I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had (10 page)

We’re looking for a happy ending here, but this is reality. Because of his obvious anger, I ask Matt if he would be willing to talk to a counselor, and he surprises me. “Yeah,” he says, not even shrugging it off.

I call his father and ask him what he thinks. He agrees that he and Matt’s mother will come in for a meeting with the head of the department, the counselor, and me. At the meeting it’s decided that Matt will start seeing the counselor on a regular basis. All’s well until the meeting adjourns.

The bell has just rung, and the corridor’s packed with students changing classes. As Matt’s parents leave the office and try to thread their way to the exit, they get stuck behind a group of black girls doing what this particular group usually does: talking trash and horsing around. The language is crude, a strong brew of F-bombs and racial epithets.

Matt’s father gives the girls a chance, but when they don’t clean up their act, he confronts them. He points out that he’s walking here with his wife, and that they are in school. He asks them to watch their language. The girls take offense. They jeer, afraid of nobody. They insult Matt’s parents to their faces, and in no time flat the confrontation escalates into a screaming match.

Afterward, Matt’s father calls me to defend his son. “Now I can see that everything Matt said about Northeast and the students there is true. I see what he’s complaining about. I think he’s right.”

This is just what a kid like Matt does not need to hear. “Whatever you do,” I tell his dad, “don’t tell him he’s right about this.” I try to explain the nature of the girls he had the run-in with. “This is cultural. This is how they communicate. It’s what they see at home and in the media. They’re just kids.”

This is enough to calm him down for the moment. He agrees to let Matt finish the year. “But next year he’s going to a Catholic school.”

I’m reluctant to admit it, but the discipline of parochial school may be what Matt does need.

One weekend I take the train up to New York to visit my friend Bobby Governale. We’ve known each other since college, when we both planned to be teachers. He went on to fulfill that dream and taught music for thirty-three years. If anybody can set me straight about what I’m doing this year, it’s my friend Bobby.

We meet at his neighborhood bar in Long Island. Bobby wears a pressed yellow button-down shirt, gray flannels, and polished loafers. When we hug I smell Aramis. Retirement seems to be agreeing with him, but I still think it’s a shame. He retired at fifty-five, at the height of his teaching prowess, because the school system began to shrink his retirement benefits. The longer he stayed, the less he would get. Another paradox of education in America. They want the experienced teachers to retire and make room for new teachers they can pay less. Talk about your penny-wise.

We settle down, and I tell Bobby about my classroom sweats, my sleepless nights, and failing Matt. I feel like I’m in confession.

Bobby listens, nodding. “What are you afraid of, Tony?”

It seems so obvious to me. “There are days when I don’t have the foggiest idea how to connect with them. How do I get them excited about learning? About what I’m trying to teach them?”

He taps the tips of his fingers together. “What else?”

He knows me too well. I say, “Okay. I keep thinking they’ll see through me. I know they will. You can’t lie to them. They’ll see me as the fraud that I am.”

He laughs. “Knowing you all these years, I knew you’d be a good teacher.”

“Hey, Bobby, did you even hear what I just said?”

“Sure, I heard. You remember way back in the beginning, when you were making
Taxi
, you came out to visit my class at Oregon Avenue School?”

“Do I ever. You rocked.” Bobby at the time was teaching sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. He was also some dancer, and that day he was combining his talents to teach his kids to disco-dance. Disco was the rage back then, so we were all doing the hustle, and Mr. G. was demonstrating some of the more athletic moves that had made him famous in the clubs. He had the kids twirling and leaping into each other’s arms, and as they did he would yell, “Smile!” The kids were having a ball, but that wasn’t all. Bobby somehow turned the whole thing into a lesson about music theory and dancing as human interplay or something. He made disco dancing the key to the day’s curriculum. That class confirmed for me that Bobby Governale was my hero.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” he says. “I was flying by the seat of my pants. I often felt as if I was faking it. And those kids could really get to me. You caught us on a good day, but there were two boys that year that I wanted to strangle. In fact, they made me so angry I nearly quit. I thought, I just can’t deal with them, and they make it impossible to teach the others, so why not just throw in the towel?”

He did? My hero? “How did you get past it?”

“Stuck with it. The first year or two, not really knowing the curriculum, is tough for every new teacher. You just keep trying. If you’re motivated, you do. The kids eventually see your passion, and that’s what makes them buy in.”

Eventually
. But that suggests time, and time is one thing teachers today don’t have. I flash back to my first week at school, before classes began, when Ms. Carroll called all the teachers down to the
auditorium and lectured us about Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. “There’s always the threat of a complete takeover by the district if a school doesn’t perform,” she warned us. “In a takeover, many teachers and staff are likely to be fired.” What she meant was that, as a result of No Child Left Behind, schools that fail to raise their test scores adequately each year can be targeted to become Renaissance Schools, a euphemism for reformed schools. This is every school administrator’s worst nightmare because it means that the district will inject the troubled school with “new leadership” in the form of hired educational management consultants, teams of district advisers, or charter school management services. “Out with the old insiders, and in with the new outsiders” is how one disgruntled teacher described it to me. I realized that day that teaching is anything but a secure job. And with the constant pressure to make AYP, time is on no teacher’s side.

“How long do you think it takes,” I ask Bobby, “to really get good at teaching?”

He stops for a moment, like he wants his words to be just right, and then he says, “It’s when they get it. It takes some time for sure, but you can tell the ones who’ll be great teachers. They’re the ones with the passion. The ones who try things and watch other teachers, and network with teachers even outside their subject areas.” He’s going now. “You’ve got to be motivated to be a motivator. You’ve got to be able to excite the kids with a story or an action and then get them to bite on what you want them to learn.” He does that thing with his face that he always does when he’s remembering. “My classroom was a safe zone. Nothing but a place to learn and have fun with music, but if I saw a kid with an issue, I told him or her: see me, let’s talk. The kids are going to love that about you because they’ll know they can talk to you.”

“How do you know if you’re motivated enough?”

Bobby assures me I’m motivated and a motivator. It will be the same in my classroom as in his. He’s so positive. It’s one of the reasons I love and respect my friend. Still, my eyes start to fill up so that I have to look away. I hope he’s right, but me, I still have serious doubts.

Five
 

H
OW BEST TO REACH
your students? That is the question.

I figure I’m off to a smart start when I assign
Of Mice and Men
. It’s a thin little book, which will make the class think it’s easy. When I hand out their copies, they immediately flip to the end. “It’s only got 112 pages. Chill!”

I just smile. This is Steinbeck, and as they quickly discover, it’s not the easiest read. There are heavy metaphors on every page. The biblical tone of the prose also puts them off, but I frame the book as a story about two friends, which appeals to them. Once we’re a few chapters in, we screen the classic 1939 movie version of the novel, with Lon Chaney and Burgess Meredith. We talk about what might be wrong with Lennie and why George is so attached to the big, dumb lug. We look at how Steinbeck set up their friendship, their characters, the setting and mood. The kids start to get into it.

After every few chapters there’s a quiz. One part of the quiz, courtesy of Ms. Dixon, asks them to compose “gists” of what they’ve read. A gist is a twenty-word explanation or summation. As you read more chapters, your gist tells more of the story, but it has to stay at
twenty words. The last gist tells the whole story. I love to watch the kids trying to tell the story and counting words on their fingers. Gists also make it easy to tell who is reading and who is not.

I feel like we’re sailing along when, midway through the unit, Howard comes to me after class to complain. Howard is the biggest kid in the class and plays on the football, soccer, and baseball teams. He also has no father in his life. He likes to goof around, but at my desk he seems earnest when he tells me, “I don’t get this story. Doesn’t matter how hard I try, nothing sticks.”

I really care about this kid, so I spring into teacher mode. “Here, Howard, let me show you.” I open the book and demonstrate how to underline important passages and make notes in the margin as he reads. I assure him it’s okay to go back and reread sections that he forgets or that don’t make sense the first time. “I do it all the time myself.”

He says, “I read the same page over and over. I just can’t remember it. I’m not good at it.”

I have an idea. “It’s just practice, like anything else. How much do you practice soccer?”

He answers, “A lot.”

“How much you practice reading?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m telling you, this is the only difference.”

“But I just don’t enjoy it—at all.”

“Practice reading, and you’ll get better at it. Eventually you’ll enjoy doing it, just like you enjoy soccer. You didn’t enjoy soccer when you first started, right?”

He won’t go there. Soccer, he insists, was fun for him from the very first kick, even when he was bad at it. We throw that back and forth a little. Then I say, “Yeah, but you like it more now that you’re really good at it, right?” He shrugs. “It’s like the ukulele,” I say.

“Hunh?” Howard’s eyebrows shoot up to his buzz cut. “Ukah-what?”

“I’ve been using thought-for-the-day calendars for years,” I tell him. “Every morning, the calendar gives me an idea or piece of advice. Well, on April 24, 2006, the thought for the day was ‘Get a ukulele and a chord book, practice thirty minutes a day for thirty days, and you’ll entertain your family, friends, and yourself for the rest of your life.’ I was like you. I barely knew what a uke was back then, but I kind of liked the idea, so I got myself a ukulele and a chord book and started practicing. It wasn’t much fun until I got better at it, but now I’ve been playing for almost five years, and that uke is like my third arm. I love it.”

Howard clearly thinks I’m insane, but I persist. “I want you to apply that same advice to your reading. Try it. Read for thirty minutes every day—anything you enjoy—practice and you’ll get good at it, I promise.” He squinches up his face and goes out shaking his head.

I track down David Cohn and tell him about my little conference with Howard. I’m seeking guidance and, as always, sympathy. David frowns and says, “Let me show you something.”

He pulls a printout from his desk. “This is a list of kids in the school who’ve been identified as gifted.” He points. There, near the top of the list, is Howard’s name.

David’s expression puts me on the hot seat. There are only two possibilities here. Is this reading issue something serious that’s been going on with Howard for a long time, something that I really do have to figure out? Or am I getting played? I try not to judge people as I judge myself, but if I do, I think this kid is playing me.

Nevertheless, Howard has made me realize that I need to find more ways to make my students
want
to read. The so-called literacy initiative that threads throughout our curriculum does not help. In
addition to teaching our main literary units, every few weeks I’m required to give my students directed reading assignments from preselected articles and short stories, followed by assigned tests on these readings. We also sample data from informational texts and textbooks, with tests that direct the students to retrieve pertinent facts. The goals of the literacy initiative are to help students better interpret what they read, and to give them practice in different types of reading. But these scripted exercises consume entire periods, interrupting our focus on the core curriculum, and let’s just say the students don’t love the material. Obviously, kids—like all of us—will learn to read better and faster when reading material that interests them. The students in my class who have the most difficulty reading are not illiterate but aliterate. Like Howard, they can read, but don’t.