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9486 in the collection
A Teacher's Baptism by Fire
My farewell column ran in my usual Friday space. I was not prepared for the stir it would cause. My colleague Richard Roeper put it in perspective: "Journalists always sit around the Billy Goat saying, 'One day I'm gonna go teach in the inner city.' They never do it. This is the first time ever."
Another fellow columnist, Neil Steinberg, griped, "The only way any of us can top this is to announce, 'I'm quitting to go wash the feet of lepers.'"
***
Four years ago, after 25 years in journalism, Leslie Baldacci quit her prestigious job as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and became a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. Thanks to an innovative program called Teachers for Chicago that allows career-changers to bypass much of the usual teacher certification process, she was assigned that very fall to teach a class of seventh-graders in a poorly performing Roseland school. In her book Inside Mrs. B’s Classroom (McGraw-Hill, $22.95), Baldacci tells the story of her first two years as a teacher. It was an exhausting, inspiring, harrowing time. Here is a series of excerpts from her book.
Baldacci's first day as a teacher was, she writes, "a freaking nightmare."
I had never seen kids act like that in a classroom with an adult present.
It didn't start out badly at all. The terrible part built slowly, like a running toilet that turns into a flood in the basement, accumulating slowly and silently, unanticipated and unnoticed until the hapless victim steps knee-deep in water.
***
I had bought two decks of playing cards and put a card on each student's desk, face up. As the students entered our room for the first time, I handed each one a card. Find the match, I told them, and sit at that desk.
Students kept trickling in, but when it appeared 28 was all we were going to get, I laid my welcome speech on them: "You hold the cards. How you play them is up to you."
For the rest of the day, every time I turned my back, kids tiptoed, crawled and slid to different desks next to their friends. All those new faces, my first day as a classroom teacher, I couldn't keep track of who was supposed to be sitting where. I wondered why the noise level kept soaring higher and higher. A poker game broke out in the back row.
***
In the afternoon, I had them write a first-day story. "A story has three parts." I reviewed the three parts and gave them prompts for the beginning, middle and end. "When I woke up this morning the first thing I saw (heard, smelled) was....
While I walked to school I saw.... When I walked through the school doors I felt...."
One boy wrote: "When I woke up this morning the first thing I saw was a dirty Pamper. When I was walking to school I saw a three-legged dog. When I walked through the school doors I felt hungry."
I loved that piece. It got us talking about all the things we can be hungry for: food, love, attention, knowledge and the next thing I knew we were discussing figurative versus literal language. For about ten minutes.
About an hour before dismissal, the students were restless, and the room was hot. Kids started hopping out of their seats, throwing paper balls, destroying their new rulers and pencils and hurling the sharp pieces at each other. They weren't doing it overtly, I'd just see things go flying through the air. I decided it was time for a washroom break.
Big mistake. That free-for-all brought both the assistant principal and the security guard running.
"All privileges are revoked!" the vice principal shrieked. She gave me a disgusted look as she stalked back to her office. Back in the room, I totally screamed at them. "If you ever embarrass me in front of my boss like that again, you will be sorry."
***
Baldacci writes that her classroom was hardly unique. It was more like "one deck chair on the Titanic."
The same sort of disorder existed at other schools in our city and had for a long time. The kids ran wild. They swore, fought, refused to work. At assemblies they booed the principal. The only punishment was suspension and that wasn't so terrible. As one of my students, Cortez, put it, "At least it's better than having to come up here and look at your ugly ass."
The school was a microcosm of the neighborhood. Pregnancy, drugs and alcohol were part of the life experience of children 13 and 14 years old. Parents had their own issues. Lives were consumed by the relentless stress and woe of poverty. Violence was omnipresent. The summer before, a serial killer had murdered prostitutes and left their bodies in abandoned houses.
Cop friends tried to warn me, and public school administrators tried to downplay the extent of the chaos. The people who were trying to make a teacher out of me did not approve of the excuse-making and held me accountable for a well-run classroom where children learned.
In reality, my classroom was just one deck chair on the Titanic. My school was just one of many poor-performing urban schools, trying to stay afloat as waves of social dysfunction crashed over its sides. But the philosophy of "no excuse-making" actually was the only way to proceed. It is what it is. Soldier on.
***
A veteran teacher assigned to be Baldacci's mentor barely gave her the time of day. Support of any kind was hard to come by.
On the third day, a girl came up to me in third period and said, "I don't feel good. I think I'm going to throw up," and proceeded to barf in my book box on her way to the trash can. In most classrooms, a throw-up incident would be the most traumatic event of the day. But in Room 118, it barely made a ripple. Hardly anyone even noticed. I dragged the book box out into the hallway and told three different office personnel in the course of the afternoon that I needed a janitor. No one ever came. I ended up cleaning off the books myself after school.
As I knelt down in the hallway, wiping off the books with a wet sponge, the vice principal walked past. She was a real miser about books, and I respected that. She alone held the keys to the "book room."
"Are you throwing those out?" she demanded. No, I said, someone puked on them this morning and no one ever came to clean up the mess. That got rid of her quick.
***
After just a week as a teacher, Baldacci told her husband, Artie, she was exhausted.
"What do they do that is so bad?" Artie asked me.
They talked incessantly. They shouted to be heard over the talking. They didn't do their work. They got up out of their seats without permission and wandered around, touching and bothering each other on their way. They shouted out questions and comments, including, "This is stupid." Any little ripple set off a chain reaction. Someone passed gas and everyone leapt from his seat fanning the air and jumping around. They threw things. They hit. I had broken up two fist fights already. They yelled out the window to their gang-banger friends and relatives, who gathered outside at dismissal time. They swore like sailors. One of my kids called Astrid [another teacher] a bitch.
***
She struggled to maintain order, and with her feelings.
Our new dismissal procedures caused a real tizzy. At 2:15, the blinds went down to prevent any gang signifying out the classroom window. With their backs to me, I couldn't be sure whether what was going back and forth with people on the sidewalk was an innocent wave or a Gangster Disciple sign, and I wasn't taking any chances.
Table by table, depending on who was quiet, they would go to their lockers. Then they placed their chairs on top of their desks and lined up.
Problem was, the chairs were molded plastic with metal legs, and they slipped and slid off the desks with the least provocation, crashing onto the wooden floors. Thirty-three chairs, and I'd bet 25 of them ended up back on the floor, some purposefully for the sheer pleasure of creating noise and disorder. The din was incredible.
At the end it got really ugly. Chairs crashing, kids yelling, running, hitting each other. I jumped up onto Freddie's desk and demanded their attention.
Eric continued running his mouth, right next to me.
I jumped down off the desk, landing square in front of him. "Stop it!" I screamed in his face. That shut him up for about three seconds, then he started talking again. I was so mad I thought my head might explode, like in that movie "Scanners." That was not a good mental state for a teacher.
I climbed back on Freddie's desk.
"No one's leaving this room until you are all quiet," I told them.
The room was sweltering. The minutes ticked by, 2:35, 2:37. People started whimpering they had to pick up siblings, had to get home. The worst provocateurs waged the greatest protest. I put my finger over my lips in the universal sign for quiet. At 2:40, they were quiet. We formed lines in the hallway and started walking to the doors. I made them stop twice, once to wait for some little kids to pass and once out of sheer spite.
I despised them. Reeling from the day, I packed my briefcase and headed downtown for my college class. Being with adults in air conditioning was like a cocktail party.
***
Baldacci's greatest support came from fellow caring teachers.
I regarded my paycheck: $633.45 for two weeks' work.
"How much of a pay cut did you take?" she [Donna] asked me.
"Two-thirds," I answered.
"S--- Baldacci, what for?" she wondered.
"Because a voice called and I answered," I told her. It was the first time I'd admitted that out loud to anyone outside my family and a few close friends. Although I did not know her well, I felt she would understand. She jerked her head and looked at me in surprise. Then a smile spread across her face.
"My sister," she greeted me, as if meeting me for the first time.
***
Baldacci and her students made a pact. It is the pact, often unspoken, that all good teachers make with their students.
Kyisha had gotten into a loud, profane fight with Tyrese and another boy who had been talking trash about her. She and Tyrese had been "going out" for a while. Then they weren't. Then this happened. She was threatened with a 20-day suspension for "starting it."
After school, I found about eight of my girls in the bathroom, where Kyisha was sobbing.
"It's not fair," she wailed. In the high-blown emotion of a teenage girl with her own sharp mind, she saw a ladder of injustice. Why was she getting suspended from school when the grownups in charge were getting away with not doing their jobs?
"How can he say he's gonna suspend me for 20 days when he's not doing his job?" she implored. "We got no books, people steal everything out of your desk and people who get sent out come right back in. Look, our bathrooms got no doors. People wreck everything. And the boys are all up there saying all this mean stuff. It's not fair. It's like everyone's against us."
We looked around us at the bathroom. No doors on the stalls, no mirrors, two stopped-up sinks and peeling paint. Everything around us seemed to prove her point. I thought of my overstuffed chair. A couple of days before, someone had smeared black ink all over the seat cushion and the armrests. I thought of the abandonment I felt as I struggled to be the teacher of these children.
She was right. It wasn't fair. Tears filled my eyes, too, and spilled down my cheeks. We started to cry.
"You have every right to feel that way," I told here, my voice breaking. It's not fair that we don't have supplies and that people wreck everything. I feel that way, too, sometimes, with our class."
We stood and sniffed in silence a while. I swore I would never cry in front of my students, no matter how bad it got, just as I've never cried in front of a boss when things broke bad. Now I had done that. Even though it was in a broken-down bathroom after school hours, by the next day everyone would know I had cried. I had given up any pretense of control.
"Girls, we have to pull ourselves together," I said, wiping my face off. "We can't let ourselves get dragged down to someone else's low level. We have to keep going, even when things aren't fair, even when everything seems to be against us. There is no other choice. We have to keep our heads up. We have to go forth with as much dignity as we possibly can and without violence."
They were still crying, but they were listening.
It isn't going to get any easier, I told them. You girls are smart and sensitive enough to recognize injustice, so you, more than anybody, can't give up. People who see these things are the ones who have to change them. That is our responsibility as thinking women. We have to keep going.
Come on, I said. Let's go.
We hugged. We wiped our faces. We mustered our dignity. We went forth.
The pact we made that day is probably what kept me from walking out the schoolhouse door on any given day. Children learn by example, and so did I. As long as they kept coming back, so would I.
There were no repercussions to my tearful breakdown. Control, I realized, was overrated. Likewise, staying out of trouble. You can have control and stay out of trouble and still not be a good teacher.
***
In her second year, Baldacci was assigned to teach the second grade, which had its own trials and rewards.
Most days left me shell-shocked. But in the midst of it all, we managed to find our pace, our groove, and I would not trade anything for those moments of grace when the learning spell charms everyone, when every kid is civil and focused and trying their best.
They come every so often. One Friday afternoon, we pulled out our water color sets. We had learned the colors of the rainbow, we had seen how prisms split white light into colors. Now it was time to mix some colors. We mixed blue and red and made purple. We mixed red and yellow and made orange. We mixed blue and yellow and made green. That was all I knew, so that was a good time to pass out paper and brushes and let the painting settle into a quiet rhythm of its own.
"Can we listen to some music?" someone asked.
"Sure," I said, thinking I'd tune in the classical station.
"Put on the Beatles!" the class shouted.
"It would be my pleasure," I replied.
There they all were, painting in the afternoon sun, singing "We All Live In A Yellow Submarine."
In that moment, we lived the life of ease. Every one of us had all we needed. Sky of blue and sea of green were being brushed on white paper. Our friends were all aboard.
***
After two years at the Roseland school, Baldacci landed a job at a public school with a much better reputation, Arthur Dixon Elementary in the Chatham neighborhood, a school led by a principal of "extraordinary dedication." Now in her fifth year as a teacher, Baldacci still teaches at Dixon. She has no regrets.
Four years ago, after 25 years in journalism, Leslie Baldacci quit her prestigious job as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and became a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools. Thanks to an innovative program called Teachers for Chicago that allows career-changers to bypass much of the usual teacher certification process, she was assigned that very fall to teach a class of seventh-graders in a poorly performing Roseland school. In her book Inside Mrs. B's Classroom (McGraw-Hill, $22.95), Baldacci tells the story of her first two years as a teacher. It was an exhausting, inspiring, harrowing time. Here is a series of excerpts from her book.
In reality, my classroom was just one deck chair on the
Titanic. My school was just one of many poor-performing urban schools, trying to stay afloat as waves of social dysfunction crashed over its sides.
We stood and sniffed in silence a while. I swore I would never cry in front of my students, no matter how bad it got. . . . Now I had done that. Even though it was in a broken-down bathroom after school hours, by the next day everyone would know I had cried. I had given up any pretense of control.
— Leslie Baldacci
A teacher's baptism by fire
Chicago Sun-Times
2003-09-12
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-leslie12.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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