Dave's Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Three: The New York Institute
Two yellow school buses picked us up early Monday morning to take us to C.I.S. 22, the middle school assigned to us for teaching in the Bronx. The first of our five weeks in New York consisted of intense training inside vacant classrooms. The hundred-some-odd Teach For America corps members were divided into six groups, each led by a CMA ("Corps Member Advisor"). Nick was in my CMA group, as were quite a few other Baltimore corps members. Our team was led by a TFA veteran named John White, a fellow UVA grad who had been teaching in New Jersey.
Any success that I can claim as a teacher has to be attributed to John White. His enthusiasm, creativity, and leadership were personality traits that I constantly tried to emulate over the five weeks of training and through out my year of teaching. By the end of New York, a few people noted how similar I had become to John (I was "Little John"). This is the John who told us a story (and he'd probably kill me if he knew I was writing this) about being so frustrated with his class that he walked out and came back in with a grocery bag over his head. About his failed "wheel of consequences" discipline system. About his imaginative idea to use paper remote controls to teach parts of speech. He always carried a clipboard around (the "tool of the visionary" as he put it), constantly spinning it around in his hand; to this day, my clipboard never leaves my side while I'm in the classroom.
The first week rushed by, and I started to become saturated with all things teaching. Lesson plans, reading strategies, gradebooks, bathroom procedures, diversity awareness and discipline systems were always on my mind. We would bounce back and forth between workshops and end the day reviewing and discussing it all with John. To say this was a crash course is an understatement, but everything was presented extremely well and I learned so much in that first week. At the end of the week, we were assigned in groups of four to classrooms. We would spend the next four weeks here, teaching real kids in real summer school and giving them real grades. No animatronic or virtual test classroom here. We were thrown into Mrs. Henry's classroom at the end of the second floor hallway, given a few textbooks and materials, and learned firsthand about how to teach. My group consisted of another Baltimore guy, Kendall, and two girls headed to California, Sara and Allison. We would usually teach for 90 minutes by ourselves, but we worked together as a group for most activities outside of the classroom.
Donnell was a kid who read on a second grade level in the 6th grade. He showed up less than half of the time and liked to sleep, but we could have great video game conversations. Nereida was a 6th grader in summer school for her poor math scores. She was talkative and liked to draw me pictures of the cartoon character Tweety. Orlando and Luis loved baseball and were native Spanish speakers; 12-year-old Orlando told us how proud he was working as a bag boy at a grocery store to make some money for his family. Our classroom of 12 students had enough to motivate me for the rest of the year. After a workshop on the importance of parent interaction, I gave Nereida's mother a call to tell her how well her daughter was progressing. Tears were audible on the other line. "Thank you. No teacher has ever called home before. She's so smart, I'm so proud of her, thank you so much." That phone call will stick with me forever. It's the day that I learned how much responsibility a teacher has to help his or her students succeed in life. The job suddenly became a hundred times more important.
So the teaching and learning part of the TFA institute was stressful and challenging, but we still managed to have a great time through it all. We had a crazy bus driver named Ruben who spoke little English except for "Vamanos!", which is exactly what he yelled when he raced the other bus home one day and cut off an ambulance to do so. On the last day of school, he stopped by an open fire hydrant that kids were playing in and everyone in the bus ran through the water and got squirted by water guns. These kids had tried to hit our bus with water every day, and they couldn't believe it when their daily target stopped in the middle of the street and unloaded dozens of teachers. Ruben has become a legend with the Baltimore TFA corps ("Were you on the bus the time Ruben ran five red lights?"). I managed to get to Times Square more than once, spending most of my time in the giant Toys R Us. I danced to Nsync's "Bye Bye Bye" at a bar and watched Nick con people with card tricks. Jasmine flew in to visit one weekend while my soon-to-be-roommates Nick, Mike, and Tammer drove to Baltimore and called with the good news of finding a house. I drew comics for our TFA school newspaper. The Baltimore corps became extremely tight during this time, mainly because we were familiar with each other from our pre-induction. Baltimore teachers claimed a local bar called "The Jolly Tinker" as our own, and we were known to frequent the place two or three times a week. I could go on and tell you tales about every night, especially how Nick had a knack for getting people mad at him, but maybe those stories are better left untold.
I was also determined to start a prank war with the other regions, although no one ever fought back. Based on a prank I had seen at UVA, I made hundreds of copies of a flyer for someone selling their Playstation 2 video game system for $50 because "institute was taking up too much time." Then I put a completely random California corps member's phone number on it and plastered them all over Fordham. When I tried calling the number a few days after the prank, I got a message with a slightly irritated voice saying "If you're calling about the PS2, it's gone - we sold it pretty quickly." Nick and I prank-called dozens of people. Kate and I made a fake TFA merchandise website and put the URL in everybody's mailboxes. Very few people ever found out that I was behind everything, but I felt that a good old-fashioned prank war would help brighten spirits.
So I was a little surprised when our TFA school director, Parag Joshi, asked to see me one morning. He asked if I knew anything about corps members getting prank calls from someone claiming to be a "CMD - Corps Member Detective." I said yeah, that was me. He said the office had received several complaints about how TFA was accusing people of things like stealing school supplies, and how it made TFA as an organization look bad. I understood his point, not believing that anyone could have taken these calls seriously. Parag then asked if there was anything else I would like to tell him, a knowing look in his eyes as he scribbled down some notes on a yellow legal pad. I caved and confessed to everything. Parag shook his head and told me that he was disappointed and expected more from me. Unsure of what my consequence would be, I braced for the worst. Parag said he wanted an apology letter in his hands the next day, which would then be copied and put in each corps member's mailbox. I walked back in my classroom, head down, when Kendall told me to turn around. I did, and saw Parag laughing as hard as he could through the window in the door. The biggest prank of the institute had been pulled on me - it was all a set-up. I think I ran outside and gave Parag a huge hug.
As institute winded down, I was ready to go home. I wanted my own classroom and was excited to implement everything that I had learned. Truly, I walked out as a different person. Teach For America did about a good a job as possible with preparing us for what lay ahead. Sara and I found a plastic yellow clipboard that our CMA group signed and gave to John on the last day - the "golden clipboard." Parag asked me to give a speech at our school the last day, so I somehow tied in the prank war to teaching. Finally, in an outdoor talent show of sorts, I played guitar and sang about TFA over songs like Complicated, Hot in Herre, Without Me and Straight Up. As I rode the train back with my friend Aileen, my tired mind tried to remember how much was packed in during those five weeks, from Nereida's supposed crush on me to some great one-on-one conversations with John. New York faded behind me, and my thoughts turned to how I was going to decorate my classroom in Baltimore. The first day of school was less than a month away.
(Dave's TFA Chronicles are eight short stories about Dave's job as a Language Arts teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools from 2002 to 2003. Read the other chapters: one two three four five six seven eight)
Sunday, May 4 at 10:51 AM
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