Reaching for the Sky

This morning, the construction crew raised the crane that will help build our new school. Dark clouds enshrouded for awhile but soon the sun burned through and the yellow steel glinted against a blue sky. I remember, in the spring of 2005, how insulted our students felt that our classrooms would be demolished to make room for a parking lot. Soon I’ll be able to look out from my new classroom and see that parking lot and remember when we fought for those crappy old bungalows. I’ll also remember my first days at Middle College. The Friday before my first day, I was invited to the faculty meeting.

When I arrived, teachers were filing into Principal Battersbee’s office for a meeting, walking up the concrete steps the led directly into her third of a dilapidated gray bulgalow. Inside, a thin layer of carpet lay over the plywood floor. Old metal chairs were arranged in a semi-circle. Battersbee introduced me to the rest of the staff as the bright new instructor who was going to finally bring some fresh teaching to our school. Afterwards, no one would speak to me.

I got a key to what would be my classroom. It was a disaster in there. Junk was piled high in the corners, including a shattered old console TV. Graffiti scrawled across one wall. It said, “SHOOT TO KILL.” The word “Gumby” was carved into several desks. At first I didn’t notice the substitute teacher I was replacing, a short bald guy with an angry face. He sat on an uneven table and seemed to blend in against the dirty white wall. He ate a burrito and waited for 3 p.m. so that he could collect the full day’s sub pay. He glared at me with puffy eyes and flicked bits of rice off his bushy mustache, then he got up and chucked a ball of foil through the open doorway and followed me around the room as I tried to get oriented. He told me that he’d been there two weeks and was glad to be leaving.

“These kids are nasty,” he said. “They don’t want to learn.” He said they accused him of racism, then showed me a snapshot of his wedding to a black woman. He said that the teacher before him had been driven from the class by “bad kids.”

I rearranged some frayed paperback books on a dented metal bookshelf. Stenciled on the top in dingy white spray paint was “South Gate HS.” Some of the books had that same insignia stamped on them. Others wore the insignia of Jordan HS, Hope High School, Rollin 60s, East Coast Crips, Main Street Bloods.

Kevin Kennedy came up the crumbling steps and introduced himself to me. He was a stocky man, a cannonball with waves of gray hair and a Santa Claus beard. He’d been a teacher since the early 1970s, started out at Jordan HS in Watts, then Polytechnic in the east San Fernando Valley where he’d been head football coach. Battersbee had referred to him as the assistant principal, though I later found out the title was fake. He was a teacher. Battersbee was exploiting his career ambitions in order to make him do some of her administrative work. He wanted me to know about the school, that things weren’t exactly the way that Battersbee portrayed them. He tried to be polite about it but I could tell he thought she was full of shit and that I was a fool. He said that giving students the freedom to come and go as they pleased had not—at least not yet—compelled those kids to attend class regularly or take academics seioursly. The sub I was replacing—I think his name was Ron—agreed with Kennedy. He said, bitterly, that these kids were out of control and that if you tried to do anything about it they would call you a racist and the principal would back them up.

Kennedy ignored the guy but I didn’t let it go. I said that it was natural for minority children to play the race card, to test your response. I had learned that much as a student teacher. There were effective ways to trump the race card—if, of course, you really weren’t a racist. That shut the guy up. Kennedy said that these kids mostly led lives of chaos and desperation and came to school in search of stability, structure, and discipline.

“What about inspiration?” I asked.

The sub sneered in the background. Kennedy pulled on his beard and gave me the once-over, as if he’d just noticed I was there.

“Yeah, that sure as fucking hell wouldn’t hurt them.”

Then Kennedy said good luck and left me there.

I took home a wad of unmarked student papers I’d found buried amidst a pile of gummed-up old newspapers and McDonalds wrappers and hoped they would inform me about the students I would face on Monday morning, but without knowing the kids their papers just confused me. Still, I assigned point values to each of them. On Monday morning I told everyone that we would be starting fresh. Those who had been slacking would get a second chance. Those who had turned in work would get extra credit. I was generous with points. What the hell. Then I made a big deal about how this would be their only second chance, and hoped I had the fortitude to back that up. I told my students that I thought it was a terrible thing that the school hadn’t provided them with a reliable English teacher.

“We ran them punks out the classroom,” said a boy named Thomas, a tattooed banger with a lazy eye.

I feigned surprise, told them they all seemed too nice to do such a thing.

That got a laugh, and Thomas’s sidekick, Ernest, said that maybe the same thing would happen to me.

“Well, first,” I said, “I have an assignment for you.”

I asked them to describe my predecessors in this class and what they had been doing. A girl named Maria asked if they could cuss and I made a speech about how profanity was a cop out, a symptom of intellectual atrophy.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

I wasn’t sure where this was going but soon they were all writing. Suddenly I was aching with ideas. Tyranny and liberation through language would be our theme. We would read 1984 and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings—though God knows how I would get enough copies. I got a little too excited and tried to tell students of my plans.

“You’re a new teacher, aren’t you?” Maria said, and though I tried to deny it they knew, and then they seemed to forget I was in the room. They were polite about it. No blatant disrespect. They stayed in their seats. But I wasn’t their teacher. They couldn’t trust that I was going to stick around and I couldn’t swear I’d be able to.

It was a strange day—strange and frightening, terrible and revelatory. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing but neither, it seemed, did most of the other teachers. That was invigorating. Try anything. Nothing to lose.

My first class had 32 students. My second class had five. Ten minutes later 25 students were added. Each had a fat stack of assignment sheets called a “contract,” the completion of which would compensate for a class flunked in the 9th grade. Pre-algebra, English, earth science. I was supposed to help them when they needed it and teach my English class at the same time. My next class had 47. Some had to sit on top of someone else’s desk. The class after that had 40. I understood why I was the third teacher this semester. I was surviving, but just barely. At one point, during that fourth class (they called it “4th mod”), I couldn’t get more than half the class quiet at once and a boy named Jerome stood up and approached me. His teeth glinted from the center of his dark face. He wore a huge winter coat with blue Dickeys and matching Chucks (Chuck Taylors, canvas Converse All-Stars, gang shoes). He leaned up to me and whispered:
“I don’t like the way these niggas is disrespecting you. You need to get strapped,” he said, meaning I ought to carry a gun. “I could shut these m’fuckas up with mine.”
I told him no thank you. I thought he might be joking but I didn’t want to know so I didn’t ask. I knew I should have, but I didn’t want to get this kid in trouble. He was the only one so far who had really been nice to me.

I didn’t think I could make it through another overcrowded class so I checked the rosters of my remaining classes. Each listed only one student.

But not for long.

During lunch, Kennedy asked me if I knew anything about basketball. He said that Mr. Butcher, a math teacher, was trying to organize a basketball team and needed some help. After lunch, we “practiced” on a weed-cracked cement court behind the “bone yard” where broken mangled equipment and furniture got piled up. Two backboards faced each other on either side of a jaggedly painted sidelines. The basketball hoops had been stolen and vandalized so many times that we had to hang them up for practice and then take them down afterwards. Only a few guys really knew how to play the game. The rest just slammed each other around and woofed and hollered.

Battersbee found me out there and asked how my classes were going. She reminded me that I was supposed to employ those innovative teaching methods we’d spoken about. This seemed to be a threat. I was working without a contract and could be replaced with a few words and a phone call downtown.

“I want you to do some team teaching,” she said. “We’ve got this really exciting class. It combines English and social studies and foreign language and even some science…. What’s that called archeology or anthropology? The study of bones and culture. It’s called Cultural Heritage class and it’s really going to be great.”

Her voice was as smooth as her polished fingernails. (It turned out that Battersbee herself was supposed to team teach this class but was having second thoughts). She gave me a room number and said, “You’ll be teaching with our foreign language teacher, Ms. Hariton. She’s one of our really dedicated teachers. She’s doing some very special things – especially with some of our Latino students.” She pronounced “Latino” with a Spanish accent.

The basketball hoops took a while to unhinge, so I ended up late to my team teaching assignment. I was filthy and sunburnt, thirsty and out of breath from running there. The door of the bungalow was open and it was dark inside. Coming in from the bright sun I could not, at first, see anything. The collective voices, loud and boisterous and combative surrounded me like a party of ghosts. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw kids sitting in clusters, talking, dealing cards and slamming dominoes, arguing and giggling and smooching. I was nearly hit by a shopping cart with two students hanging from it. Then a pair of rolling office chairs in what seemed to be a demolition derby. There must have been over forty kids in the darkness and I saw no sign of a teacher anywhere.

At the far end of the room was a small television showing something videotaped off PBS: wavy lines, and twisted images of desert landscapes. Loud distortion blurted out in sour spurts. It was as if the teacher – if there really was a teacher in this room – had, rather than try to quiet students, tried to maintain their attention by turning up the volume knob.

There actually was a teacher in the room. A squat woman with narrow shoulders and a big face and huge hair hunched over a small desk in a corner of the room.. A tiny girl sat next to her weeping. The teacher, Ms. Hariton, held the girls hand and tried to console her.

“Maybe you can get them to pay attention,” she said, seeing me. “I’m trying to help Rosa. Her boyfriend was killed by the Florence gang last night. He’s a member of South Los and they’re at war.” She seemed very proud to know all this. “Isn’t that terrible?”

I made eye contact with the poor girl to let her know I sympathized, and tried to imagine what I might do to get everyone to pay attention to those strangled images and strange noises springing from the television – and why anyone would want to pay attention to it. What I really wanted to do was get the hell out of that cave of madness. I thought I’d get fired if I didn’t stay there and “team teach,” whatever that meant, but I was at a complete loss and so instead, I proposed to
Ms. Hariton that we split up the class.

“Oh,” she said and I thought I heard her sneering a little and muttering something about “Mr. Innovative Teacher.” She was probably relieved to be able to get rid of half the kids – and to be able to choose which half. She opened her roll book and started to make a list of the students I would take. At the top of the list was my old friend, Jerome Smith, the boy who had, that morning, offered to brandish a gun in order to assist me with my classroom management. No one ever said anything to me about my refusal to team teach. Nor about anything I did or did not do in my classroom. I could have been teaching straight out of the Communist Manifesto or the Anarchist’s Cookbook. I did, in fact, probably violate some sections of the education code and the school district’s rules that first semester, trying to excite my students about reading and writing. No adults ever visited my classroom. It was just me and the students, and as long as I kept them all confined to the classroom and no one got seriously injured and no one complained about me, it was assumed that I was doing a good job.