanations? Brilliant exposés, scholarly teaching? No! Family and society ask you to help raise their children, to make honest people of them. That is to say that they expect not words but acts, not another course added to the program but a completely practical service that you can render to the country more as a man than as a teacher. – Jules Ferry, Letter to Teachers, 1883
Teachers of the World, Unite!
THE Fellows program, like the Olympics, held opening ceremonies the day before summer training was to begin, an unusually hot day in late June. It was basically a big pep rally held at a hotel ballroom across from Penn Station. Guest speakers included the outgoing lame duck Chancellor, Harold Levy – things hadn’t worked out between him and the new billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg (I wasn’t entirely clear why a billionaire wanted to be mayor; I figured Mike was simply bored out of his mind – once a striver, always a striver, I guess), who wanted his mayoralty to be judged on his commitment to education. One of his primary aims was to accomplish what Giuliani had been unable to do: re-centralize the Board of Ed under the control of the mayor’s office (it had been de-centralized in 1969). We didn’t know who was replacing Levy yet, but we did know that our employer had changed. The Board of Education, in a desperate image-makeover bid, had suddenly renamed itself the Department of Education.
We got a brief earful about the recent No Child Left Behind Act, which had been signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 8th. It was touted by the White House as the “magic bullet” that would somehow close the achievement gaps (caused by race and poverty) in America’s public schools. Its major goal was to have student “achievement parity” by 2014, and have what it termed a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom by the 2005 – 2006 academic year.8
The majority of the time seemed to be spent praising us, and telling us how important we were going to be in the lives of these special children. Every speaker felt it necessary to tell us how wonderful we all were, what an amazing thing we had chosen to do, how badly we were needed, etc. On the surface, this would seem to be both flattering and comforting, but it must be said here that I tend to be a cynical man. Whenever people in authority start effusively praising impressionable neophytes, my hackles go up; you sense they’re trying to lull you into a false sense of security just prior to some kind of debacle. It was obvious that this job was going to be a lot tougher than anyone was letting on.
As I sat there in the audience, holding my program, I thought back to my Fellows interview – why was I here again? What had I told the guy why I’d wanted to teach high school? I’d put on my best suck-up face and said, “My fondest educational memories are the ones stemming from my days at Stuyvesant High School.” I’d continued in this rhapsodic vein: “Yes, a whole group of teacher’s names can spring to mind from Stuyvesant, whereas I can barely remember more than a couple of my college professors…” Though the answer had felt phony, I knew it to be sincere – I hadn’t been a big fan of college.
Now, as the speeches droned on, I decided now was the time to examine a little more closely my motivation for becoming a teacher. First and foremost, I knew that I was not a crusader. I wanted to teach what I had been taught, and how I had been taught it (unbeknownst to me, this would make me singularly unqualified for the coming task). I’d enjoyed high school, but I had not, at any time, ever wanted to teach at a high school in the ghetto; this program was a means to an end. And that end? My primary motivation was that once I broke into the system, and got certified, got a few years of experience under my belt, it would be a job that traveled, had benefits, which would always be in demand, and be on an academic calendar: in other words, I’d get my summers off. Part of its appeal was that I would not be working to make money for somebody else; thus the job had inherent humanistic meaning, and a sense of purpose. Did I love children? Well, children were people – I loved some people, so I guess it would be fair to say that I could bring myself to love some children. But to me love was something doled out sparingly and with discretion, it was not a soggy blanket to be draped over entire categories of people, and certainly not as a matter of principle: you must love all children because… they are children… seemed a kind of tautological argument. St. Francis (or even Jesus) I was not.
The main item on the agenda was general exhortation, trying to get us all geared up for the tasks ahead. It wasn’t quite like a prayer-tent revival, though that was certainly its intent, and there were quite a few people in the audience who certainly seemed to feel that way about the proceedings, as they swayed and nodded. But for more than a few of us out there in the dark, there was more than an air of the soviet about it all – it was as if we were at some Party Congress applauding wildly at the unveiling of the next Five Year Plan. We were not so much a choir of the converted as a group submerging its misgivings for the cause – it was too late now, training was to begin the next day at CCNY.
* * *
The City College of New York, or CCNY, is located on a hill in Harlem at the intersection of 137th Street and Convent Avenue. The school itself has a long legacy of helping the poor, in the person of Townsend Harris (1808 – 1878), who attributed the difficulty of his journey from poverty to wealth to his inability to afford a decent education. Thus, he resolved to find a way to offer this opportunity to the poor and new immigrants of the city; he founded the Free Academy in 1847 (tuition was, as the name implies, free); later changing its name to the CCNY, it was incorporated into the CUNY system in 1961. By the turn of the 20th century, CCNY had become informally known as the “Jewish Harvard,” because the Ivy League had developed the SAT to keep the Eastern European barbarians outside their gates (and then had had to develop “the interview” once they’d cracked the test). During the 1940’s, however, Harvard became the “Jewish Harvard,” and CCNY became more and more a school of color; the culture became less Cracow, more Caribbean.
In 1969, the same year that the New York City school system was de-centralized into 32 community school boards, City College was perceived as no longer fulfilling its original mission of providing a higher educational opportunity for the poor; the high standards the school had for admission were now seen as a barrier to social equality. So in response, CCNY adopted an “open admissions” policy for the fall of 1970: now, any student who had graduated from a high school in New York could attend, regardless of academic records. This policy, in conjunction with ever-dwindling funding (CCNY began charging tuition in 1976), started a long period of intense decline for the school. The once-proud institution became a shell of its former self, increasingly devoted to remedial education, as most incoming graduates of the NYC secondary school system were discovered to be practically illiterate. Powerless to raise the standards of the high schools, CCNY had to slowly but surely lower theirs. Finally, tacitly admitting that open admissions had been a dismal failure, the school ended the policy beginning in the fall of 1999. High school graduates now had to have an 80 average, and be able to pass a battery of assessment tests, to be admitted.9 But City College, despite its faults, was there to answer the call when the Teaching Fellows needed schools to train their ghetto-bound teachers. The school was still trying to keep the faith, staying true to its original mission of education for the city’s poorest and most disadvantaged citizens.
Re-enter me. As I marched up the slope towards City College under the baking concrete heat of Harlem in summer to begin my training, I remembered that I’d vowed never to return to this place after getting my first M.A. (in writing) back in ’96, as my classes had been for the most part an appallingly bad joke (though I had met my wife there – and admittedly I’d only attended to avoid getting a job). Many of the original Gothic buildings had been under renovation when I’d attended the first time around, and here it was 2002 and they were still busy working. On the same buildings. Looming above the campus was the violet-and-grey-hued stone of the Northern Academic Center (the NAC, pronounced “knack”), the Rikers Island architect’s lowball abortion of a school building. I don’t know anything about architecture, I admit – maybe in some circles the NAC’s early 70’s modernism was considered sleek, even elegantly utilitarian. To me it looked like the command center from Battle for the Planet of the Apes – I kept expecting to see sentient chimps and gorillas led by Roddy McDowell storming the place. Its sole saving grace was the air-conditioning.
If possible, the interior of the NAC building was even more hideous than the exterior; yellow cinderblock halls had garish orange doors recessed into them. It was behind one of these orange doors that I met the 24 members of my group, designated by the program as 5CC10: 5th Cohort, City College, Fellow Advisory group 10; we were all the presumptive English teachers in the city’s worst schools: Taft High School, Theodore Roosevelt High School (located near Fordham University in the Bronx), and Louis D. Brandeis High School, the only zoned school in Manhattan, located on the Upper West Side.
On the first day of class, we went around the room introducing ourselves and what had brought us here. As I sat there listening, I felt like a Hollywood producer; I could hear the gravelly voice of the movie previews guy in my head: In the aftermath of 9/11, in the summer of 2002, a rag-tag group of societal misfits and money-world drop-outs from all over America would answer New York City’s plaintive call for teachers. In eight short weeks they’d be turned into lean, mean, teaching machines and unleashed on a rotting, but deeply entrenched, public education system. No one expected any of them to come back alive… Circumstance and temperament: as far back as high school, I had never been much of a joiner – I’d never liked clubs or teams, and yet here I was. I looked around the stuffy, overcrowded room that we would begin to learn how to teach and wondered, with my supercilious eye: Who was going to make it?
As for me, I remember being somewhat appalled. All these total strangers with this bizarre penchant for sharing… It felt more than a little like group therapy. It just wasn’t me. When it came to be my turn, I debated opening with “Call me Ishmael,” and leaving it at that, but I settled for saying that I was a very private person, one who didn’t like to bare one’s soul to people he didn’t know. I had become a somewhat reticent person in the last few years, I said, so I hoped they wouldn’t mind if I kept my background notes brief. Or, as the Smith’s song said, “If you’ve got five seconds to spare, I’ll tell you the story of my life,” reduced to a type: middle class kid from Brooklyn who had gone to the city’s schools from Pre-K to M.A., the soundtrack to the gentrification of his neighborhood “All Things Considered” on the radio and the silver trumpets of “Masterpiece Theatre” on the TV.
* * *
The knock on my door came before dawn. “Roston,” the voice said. “Let’s go.” The floor was freezing, and I shivered as I put on my white t-shirt and blue shorts. My partner was waiting for me in the hallway – he knew what he was doing, he’d been with the fleet. We quickly moved down to the assembly area, and then were marched across the street in the cold pre-dawn darkness to a mist-shrouded field. Standing there in white t-shirt and blue shorts was the former Vietnam Force Recon Gunnery Sergeant who was going to lead us through Hell Week. In August of 1986, I was a Midshipman 4th Class, having made the mistake of joining NROTC without the benefit of a scholarship; I had originally wanted to attend the Naval Academy. I had walked to the Court Street offices of Steven Solarz, my local Congressman, to go over my qualifications with him. As a result, and because my mother’s uncle’s cousin had been his Washington mentor, Solarz made me the principal nominee for the district. Normally, this would have meant automatic acceptance, equivalent to early admission, but there was a catch: I wore glasses, and the service academies at that time had a strict quota as to how many vision-deficient candidates they would accept. Therefore, all such candidates went back into the regular applicant pool, where I shared space with all those Eagle Scouts and three-letter athletes. I did not make the cut. So I had joined NROTC with the intention of trying to transfer my sophomore year.
This was how I found myself in Charlottesville, standing in front of a mirthlessly grinning fire hydrant of a marine, who stuck his finger in my face and told me to give him twenty push-ups or he was going to tear my head off and shit down my neck. Or something like that. After a brutal series of calisthenics, we went on our first of many long runs, singing jodies under the rising sun:
C-140 rollin’ down the strip,
Recon Marine gonna take a little trip.
Mission top secret, destination unknown,
Don’t even know if we’ll make it home.
Stand up, hook up, shuffle to the door,
Take a deep breath and shout “Marine Corps!”
And if I should die in a Commie ditch,
Bury me with the son-of-a-bitch…
Along the way, some fell by the roadside to vomit; when we returned to the field, upperclassmen went up and down the line putting ice cubes in our parched mouths so we wouldn’t puke or pass out, because we had another series of calisthenics to do. We then ran back to the dorm to take a Marine Corps shower – if you got wet, you were in too long. After donning our khaki uniforms, we were marched to the cafeteria, and I have never eaten breakfasts like that before or since. We all of us loaded our trays to the breaking point – we were putting pancakes on waffles, wrapping sausage in bacon, and it still wasn’t enough. We sat at the tables stuffing our faces and giggling in disbelief. Then we’d spend the rest of the day marching around and drilling under the August sun, before more calisthenics before dinner. At the end of training, to my surprise, an upperclassman named Karl Kime pulled me aside and said I should consider joining the marines instead of the navy. This was a man I often saw running in boots and utes as he prepared for Quantico. “Why?” I remember asking him. “Because you’re an oddball, Roston, and the marines love oddballs.” During the fall semester, I trained every Wednesday with the marine candidates, going on 8-mile runs, then the calisthenics circuit in the basement of the NROTC building, “C-140 rollin’ down the strip…” But it didn’t last. My uniform was ill-fitting in more ways than one – I started failing inspections, was late for drill. I found I’d lost my taste for just about everything associated with college, and having discovered rock music I was coming into my own as a rebel, shedding my straight-arrow skin, so I dropped out of the program at the end of the term.
But had I stayed in, there is every possibility that, like Karl Kime, who I later heard commanded a rifle platoon over there, I would’ve been shipped to Iraq just in time for the first Gulf War. From the accounts I’ve read about it, it doesn’t sound like I missed much (Jarhead comes to mind, and with my luck I probably would’ve ended up as a Quartermaster), but every once in a while over the years I’ve wondered, and regretted.
* * *
Teaching Fellows summer training had been frequently referred to in the media as “boot camp” for teachers.10 This was because you had eight weeks to learn an entirely new profession, in much the same way that civilians had thirteen weeks to become transformed from individual civilians into a community of soldiers. Under normal circumstances, graduate training of a teacher consisted of 38 credits spread out over four semesters, including hundreds of hours of observational fieldwork and one semester as a student-teacher in a high school classroom, basically co-teaching with an experienced and licensed teacher. Then you were given your M.A. in Secondary Education and your initial state certification. However, this was not normal circumstances, and, because of this, the schedule was extremely compressed.
The focus of the summer training was six graduate credits in education, presumably to acquaint us with the latest in pedagogical methods. We would be in school Monday through Thursday, in class from 8am to 4pm. After that, we had what was known as Fellow Advisory from 4pm to 6pm – this was a special training session specifically for us as Fellows, which would be led by an experienced Teaching Fellow, meant to introduce us to the vagaries of the New York City system. After our graduate work was completed, in about six weeks, we would be sent to our respective schools to help teach summer school there in the mornings. We didn’t march around under the hot sun, but we did get a $5 voucher for a helping of glutinous starch from the City College cafeteria that we hungrily devoured every day.
What did I know about this job before I arrived? Not much. I had been taught all my life, of course, but that didn’t tell me anything. When I’d owned a car, I’d taken it to get fixed – this didn’t mean I knew how a carburetor worked. Teaching to me was some smart person standing in front of a classroom of kids who were there as a stopping point on their way to somewhere else – college, career – and telling them something new, the archetypal “sage on the stage.” In the case of good teachers, the new was also exciting and interesting. I was lucky – most of the teachers in my life had been good ones, especially in high school. I still fancied myself a lifelong student, or learner. But mostly what I knew about teaching, especially in the ghetto, came from the movies. In this I was no different from anybody else in the room.
There are two kinds of teaching movie: teaching in the white world, and teaching in the ghetto world. But teaching movies in both worlds are not about teaching per se. Why? Because it’s like welding when it’s well done; we can admire the skill that goes into it, but it’s boring to watch. After all, welding only became interesting when the welder took off her clothes and danced around under a bucket of water. That’s why no movies about teachers and teaching actually waste a lot of time on things like curriculum; instead they traffic in the “bigger” issues: inspiration, motivation, changing society.
For instance: In the white-world movie Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams, teaching at a stand-in for Philips Exeter, gives the kids a shock by asking them to tear out the boring introductions to their poetry textbooks, and spends a lot of time jumping on his desk to make a point. Of course what he’s really teaching these privileged boys is how to think for yourself; one of his students is actually stupid enough to take this advice and ends up committing suicide. In Mona Lisa Smile, Julia Roberts wants the girls she teaches to see that there is more to life than looming housewifery. Her students are hostile at the start: “Long way from Oakland State?” snipes the Jewish girl (considering this is Wellesley in 1953, I’m sure she was the only one attending). But Julia Roberts perseveres in the face of this withering firestorm: she wins the girls over with her knowledge of modern art combined with think-for-yourself ideals. In both cases, the teachers become inspirational firebrands beloved by their students. And both teachers, of course, end up being fired.
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