The Sub

When I got the text on my phone this morning, my heart sank. My mentor teacher would be subbing for the Assistant Principal today, and her classroom would have a sub.

I realized just how traumatized I had been by my last placement. The fight in my classroom had broken out with a sub in the room. I almost wanted to call in sick.

But these kids are a lot better behaved than the ones in the last school - and, as I found out over the weekend, from better financial circumstances. Their families are mostly working-class or lower middle-class, not poverty-stricken and crime-ridden. So I decided to give it a try.

My mentor teacher had picked out a short story called "Crash Room" from a collection titled Working Days. I later looked up the book on Amazon and found that School Library Journal and Booklist both called it "uneven"; I found "Crash Room" pretty boring, but I didn't have a say in the matter so I decided to give it a whirl doing a read-aloud. I'm planning to start a unit on Walter Dean Myers's 145th Street next week, so I wanted to get the students used to a different style of teaching.

The sub was extremely impressed. She couldn't compliment me enough, which of course felt great. I wasn't too happy with the questions I was asking the students - basically, all pretty obvious things like: "So what do we know about the narrator at this point?" Almost none of the questions could spark debate, but that was also in part due to the amateurish quality of the writing. For instance, the fact that the protagonist came from a Latino background was not made clear until halfway through the story, and had almost no bearing on it although it was about hospital workers in Texas. Maybe I should have asked the students if they were enjoying the story or not, and if not why not, but I didn't think it was my place to cast aspersions on my mentor teacher's choice of material in her absence. In any case, it's my own fault for not being able to make lemonade.

But I was gratified that, even if there were a couple of sleepers and a few texters over the three periods, there were no behavior issues that were noticeably worse than what I see when Ms. F is around.

"Incident Report" - Fight in class

In [Mrs. D's classroom], at about 1:00 p.m., I was helping a student with his creative writing composition while the rest of the class was supposed to be working on their own stories. Besides myself and the class, a substitute teacher and a City Year intern were in the room.

Suddenly I saw M. [an always stylish young man with an athletic physique and a spotty attendance record] shoving chairs out of the way. I went over to him to find out what was wrong, and he shouted past me, "Come on, let's do it, we've got plenty of room now." I looked behind me and A. [a known gang member, I've been told, who has yet to crack a book or notebook in this class as far as I can see] was at the other end of the room, taking off his jacket.

Several students went over to A. to try and calm him down, while I tried to prevent M. from getting any closer to A. - without success. They began fighting, and I attempted to get the rest of the class out of harm's way, telling several individuals to sit down and others to stay back. Everyone wanted to see what was happening, and all of my attempts to isolate the combatants failed. Within a few seconds, A. and M. had gone into the hall.

I stood in front of the classroom door to prevent anyone else from leaving the room, holding onto the door frame with outstretched hands and shouting at the students to remain inside. They crowded the doorway, and those in front began pushing me away from the door frame in order to get into the hall. I don't know who was pushing me, but it was gradual pressure from everyone at the door and possibly from those behind as well. I am not even sure the people who were pushing against me were actually trying to physically remove me, or if it was those behind them who were pushing, but everyone I could see was yelling at me to get out of the way so they could watch the fight.

As A. and M. continued to battle each other, with their arms locked around each others' necks, I tried again to get everyone into the room and was completely ignored. I tried to get past the students, who were now coming out of all the classrooms, in order to alert security - but the crowd was too thick. I ran for my cell phone and dialed 911, since there was still no sign of security. I got through to the police for a moment, but then the signal was cut off as it sometimes is in that hall. The boys were still fighting and some of the male teachers were trying to break them apart, so I tried one last time to get the class back into the room and was ignored once again.

There was an opening in the crowd, so I went down the hall and rounded the corner. At the far end of that hallway, past the cafeteria, I saw a lone security guard strolling in the direction of the fight. I shouted, "We've got a bad fight here, get everyone you can over here." His only reaction was to make a downward motion with his hands as if I was overreacting. I turned and went back into the hallway, where the fight was apparently still going on.

I slipped past the crowd and went into the room. One student was sitting there. Moments later, slowly but surely everyone else straggled in, elated by what they had witnessed. Several students expressed their anger at me for calling 911. I asked the class if anyone knew what had happened, and a few reported that A. had just been "playing with" M., but then it got serious. No one knew exactly what had been said.

*******************************************************************

I was, of course, distraught. The principal came jauntily into the room a few moments later, and told everyone that A. and M. had been suspended for 10 days and were on their way to being expelled. He added thank-you's to students who regularly come to school in order to do their work, and ended by threatening anyone who mentioned the incident in class with a five-day suspension. He did not spare me or the substitute teacher so much as a glance. As I was leaving the building later on, I ran into him in the hallway and told him that I had tried to keep everyone in the room but they had pushed past me. He told me to file an incident report; I'll bring in what I've written above tomorrow.

Later on, I went to my evening class on literacy strategies. It's full of working teachers, and one of them suggested that I use my cell phone as a video camera instead of calling the police - which I hope I will have the presence of mind to do next time. I feel partly responsible for the whole thing because I didn't do what the textbooks say - I didn't de-escalate the situation, but rather escalated it by shouting at the students and blocking their way out with my body (although in my defense I would add that nothing less than shouting would have been heard by anyone except those students standing within several inches of me). But I have to admit that I still can't think of anything else I could have done to prevent the students from leaving the room - or, for that matter, to prevent the fight - and of course I'll never know whether videorecording them (or pretending to) would have helped either.

Sad student story

I was in the other English teacher's classroom at the "9th Grade Academy" last week, because my mentor teacher took a personal day. This teacher, Ms. C, is a former principal whose school was closed down - she never told me why - and who is now trying to make it through her last two years in the classroom before she can retire. "Are you REALLY SURE you want to spend THE REST OF YOUR LIFE doing this?" she asked me several times, when the class simply would not settle down and be quiet no matter how many times she raised her voice.

Unlike my mentor teacher, Ms. C has four working computers and a Smart Board - which basically a white computer touchscreen as big as a blackboard. You can type onto a connected computer and what you are typing shows up on the Smart Board; you can access the Web on it; you can run videos or presentations on it; you can switch to the document camera, place your printed-out grammar worksheet under the camera and everyone will be able to see exactly how you fill out the right answers on it. It is a terrific tool, and much more desperately needed in urban schools where the socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds of most of the students cry out for an engaging curriculum than in the suburban and private schools where such boards are already pretty ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, Ms. C doesn't make any more use of the Smart Board than my mentor, Mrs. D, makes of her room's traditional blackboard. All that was on the high-tech screen was the day's assignments, typed out instead of written in chalk. Mrs. D couldn't tell me why all of the technology was in Ms. C's room and not in hers.

Ms. C told me a terrible story, though. A few weeks ago one of her best students - she pulled out the girl's notebook to show me pages filled with writing, with that wide penmanship that looks like the outline of a daisy chain - went out to the bathroom during "lockout," when police patrol the hallways and classroom doors must be locked. Ms. C had been busy with something else and had forgotten to write her out a pass; the girl's bathroom was just across the hall and down a few feet anyway.

Her student was busted by an officer and taken to the principal's office, where she was summarily suspended for three days. When she came back in tears, the teacher ran down to the principal's office as soon as she could to plead the girl's case. The principal turned Ms. C down, saying "lockout is lockout" and he couldn't make any exceptions. The girl was suspended for three days.

I was shocked. It verges on criminal negligence to punish a motivated young woman so unjustly, perhaps destroying her desire to work hard at her education in the future. Not only that, but at a school like this one, in a rough neighborhood - a school that was labeled "failing" under the No Child Left Behind law and is only in its second year post-reorganization - students like that girl are practically worth their weight in gold, in terms of how few and far between they come. How could anyone be so shortsighted as not to realize that, and still have made it into the administration of a public school in a major city?

My professors assure me that the parents can complain and go over this principal's head, but the whole incident occurred several weeks ago. I don't know if Ms. C ever advised the parents of their options, but as she was a principal herself, she must have known that options exist.

The whole thing is utterly depressing. I'm not scared anymore to teach in an urban school because I am afraid of gang members or drug dealers in my classes. I'm scared to teach in an urban school because I'm afraid that the administrators won't have my back.

Meet the Mentor

I met my mentor teacher yesterday for my first field experience. She hadn't been planning on having a teaching intern, but the teacher I was placed with first decided she didn't want one this semester. So we both ended up with each other - hardly an auspicious beginning. Despite that, we related pretty well to each other.

It's an urban school with an illustrious past and a major sports reputation. Among the alumni: several NFL players, a former mayor and a former U.S. Senator, a few popular entertainment legends. But two years ago the school was deemed "failing" under No Child Left Behind, the principal was fired along with half the teachers, and now there are three "schools within a school" in the old building. One of those mini-schools is called the Ninth Grade Academy; that's where I'm placed. Its purpose is to bring together students of disparate backgrounds and neighborhoods and make them jell as an eventual graduating class.

When I got into the classroom there were only about a dozen kids in the room. Two of the boys were in uniform, one was in a sweater and tie. I was told there was a dress code, but it wasn't explained to me and I'm not sure what it was. Maybe everyone needed to be wearing a collar of some sort, precluding t-shirts and low necklines.

The kids were grading an "adverb practice" worksheet; they exchanged papers with their partners, then went around the class reading sentences aloud and telling everyone which words were the adverbs. The sentences were stereotypical: "The train raced quickly down the tracks." I immediately thought of ways I would spice them up: "The defensive back blatantly fouled the runner." One girl was marking her partner's worksheet with a crayon. But the students were extremely well-behaved. I later found out that this was the honors class.

After the adverb exercises, the teacher had them silently reading from whatever books they had brought from home. This gave my mentor and me the chance to chat in low whispers. She complained that the principal of the Academy was going to double the number of students in this class over the next few days, based on new standardized test results. She had begged him to wait until January, because the group was already in the middle of THE LORD OF THE FLIES and she didn't even have enough books for that many kids - but he had apparently decided to go through with it in spite of her objections.

Once the silent reading was done, they spent the rest of the period reading aloud from LORD OF THE FLIES, with most of the students taking roles (including the biggest role, that of narrator). I was a bit worried when I heard them read, because I literally did not understand a lot of what they were saying - I haven't encountered pronunciation like this in more than 20 years. The teacher never stopped the reading to ask questions or make comments. A few of the students followed along with their heads on their deskchairs turned to the side to look at the paperback books resting on the edges, the picture of literacy drudgery.

I remembered my own high school study of this novel in 1977. My teacher broke us up into small groups to discuss a bunch of questions he had on a list. One of them was: "Why is this book called LORD OF THE FLIES?" We tossed that one around for a few minutes, and then finally one of my co-future English majors opined wryly, "Because flies are attracted to shit and this book is a lordly pile of it."

No one would use language like that in this school building, but I bet the sentiment would have been cheered by most of the students in the room.