jay/day

From Evert Cilliers …

I’m becoming an English High School teacher in the Bronx in the New York City Teaching Fellows program (20,000 applied, 2,700 accepted). They subsidize one’s study for a Masters in Education over 2 years (you need it to be a teacher), while you teach in a school in a high-needs area, i.e. in the Bronx where the black and Latin kids live in dire straits. Girls have babies at 13 and 14. Boys end up in jail. Single-parent families. Drugs, abuse, guns, just about every child knows someone who’s been killed.

This Teaching Fellows program started maybe 6 years ago, small, and has now grown to current size. Funded by one of Clinton’s things, Americorps, that Bush hasn’t tried to kill yet.

We 2,700 are divided between a number of colleges, and my small group is at the best one, Lehman College. Currently I spend mornings in a middle school, hormone age from around 10 to 13, and go to college at Lehman till 6 pm. I have to get up at 6.30 to commute to my school in the Bronx and get home around 7.45 p.m. looking at 4 to 5 hours of homework every night. It’s pretty grueling. Actually worse than Chiat/Day and night.

But we’ll be done by August 1, and I’ll be free for 2 weeks. Except I’m still hunting for a job, because I want a choice or two, and will do my bit in a rat-feces-infested school if I have to for 2 years (where some of my colleagues are teaching summer school), but would actually prefer a school with a fairly clean building and no bullet holes in the walls.

My teaching fellows, whom I meet in 3 groups -- Psychology, Technology, and a practical course from 4 to 6 with a teacher to prepare us for actual teaching -- can’t quite make me out, but enjoy my candor and eccentricity and wit. I introduced myself to a high school class as follows. "I don’t have the time to tell you who or what I am, because I’ve got to get through this lesson to prove to the principal and the assistant-principal that they should give me a job, but for now, just think of me as the man from Mars with the power to destroy any stereotype you may have of any human being on earth." (We were four teachers competing for the same job. I don’t think I got it, but I really want to work there, and I’ll apply there again in 2 years time.)

More than half of my Teaching Fellows are in their twenties, many 22, though the program was supposed to be about giving older people the chance to give something back to society. In our FA class of 31, we’ve got 3 blacks, one Iranian, a number of Jews, four gays, among whom one flamer and one butch guy who thinks the flamer gives gays a bad name, one out lesbian, one just about full-blooded Native-American, though I can’t pronounce the name of her tribe, a couple of high-powered Connecticut 40 plus women (one of them once showed Bill Gates how a new piece of tech worked, and pumped him about the days when Microsoft had barefoot guys who never brushed their teeth sleeping under their desks working all over place)… anyway, despite the fact that most of us are white, we cut across all lines of gender, age, sexual orientation, profession, states, and whatnot, and I think we might even have a closet lesbian, or maybe she’s just discreet. I keep thinking she should say partner when she says roommate.

The buzz in our class is like Florence Nightingale radiation bouncing off the walls. I’ve never been among a bunch of such wonderful and amazing and creative and committed people. Makes one proud of America, as much as the problems we face make one mad.

Two weeks ago I had a real breakthrough and it was as if a light switched on in me. I had been so ambivalent that just before the program actually started, I contacted a headhunter in Toronto for a copywriting job. He came up with one or two possibilities. I’d also gotten disenchanted with the U.S. now that the curve of oligarchic power is still trending upwards and doesn’t look to hit its peak even if Bush gets voted out. That great old divide between the top dogs and the rest of us. The rest of us may not include some of you, but most of those who earn under 100k a year are now worse off than we were in 1970, and WE DON’T KNOW IT. It doesn’t help me to know that the left has won the cultural war either.

Anyway, two weeks ago, I had my first lesson. Sat down with my 12-year-old kids in 6th grade, read a story, acted things out, and went home very excited. I loved it. They were so adorable. I think I can be brilliant at this. I can improve the minds and lives of these kids, and be one of those teachers they’ll never forget. Does something to my soul to know this.

I said to myself if an ad agency came and offered me my dream job now, $300k a year supervising 30 people, some good safe accounts, and the time to pitch new business, I’d turn them down. It’s that serious. Why should I mess around with the problems of motivating 30 adults when I’m faced with 30 kids whose very lives are at stake?

Yes, there will be a book, fiction, to protect the innocent and spare the guilty. Or maybe a memoir, an Afrikaner teaching in the Bronx. Or maybe a crusading expose.

Travis, our most disturbed boy: Everyone yells at him except me; he's driven them that crazy. Never works. Has issues and disturbs teaching. If he's not distracting, he's sleeping. The first time, not knowing his history, I asked him, a foot away from the side of his head, if he had a problem getting started. He stared straight ahead, didn’t move a muscle, nothing, a statue. Startling, to say the least. I tried again, saying I want to help (I should’ve started with a neutral "how's it going?" instead of using the negative word "problem"). He didn't stir, flinch, nothing. So I asked him his name. He turned slightly and asked:
"Why?"

Interesting that what I thought then was incredibly rude did not move my emotional meter one inch up or down. I said "Well, my name is Mr. Cilliers and I just wanted to know yours," and moved on, baffled. We got a chance to talk the next day and again I asked him his name, and this time he asked "why?" again, and I realized it was an automatic tic.

The Boy Who Asked Why.

At the end of the day as the kids were leaving, I happened to look his way and he gave an almost imperceptible nod of acknowledgement, on which I lived for the whole night. I knew I had managed to slip in there somehow. The next day he started doing work, something I'd never seen him do. The day after that there was a commotion, and in his other class he hit his best friend Ennis who'd called him a name (probably faggot). Travis was restrained by security. I saw a Last Resort in Action.

They called his Mom. He was very upset. "Why you call my Mom?" Tears. Sat in the assistant-principal’s office, wanted to walk out, stopped by inflexible arm of security guy. I told the a-p that he'd started work the day before. She said, hey, Mr. C, talk to him, he was with fatherly-figure-type guidance counselor Mr. Perez in office next to a-p. So I said to Travis I appreciated how he'd started work the day before. He was calm; Mr. Perez had chilled him out. Then I said that maybe some time he and his friend could work it out, and it was touching the raw wound, he flared up again. "He call me a name, I never talk to him again!"

Saw his Mom, seemed friendly and stable, had baby on arm and little girl next to her, a good 8 years younger than Travis, maybe he feels displaced by them.
The next day he was back at school, and his name came up in front of the class outside my hearing.

The teacher, loud, glaring his way: "Travis! He have to change his ways!"

She might as well have driven a nail through the kid’s head.

Maybe two days later we turn our desks into a circle so I can read a story to the class, my first or second day "teaching," and this was the one that threw a big switch in my mind: I love this, I can do it brilliantly.

Sitting down, I read with them a really lame story from one of their readers. Travis is in the circle, but he doesn't turn his desk around to face in, he's facing out, sleeping. I tell him to turn his desk around. He doesn't. I dart over to him quickly (this is all instinctual after being told it's bad to embarrass kids in front of others) and say softly, "Look, Travis, while you’re in the circle you have to turn your desk around, otherwise, go sit over at the side." I turn and dash back to my seat expecting him to head for the wall with the out I gave him. As I sit down I see him turn his desk around.

Some time later he actually does a few lines on something they're supposed to write. Excited, I rush over to the fatherly type guy who thinks I want him to come and talk to Travis, and I literally have to stand in his way and tell him, "later, not now, when Travis is actually doing something." He says he's looked at the boy's record, Travis will have to shake a leg to pass, family issues; can't wait to get them out of him.

A day later Travis wants to know how to start writing an assignment. I guess his Mom and the fatherly guy told him he'd better shake a leg; he has some catching up to do. But then he wants more lines from me, so he can just write them down. I tell him to do them himself and at that moment, I write him off in my heart, and for the rest of the day.

When a remedial reading teacher comes, a contract with an outfit from Australia (hey, we’ll try anything, and the Aussies know more than we do) Travis acts out again, and she tells him not to talk. Twenty seconds later he's talking again and she darts over, "Is there a problem? because if there is I must ask you to leave, because it's rude and impolite and doesn't show respect, it's unacceptable behavior." Travis shuts up, maybe sleeps. Easy for her to be deft when she's not there every day.

When the time comes to choose a 'Just right for me' book (you like cover and title, you read back of book and are intrigued by premise, you read first page and find no more than 5 words you can't understand), and they go up in threes to pick a book, Travis asks her if he can go to the bathroom. Ducks out of anything that will show up the fact that he knows nothing, in a system of social promotion that has let him pass till he’s a big problem at 12. She says she isn't his teacher, Miss J has to do it. Miss J does, stupidly in my opinion, and he and his friend leave (Ennis, who can’t read either, who called Travis the bad name, and is a borderline case with another kid Dorrel).

Travis comes back and chooses some picture books about fish. His friend stays in his seat. I ask his friend why he doesn't go choose a book, and he says no, Travis will do it for him. I don't know what to say and move on.

I tell my Fellow Adviser during a break at College about Travis, and tell my advisor the boy is lost, he'll be in prison, and I tear up, as I'm doing now. He takes me outside and I go to the bathroom to bathe my reddened eyes. He says he can't tell me how often this scenario happened to him the first year of teaching and broke his heart. Now I am actually crying. Lack of sleep, I guess.
I also have a teacher's pet, Spanish, Madeline, who writes 3 pages for every page the others write, and is a real storyteller, though somewhat unfamiliar with conventions of English spelling and grammar. I told her she writes well, she has the talent, and repeated myself, and asked her why she never wants to read aloud in class, "Are you shy? I used to be shy," and she patronizes me beautifully: "Don't you see how many others are waiting for you to mark their papers?"

I asked her what she was doing in summer school and she said the math was hard. So I go over and ask the math teacher, "hey, this Madeline is great in English, how's her math?" and Ms. R says, "Her math is terrific, look, she tutoring another child," and there sits my Madeline, teaching another kid, side by side.
I go ask the a-p did Madeline fail or did she just pass? The failures and the almost-failed are in summer school, if they fail again they’re held back, and not socially promoted as happened before. It turns out she failed. Can't believe it. Maybe they mark her down for grammar mistakes. Maybe she tests badly. But I told the a-p she's one who could pass. Want to call her mom and tell her she’s got a kid who could go all the way to College, but what will the mother think of my encouragement if Madeline fails again?

Sometimes you don’t want to call the parent about a problem. The parent might beat the shit out of the kid, and you made it happen.

Yesterday I hear something has finally been done about Travis. He’s going to go to Special Ed, where they’ll use all the resources of the city to bring him up to speed and save his future. His family will also go to counseling.

He’s so weird. He’s not only totally truculent, but he can’t sit still, so he wanders around in this zombie-like way, floating out of the classroom when you turn your back to go disrupt another class. His math teacher: "I don’t like myself for saying this, but I hate that kid’s guts." Mr. Perez says he’s the kind of kid who’s so un-centered and out of touch with reality, gangs will use him for small jobs, and soon he’ll get caught holding a bag of dope, and then enter the prison system and be lost forever.

When I asked Mr. Perez why it took so long for intervention to happen, Mr. Perez just sighed and said: "That’s a good question."

Today a brilliant teacher came to substitute teach, and by accident I saw best practice whereas up to now I’ve been working with an English teacher who can’t spell, and who mixes her tenses and her singulars and plurals, and manages the class by yelling at them. It’s great when they yell back, but heck, no way to run a class. This teacher thinks a ravine is a raven, and told the kids a cock-and-bull story about how a raven told a dog in their lame reader where the missing dog was, when the missing dog happened to be in a ravine in a shed. She argued with me about the spelling of "whinning," which she had changed from "whining" in all the kids’ papers. But now she’s beginning to trust my expertise, and doesn’t mind asking me anymore how to spell and pronounce words (didn’t know how to pronounce "scarce") in front of her students.

The brilliant teacher was a joy to watch, like a thrilling performance. Real-life performance art. Better than anything I’ve seen on stage except maybe Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. She was in this school the year before, so she knew the kids, and told me how she had told the authorities again and again that Travis had to be tested, and spoke to me about how she managed another problem child, Gabriella, by ignoring her into behaving, until the kid, who now drives everyone so crazy that she’s been suspended for 3 days, started bringing her presents and actually working.

All that these poor damaged kids need is stability and someone to care for them. I will be one of those who do that for them, so help me.

I felt so honored to be in the presence of this brilliant teacher, black and proud and only 24, and more brilliant at her job than I’ve ever seen anybody at their job, and I’ve worked for some really brilliant Creative Directors. Still young and unaware of her brilliance: she enjoyed me telling her that I want to be her, and that I’ve never seen anything like how she controls a class. This woman should be president, her instinctual flair for handling people is unbelievable, and she developed her bag of tricks, very neat ones, in 3 weeks flat when they threw her as a rookie in with the hard cases.

Other colleagues tell great stories. Of a young, tough, known drug dealer who begged the teacher to give him a little golden star sticker. He finally finished his work because the other kids were getting stickers and he wanted one.
Of a teenage girl who said casually: "Miss M, last night my friends came over and pulled a train on me."

Of a white female teacher who yelled at a black 12-year-old for 3 minutes, ending her harangue as follows: "Do you want to be a cop killer? My cousin’s best friend is a cop; do you want to kill him? because that’s what you’re going to be, a cop killer! Are you going to kill Vinny? You cop killer!"

Etcetera. I’m fastening my seatbelt, because I’m in for the ride of my life.

- Evert