Your First Year of Teaching
Spring of 2002
It’s 6:50 when you enter your dark classroom and flip the light switch. Students won’t be arriving for one hundred minutes, but you know the success and ease of your day is predicated on you being there now. Carrying a heavy bag, you can see your breath as you lumber to the blackboard and write the date in the upper right corner February 18, 2002. One week until the school science fair, you think, and a half-hour until the heat comes on. Built in 1895, the building is heated by an old furnace that often breaks down. The building engineer turns it on when he arrives at 6:30, but it takes a long time before the heat reaches the fourth floor radiators and can begin to slowly warm up the room. You drop your bag to the floor with a THUD and drag it past the chalkboard, through an adjoining room that you call a “lab” (but is actually a vacant room with some tables and chairs) and into a closet. Sixty pounds of sand. You’ll use it for forty minutes after lunch.
Next, you visit a terrarium that sets on the windowsill of the lab. Luckily, the sun has been shining for the past several weeks and the aquarium temperature has remained high enough to keep the plants and iguana living inside of it alive. You reach in your pocket and pull out a scrap of lettuce to feed the iguana. As you switch on a desk lamp to warm the terrarium, you look down at the dark parking lot, which is partially illuminated by an orange floodlight. With the exception of the custodian’s station wagon, there is only one car in the lot, a red SUV, belonging to an autistic-support teacher that lives in the suburbs.
It’s Wednesday morning at Carpenter Elementary School, and you’ve already worked thirty hours this week (you’ll work forty more before the week’s over). Your job description reads Middle School Science Teacher, but this title falls far short of your duties. You also teach an English and Writing class every day as well as music once a week. Still, none of this is your major concern right now. At the beginning of the year, the principal told you that you were in charge of organizing a science fair in which every student – 273 to be exact – hands in an individual project. The science fair will be held in a week and you’ve only received two. Normally, someone with your job description would have a science background. You do not. Science was always your worst subject, you haven’t attended a science fair since you were in first grade, and you don’t even really like the subject. However, you had a wonderful experience student teaching here last year and when the science position opened up last summer, you took the job without hesitation.
You sit down at your desk to review your notes from the night before, knowing that the next two minutes is the last you’ll be sitting for another eight-and-a-half hours. There’s a reminder to talk to the principal about an eighth grader named Jason. Five school days have passed since he refused to work where you asked him to, and he has yet to serve a respectful detention. You remove the scrap of paper from the clipboard, stuff it in your pocket, and notice an indirect object homework sheet. There are ten sentences single-spaced under the heading and instructions, with a duplicate copy underneath. Each teacher has an allotment of paper, which they cannot exceed, so squeezing two assignments on a piece of paper is wise, if possible. Of course, English textbooks would remedy this entire problem, but you’ve only been given ten (eight have a cover) and there are twenty-six seventh graders.
There’s a simple reason you chose to run off copies now instead of setting up the lab, which is a more significant priority at this point. Last week, while printing copies at 8:00 a.m., the principal dismissed you from the copier in front of four colleagues, saying, “You’re done here” with no explanation. It would’ve been nice to run off copies before leaving last night, but by the time you typed up the homework sheet the office was dark and locked like every other room in the school.
Back in your room, you’re writing notes about indirect objects as diligently and neatly as possible. Directly out of the textbook, you copy a definition, instructions on how to identify it, two example problems, and how to diagram them. You flip to the chapter review and begin copying sentences, being sure to change names and content when needed to make them ethnically appropriate. My dad gave Roger a golf Club. becomes My mom gave Kaideen a basketball. .
When you finally finish at 7:30, the chalkboards are covered, hot air has slowly begun to purr out of the radiator, and faint streaks of light have started painting the horizon to the west. You can’t believe how quickly the last forty minutes have passed and, wondering how you’ll have the lab prepared in time, you find yourself running to the lab closet. As you organize materials, you don’t mind the stress of having to set the lab up quickly. The fifth graders are your favorite group to work with, so you want to create the best lab possible. Spaced across the table are a bag of seventeen plastic cars, stack of seventeen short pieces of wood, seventeen rolls of tape, and seventeen rulers, each in a separate stack. Preparing seventeen of each item allows all thirty-four fifth grade students to work with a partner. Facing this many students with no assistance leaves no room for lack of organization on your part.
The students will be learning why cars are streamlined as part of their wind resistance unit. To do this, they must measure the distance a car travels down a ramp with cardboard taped to the front bumper and sticking straight up in the air. Then, they will tape the top of the cardboard to the hood, roll it down the ramp again, and take another measurement. You grab a large scrap of cardboard from a reserve heap kept beneath a table. You’d like the students to cut out their own pieces of cardboard during class. This would save you time and help them learn to follow directions from a scientific procedure. However, you only have ten pairs of old, weak scissors, so you grab your pair of left-handed shears and begin cutting with your right hand.
The sun has risen, you are warm (the furnace has pumped too much heat into the room and you’ll soon have to open some windows to cool it off), and only two more pieces of cardboard need to be cut when you hear Social Studies teacher and thirty-year School District of Philadelphia veteran, Deborah Smith, laughing and wishing the elevator lady a good day. She always arrives at the same time. You don’t need to look at the clock to know that it’s 8:05 – twenty-four minutes until you need to pick up students.
After the cardboard strips have been cut, you look at the lab to make sure there’s nothing that you might have forgotten. There are four tables spaced across the room. The fifth graders will need as much floor space as possible to conduct this experiment, so the tables will need to be stacked on top of each other in a corner. Remembering that you forgot to check your e-mail, you rush over to the classroom, turn the computer on and hurry back to the lab.
You’re sweating when you return to the computers. The tables are old, heavy, and required every ounce of your energy to lift alone. As you punch in the password, you hear Randy Goldman – the Reading teacher – wishing you a “Good morning.” Eight-eleven, you think to yourself, as you return his greeting. Mr. Goldman is the fifth grade teacher and a very good man. The thirty-four students in his homeroom exceed the legal limit by one. He started the year with thirty-two, but two students were transferred into the school for disciplinary reasons – one in November and one just two weeks earlier. When the principal gave him the choice between teaching the illegally-sized class, or moving one of his more advanced students to sixth grade in the middle of the year, he chose the former rather than the latter, not wanting to stunt anyone’s academic and/or social progress. Les Stoddard, the math teacher who you student taught under last year, hasn’t arrived yet, and you hope that he’s caught in traffic. If he is, he’ll arrive soon after 8:30, at the latest. If he’s sick, you’ll probably lose your second period prep (Carpenter rarely receives substitute teachers), which you desperately need in order to prepare for the eighth graders who come in right after the fifth grade lab.
The value of Les’ presence stretches far beyond securing your prep period. The entire floor becomes chaotic when he’s not there, because no other teacher is able to command the respect that the students grant him. Les is the backbone of the middle school, and the main reason you chose to teach here. Just a block away, there are housing projects, where some of the biggest drug dealers in America have been known to operate. Many Carpenter students are impoverished, neglected, sexually abused, and physically abused. While student teaching under Les, you knew all of this; you just didn’t know how hard it was to do what he made look so simple. Last year, you rarely saw Les yell at a student or be defied in anyway. The students loved and respected him and no one wanted to be on his bad side. The same is not true for you, however. You grew up eighty miles west of Philadelphia, surrounded by forests and farmland. Detention was rarely issued to any student in your middle school and hearing a shouting teacher made your ears perk up and curious about who had provoked him or her to such anger. No component of your background could have prepared you for this job.
Teaching in the city had never been a goal or interest of yours. You just sort of stumbled into it. You wanted to teach and the master’s program that you were in required an urban, public placement. Les made it look easy and rewarding. He maintained a relaxed, yet serious class tone, masterfully balancing the role of teacher, friend, and occasionally guardian. As a result, many students, who would have caused problems and not worked hard, stayed out of trouble and became good students. When you took the job you hoped that you would achieve similar stature in the Carpenter community.
There are two messages in your Inbox, one from the School District of Philadelphia Teacher’s Union President, which you delete without reading, and one from Keith’s mother, who you correspond with two to three times a week. She feels that “you are taking advantage of the fact that you e-mail her by singling Keith out.” Obviously, Keith - a student who commits at least a dozen offenses per day that would warrant suspension in any suburban school – has complained about you to his mother. You’re angry and know that it’s unwise to reply when feeling this way, but you do it anyway, politely assuring Keith’s mother that you are not intentionally singling him out, but want her to know that he has been blatantly disrespectful everyday for the past week and if she doesn’t want to receive your e-mails, then you’d be happy to recommend suspensions to the principal instead. You click ‘Send’, forget what you’ve written, and, hoping to speak with the principal about Jason before having to pick up your students, run down the stairs because you fear that waiting for the elevator will leave you short on time.
In the office, the principal makes eye contact with you, nods briefly, and turns to go back in his office. “Mr. Fromm,” you call out, hoping he has thirty seconds with which to listen. He does, and you explain to him that during detention yesterday Jason took four minutes to walk the two flights of stairs to your room, then continued playing with the Velcro strap of his watch after being asked to stop. Finally, he propped his feet up on a desk and tried to fall asleep before you dismissed him a half-hour early. “Send him to me, first thing,” he says, and you feel your heart sink, because you can tell by his tone that the student, who preceded yesterday’s antics by twice skipping detention altogether, will not be suspended like you think he should be.
Relief. Les walks into the office. There will be no lost prep.
***
Walking into the schoolyard, you hear your name being shouted from multiple directions. Students of ranging grade levels run towards you holding large poster boards. You ignore their cries and crouch down to receive a hug from the most beautiful first grader in the world, knowing this is your last moment of peace until 3:09. Standing, you collect a half-dozen boards, and it is clear that your ploy of offering extra credit to students who finish a week early has not worked.
The bell rings and eleven seventh graders are in line. Two boys who should be in line are throwing football by the gate. You call for them and they hear you, but continue throwing. As you make your way to where your class is standing, you approach Jason, who is lining up with his class, and tell him that he is supposed to report to the principal’s office. He continues walking as though you’re not there. The boys are still throwing football, and you call for them again. They make sure to get a few more throws and catches in before moving towards the group. As they slowly traverse the asphalt, Mr. Stoddard guides his sixth graders into the school and up the fire tower, followed by Ms. Smith and the eighth graders. The boys still haven’t completely joined the line when you decide that you’ve waited long enough and motion the class with your free hand to follow you inside.
Holding the 36-inch boards, you walk clumsily to the fourth floor, following the school rules. The seventh graders are divided into two lines – a boys, and a girls – and they stop at each landing until you say “pass,” at which time they walk to the next landing and wait until they hear their cue to continue walking. Your class is fairly quiet, but the fire tower is not. Profanity echoes up and down the tower. A few eighth graders have lagged behind their class, and are now holding up your line, because Ms. Smith doesn’t follow the rules that you are adhering to. You tell them to continue walking and they ignore you, as though you’re a fly on their hand – more of an annoyance than a threat. After being ignored several times, issuing detention seems like the logical recourse. However, you’ve tried this in the past, and the students probably won’t show and there will be no consequences for not attending. Even if they do attend detention, it is only for ten minutes after school. Dozens of students serve four or five times a week and never receive the threat of suspension or expulsion.
A few more seventh graders joined the class on the walk up the stairs, so there are fifteen in all when they are seated in the classroom. You know more will trickle in any minute, but after propping the cumbersome boards next to a bookshelf you start the lesson anyway. “Indirect objects,” you say, “are who or what the direct object is referring to.” A knock on the door. Three well-behaved fifth graders are in the hallway, science fair projects in hand. Momentarily, you are excited, because the projects look incredible. A boy has balanced a toothpick on top of a bottle, with a potato and two forks; a girl has built a clay volcano; and, another girl built a racetrack. Your class has started talking, however, so there’s no time for compliments. “Back table,” you say, pointing to the lab. “Please leave through the lab door.” A boy in your class says something insulting to one of the girls as they pass in front of the class, so you make him stand next to a bookshelf. He mutters something under his breath as he walks to the perimeter of the classroom. Normally, you’d address this, but by doing so you’d raise the possibility of a confrontation and you don’t have time next period to call his mother or sit through a meeting with the principal, so you pretend that you didn’t hear it.
Two more students arrived during the delay, so you further postpone the lesson while they seat themselves. “Indirect objects,” you say, “are who or what the direct object is referring to.” Volunteers review what direct objects are and then you go over an indirect object example. The class seems to get it, so you go on to a second example. “Does anyone think they can give an example of a compound indirect object?” Three hands shoot up, as static from the television can be heard in the back of the room. On cue, the class stands for the pledge to the flag, then sits down to listen to the morning announcements. Students of the month are congratulated and the weather will be sunny with a high of forty-five degrees, so recess will be outdoors today. Science fair projects are due a week from today.
When announcements are over the class has enlarged to nineteen. Five students who show up regularly are still missing. You ask again if anyone can give an example of a compound indirect object. Four hands shoot up this time. While the student you called on begins talking, you hear the door open and a pair of crutches click their way through the doorway. Chris, a student with an amputated leg has joined. At least his mother isn’t here, you think, recalling an incident last week, in which she called you out of class at this exact same time to chastise you for not knowing why her son’s lunch was stolen the day before. The sentence is volunteered and understood amid the chattering of Chris’ crutches and you feel satisfied that the class is finally under control. You demonstrate how to diagram the sentences, and have the students begin diagramming the sentences on the board.
As the students work, you bounce around the room, helping as many students as quickly, yet thoroughly as you can. Each time you bend over to help a student, you hear talking and giggling and have to stop what you’re doing to reestablish silence. You’re lucky that they have gym next, because a few inquiries as to what their plans are for second period solves your problem. Three more students arrive during this time, including one who was out sick the past two days and wants his homework. You retrieve it from a folder behind your desk and return, tending to raised hands.
At 9:10, you are standing in front of the door, waiting for the class to become quiet. The students like gym, so it’s not difficult preparing them to leave. Just as you’re about to dismiss the class, you hear laughing and someone yell, “Shut up, Keith!” Keith has snuck into the closet and you call for him to come out. When Keith is back in line and stops laughing and talking you walk down the stairs – two lines, stopping at every landing. It’s much easier when there’s only one class on the steps at a time.
You arrive in the basement cafeteria/gym, having only stopped the class twice for getting too loud. Keith, both times, was the main culprit. Your only real problem came when the class was quiet. Rachel, a fourteen year-old who is waiting to be disciplinarily transferred out of the school, screamed “Fuck you!” at one of the boys. Long ago, you stopped addressing her outbursts. It only makes her more volatile. She knows that she has been expelled and, while her paper work is being processed downtown, has chosen to cause as many problems for the school as possible. Every teacher, including Les who no students cross, has been the recipient of Rachel’s disrespect and defiance. All in all, you think, it’s been a smooth day.
As you write up Rachel’s latest offense in the office, you wish the principal was nearby. Then, Rachel would be removed from the class. He’s in a meeting, however, so you clip the pink slip to a clipboard that he may or may not look at today and hustle back to your room.
***
It’s 9:25 when you begin water-sponging the blackboards. Where did the first ten minutes of your prep go? It’s 9:30 when you’re done and you trot over to the lab to move the science fair projects that you received today into the closet, so that no one will be tempted to steal or sabotage them.
While the water on the chalkboard dries, you grab an eighth grade textbook off of a shelf and begin reading so that you can plan today’s lesson. The eighth graders finished early yesterday and, knowing they wouldn’t sit quietly for fifteen minutes, you crammed in the follow-up lesson. Today’s lesson should’ve been planned last night, but after eating and shopping for sand you succumbed to exhaustion, only reading two paragraphs before falling asleep.
After noticing the board has dried, you start scribbling down notes about the solstices and equinox’s. You push the eighth grade work aside, pick up your clipboard, and begin copying down the Problem, Research, Hypothesis, and Experiment on the board, as well as Collect Data, Analyze Data, and Conclusion questions. It’s 9:40. If you write quickly, you have a chance of getting it all down.
At 9:50, you’ve just finished writing the experiment when Ms. Adams walks through the door. Her title reads Small Learning Community Leader, meaning she governs the upper floor, helping all teachers create a better learning environment for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. But, you haven’t seen it. For the nearly six months you’ve been working with her, you’ve seen her cut out letters in her office, sit in meetings with the principal, and look the other way when you’ve had disciplinary problems. She asks you if you’ve collected money for next week’s museum field trip. You haven’t. She also wants to know if you’ve written a blurb for the March newsletter. You say that you have not, but will have it done by tomorrow morning. Lastly, she wants to know if the class has decided if they’d rather see a butterfly or Birds of the Amazon video on next week’s field trip. You promise that you will ask later in the day, and you wonder to yourself why she can’t take care of these chores herself.
Ms. Adams leaves and you complete the outline of a chart for the fifth graders’ Collect Data lab report section. You will need to write Analyze Data and Conclusion questions during class, after they have conducted their experiments. The eighth grade worksheet hasn’t been finished either. That, too, will have to be “winged” during the class.
***
The fifth graders are waiting with their teacher outside your room when you return with your class, which now has ballooned to twenty-four students. You hurry the students along, telling them to quickly get everything they will need for Reading and Social Studies, because they won’t be returning until lunchtime and they won’t be allowed to come back in the room once they leave. Slowly, the students filter out of your classroom to Reading. The fifth grade teacher has joined them, leaving you caught in your doorway, monitoring thirty-four fifth graders (no one is absent today) in the hallway and a half-dozen in your room. The fifth graders are loud, and you tell them to quiet down when you’re not telling the seventh graders in your room to hurry up.
Within a few minutes, the seventh graders have all left the room, except for Rachel. She’s standing next to her seat, jacket on, telling you that someone put gum in her desk. “Rachel,” you say, “you’re going to have to take your jacket off and go to Reading.” The School District of Philadelphia has a no jacket policy, fearing students might conceal weapons. You’d like to ignore it, but you will hear from Mr. Fromm if he sees her wearing it.
“No,” she says. “Someone put gum in my desk.”
If you’d stop to think about Rachel, you’d sympathize with her. She’s been through more in fourteen years than her classmates have combined. Her psychological file is thick and horrifying. Mother died when she was two. Father sexually abused her until she was ten when her cousins moved her to Kentucky. She tried to set fire to her school in Kentucky, and was expelled before her grandmother moved her back to Philadelphia. Her life has been miserable and you’d like to help her, tell her that you care about her, but your sad reality is that you have thirty-four fifth graders in the hallway who need to learn and Rachel is suspending their education right now.
By now, the fifth graders have been waiting in the hallway for over seven minutes and they’re antsy. “Rachel,” you say, raising your voice. “Jacket off. Go to reading.”
She continues to stand, shrugging her shoulders. You pick up the phone to call the office. As you begin to dial, you see Kent throw a pencil from the back of the fifth grade line at a girl in the front, hitting her in the head. The girl screams that she’s going to kill Kent. Technically, Kent and the girl should both be suspended at this point, but you know you won’t have time to report the incident. You pause a moment, ignoring both problems. What can you do?
You dial the office and tell them that Rachel won’t take her jacket off, won’t leave the room, and that you’d like to begin class, so could they please send someone up to get her out of the room? Ms. Adams would be the logical person, but she never seems to be close by when classes pass. Rachel leaves (still wearing her jacket) before you hang up the phone and when you do, the fifth graders have reached a nearly deafening tone. As loud as you can, you yell, “Fifth grade.” All but a half-dozen stop talking. You call these students’ names out individually, at which time they stop talking and one or two begin. You repeat this process two more times before earning total silence and a hoarse voice.
***
At 11:10, cars and boards are scattered across the lab, and cardboard pieces and masking tape are strewn about the floor. Amanda’s sitting by herself in the lab. Kent, Isaiah, Tami, and Julie are each standing in a separate corner, and two others have been sent across the hall to Les, who you lean on, because the students hate going there more than the accommodation room. There’s twenty minutes left in their marathon class. They are quietly working and they, at most, have done fifteen minutes of work. Although the class has twenty-five of the smartest, most well-behaved students that you could ever find in any school – private or public, urban or suburban – they also have nine students with severe emotional/behavioral disorders. Class only began at 10:15 and after that it continued to be interrupted by the students who are no longer in their seats. These well-behaved students, you think, must be robbed of three to four hours of education a day.
As they work, you write down the Analyze Data and Conclusion questions, peaking over your shoulder every other second to make sure everyone remains on task. You finish with ten minutes left in class, and you’d like to begin cleaning up, but you can’t, because you need to prepare for the eighth graders who will be arriving in less than ten minutes. You have a girl that you know will finish the lab report for homework gather the cars, boards, and tape rolls to make sure there are seventeen of each, while you scribble down problems in your notes.
A plane leaves Omaha at 6 p.m. and arrives in LA at 7 p.m. How long was the flight? You write this down and eleven other problems like it, just before it is time to line up. The noise level has risen, so you shout “Fifth grade” and eventually quiet the class down and ask your volunteer if there were seventeen boards, cars, and rolls of tape. She says there were seventeen boards, but only fourteen cars and fifteen rolls of tape. You ask the class to look around and say they’re not going anywhere until the missing items turn up. The eighth graders, however, are outside your room making lots of noise, which means the math teacher is waiting for the fifth graders. Giving in, you tell them to line up and regret making a blank threat, because this is a loss and you feel that every time you lose, you look weaker in the students’ eyes.
***
In the hall, facing the eighth grade, it is apparent that this will not be an easy day. As you suspected, Jason is in class, which means that he received neither an in-school, nor out-of-school suspension. He is quiet and you know he won’t give you trouble today, but you know that others will and part of you thinks that if he had been suspended this might have changed the entire classes tone. The eighth grade is your toughest class to teach. They are the oldest group in the school, with a history of being out-of-control, and you are a first-year teacher, a natural target for their disobedient energies. You needed Jason disciplined severely for treating you the way he did. Now, you feel, any discipline you try to implement will be ridiculed by the students and you will be powerless to back it up.
They were loud coming into the room and now that they’re finally seated, you still can’t begin class. Erasing the board is imperative to delivering your lesson, but it is also essential to not take your eyes off the class. You withstand a wave of noise as you wipe the chalk away, creating a faded, yellow dust film on the board. Turning to face the class, you realize your lesson will be postponed several more minutes. Five students are wearing jackets and at least that many are chewing gum.
“Jackets off, gum in the trash,” you say, looking at a girl who is guilty of both offenses. You don’t really care that she’s wearing a jacket or chewing gum, but it does bother you that you’re being tested. School rules are being broken, and the principal held a meeting last week, in which he berated you, and the other teachers on your floor for doing a poor job of enforcing them. Les said that he thought their responsibilities were great enough, without having to enforce no gum chewing, a rule that the students resist with their greatest, most defiant efforts. The principal’s response: “That’s teaching one-oh-one.” Right now, you’re breaking school rules by not giving each student wearing a jacket or chewing gum detention. However, doing so would be futile. If the students would attend, they would come back tomorrow chewing gum again, and if they didn’t attend, nothing would happen anyway.
Slowly, the girl begins unzipping her jacket and makes her way to the trash can to spit out her gum, staring you down the entire time, as if to say “Fuck you.” You glance at the other side of the room and tell three more students to take their jackets off, and two others to spit out their gum. You look at them until they begin to peel their garments, or slowly walk to the trashcan. In the meantime, the class has gotten loud again – talking, yelling at one another, and laughing at you. You are their toy, the subject of their play and taunts.
“Yesterday,” you say, beginning your lesson amid loud talking. “Owen, up here. Kari, turn around. Yesterday, we talked about how to convert kilometers to miles. Tony, eyes up here. Tiffaney, face front. Owen, stop talking.” You begin writing 10 kilometers on the board. “Can someone tell me how I can convert ten…Tony, stop talking…kilometers…Tony…to miles?” Two hands shoot up and three answers are called out. “One at a time. Gerry, turn around. Yes, Cassie. How do you convert ten kilometers to miles? Tony, last warning,” you say as Cassie begins to say something. Tony erupts in laughter. “You’re gonna have to leave,” you say, looking at Tony.
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Let’s go. Mr. Stoddard’s room,” you say, grabbing a pass that you’ve written in anticipation of an incident such as this, and handing it to him. Your decision to send Tony to Mr. Stoddard’s room was calculated. The students hate going there. Stoddard is respected, and they don’t want to lose his favor. The accommodation room can turn into a playground and they know that if more than two or three students are sent there, then the woman in charge will refuse to take more students and complain to the principal that you can’t manage a classroom. Fully capable of managing forty or more students at once, Mr. Stoddard, graciously, will accept as many students as you send him.
“I didn’t do nothing,” he says, leaning back on his chair – his arms folded, his voice rising.
“Leave or I’m calling security.”
Students laugh, but you ignore their taunts. Tony stands as other students resume laughing and talking. He slowly, defiantly picks up his books and walks slowly and defiantly to the door. “I’ll go to accommodation, but I ain’t going to Mr. Stoddard’s room.”
“Then you’re wondering the halls and I’ll have to call security.”
Tony walks out in the hallway as slowly as possible, and makes his way towards the adjacent room. You’d like to shut the door and continue your lesson, but you fear Tony might turn the corner and ditch the rest of class. It shouldn’t matter what he does. You should be able to hand him a pass and if he doesn’t go where he’s told, then he’ll be punished by the administration. You told the principal your feelings a few months ago and he said that if the student leaves the building and gets hit by a car, then the school is liable. In this meeting you said that if this is the case, then why are we allowed to send students to the bathroom with a pass? His response: “Stop being argumentative.” So, you wait for close to thirty seconds as he walks ten feet and the rest of the class becomes loud. Technically, you’re breaking the law, because you can’t see every student in the class right now. The principal’s suggestion to remedy this problem was to call Les before sending him a student. Then, if the student doesn’t show up within a minute, he calls you back, at which time you call the office to let them know a student is roaming the halls. You refuse to do this. The logistics are too many to pull off effectively. Furthermore, you hate receiving calls while teaching and you won’t allow Tony to disrupt two classes. One would think that sending the student to accommodation would be less time consuming, but it’s more. To do this, you need to fill out a pink slip, which would take several minutes to write, and then you’d receive a call from the woman in charge, confirming that the student had arrived.
Tony eventually makes his way into the room and you return to a noisy class. “Alright,” you say, loudly, cutting the noise in half. “Sorry, Cassie. Laura, be quiet. Owen keep it down. Gerry, sit up and face front. Cassie, could you tell us how to convert ten kilometers into miles?” She begins answering. “Gerry, Cassie’s talking. Sorry, Cassie…go ahead.” Cassie correctly answers that you multiply kilometers by six tenths to get six miles. Three minutes to get a simple answer and more energy than one of your middle school teachers had to expend in a class period.
The class begins to get noisy again, and you’d like to give them a textbook assignment. Your voice is becoming more hoarse, and by doing so you wouldn’t have to struggle so much to get through a lesson. They work well this way – you’ve seen them do so in other classes and even this class when the assignment is straightforward and involves independent work with direct instruction. But you pan across the room and see eight or nine students that are trying to concentrate, to learn amidst the chaos of their classroom environment. They’ve shared a classroom with these students since they were in kindergarten and, you feel, they’ve missed too much education, because teachers simply gave up on educating a class this rambunctious.
You take a deep breath and continue. “If you turn – Owen - to page four-twenty-four – Kevin - and look at the map, you’ll see – Gerry – Laura - that the continental United States is separated into – Owen - it is separated into four time zones. Does anyone know what time zone we live in? Kevin, stop talking - Gerry, turn around - Laura, eyes up here. Yes, Cheryl. What time zone do we live in? Correct – Owen - we live in the Eastern Time zone. Do you want to join Tony, Owen?…Then sit there and shut your mouth. If it’s four o’clock in Philadelphia, what time is it in Los Angeles? Don’t call out. Hand raised. Cassie…Right. Nine o’clock.”
After going over several more example problems, you begin writing problems on the board. You withstand the noise, stopping only occasionally, telling the class that they’ve become too loud, as you write fifteen problems on the board. You finish at twelve o’clock and by this time the class has become somewhat pacified. You know that at least a half-dozen students deserve detention, but you choose not to give any. They won’t mind serving it, and nothing will change anyway. You sat through countless meetings with the principal and these same students for the first five months of the year. Each time, he’d explain that if their behavior didn’t change, they would be suspended and eventually expelled. But this never happened, so you decided recently that attempting to discipline them only wasted what little free time you had, because although the principal verbally supports you, his actions are saying, “You’re stuck with these kids for the rest of the year. Do the best you can.”
You grab a push broom and start sweeping up the mess that the fifth graders made. Occasionally, the talking grows too loud, at which time you quiet them down, which works for a minute or two before growing loud again. You hate yourself for settling for mediocrity, but there’s still three hours left in the day, three classes to teach, you’re voice is weakening, and you can feel a head ache in its incipient stages of development.
***
Classes pass and the seventh graders are back in the room, grabbing their coats and lunches, and lining up. They’re wound up. It’s been a long morning for them as well, and they’re eager to get to the lunchroom. You tell them twice that we’ll leave when it’s quiet, but there is still talking. You grab your lunch bag and sit down, exhausted. It’s 12:15. The other teachers have already walked their classes downstairs, some in a frenzied state. You take out your sandwich and begin eating, not to send the students a subtle message, but because you can’t afford to waste this time, or more of your energy. The class gets quiet as you shove the last of the sandwich in your mouth at 12:18.
***
Returning to your room, you grab a bucket and sponge and begin wiping off the chalkboard for the afternoon. The walk to the lunchroom went smoothly, probably because Rachel was in accommodation for a run-in during Reading class. You grab an apple to eat as you wash the boards and when you’re done you finish sweeping the mess that the fifth graders made. You find two rolls of tape by the windowsill, a car beneath a table, and another car hidden behind some books. You’re still missing one car, and this bothers you for several reasons. You used your own money to buy the car, and even though it only cost fifty-nine cents at Wal-Mart, you still feel robbed. It bothers you more, though, that you used your own time to purchase the materials. Every Saturday and Sunday you spend several hours shopping for Science supplies. You’re happy to do this, except when something like this happens. But what bothers you the most is the blatant disrespect you’re receiving. You asked the class to return the cars and by one not being accounted for you know that some student is fighting back at you in one of the only ways they can. You try to remind yourself that the students you’re teaching come from the toughest of neighborhoods, with the worst of home lives.
It’s 12:35 when the tape and car is put away, and you hurry to the closet to get the sixty pounds of sand that you carried to work that morning. You grab a bucket and carefully fill it with sand, and place it on a small table in the lab. You open a cabinet, grab a box of coffee filters and stack of Styrofoam cups, and put them next to the bucket. When you’re done, you fill another empty bucket with potting soil. Almost done. After grabbing a third bucket, you walk briskly down the hall to the janitor’s closet. You’re lucky that the door is open, because normally it’s not and you would have to track down the building engineer for a key. You fill the bucket with water and, being careful not to spill any, walk it back down the hall to your room.
Any other middle school teacher in the city would not have to set up the lab during their lunch. They would have preparation time. They would also only have one curriculum to teach, which they would instruct to three or four classes. This means that by teaching four different grades of science you plan four times as many lessons as someone with the same job description somewhere else in the city. This doesn’t even include English and Writing, which are filler classes, because your middle school is part of a K-8 elementary school. Contractually, as an elementary school teacher, you’re only entitled six preps a week – one per day and two one of the days. In district wide meetings, you’ve discussed this roster with other middle school teachers. Their responses are mostly the same – head shakes and smirks, as though you’re naïve for accepting this job.
Les told you that Mr. Fromm developed this rigorous roster because of pressure from cluster leaders, his superiors that in a bureaucracy as large as the School District of Philadelphia serve as a type of superintendent for several dozen schools. The other teachers (all veteran’s of the Philadelphia public school system) in your team grudgingly accepted the roster, anticipating the potential problems of facing one hundred and twenty students a day. As hard as this is, Mr. Goldman and Ms. Smith who teach Reading and Social Studies, respectively, benefit from teaching universal curriculums to grades five through eight, varying difficulty levels slightly in accordance with the grade level. Les, the math teacher, and you don’t have this luxury. In math and science there are separate textbooks for each grade and benchmarks that need to be met. You feel a little more cheated than Les, because at least he benefits from not having to gather, set up, and clean up labs every day, not to mention coordinating a science fair. The inevitable affects of this roster are inferior instruction, loosened discipline, and you working through your preps and lunches, as well as extensive hours before and after school.
The chalkboard has dried and you begin writing: