The double doors swing open like the gaping mouth
at the entrance to Steeplechase Park and I’m swept into a maelstrom of shouts,
shrieks, bells, buzzers, kids flirting, teasing, threatening, senses assaulted
by a kaleidoscope of adolescent fashion and tropical perfume infiltrated by the
smell of reheating beef patties, greasy fries, and sour milk. Students are
racing up the down staircases, overwhelming hall monitors waving frantically
and ineffectually as Mumbai traffic cops. Enrico Fermi Junior High School,
Bushwick, Brooklyn, early 1970s. This Bushwick is not the hipster hive it is
today. It’s raw, rough, in “transition.” A few years later, a few blocks away
on Knickerbocker Avenue, mob boss Carmine Galante is assassinated after a
leisurely lunch and cigar on the patio of his fave restaurant.
I head, crisp new NYC teacher’s license in my
tan briefcase, for the principal’s office, uncomfortable in my new green suit
bought “on time” with my mother’s Abraham & Straus card. I’m the first in my
extended family to aspire to such a position, and Gloria, my mother, is so
proud. But even in Brooklyn, my ‘dese and dose’ Gowanus accent gives folks pause.
I want to do well. I want to connect with students, inspire them as books and
reading inspired me. “Gladly would he learn and gladly teach,” is my mantra. Instead
of the principal, I meet the dean, like many of these guys, a short, bull-necked
Phys Ed teacher who thinks a Chaucer goes under a coffee cup. He flicks at my
paperwork with his thumb, looks me over—I’m a big guy, 6’ 1”, 200 lbs.—and
grunts, “You start after lunch.”
“I...I guess.”
Substitutes face other faculty members’ worst
day every day. We do this for about $5 an hour, less the price of subway fare
and a cafeteria lunch. The administrators know this, the teacher mysteriously
laid low by a 24-hour virus—who happens to be facing five English-as-a-Second
Language classes in a row—knows it, and the kids, be they Albanian hell raisers,
vatos locos from Aguadilla or wiseguy wannabees from Bensonhurst—surely know
it.
I don’t know it.
This will be a recurring theme in my life: eager
but unprepared; broke but already blowing my $40 day’s pay. I make my way down
to the cafeteria. Teachers in wide ties and plaid cardigan sweaters sit off to
one side like freaks in a carnival sideshow, many working on the baked fish
special. Too nervous to eat, I push a cup of green Jello around with a plastic
spoon.. After lunch, the dean appears and escorts me to a third floor classroom.
Like the Red Sea parting before Moses, students scramble out of his way,
shrugging off jeans jackets decorated with forbidden gang colors, snatching fedoras,
watch caps and Afro picks off their heads
“Is there a lesson plan?” I ask as we stand
outside the door.
In a perfect world, teachers are supposed to
prepare a detailed road map for substitutes to follow, thus ensuring continuity
of learning. He looks at me as if I’m speaking Chinese.
“Let’s see what we got here.”
He opens the door. A classroom full of
shouting 14-year-olds falls silent as a refectory in a Trappist monastery.
“Melvin, get to your seat,” the dean says. “NOW!”
Melvin is a character, a recurring nightmare I’ll
meet again and again in my five years in the New York City public school
system. This particular Melvin is short, skinny, loud, hyperactive, top of the
line ADD candidate in today’s schools. In a very few minutes, Melvin (why are
so many Puerto Ricans named Melvin?) will do his best get me fired—and possibly
imprisoned.
The intercom crackles. The dean, needed
elsewhere, vanishes. I have 45 minutes to fill on this first day of the rest of
my professional life. A wall of sound, maddening, unstoppable, assaults my
ears. My “teaching materials” consist of a few dozen raggedy copies of Junior Scholastic magazine, the crossword
puzzles filled in, pages torn or covered in crude drawings and misspelled obscenities.
I pass them out. The kids groan and toss them in the air. The seating plan is useless—I
don’t know anyone but Melvin and he’s back chattering away in Spanish to a girl
bursting out of her clothes in full post-pubescent flower.
I decide to write a few vocabulary words on
the “blackboard”—this is Brooklyn before the great cultural awakening —and run a
drill. The words come from an endless list—English and Latin—I was forced to
memorize in Catholic schools where the halls were silent as the Callixtus catacomb.
I’m reaching for a piece of chalk when first spitball hits me in the back of my
head; others zip past, sticking and then dripping down to the board like snail
smears. This accompanied by a chorus of giggles and shrieks of “Oh snap!” I
know if I turn around, Melvin and the other perpetrators will appear as innocent
as Raphael’s angels, but the odd thing is I find this hilarious funny, like watching
a character on “Happy Days,” or “Welcome Back Kotter.” I’m trapped in the
funhouse of my own sense of humor.
“Please copy these words into your notebooks,”
I say projecting gravitas.
A dozen students, mostly girls in the front
row, set to work. I risk turning my back to the snipers and add a few more
words. My plan is to “elicit”—an important word in pedagogy—definitions from
the students, discuss and refine. This, I’ve been told in otherwise useless
education class, is how real learning takes place. I sit down at the desk, flip
through the red plastic folder of Delaney cards (a system of miniature individualized
index cards used to tracl attendance, etc.) looking for this bastard Melvin’s
last name. Amazingly, the noise subsides
for a few minutes.
And suddenly, it builds into a devastating
chorus of panicked shouts.
“Melvin!
Melvin! Melvin!”
I look up. Students are out of their seats
screaming and pointing.
“MELVIN!!!”
I jump up. One of the unscreened classroom windows—it
seems wide as a barn door—is open.
“He fell out the window? Jumped? On my first
day! I haven’t even filled out my paperwork. What do I do?”
Nothing. I’m paralyzed.
Another round of screams, this echoing from down
the hall. I imagine Melvin in his thin red turtleneck and grey and black
checked pants smeared on the concrete three stories below. I see tonight’s tabloid
headlines, “Teacher Dawdles Student Falls To Death.”
Gloria reads the Daily News and Mirror.
A pounding
on the classroom door. I stagger over. A teacher I remember eating baked fish
in the cafeteria staring at me wordlessly. Melvin’s left ear is pinched between
his thumb and forefinger, high and hard enough so that the boy—grinning (!)—is standing
on his tiptoes. While my back was turned, Melvin apparently decided to climb
out the window as a joke and inched backwards, his sneakers barely gripping the
tiny ledge, 50 feet to the next classroom, where he was spotted and hauled in
like a mackerel.
The bell rings and my students vanish, Melvin
skipping down the hall not a care in the world.
I’ve
got another class in five minutes.
Somehow, I survive the semester at Enrico
Fermi. In winter for fun, our students form a firing squad across narrow Starr
Street and pound their hapless teachers with snowballs as we exit the building.
One day, another substitute, John McDonagh, and I have had enough of the daily
gauntlet. We fire back and sure enough, I bloody one particularly annoying
kid’s nose with a chunk of ice. I’m called into the principal’s office for a
disciplinary hearing. By then, Melvin
and his hermanos recognize my blue Alfa
Romeo and fearing reprisals, I’m forced to park farther and farther away from
the building. I’m up to ten blocks when I hear of an opening for an English
teacher in a leafy junior high in solidly middleclass Bensonhurst, a position
as rare and unlikely as a white whale.
