I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had (14 page)

Meanwhile, the school administration approves our Washington trip for November 16, and I hand out permission slips to be signed by every student’s parents. The class is jazzed, but as the trip gets closer, I start sweating. Among many Northeast students the rule seems to be, Rules are made to be broken. And for all the manuals, books, policies, and programs that have been written and announced about school discipline—despite the presence of a Philadelphia police station on campus!—only students who get into physical fights face serious consequences. Behavior codes are clearly posted, and teachers remind students of them every day. Everyone knows the policies on uniforms, hoodies, iPods, running, shouting, and the rest, but no one is consistently and actively enforcing these policies. Even in my own classroom, I have no real framework for disciplining my kids. If they wear hoodies or have their earbuds in, the teacher is supposed to make them take them off, but if the students don’t listen, the teacher is stuck. The only recourse is to make a thing out of it, involve the dean’s office, and probably lose precious class time, and not many teachers are willing to trade their all-important “momentum” for discipline. The kids know this, and some push as far as they can. If they’re like this in class, I don’t want to think what the bus will be like.

As if to drive the point home, the day before our trip I get an alert from Assistant Principal McCloskey during fifth period that Pepper, my dog biscuit kid, was just assaulted in the hallway. Downstairs, sitting in the school police station, Pepper looks pitiful. His eye is bruised and swollen and his cheek discolored.

“I was standing in the hallway, just talking to a friend, when this kid came by and punched me in the face,” he explains. He’s close to tears.

Having absorbed my share of punches, I can see that Pepper’s taken quite a shot. He’s not a bad kid. He can be a slacker and sometimes
an instigator, but he’s never mean. And he’s small, so I immediately identify and sympathize with him. “Did you see who did it?” I ask. “Do you know why he hit you?”

“I don’t know why. It almost knocked me down. I looked up and saw him running away, but I’m not sure who it was.”

We sit together for a few minutes, just waiting. The station, adjacent to the cafeteria and the teachers’ lounge, is not much of a police facility. There are three or four desks and computers, benches for offending students, a holding room for extreme cases, and a viewing station linked to all the surveillance cameras around the school. Right now there are three guards—two men and a woman—present, two boys being processed at the desks, and another in the holding cell. The phones ring every couple of minutes.

“Is it always this busy?” I ask the female guard, who appears to be the toughest of the three officers.

“This is nothing. You should’ve been here half an hour ago.” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder at one of the kids at the desk. I know him, so I ask him why he’s here.

“I got in a fight with him,” he answers, pointing to the holding cell, where another boy is pacing and yelling. Fighting still has some kind of magnetic draw for me, and I’m on the verge of involving myself in this case, too, when Officer Anderson calls Pepper and me over to view some of the surveillance tapes from the time and area of his incident.

Anderson is a big man, a veteran school guard, and his tone with Pepper is both optimistic and comforting. “Let’s see if we can find your guy.”

We face the bank of video monitors. “Do you have cameras covering the whole school?” I ask.

“Just about. Definitely where your student was assaulted.” Officer Anderson runs some tape back and forth, switching from hallway to
hallway. He zeroes in on the location, searches the time code for the reported time of the incident.

Suddenly, we’re there. The hallway fills with bodies during the period change, and there’s Pepper. Just standing, talking. Although we can’t see the actual punch, there’s no evidence that he’s doing anything to invite trouble. Then, a second later, he recoils, and there’s the student running away—down the hallway, into the stairwell. And, on the next monitor, up the stairs he comes, facing right into another camera.

Officer Anderson knows him. “Mr. Danza, there’s over three thousand kids in this school and about two hundred knuckleheads, and this is one of ’em. I’ll pull his schedule.”

Pepper and I go back to the bench outside. I tell him it’s good that we know who hit him, but Pepper still looks miserable. Officer Anderson comes back with a photograph and a schedule. “I was right, a real knucklehead.”

When I look at the picture, I mutter under my breath. So that’s the jerk who punched my kid. I feel like a protective father, and I want to give this bully a beating he’ll remember.

Officer Anderson calls on his walkie-talkie for Officer Morton, who appears almost immediately. “Bill, go up to 238 and get Elvis Jones and bring him down here. He assaulted another student.” Officer Anderson hands Morton the paperwork and returns to his desk. “Never a dull moment.”

Officer Morton sends Pepper back to class but asks me to accompany him to get Elvis. It’s not the best idea I’ve heard. My emotions are running high. I remember what it felt like to be small and picked on, what it took in my day to make bullies back down. You can’t fight fighting with fighting now. I know that. But this Elvis creep messed with one of my kids, and my blood is boiling.

When we get to room 238, Officer Morton knocks on the door. Mr. Florio, the basketball coach, is teaching his English class. Morton
explains the situation, and Mr. Florio calls Elvis out of the class. I wait in the hallway, and when Elvis emerges I’m stunned at his size. He easily has fifty pounds and more than a foot of height over Pepper. As we start down the corridor, Officer Morton says nothing, but I can’t hold back. “Why’d you hit that little kid?”

Elvis acts as if he hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about. “I didn’t hit nobody, and I don’t have to talk to you, you ain’t my teacher.”

“Why’d you run? Is that what you do, punch kids half your size, then run away?” He doesn’t answer, which just steams me more. “You afraid to pick on somebody your own size?”

He turns then. “You’re my size.”

“Why, you want to try me?” I say.

He looks at Officer Morton, who’s facing straight ahead, saying nothing but walking in lockstep beside him. Elvis turns back to me. “You’re only talking like that because you know I can’t do nothing.”

The steam keeps building. The days of kids backing down just because you’re a teacher are clearly over. Elvis wants to fight me, and the feeling is so mutual that it’s all I can do to haul myself back from the brink. Fortunately, Officer Morton has a cooler head, and he wears the uniform of authority. As we get to the stairwell, he says, “I’ll take it from here, Mr. Danza.”

I stop. The stairwell door shuts in my face. Through the glass I see the kid throw a final glare at me over his shoulder. That was close. Almost too close. He still might try to retaliate against me, either personally or through his friends. It’s the code: if pushed, you have to push back. As Coolio says in “Gangsta’s Paradise,” “Me be treated like a punk, you know that’s unheard of.”

Elvis’s code may be my old code, but it’s wrong. I’m going to have to watch myself.

“You can’t let them see that they get to you,” David Cohn advises when I tell him about my near altercation.

“How do I do that? Don’t smile before Christmas?”

“Show them you’re in charge by acting like their leader. Watch them and listen, and learn from what you see and hear. Show them how you expect them to behave. And don’t ever let them pull you down into the fray.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Sometimes,” he admits. “Have the courage to be calm.”

“Hah!” I hold my head in mock agony. “I’m the wrong casting for that! I do like that, though, ‘the courage to be calm.’ I only wish I had it.”

“Give it a try on the trip to D.C. I’ll be there to back you up.”

“Well, at least Elvis won’t be.”

C
ALM IS NOT
in the cards. At six o’clock on the morning of November 16, I’m pacing on the corner outside school. It’s freezing cold. The chartered bus is late. We’re supposed to be on the road by six-thirty, and I’m the only one here. The other chaperones show up over the next fifteen minutes. They include Al G’s math teacher, Ms. Green; David Cohn; and Kelly Barton, Northeast’s past principal, retired now, who serves as our production’s liaison to the school district. Kelly’s a big easygoing guy who’s done more than a few field trips in his day. He tells me to stop worrying.

Fat chance. I’m taking this crew well out of my comfort zone, and I’m scared. “Our production team’s not even here,” I wail. But then they are. And my twenty-six students all magically appear right about when the bus does, at 6:28. Kelly’s right; I need to get a grip.

Because we’re shooting every minute of this excursion, it’s not as typical a field trip as I’d like. But in a few ways it’s better. The show has provided lunch for everyone on the bus, and the box lunches are quality, with a variety of sandwiches on what is the most important part, a great roll. Well-fed kids tend to be happier kids, and the same
goes for teachers. Also, because activity looks better on camera than kids sleeping or staring out the window, I’ve planned some group fun. The road spotter game using an iPhone app morphs into an energetic competition between the kids and the teachers. And I’ve brought my trusty ukulele so we can have a sing-along—special for Howard. I mess with them a little, playing old songs the kids don’t know, then surprise them with Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” I learned it from a video on the Internet especially for the trip, and it’s a hit. Even Fred the bus driver sings a few choruses. By the time we get to the capital, the sun is gleaming, and we’re all pretty chill. Even me.

When the kids point out the windows, recognizing buildings they’ve seen only in books, their oohs and aahs thrill me. Then Fred gets on the loudspeaker and starts playing tour guide. He charms the kids and really knows Washington, D.C. We don’t have time to stop everywhere, but he drives us as close as possible to the White House and the Washington Monument. I tell Nakiya, who’s sitting next to me, about the time I came to Washington with my Boy Scout troop when I was thirteen and won our race to the top of the monument. “Back then, people were allowed to climb the stairs to the top. It was different then,” I’m sorry to say. “I remember the hit song playing on the radio that day was ‘Can’t Get Used to Losing You’ by Andy Williams.”

“The things you remember, Mr. Danza,” Nakiya says, tuning up her dazzling grin. I couldn’t agree more.

The Folger Shakespeare Library turns out to be close to the Capitol, which makes it seem as if every inch of D.C. has historical significance. I’m pleased that the kids get this and that they’re uncharacteristically polite to the curator who greets us and escorts us into the library’s Great Hall, where vintage texts and illustrations of Shakespearean works are displayed.

“Look, Mr. Danza,” Katerina calls out. “Julius Caesar
is dying
!”
The other kids crowd around the exhibit, showing the kind of enthusiasm they normally reserve for a new Jay-Z single.

“I wonder why they wore bedsheets in Rome.”

“They called ‘togas,’ schmo.”

“Isn’t Rome in Italy?” Nakiya’s voice climbs over the others. “Mr. Danza, why didn’t Shakespeare write
Julius Caesar
in Latin? I’d rather read
Julius Caesar
in Mr. Smith’s class than those stupid grammar lessons.”

Many of the kids, including Nakiya, have a running battle with their Latin teacher, but I’m not going there. “Okay, gang,” I call, trying to subdue my surprise and ecstasy at their
engagement
. “It’s showtime!”

We file into the Elizabethan replica theater, where an acting troupe called Bill’s Buddies begin to act out scenes from several of Shakespeare’s plays and then invite the kids up onstage to become part of the performance. Nakiya, Chloe, and Eric Lopez are all natural hams, but even Monte and Eric Choi get into the act. Onstage and not afraid to make fools of themselves, they’re laughing so hard I’m not sure they realize they’re learning. The kids’ knowledge of
Julius Caesar
when quizzed by the acting troupe gives me a whole new sense of my students’ involvement. The educators at the Folger who put together this program are no slouches, and even by their standards, the kids know the play. My students make me look good.

After the Folger Library we move on to the National Archives for more interactive exercises, this time focusing on the Constitution. The students take on the role of archivists, selecting and analyzing primary sources—ordinary diaries, letters, and memoirs—for historic examples of constitutional issues, such as separation of church and state, and checks and balances. Then they find where in the Constitution these concepts are supported. The idea is to demonstrate what the Constitution means in people’s real, everyday lives. Even
my most unmotivated students are working, which illustrates how, when learning is fun and collaborative, kids do respond.

As they divide into teams, each researching a different set of records, the kids look so good in their uniforms, like authentic archivists pulling documents and poring over them. White Nick and Ben-Kyle take charge of making a video of the class at work, with Nakiya narrating. This is recorded on a DVD for us to take back to school with us.

By the time we get to the Lincoln Memorial, everybody’s so steeped in the aura of history that the kids act downright reverent as they gaze up at the huge stone likeness of Abraham Lincoln. We take some group pictures with the Washington Monument in the background, which I will copy and frame for each kid, and they let off a little steam chasing geese around the Reflecting Pool. All in all, it seems to me, this day is as good as they come—a day I hope these kids will remember the way I remember my day here as a young Boy Scout.

On the way home, Russian Playboy cements his image as the class ladies’ man. In the back of the bus, I catch him making out with his girlfriend, so I move him. By the time we reach Philly, he’s kissing the girl next to him in his new seat. This Russian boy just can’t keep his hands off American girls, but I don’t dare laugh. To the kids it’s a big scandal. Teen breakup in the making. “You wanted drama,” I tell our director.