“So…why do you want to be a teacher?” the energetic interviewer asked, holding her clipboard, pen in hand, ready to take notes.
“Well,” I said with confident disinterest, “I really don’t.”
Since I was interviewing for a highly competitive teaching opportunity, the woman’s raised eyebrows and dropped jaw didn’t surprise me.
I didn’t want to be a teacher. I never wanted to be a teacher. Since I was 7 years old I wanted to be a writer. All the women in my family are teachers–mom, aunts, sister, sister-in-law, cousins–and I believed I was destined to be different.
“So why are you here?” she questioned.
Why was I there? A month or so before the interview, my friend Adam found an article in the NY Times about the New York City Teaching Fellows; an accelerated Master’s degree program for new inexperienced teachers initiated by the NYC Board of Education Chancellor. This program planned to take non-teaching professionals from the world of business and otherwise, put them through “teacher boot camp”, and place them in NYC’s lowest performing schools. The hope was these new teachers would bring their outside “know how” into the classrooms and “make a difference.”
Maybe you have seen their ads on the subway. “Do you remember the name of your first grade teacher? Who is going to remember yours?” or “What do you call a room full of authors, inventors, and explorers? Your first period class.”
Anyway, Adam decided to apply. Since he was living in Delaware at the time, he asked me to go to an information session in NYC to see what the program was all about. Adam and I had both been journalism majors and were both in the process of looking for jobs. He was doing some freelance work from home, while I took a job with a public relations firm. This job was not all I was hoping for in my first job out of college, but I was excited to be making an actual salary, albeit a very insignificant one that still did not allow me to move out of my mother’s house. I was commuting on the Long Island Rail Road every day with the rest of the sleep deprived workers facing 1.5 hours on a packed train each way. The scene on the railroad of my 6:13 a.m. train was like an ad for people needing Prozac. I did not want to do this for the rest of my life. (Although I did feel important and very grown up in my dress suits and blazers and really uncomfortable shoes, coffee in one hand, newspaper in the other).
I went to the information session for Adam and reported back to him. He applied for the program and I decided I was going to quit my job and move to California. I decided I was moving to San Francisco, even though I had never been there. I had always wanted to live in California. (My friend Jamie and I dreamed of moving there since elementary school. We said we would both go to UCLA and drive around campus in a gray convertible with a pink pinstripe.) I believed making the move would be a great new start for me. I had always lived on the east coast, so why not try the other coast? I got a job at an internet company a college friend was working at, had an apartment to stay in with my friend’s cousin and was planning to leave at the end of July 2000.
“Why don’t YOU apply for the Teaching Fellows?” Adam kept bugging me. “You would be perfect for the job. You love kids.”
“I am NOT being a teacher,” I said firmly. “I am moving to California.”
“Just apply,” he continued. “What’s the worst that can happen? You get it?? You can always say no. It’s a free Master’s!”
I rolled my eyes and gave in.
Adam and I wrote essays about why we wanted to be teachers. I wrote of my experience working with autistic children during college summers. It was true. I did like working with children. I wasn’t too bad at it either, but I had convinced myself I was going to do something different from everyone else in my family.
We sent our applications and essays in. I got called for an interview. Adam did not (which actually turned out better for him because he has been traveling around the world and has become a very successful journalist. Plus, the one time he visited me in my classroom, he was ready to leave 5 minutes later!).
“Well Dayna,” the young interviewer sighed, “you are one of the better candidate I have met today. I think you really have what it takes to be a great teacher. We will be contacting you within the next few weeks. I really hope you reconsider your decision to move to California.”
I did reconsider.
I got accepted into the NYC Teaching Fellows program as cohort 1. Thus started my illustrious career as an elementary school teacher and the roller coaster ride through the NYC Board of Education system.
After three weeks of twelve hour days, five days a week of intensive coursework, I was given a position as a second grade teacher at a school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. My new school was in the bottom ten of the worst performing schools in NYC. It was known for its drive-by shootings and arrests in school more than its academic achievement.
Mikey was the first one I met.
“Good morning!” I said with extreme excitement, smiling ear to ear, already breaking the very first rule of teaching, “Don’t smile before Thanksgiving.”
Mikey rolled his eyes, as did his mother.
“YOU the new teacher for 204?” she asked.
“Yes!” My cheeks were starting to hurt I was smiling so much.
She looked me up and down and grunted–”Hmmmph!” She then turned to another parent not too far away, making no attempt to make her words unheard. “You see that whitey over dere?” (actually pointing at me) “She Mikey’s teacha!”
I was temporarily deflated, but was convinced I was going to be THE teacher everyone in the school wanted. I didn’t want to be a teacher, but if I was going to be one, I would be the best damn teacher I could.
The rest of the class came and we began our journey to the classroom. Mikey’s attitude did not change. When we were playing the name game, an ice breaker, he put his head on the desk, pulled his uniform sweater over his head and began snoring five minutes later. I guess it didn’t help there was a television camera in our faces.
PBS decided to do a six-part documentary following five brand new Teaching Fellows over the two years we were in the program. Along with four other new Teaching Fellows from my school, I was chosen. Our arduous journey of being thrown in one of the roughest, toughest schools in NYC, without much experience, to guide these children towards a successful future was all being documented. No pressure.
So as if I was not nervous enough to face twenty-five 7year olds who I was chosen to teach, trying to pronounce their names correctly without be laughed at, not knowing exactly what to teach them, not having any books or materials or enough desks, with only three weeks of training, having a microphone attached to me and cameras around me did not ease my anxieties.
I made it through the first two months without crying. Koi, a 7-year-old in my class, did it. He sat in the front of the room. In second grade he could hardly write his name, which was only three letters long. When I asked him what one plus one equaled, he scrunched his face and guessed, “Ummmm….64?”
I spoke to the assistant principal about getting him tested for a learning disability. I spoke to the school based support team (which was not so supportive at all). The only answers I got was from his first grade teacher.
“I requested to have him left back, but this district promotes all K-2 students despite his or her abilities, or lack there of. It’s called social promotion,” the experienced teacher said in disgust.
What I found more appalling was his mother’s refusal to recognize her child had a problem.
“Isn’t that educational neglect?” I asked, with my save-the-world attitude .
She chuckled at how naive I was. “Welcome to the Board of Ed,” she said, a phrase I became very familiar with, often heard when some kind of bureaucratic atrocity occurred.
It was a Tuesday. Koi was taking his pencil on his desk during math.
“Please stop doing that Koi,” I said. I stayed patient when he did not stop.
“Koi,” I said, “you have two choices: either stop tapping the pencil or I am going to take it away from you.”
As soon I was done talking, he stared right at me and started the tapping again. I grabbed the pencil out of his hands. He started screaming, “GIMME MY PENCOO! I WANT MY PENCOO BACK. ITs MINES!”
I said no and tried to go on with the lesson. Yeah, good try. He told me I sucked and that I was a “f***ing white b*tch” and then proceeded to reeked havoc in my room. First he ran around the room a few times smacking kids in the head. Then he pulled Taekwon’s chair out from under him and slapped Britney in the face. Next he pushed over table 6 which landed on Alicia’s head. Class 2-204 was officially out of control and all I kept thinking was “Jesus Dayna, why didn’t you just give the kid back his damn pencil!”
The seven principals of learning we were taught during our summer training session were definitely not helping me now. Taekwon’s head was bleeding. Britney and Alicia were crying and Calvin was trying to hold back Koi from hitting two other boys. Then Koi ran for the door!
Kids were running around and screaming at me: “I need to go to the nurse Ms. G!” “I need to go to the baffroom Ms. G!” “He’s gonna get away Ms. G!”
OK, I thought, focus. Taekwon is bleeding. Tend to him first. What do I do? What do I do? Latex gloves, where are the latex gloves? They said I would have latex gloves. No latex gloves. Tissue? Paper towels? I searched quickly around the room. Nothing. Oh! I thought. Call the office! They’ll help me! But my phone box was locked and I hadn’t gotten the key yet. My body tensed up as Koi was kicking me and screeching at very high decibels as I blocked the door he was trying to get out of.
Laseema, the girl genius in my class, saw my distress and came over like an experienced emergency room nurse to save me. “Ms. G! I got his arms! You grab his legs!” She grabbed Koi’s arms, struggling. I did as I was told because, although she was only seven years old, she had seen this kind of incident a lot more than I did in my twelve years of middle-class, suburbian education. I trusted her. Another helpful student opened the door. Luckily, just at that moment, my teacher’s aide (who I only had for 2 months because she later got sent to the “rubber room”, a place where educators sit idly while awaiting their fate on charges they have been brought up on) came to the rescue. She took Koi down to the office and I went inside to deal with the repercussions of the incident.
That is the day I cried. I cried because as I handed the boy that caused a commotion in my room earlier that day over to his mother, she grabbed him by the neck and said, “Wait ’til you get home BOY! You gonna get it!” I was shaking. The boy who terrorized my room, was now looking back at me with tear-filled eyes. What have I done? I thought.
This is just one frightful moment I have experienced at that school. Not all stories are like this one though. Some are really funny, like when Calvin starting humming the Bee Gee’s song “Stayin’ Alive” during a quiet activity and everyone joined in on “Uh Uh Uh Uh Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive!” part. Some are amazing, like when we went to the aquarium and there was a cigarette butt in the sting ray tank and my class cheered after we chased down the aquarium worker to take it out.
I had a lot of days like the one I described, but as each day went by, (and I know this sounds very cliche) I became a stronger person and stronger teacher because of it. That was the most stressful, terrifying year of my life. It was also the most joyful, fulfilling, interesting year.
I’m glad I decided not to move to California.
