The Teach For America Chronicles

The following is an eight-chapter retrospective about my experience as a first-year teacher in the Baltimore City Public School system. No Child Left Behind? Thousands of children are being left behind and deprived of their full potential through this country's lopsided education system. Teach For America is a step in the right direction (and I remain a firm advocate of the organization), but the goal of equality in education is still far from a reality. The following is my story; the experience of one teacher in one school in one American city.



Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter One: Recruitment

During my summer breaks from college, I worked at a day care center in Burke, Virginia called Kiddie Country. It was a perfect job for an overgrown kid like me. Days consisted of epic hide-and-go-seek games, beating difficult Game Boy Advance levels, field trips all over the DC region, getting pushed into the swimming pool, singing, drawing, and other general elementary school stuff. Three other staff members made up our summer elementary team, who looked over about 31 kids. We didn't really teach per se, unless you count the time I taught them the moves to Nsync's Bye, Bye, Bye for their Parent Spring Program.

Enter the college job search, post-9/11 economy. I decided I wanted my job to consist of two things: 1) kids and 2) helping others. Naturally, teaching sprang to the front of my mind. It was in my third year of college when first I heard about Teach For America. Peace Corps always interested me, but TFA was part of Americorps, more like a domestic peace corps. An older friend who was in a few of my English classes had just been accepted. She was excited to be moving to California to teach. This sounds good, I thought. She was a smart, established person at UVA. She must know what she's doing.

My fourth year rolls around and there's a TFA information session held in the basement of our charity organization, Madison House. I remember being the first one to help myself to a drink and thinking first impressions, don't spill, don't spill as I poured Sprite from a two-liter bottle into a small paper cup. The info session was great; a UVA alum and DC corps member led the show and answered most of my first questions. I picked up an application and several info packets and felt that this job was right up my alley. A two year commitment meant I could move on if things didn't work out in the teaching world. A handful of friends were at the meeting too, which was comforting.

One day I walked into the Cavalier Daily newspaper offices and was given an assignment to draw a picture for an accompanying article about Teach For America. A UVA graduate had quit her job after just three weeks. Seven murders occurred outside her school during training, rats were thrown at new teachers, and school fires were common. You guessed it...this person who quit was my friend. Crap.

TFA continued to get some negative press, but I remained hopeful. I even drew an editorial cartoon about the situation. I browsed through the application over winter break and started thinking about my site assignment. TFA places corps members in 18 regions across the United States. On the application, you rank the sites and there's no guarantee that you will get your first choice (although most people get one of their top three). I wanted to stay close to home (Burke, Virginia), but I wanted to try something different than Washington, D.C. I had always liked Baltimore when we saw Orioles games, and the site brochure showed that the cost of living was considerably lower than most of the other regions. I thought strongly about New York and Atlanta, but I decided that a first-year teacher salary wouldn't allow me to save as much in those two cities. My final ranking was Baltimore, D.C., Atlanta, New York.

I found out through the mail about a month later that I had been accepted for an interview at UVA. Not only would I be interviewed, but I also had to plan a five-minute lesson to teach to the other applicants. Any subject, any grade, any style. I'll never forget the night before the interview. I was stressed out beyond all belief, still undecided about what to teach. My girlfriend Jasmine helped me decide on "Mr. Werner teaches second-graders how to draw a fish." She printed out the individual shapes that would together form a fish and let me borrow markers and construction paper. I tested it out on her, word-for-word, a few times. I was finally ready.

I only semi-recognized one friend-of-a-friend out of the interview group of about 15. Two women ran the interview. First, the bad news. They let us know that, due to either the present state of the economy or more exposure, their expected applicant pool had doubled. They would still be accepting about 20% of their applicants. Before those pessimistic numbers sank in, it was time to start the lessons. Most people did a really good job. There was only one that I remember being painful to sit through; some girl was teaching us about plural predicates and I don't think any of us had a clue what she was talking about. I was towards the end. I passed out the materials to my "students" and taught them, step-by-step, how to draw a football-shaped fish. The interaction was fun, and I made fish faces and bubble noises...the works. Five minutes raced by and I just managed to squeeze everything in. I remember feeling that I had messed up because I threw some of the example shapes on the floor while I moved on. Pretty soon it was time for a group interview, a roundtable discussion of education. It was like any bad college discussion section where the one annoying guy dominates the show. I think I got one comment in. Annoying guy was talking about politicians and the government, I don't know, I wasn't really following much. We took a break for lunch and then it was one-on-one interview time

The half-hour interview started off great when the interviewer, a UVA alum, said that she had read my comic online and was glad to finally meet me. That made the rest of the interview go by a lot easier, and I left feeling good about my chances. But here's the best part of the story, in true Zack Morris-esque form. Walking home one night later, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the two recruiters sitting in Arch's, an ice cream place right near my house. They were both going through paperwork and folders; their notes on the applicants and their applications. So I went back home and changed into some nicer clothes, then walked back into Arch's, pretending not to see them while I waited to order. I heard some chattering followed by one of them calling my name. I turned around, feigning surprise, and started a quick five-minute conversation. I asked them how long they were here, how the rest of the interviews went, what ice cream they were having, you know, the usual. I left with a chocolate brownie sundae and everybody smiling.

Shortly after I received a letter in the mail confirming my acceptance into Teach For America and my placement as an English teacher in Baltimore city. Finally, I had a job offer. I was pretty much the last one in my circle of friends to get one. It didn't seem possible that I would be by myself out in the real world in a few months. I flipped through the gajillion (that's a lot) papers TFA sent me. Summer Institute in New York? Pre and post-inductions in Baltimore? Praxis testing? Maryland teacher certification? Whatever I thought that my Teach For America experience would be from these papers was waaay off. I got incredibly tired of people responding to my good news with "Ooh, Baltimore inner-city schools. You're going to have your eyes opened." Seriously, everyone said I was going to have my "eyes opened." How bad could it be?



Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Two: Road To New York

There was a small reception at the Biltmore (a popular Charlottesville bar and restaurant) for those students accepted into Teach For America. I got to meet the three other UVA'ers going to Baltimore and have some questions answered by the same guy who ran the first info session I attended. Almost immediately after graduating in May, there was a three-day pre-induction in Baltimore. The Baltimore directors asked us to bring up some completed forms and resumes along; we would be visiting a Baltimore City job fair during our stay, as well as checking out possible places to live and getting acquainted with the schools. I drove down one afternoon, checked into the hotel, and watched that show for several hours where the guy talks to dead people. I was pretty early.

Slowly but surely, more people started settling in. I went to dinner with five other guys and I was silent for the most part, taking in the conversations around me. Kendall was moving in with his girlfriend, Dave went to college in New York and Jesse was engaged at one time. When we went back, a TFA crowd had formed in the hotel lounge area and we joined in. The crowd got bigger through out the night, and although I don't really remember any of the conversations, I met most of my future Baltimore friends for the first time that night. I went back to the room early, borrowing a cell phone to give Jasmine a call and calling it a night.

I'm not sure of what order the other pre-induction activities went in, but I remember a few highlights. We went on a fairly boring "Live Baltimore!" bus tour of the various city neighborhoods, but not even the exclamation mark could liven things up. Andrew Newman continually asked the tour guide if there were any good Mexican restaurants, the only bright moment in an otherwise long and confusing trip. The job fair was a disaster - only certain schools were partnered with Teach For America, and only certain certain schools needed Language Arts teachers. It's interesting - I put down elementary as my grade level preference when I applied to TFA, but I just assumed they needed more middle school teachers when I was sent my assignment. I observed several teachers teaching at Robert Poole Middle School, including my future Program Director, Camika Royal (remember the name, she plays a prominent role later on in this journey). The classes were seemingly small and under control, and the teachers were excellent.

But it was at the Gin Mill bar and an after-party where things got interesting. One guy took my wallet from my pocket without me even realizing it. And so I met Nick, my future roommate. By the end of the night, we talked about trying to find a few other people to live together with. Nick then proceeded to continue his soon-to-be-infamous magic antics by levitating David-Blaine-style on the sidewalk, making up a story to this girl about being trained by monks. I was pretty sure that we would get along just fine.

When I came back home to Virginia, I went on a week-long vacation to St. Maarten with my family, only to turn right back around and head up to New York via train. The Teach For America Summer Institute was a five week "teacher boot camp" where we walked in as normal college students and would walk out as motivated save-the-world teachers. Headquarters was Fordham University in the Bronx. I walked from Penn Station to Grand Central and took the subway to Fordham (Dad had shown me numerous times how to get there on a map). It was a pretty cool feeling walking through the crowded tunnels of New York with 3 suitcases strapped all over me. It sank in that I would be a city kid for five weeks. Figuring my way around Grand Central was like a rite of passage or something.

I arrived at Fordham late that afternoon and picked up some forms, an ID tag and free stuff. I ran into Kate, a friend from UVA who was assigned to the Washington D.C. corps (New York was the training ground for about half of TFA; Houston held the others). I met my institute roommate, Akshay, and my old UVA roommate, Chris. Many of the Baltimoreans were housed in the same hallway of one dorm building, so I got to know a lot of them much better when we had to share a dorm bathroom. It was the first year of college all over again. I ran into Nick, who informed me that he'd added Mike and Tammer to our list of roommates. I was excited, especially after I actually met the two of them. Splitting the rent four ways was going to be helpful, and everyone seemed like they would get along well.

New York training was about to begin. On Monday I was reporting to to C.I.S 22 Middle School (hereafter known as "the double deuce") in the Bronx. The reality of having a job in the real world was sinking in. After a few days of training, I would be teaching a group of summer school students. These five weeks in New York were probably the most fun I had with Teach For America - and I was a changed person when I left.



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.



Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Four: First Quarter

"You're going to be an example we'll use in the future for someone who is flexible," a Teach For America employee told me. This was after she informed me that I was finally placed at Northeast Middle School #049, after being previously told I would be at Fallstaff Middle School and then Dr. Roland Patterson Academy. Every time they changed my assignment, the new school was closer to my home, so I didn't mind. My roommates and I settled into our house in Fells Point, a neighborhood that seemed to be gorgeous on one block and boarded up on the next. My room, the "football field room," stretched back deep into the house and gave me plenty of room for musical instruments and gear. It also had a door leading to a rooftop deck, a place where I'd eventually spend a lot of my nights watching the ships on the water and the airplanes coming to and from BWI Airport. I became much closer with my roommates. Nick and Tammer being great chefs and Mike owning a George Foreman Grill, we always had dinner together. Our stories and arguments were always something to look forward to.

Northeast held a new teachers' meeting a few weeks before school started, so I drove over and pulled up my plastic orange cafeteria chair into a group of about 12 other teachers. Mrs. Jones, our principal, led the meeting. This too was her first year as a principal, but she was energetic and excited about the newfound responsibility. The "Supreme Team" (as she dubbed it) of herself and the two assistant principals was going to make Northeast a "blue-ribbon school." It eased my nervousness and made me anxious to start decorating my classroom. After the meeting, Mrs. Jones opened up the supply room and pretty much said the equivalent of "go nuts." A world of construction paper, yarn, chalk, staplers, folders, tape and markers appeared on endless metal racks, and like the proverbial kid in the candy store, I grabbed anything and everything. For someone who has always loved art, it felt like I was looting a craft store to get these huge baskets of materials. Mrs. Freeman, the 6th grade assistant principal, gave me my schedule: Classes 704, 604 and 608 for 90 minutes everyday. It was one seventh grade class and two sixth grade classes, so she informed me that I would be teaching in two different rooms. When we walked upstairs, I found out that these weren't rooms; these were open-space.

From what I've heard, open-space was an idea from someone's college thesis that said schools shouldn't have walls or doors. The idea was, if a student in one class wasn't paying attention, maybe he or she would listen to and learn from the adjacent classes. Maybe it sounds good on paper, but it creates a cacophony in reality. Most teachers at Northeast taught in classrooms - the seven other TFA teachers at my school did - but each grade subschool had a large open space that was divided into three rooms by several partitions and dividers showing the perimeter. Mrs. Freeman showed me my rooms, which in both grades were sandwiched in the middle of the three open-space rooms. Luckily, I ran into my mentor, a woman whose job it was to help new teachers through out our first year. She convinced Mrs. Freeman to just let me have the room in the 6th grade wing so I wouldn't have to switch or decorate two classrooms.

And decorate I did. When I did Summer Day Care at Kiddie Country, we always had theme weeks where we would decorate the classroom. My perennial favorite was the outdoors week, where I turned the classroom into a jungle. So that's what I did here too. About 30 huge green construction paper palm fronds hung from the ceiling with green yarn vines strewn about. A cartoon monkey and a snake were hidden behind some leaves. Then I took a huge slab of cardboard from our house's Ikea purchases and created a sign that said "Welcome to the Language Arts Adventure...with your tour guide, Mr. Werner." Apparently word got around TFA quickly because a lot of corps members said they had heard about the jungle classroom. I had learned over the summer how important creating a positive classroom environment was to teaching, so I probably went a little overboard. But this was my room, my office, my domain. I loved it. I also took an old Bruce Lee college poster from Enter The Dragon and drew him a book and a "#1 Harry Potter Fan" tee-shirt. "Reading...it's a kick!" It was so corny and yet simultaneously so awesome.

Before the school year started, I began to learn about the paperwork outside of the classroom. This is the part that most people don't see. You needed to write a lesson plan every day following a specific format, with a learning objective written in a "know / by" format, like The student will know how to identify an adjective by completing several workbook exercises and participating in a group activity. Good planning equals good instruction, so I had no problems with that. Grade books, attendance books, a lesson plan book; still no problems. Then there was the DSA portfolio (DSA stands for something important, I'm sure), supposedly one of the items that would determine my evaluation rating at the end of the year. It had to consist of student samples, parent phone call logs, documentation of everything and show improvement over the course of the year. There were also writing folders, where students had to follow a cookie-cutter essay writing format and record and store all of their writing for the year. There was a list of content standards to follow (so if you're teaching prepositions, they need to follow standard 6.12.3.a, and that should be documented in your lesson plan). Individually, these all seem like good ideas. Together, they become roadblocks to actually teaching something meaningful. The state gave me a curriculum, told me what textbook stories my kids had to read and what skills they had to know, but didn't say how.

I began to plan for the year and quickly realized the immense challenge of making these things interesting for the students. Matthew Henson, among the first people to reach the North Pole and a prominent African-American explorer, had a 15-page biography that started out our year with a resounding booooooring. Someone falls in the ice and dies, but the excitement of finding the North Pole on page 14 wasn't going to wow these students. The worksheets and teacher's edition we were given continued the stale instructional trend. So I began making my own worksheets, following a lot of the same principals I used with the comic strip that I drew in college. Cameron and Ashley were joined by Marlon and Jasmine, and their cartoon faces appeared on all our work and their names were in all of our examples. I also hid a star on each worksheet and gave the kids an extra point if they circled it...anything to grab their attention.

The first day of school arrived with much anticipation and preparation. I did the standard "here are the rules and emergency contact information" routine while wearing a fedora hat and giving a tour of the classroom with an attempt at an Australian accent. We went around the room and the students introduced themselves too - everyone, in all of my classes, except for Paul. Paul didn't want to say his name or anything about himself. I accounted it to shyness and let it slide, but told him I'd be talking to his mother soon about classroom participation. It was a great first day, and some students were already winning my heart over. The biggest surprise was the roster for 604: they had 44 students on roll. Marshall and a few other kids had to sit on a stack of newspapers in the back of the classroom when we ran out of desks, but they didn't seem to mind too much. 44 students squeezed together in a middle open-space classroom made things tight, but we managed.

704, my 7th grade class, was first period every day. They had their share of talkers and attitudes, but I loved them. For the most part, they were a well-behaved class with mostly polite and intelligent students. I guess every teacher has that one kid who latches on; that one kid who comes after school to help you put chairs up or wash the boards. It only took about a week to figure out that Sierra from 704 was going to be that student. I saw Sierra just about every day before, during, and after school. I walked Sierra and another student home one late day after school and remember the thrill in going down the "shortcut" through the woods that all the kids used to get to school. 604 and 608 were just getting adjusted to middle school and needed a little more growth in terms of behavior and language arts skills.

Over that first month, things quickly began to change. Students began to cut classes and roam the halls, running and yelling during my instruction. With no door, and "walls" that could be pushed over, nothing was stopping these children from entering my room and saying and doing whatever they wanted. Security, in the form of two guys with walkie-talkies, couldn't possibly handle the exponentially-growing swarms of roaming students. The fire alarms went off at least twice a day, and soon everyone learned to just ignore them. The kids knew how to turn on and off the hall lights and I was soon flicking my lights back on over 25 times a day (but sometimes just giving up and resorting to teaching in the dark). I was extremely self-conscious of how loud my classes were getting, especially when I had to respect the teachers and classes on either side of me. And some of these classes didn't get along and liked to throw things over the dividers. I remember one instance when the class next door threw crumpled paper balls and an all-out war almost erupted, with almost every student standing up to represent 604 with flying textbooks and pencils.

Management always was my weakest point in the classroom, and my discipline and consequences never seemed to work. Written apology letters didn't work. Students didn't show up for detention and my administration didn't seem to have strict consequences for skipping - in fact, we weren't allowed to keep students for detention without a day's notice. Taking points off grades only affected a handful of students. The last resort, parent phone calls, were a mixed bag. Some days I would talk to 10 grandmothers, moms and dads and see immediate behavioral changes in their children the next day. But one day in particular I remember calling 32 parents and not feeling any difference during class the next day. Regardless, I kept it up. Parental interaction was always something I tried to stick with, even if it meant calling some students' houses every day. A lot of the emergency contact numbers were wrong or disconnected, which led to a cell phone or work number search that usually left me empty-handed.

By my nature, discipline was hard. I consider myself extremely patient, laid back and generally optimistic, but I was being pushed in another direction. Politeness had run its course. It started to get to the point where I felt I had very little power in my classroom; I would be teaching something and feel like not a single student was paying attention to me no matter what exciting worksheet I had created. Most were talking to each other, yelling across the classroom or asking to get a pencil. Using a technique from the summer institute, students had to trade me one of their shoes if they wanted to borrow a pencil. That way, I always knew I would get my pencil back at the end of class. These students never took responsibility for their own actions; it was always someone else's fault. They liked to talk back and start arguments about why they weren't sitting down. They're just sixth and seventh graders, I kept reminding myself.

I lost it one day, and only one day. I had class 604 settled and was going over a new discipline system with warnings and a specific chain of consequences for misbehaving. I finished my speech and asked for questions, and Terri raised her hand. She asked me why I treated Jared, a Special Ed kid, differently from the rest of the class. The day before, Jared had hit another student and all he got was a phone call home from me. What she didn't know, or did know but chose not to say, was that Blake and Shaheen were saying things about his mother that, as I'm sure you can imagine, were extremely cruel and graphic. When I tried to respond, Terri interrupted me and kept on talking. I asked her politely to be quiet. Twice. Three times. Four times. Seventeen times later, Terri was still talking louder than ever. I exploded. I yelled, grabbed her worksheet, ripped it in half, threw the scraps across the room and told her to get out of my classroom. This was something I never thought I would be capable of, something I never would have imagined resorting to. The principal, who was on the other side of the school, heard me from all the way over and made her way into my classroom. She gave a short lecture to the class about how hard Mr. Werner works to plan for you and how you need to treat Mr. Werner with respect and she should never have to hear Mr. Werner yell like that again. Terri was suspended and I got a grain of confidence back.

After a suggestion from my roommates, I started an after school drawing club. Sierra was always there, but for some reason, a lot of the so-called "bad kids" seemed to come too. These kids were absolutely horrible for me in the classroom but completely different in a small group setting in the library. Paul, the defiant student from the first day of school, showed up regularly. One day my group of about 7 stayed until 5:00, freestyling, learning the Harlem Shake (ask me to do it the next time you see me), drawing decorations for my classroom and playing tackle football outside. Another TFA teacher told me that I shouldn't let the bad kids stay after school until they changed their behavior in my class. It was a good suggestion and I probably should have followed it, but these kids were gasping for attention and my heart usually overpowered my mind. Tuesdays after school became the one thing that I always looked forward to.

In the continuing effort to improve my discipline, I attended a TFA workshop on setting the students up into groups. Groups were positively rewarded by buttons (or tickets) that could be cashed in for prizes at the end of the week. Group activities encouraged talking, but it was better to talk about a graded assignment than how you were going to fight someone during lunch. It gave me a new burst of inspiration and I tried it in my classroom. It worked for only three weeks, but those were some great three weeks. Every strategy I had seemed to work for a couple of weeks but then run out of steam.

And then "the state" came in. They remind me of the Agents in the Matrix movies. Men dressed in suits approach in groups of three, walk around your classroom while you're teaching, take notes on their clipboards, ask some students questions about what they're learning, and then they're gone. They're paid more than teachers and many of them are former teachers, so tensions tend to rise when they appear. Here's where that extra paperwork comes in. Here's where those writing folders, content learning standard 7.3.6.b and that DSA portfolio need to be in order. I will never forget a lesson where I was teaching the students about facts and opinions and had them going through newspapers to find examples of both. A woman from the area office came in, sat me down, and informed me that I should have taught these students "newspaper etiquette" before the assignment; specifically, what a "gutter" was (the white space in between columns). The sarcastic Dave inside me said "Oh crap! I can't believe that I didn't think ahead enough during my fact and opinion planning to teach kids the life-saving skill of identifying gutters, but I'll try harder next time." Instead, I smiled and nodded.

Many teachers began to murmur about their disapproval of the way the administration was handling things. The same kids were roaming the halls and talking back to teachers, and nothing was being done. Kids were being given second, third, fourth and seventy-eighth chances and maybe a scary lecture. I was having a hard enough time controlling my classroom, let alone the dozens of kids outside of it at any given time. Punch a kid, get suspended, right? Punch a teacher, get expelled, right? Cuss out a teacher, get suspended, right? Well, okay, at least get detention or an alternative classroom setting? There were several instances of each of these, and sometimes no consequences were given by the administration. The consequences that were given were lifted when Mom came to school to complain about the unjust treatment of her child. The teacher next door to me was moved to another school, as was another teacher because "the state" said they were surplus. Three teachers quit, two women in the office were laid off, and one of our two security guards was taken away.

Nine weeks seemed like nine years for first quarter. My perceptions of this job before school and my reality now were on completely different ends of the spectrum. Grading was a simple system: above a 70% was passing, below was failing. Most kids hovered dangerously close to that percentage, and over half my students failed first quarter. I hoped it would be a wake-up call. Second quarter was about to begin, and the staff had an after school meeting to address some new concerns, specifically class size and student behavior. The enormous sixth-grade classes were broken up and a new 611 class was created. Because of the decrease in staff, many teachers' schedules were changed to pick up new classes. A xeroxed schedule was placed in my hand, and I searched for my name. To my surprise, Mr. Werner would now be teaching 704, 705 and 706 - all seventh grade. First quarter ended and second quarter, the most challenging part of my year, was about to begin.



Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Five: Second Quarter

For second quarter, I kept 704 (Sierra's class), dropped 604 and 608, and added 705 and 706. Planning with two different curriculums daily had been difficult, so I was relieved to stick with just the 7th grade. 704, my homeroom class, was still manageable but had a few new students added in after the schedule change. 705 was the most well-behaved class I had encountered over the entire year; 706 was the absolute worst-behaved class I had encountered over the entire year. Go figure. The good news was that I got to move to the vacant open-space class adjacent to me, which meant I had more room, board space and better desks. I took all my palm fronds and vines down and moved them to the new location.

I basically got to start over again with 705 and 706, which was great. I could be strict with consequences up front and start a new tone. It worked with 705, but not 706. I called most of their parents on the very first day. These guys were off the hook much more than my 6th graders had been. Now, instead of students just talking while I was trying to teach, 706 students liked to get out of their seats, play "trashketball", hit each other and complain that they got hit. Daryl in 706 became the bane of my existence. He was always in hyper-crazy-go-insane-swearing mode. My first-year mentor came into my class and helped me with some of the behavior problems, sometimes taking five or six of the troublemakers into a different room to complete assignments alone. Usually, though, I dreaded that last period 706 class. I never seemed to leave school on a good note.

The after school drawing club was losing its initial appeal, so I decided to start something new: a reading club. My parents gave me boxes of my old books, and I created a class library. I added a few incentives to stay after, like free point tickets or snacks and soda. It sold well, and I had about a dozen kids stay after during the first day, including some of my old 6th graders, and some kids who weren't even in my classes. And again, the "bad kids" liked to stay after with me. This is where I met the infamous Prince, a name I had heard teachers yell all over the school. Prince started to come visit me in the mornings too and borrowed some of my old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.

The school as a whole was getting more and more out of control. Now I was faced with an extra challenge: as the only 7th grade teacher in the 6th grade wing, I was on a different schedule than the surrounding classes. This meant for half of 705 and all of 706, I was the only teacher in the 6th grade wing. So all hall wanderers, all lightswitch flickers, and all friends in other classes knew that they wouldn't get caught in the 6th grade wing during those times. Almost every day things were thrown over my dividers when students entered the vacant classroom next door. Textbooks, paper, eggs, pencils and pens, trashcans, carrots, chairs - I saw them all airborne at some point, all hovering in what seemed like slow-motion over my students. The school was changing from just being out of control to dangerous. Even the well-behaved 705 class started to deteriorate after dodging projectiles from students hiding behind dividers. After one particularly bad incident where my student got clocked with a textbook, I had the students write about the lack of safety in the 6th grade hall and turned in the responses to the principal. Jordan, an absolutely brilliant student and just all-around good kid, wrote "I was scared today. I hid under my desk because I was afraid of getting hit by books." Regardless of our cry for help, the throwing continued.

Winter break could not have come at a better time. I needed a week to relax and think everything over, and then finish up the remaining month in the second quarter when I came back in January. On the day before break, Daryl from 706 came into my 705 class, saying that he had been kicked out of math. Not wanting him wandering around the halls, I sat him down in a corner and gave him paper and a pencil to draw with. As I was lining the students up for their next period, Daryl joined a group of my 705 students who weren't getting up just yet. They were playing paper-rock-scissors. I asked them to line up twice but they were too caught up in the game. Soon Daryl had added a new element to the game: hit the person on the back of the head who loses. Everyone laughed and thought that this was a great idea. By this time, I went over to the table and asked each student individually to line up. No one responded; it was like I wasn't even there. I turned around and decided to start taking the rest of 705 to their next class and hoped the paper-rock-scissors crew would quickly get up. I had made my way to the front of the room when I heard yelling, and I turned around to see the crowd of kids all getting their punches in for the loser of the game - a kid named Darnell.

And then I saw Daryl grab Darnell's head and slam it into the edge of the desk. The laughs turned into shock, the rest of 705 and the now-approaching 706 raced to the scene. "Get help now" I whispered to the nearest student, who ran downstairs. Blood covered Darnell's face and more blood on the desk was dripping onto the chair and carpet. I stood in absolute disbelief, unable to move or even process what had just happened - how Daryl could have been so cruel and violent as to intentionally do what he did. A teacher later criticized me for not immediately rushing to Darnell's aid. Another teacher criticized me for not breaking up the flurry of fists dished out to Darnell. I can't explain why I stood frozen there. I felt more powerless than ever in a place that I didn't want to be in. Darnell got stitches that afternoon.

The break was a reflective time. I thought about the year so far; what I had done wrong coupled with what kind of a world I was teaching in. I began to think about everything from quitting to moving to a different school to leaving after finishing the school year. I had never felt this unhappy before. When school started back up again, things seemed to be even worse. The ever-present hall wanderers were having races down my hallway. The water fountains were cut off because a study showed the pipes contained high traces of lead. Bathrooms had to be locked up because students were using the walls instead of the toilets (and yes, for #1 and #2). And then something unexpected happened in my personal life, and I suddenly felt alone at the most challenging point of my year. I spent my lunch periods locked up in the 6th grade planning room with my head down and my eyes closed while I listened to the yelling in the hallway outside. I would open a cabinet door slightly to block me so it would give me enough time to pretend I was eating if someone walked in the door. As a thin person who couldn't afford to lose much weight, I lost ten pounds.

The teacher next door to me was a woman originally from Trindad named Ms. Jacob. She had a thick accent that caused the kids to call her "Miss Cleo," but even they knew that she was an excellent teacher. She was only in her third year of teaching, but she was always someone that I could talk to for a direct, honest answer. She came up to me one morning, sensing something was even more wrong than usual, and asked me about it. I was writing an objective on the board, chalk in one hand, clipboard in the other, and just started crying. The kids began to walk in, and she took me to the 6th grade planning room and closed the door. We talked until the announcements were over and I composed myself again, but when I walked back into the classroom, I wished I was anywhere else but there. There was no such thing as a "good day" at Northeast. The days got progressively worse.

I know very little about the clinical nature of depression, but the days dragged on and I had no idea how I was going to survive two more quarters of this. I had exhausted myself on discipline, phone calls, making worksheets and instruction, but worst of all, I felt like I wasn't teaching these students anything. My save-the-world dreams of teaching had been reduced to a battle to survive. Second quarter was ending and few things made me happy. I had received a Nintendo Gamecube video game system for Christmas, and it frequently became an afterschool outlet, as did writing music and drawing. I met with Camika, my Teach For America program director, for a one-on-one midyear meeting. She had heard about the daily challenges from the other Northeast teachers, since everyone was having an extremely difficult time with the administration and our environment. I basically talked for 45 minutes, answering a list of questions about my year, and Camika gave me some ideas, strategies, and phone numbers to call.

With the help of an assistant principal, I was finally able to get in touch with Daryl's mother. We sat down with Daryl in the 6th grade office and talked for a half hour. It was visible that Daryl's mom was trying hard with him, but now she seemed helpless. "I don't know what else to do anymore," she said several times during our conversation. "I even took Christmas away from him." The kid inside me slumped as I looked at Daryl's gaze at the wall. His mother and I left the meeting with more questions than answers. During one particularly difficult day at school, I dropped 706 off but asked Daryl to come with me. We sat down in the 6th grade office and just talked. We talked like two kids, especially about video games. And Daryl pretty much told me his life story. He sometimes saw his Dad, and his older brother worked at the BWI Airport. He had to go to court once a month because he had told a teacher he wanted to kill her. This was after she ripped up his drawing of Pikachu that he had worked hard on. So I asked Daryl if he wanted to stay after school on Wednesdays for a couple of hours to do extra work so he could pick up his grade, but also to play Game Boy Advance video games. He agreed and asked me to call his mom for permission. I did, and she thanked me.

Second quarter ended with the same things being thrown and the same battles being fought, but connecting with Daryl was the first bright point of teaching that I had seen in a long time. The first day he stayed after, we read an textbook story about Jackie Robinson together and played Bomberman Tournament by linking our systems together. Again, what was it with me and this attraction to the so-called bad kids? I always chalked it up to my inexperience and thought they liked me just because they could get away with anything while I was around. But Daryl was starting to change my mind.



Dave's Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Six: Third Quarter

As an uncertified teacher instructing in Baltimore City Public Schools, the agreement the city makes with an organization like TFA is that we have to be working towards our certification. Because of this, I had to take education courses at Johns Hopkins University. When you think of Johns Hopkins, you think prestige, right? Johns Hopkins Hospital is known nationwide for being incredible. My second semester JHU class, however, was the most worthless and poorly instructed class I have ever taken in my life (including Mrs. Branch's 3rd grade class, where God only knows how I learned multiplication). It was a class on reading, taught by a woman who had been a reading specialist in the Baltimore City system for many years. She had a knack for showing up late or not showing up at all. The two times that she didn't show up at all were unannounced, so we waited around until the famous college "15 minute rule" went into effect. Even worse, she never gave any explanation for her absences in the following weeks.

No one had any idea what grade we were getting in the class - some papers got number grades, some got checks, and barely any had comments written on them. Nick was so sure that the professor didn't read our papers that he turned in one assignment twice, simply changing the names in the first paragraph to reflect the new article we were critiquing. Some of her classes were "e-classes" where she met with us for five minutes and vaguely told us to find "20 reading strategies" on the internet by the next week. Then, after one of her unexplained absences, she lectured us about how unprofessional our work was. When she couldn't pronounce "Saddam Hussein" and called the teaching practice of differentiation "differation," our standards for this so-called graduate level "reading" class were lowered. The Tuesday night class mainly consisted of our TFA friends, and all of my roommates were enrolled with me, so their sense of humor was the only thing that kept me smiling. Well, that and the time we drank during class (which apparently caused some ripples in the TFA office, but trust me, it helped alleviate the pain).

The little optimism that I had from working with Daryl at the end of the second quarter seemed to domino into more good things. The school's problems were at a fever pitch, with the administration as unresponsive as ever, but I was almost getting used to the things being thrown in my class or the names I was called by students roaming the hallways. I started to take things a little less seriously, because all I felt that I could do sometimes was laugh. I remember one time when I was reading a story aloud to my students and a crowd of about 10 hall wanderers decided to hang out and be as loud as humanly possible in the sixth grade hallway. Then the fire alarm went off, then more kids ran in, and then the lightswitches starting flicking on and off - you know, the usual. I stood up on my desk and never stopped reading. Two of my students positioned themselves with their textbooks by the lightswitches in my room and matter-of-factly turned the lights back on whenever they went out, without even being asked. They were also used to this insanity, but their willingness to keep reading and learn was admirable to me.

A student from 705 gave me my first present of the year, for no particular reason - a miniature statue of a wizard that looked similar to Dumbledore from the Harry Potter books (sometimes I would talk to my classes with a British accent, which always got their attention and sometimes quieted them down). Scribbled on the box was "To the best teacher ever!" I thanked him and kept the statue on my desk in the sixth grade planning room, a reminder that there was good amidst all the bad. The depression I was feeling over the second quarter was slowly crumbling. I started giving rides to work to my coworkers and neighbors Matt and Randy, whose company in the mornings was especially nice to have. Visits from my college and high school friends helped keep me in good spirits over the weekends, especially a particularly wild weekend with my old bandmates Don and Jeff. Things were gradually getting better, which of course meant that something bad was bound to happen soon.

A first-year writing teacher that I had immense respect for, Ms. Zimmer, quit her job at Northeast in a flurry of tears. When the "state" guys in suits came around one day, she handed them a huge stack of papers documenting how the administration had responded questionably to certain incidents. Those papers may have been the catalyst for something that eventually happened during the fourth quarter, but we'll get to that later. Two more teachers quit and they sent in two replacements; the replacements quit too. One teacher was asked to leave after supposedly hitting a student. Even the librarian left. The 6th grade assistant principal left temporarily for bereavement. Our staff numbers were dropping fast and several teachers that were sticking around had poor attendance. So what happens when you don't have enough teachers and the substitutes don't want to come to your school? The administration or the few office aids we had left would cover the classes, or certain brave teachers combined their classes with the teacher-less classes. But sometimes the classes didn't even have a teacher at all. The open space in the eighth grade wing, now vacated by Mrs. Zimmer and an older teacher that left after her husband passed away, seemed at times like an unsupervised war zone. I saw paint splashed onto dividers. I saw a trashcan thrown at someone and trash covering the entire floor. I saw kids wrestling in the empty rooms and substitutes looking helplessly at me. I heard the frustrated janitors cursing under their breath, or sometimes out loud.

An "emergency meeting" was announced after school one day. We had elective classes at our schools, classes like art, music, health, and Spanish, but the students hadn't been switched over to their new electives at the end of the first semester like they should have. These schedule changes were the supposed reasons for the meeting. I came to the meeting a little late because of some after school students, and sat down in a familiar plastic orange cafeteria chair. Mrs. Jones, the Prinicipal, was just finishing saying how we should congratulate Mr. Coury on being so flexible. Mr. Coury, Matt, was one of the people I drove to work every morning. I later found out the he would now be teaching all new classes in a new subject, Language Arts, instead of Social Studies to fill a vacancy in the eighth grade. She followed this announcement with a comment about thanking me on being flexible too. Wait a second...what was going on here...why was I flexible too? And just like the end of the first quarter, a new xeroxed schedule was placed in front of me. As of the following week, I would be losing my seventh grade classes and teaching all sixth grade classes.

I called Camika, my TFA Program Director, and just said that I needed someone to talk to. She listened as I told her how my classes were completely changed again, and the frustration that I was feeling with never being able to hold on to my students. No more Daryl. I was losing 704 - my homeroom, my favorite class, the one with Sierra in it. How was I expected to make significant progress with my students when the school took them away from me every three months? She helped me cool my mind, and I ended the conversation feeling a little better about the situation - maybe it was a blessing in disguise. It solved the problem of being the only 7th grade teacher in the sixth grade wing. I had taught one class, 608, during the first quarter, so at least there would be some familiar faces. I would get to talk to the other 6th grade teachers during lunch instead of locking myself up in the planning room alone. Luckily, this change turned out to be the best thing that happened to me all year.

I said goodbye to my 7th grade classes at the end of the week and welcomed 611, 607 and 608 at the start of the next. My new classes were smaller in size and the students seemed better behaved. 611, my new homeroom, was the class that we had to create because of the saturation of kids during the first quarter. Although they were my smallest class, they were the most difficult to control. Several personalities clashed and there were a good amount of consistent talkers. But they were more manageable than Daryl's 706 class, and 607 and 608 were angels when compared to my seventh graders. I was a little more motivated to be creative with these classes and try some techniques that they would actually listen to. To help teach cause and effect, I secretly told a student in each class to come up and tap me on the shoulder when I started teaching. When they did, I unexpectedly drew a plastic lightsaber out of my pocket and swung it out, stopping inches in front of the student's face. Yeah, THAT got their attention. I copied off an interview from Vibe magazine with the popular rapper 50 Cent and we talked about his use of metaphors and whether dissing Ja Rule on his records was personal or just part of the culture. Teaching became a little more enjoyable, dare I even say fun on some days.

My students were doing classwork in 607 one day when a group of three hall-wandering boys started yelling things into my class. I asked them politely to leave, and suprisingly, they did. Ten minutes later, one of the boys came back and began talking through my flimsy divider walls to a female student in my class. He proceeded to walk into my class, walk in the back of the room, and start pushing her. I sighed as the lights began to flicker on and off and I walked to the back of the class. "I'm gonna fight you," he kept on repeating as he grabbed her arms and pushed her around. Now out of her seat and cornered against the wall, I asked my student to please sit down and asked this student whom I had never seen before to please leave. Both ignored me, and the boy's behavior was becoming increasingly more physical, shaking her back and forth. In an attempt to distract him, I noticed that he was wearing a hat indoors - which was against school rules. I took his hat and told him once again to leave. Like a moth to the flame, he stopped pushing my student and pushed me as I swung his hat behind my back. "Give me my hat back," he muttered, continually pushing me until my back was against the wall. 607 started to get out of their seats and stand up. Very patiently, I continually repeated that he needed to please leave my classroom. He backed off and started to swear at me, calling me every racial slur and word imaginable. This caused one of the teachers in a nearby classroom to open her door and see that there was a problem. She called down to the office for help via the intercom system in her room. The unknown male student went to a nearby stack of textbooks and my reading club books and threw them to the ground in anger, still swearing at the top of his lungs. He snatched one book and motioned once, twice, and three times like he was going to smash me in the face with it. I stood my ground, continuing to ask him to please leave my classroom. He then threw the book down as hard as he could at the ground and attempted to grab his hat again, this time even more enraged than before. My back to the wall, I sandwiched the hat and continued my repeated message quietly.

He backed up a step, yelled something, and punched me with a closed fist in the left side of my head, directly behind and above my ear. The other side of my head slammed into the wall right behind me, and a burning sting seemed to echo through my skull.

I stared at the faded blue carpet for a second and then looked back at the unknown student. I held the hat tighter than before and quietly said, "Please leave my classroom." The boy walked away, swearing and stomping down the hall. He threw open the sixth grade doors and left the wing. "I'm fine, I'm fine," I said to break the awkward silence of 607. "Please just sit down." A minute passed, and the boy came back through the doors, now yelling about how he was going to shoot and kill me. Help finally arrived in the form of a male social studies teacher from the opposite side of the wing, who grabbed the kid and dragged him into the sixth grade planning room. It was close to the end of the period, so I lined my class up and walked them down to lunch.

As soon as I dropped my class off, Mrs. Jones asked me to come to her office. I talked to a school police officer on the phone - he was busy with a high school, so he wasn't able to come down to Northeast. He took my incident report and information verbally and informed me what I needed to do if I wanted to press charges against the student. One of our assistant principals rushed in and said that the student had left the building after she handed him his suspension papers. He was an eighth grade student. I filled out some official school forms and listened as Mrs. Jones called in six students from 607. They individually gave their testimonies as to what happened, and then filled out some forms too. One of the students was the girl who he had been trying to fight in the first place - and she revealed that she didn't even know him; the first time she had seen him was when he was yelling from the hallway. After about an hour and a half in the office, I left and slowly walked up to join the sixth grade teachers for lunch. As I walked back, I began to second-guess myself. I should have just given him his hat back. I should have called down to the office when the three boys were first yelling things into my room. I walked into the planning room, sat down with the unusually quiet sixth grade teachers, and gave an abbreviated version of the story I had written down several times downstairs. They offered their support, which was comforting. When everyone left to prepare for their last period classes, I sat at the table alone and stared at the cabinet door I used to swing open to hide behind during the second quarter. I heard the familiar yells of students roaming in the halls. I ran my fingers through my hair, feeling the bump that was forming underneath it. I remember continually looking at my fingers, thinking that I would see blood after I felt the unnatural sticking of my hair. I stopped my second-guessing but forced myself not to process everything that had happened yet as I walked out to teach 608.

I started class with the story of what had happened, since they had all heard someone had punched me but I hadn't punched him back. They were full of questions, and everyone wondered why I hadn't hit back. I wasn't sure, I said. I told them that I didn't know what consequences would have been brought up against me for hitting a student, whether I acted in self-defense or not, but that I didn't want to risk losing my kids. They class went on normally, with one boy asking for the student's name so he could go beat him up with his friends after school. I didn't, but thanked him just the same. After school, several teachers, especially the TFA teachers, gathered in my room as one of the assistant principals held another "emergency meeting" about the events of the day. Suggestions, comments, and opinions swirled around me, but I didn't say anything, absorbing the urgent voices. When someone commented on how slow and non-existent security help had been even after being called down to the office, the assistant principal suggested using a code word for calling to the office with extreme cases - "Code Word Buffalo."

A mental avalanche of the lack of administrative support I had been experiencing for the entire year drifted through my head. They were quick to help me immediately after the incident occurred, but why was there an eighth grader in the first place skipping class in the sixth grade wing when it was the third quarter of the school year? They knew that this was a problem and nothing was ever taken care of. Now their solution was "Code Word Buffalo?" Where was I teaching? Why was I here, continuing to feel depressed and being tossed around to different classes every quarter? Why was I staying and listening to this painfully clear lack of leadership? Three TFA teachers took me out to a bar afterwards and we thankfully didn't talk about school - mostly about their past boyfriends actually, if I remember correctly. I drove back home to my family in Burke, Virginia that weekend. While being stuck in rush hour traffic, I began to look back on my year and think about how honestly unhappy I was. My loyalty to Teach For America's two year commitment was mixed with my realization of how mentally and emotionally drained I was, whether that was due to my inexperience or my environment (but probably both). I thought about an information session that I had gone to at UVA about a graduate school in Atlanta called Portfolio Center, and how I had left the meeting enthusiastic, motivated, and happy. It was always in the back of my mind, a place that I thought I would look into after my two years in Baltimore. But its appeal rocketed to the front of my mind during that car trip home, and I decided fairly concretely to leave teaching when the school year ended.

Why didn't I quit right then and there? So many other teachers at our school had, veteran and new alike. Most people were surprised that I even stuck around to teach 608 after being punched in the head, thinking that it was perfectly acceptable to leave school and take a few days off. The truth was, I hadn't missed a day of school, only really because of something the TFA Summer Institute had said about the importance of being there every day for your kids. At the same time, the TFA corps member inside of me said to be stronger and that, no matter what happened, the fight for equal education was more important. I was never someone to give up, and something inside me told me that I wasn't trying hard enough or that I shouldn't take any excuses. Because the kids didn't have a choice. This was their education, like it or not, and they couldn't just walk out and quit. Some may call this TFA cult brainwashing, but to this day I feel that it's at the very heart of their mission and a cause worth fighting for. But for me, mentally, physically, and emotionally, I was exhausted and turning into someone who I didn't want to become. Two years was TFA's number; one was mine.

I made plans that weekend to visit Portfolio Center over my spring break. I talked to Camika for the first time since the incident when I got back to Baltimore and told her my plans. She said that she supported me in whatever decision I would make, but to give it some time until I was 100% sure. She sent me a card later on, just letting me know that she was thinking about me. I returned to school with a strange new interest, knowing that this year of teaching was my first and now my last. I remember talking to a veteran seventh grade math teacher during a planning period and having her tell me very candidly about her troubles separating the professional from the personal. It made me very emotional to see this older woman tell me that she didn't really like who she had become after teaching for so long at this school, especially after she said that this had been the worst year that she had ever seen. "You're lucky you're still young - you can run," she said.

I never taught Greg, one of the few Caucasian students at our school. I saw him in the hallways sometimes, cutting class, hanging out with a few of my seventh grade girls. I heard rumors about drug dealing and abuse, but never above a whisper. On a Monday morning when a student told me Greg had been murdered over the weekend, I was in disbelief. When the student proceeded to tell me how he had been killed, I was even more shocked that my 12-year old student was describing what she knew and saw to me. With respect to Greg's memory, I won't write about how or why he was killed. I went to the viewing with two other teachers and a student during our planning period. Greg was wearing his favorite sweatshirt in the casket, a toy red bike propped up against the hinges. One of my students once told me that my blue eyes were "pretty just like Greg's." Now I was staring at his eyes, closed forever. It was difficult to watch this single student we had brought with us, a friend of Greg's, coping with death for the first time. The sixth grader buried his head in Ms. Jacob's arms and we left after 15 minutes when he told us he was ready to leave. The school had a difficult time responding to the tragedy as well - "RIP WBG" was written all over our school - Rest In Peace White Boy Greg. Students seemed almost justifiably wilder than ever, and Mrs. Jones made several announcements about respecting Greg by behaving and not vandalizing school property. Mrs. Jones was interviewed on our weekly television announcements and said something about Greg looking down from above on students roaming the halls saying "No, go to class, don't misbehave like I used to." I stood silent in my classroom while my kids watched, eyes transfixed on the television screen. Was she really using Greg in an attempt to cut down on her problems with the hallways?

But the story of Mrs. Jones doesn't end there. At a faculty meeting shortly thereafter, she referred to the students as "diamonds" that the teachers were not helping to "shine." She was blaming the teachers for the state of our school, admitting to no responsibility herself. During the meeting, a younger teacher snapped at an older teacher about how she couldn't control her classroom and was sick of her telling him what to do, storming out the door. The diamond metaphor was stretched as far as it could possibly go as I sat silent through a two-hour argument. "You can't make diamonds without pressure," one teacher quipped. As usual, we left the meeting no better off, with no solid solutions to improve our school. Morale was at an all-time low, no matter who you were or what your age was.

A former Northeast TFA teacher named Tim e-mailed me and said that he would be in the area soon, and wondered if he could stop by and informally observe me and just talk. My first paranoid reaction was that TFA was sending him in to save me from leaving, but common sense told me that this was not the case. He immediately reminded me of John White, my role model from the New York Summer Institute. He was very good with the kids, and had an infectious positive attitude that brought my school morale back up several notches. We talked for most of the planning period after my 607 class. He asked what my plans were for next year, and I told him. Instead of trying to convince me otherwise, he simply asked how he could make my last three months better. We talked about different concrete strategies and ideas to help me become a better teacher and enjoy the last quarter more. He encouraged me to sit down over Spring Break and think about everything that I ever wanted to do as a teacher, and what I wanted to get out of that last quarter. When he left, I felt extremely motivated to do something BIG. Something that would truly teach these kids Language Arts skills applicable to their real lives.

Third quarter was my turning point. It was the time that I decided that I needed to leave while also being the time that set me up for my most successful and happiest quarter of teaching yet. I never pressed charges against the student who punched me. After a little research, I found out that both of his parents had died and he was on medication - medication that he had not received on the fateful day (but also for quite a while, it seemed). They weren't excuses, but they were enough to extinguish my anger. The student had been expelled and moved to another school, and I figured that was enough and put it behind me. Whatever compensation I would have received or whatever mark went on his record seemed irrelevant. I began sketching an idea during my lunch breaks, an island with the 6th grade teachers' names as various cities, mountains and rivers. I scribbled down a brief outline of a grading and teaching system that I wanted to implement. One idea led to another, and pretty soon I had two pages of scrambled notes all about what I wanted to do fourth quarter. If I'm going out, I thought, I'm going out with a bang.



Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Seven: Fourth Quarter

I visited Portfolio Center over my Spring Break and instantly fell in love. I knew that this was where I was supposed to be. PC was an exciting world of creativity that seemed to fit my interests and dreams almost perfectly. Whatever lingering doubts I had about leaving Baltimore evaporated into the hot Atlanta air. When I returned home to Burke, I pulled out my fourth quarter curriculum, textbooks, notes, and calendar. I spread them out and began mapping out the final quarter. I decided to make a simple point system for the students to follow - there would be a total of 1000 possible points. They would be given work folders with a point checklist to add up their points at any time and figure out their percentage grade (by simply taking off the last number of their total). I took the idea of "Northeast Island" that I had started sketching during planning periods and made it an escapist world that would serve as a quarter-long theme. An island map was drawn, some island inhabitants were created, and the first worksheets were made.

I looked at the 6th grade fourth quarter required curriculum and made the easy decision to race through it as fast as possible. I would still teach my students the skills Maryland wanted them to have, but in about half the time they asked me to because, quite frankly, I didn't think that we needed to do things like spend a week on the folktale Brother Fox and Sister Coyote. What did I want these kids to really remember? My first goal was to make writing fun, because few students felt that way. My second goal was to teach them the basic parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. My final goal was to hold them to extremely high standards and allow for no extra credit work or cutting corners. Since a 70 was passing, each student needed at least 700 points to pass my class, no exceptions. Partly to make the students excited about the island, and partly to keep myself organized, I made a small website for Northeast Island. It was inspired by a website called project312.org, developed by a DC Teach For America corps member. His website used incredible photographs to display his students' dreams and hard work. I thought a name on a website might be an extra incentive for a handful of kids, so the island homepage was born. When school rolled back around, I was actually excited to go in. My mom and I had spent my last day at home gluing maps and putting names on the student work folders. Many students were excited to have their own folder with an individual grade checklist. The island theme sold pretty well, and the first "island immigration" worksheet gave me some great material right away for the website.

I failed often during my year of teaching - plans gone wrong, topics not taught well, nights without parent phone calls. But if I had to pick one of the few small successes from my year, it would be the Northeast Island creative writing project. Students were instructed to move into the island and decide where to live, what job they wanted and what adventures they would have. Every Friday would be devoted to working on this massive continuing story of their explorations on the island - but I wouldn't be peering over their shoulders with a red pen or correcting their split infinitives. This was freeform writing, and what they wrote about on the island was up to them. I emphasized imagination and creativity as their focus and expected a 25-page, single-spaced story from each student by the end of the year. It was an 100 point project, with each page being worth 4 points. To help motivate the students, on each Friday I handed out a map or special handout of one part of the island in detail. When week one rolled around, the students would see the Robota Nightclub, the Manger L'Oiseau restaurant, and the Dome Sports Arena drawn in Kerner City. These magnifications of the main map were the students' favorite part of my class. Every Friday brought a new map, which I hid ten stars in and made all sorts of places for them to write about.

And write they did. Using the maps as motivation, writing became exciting. Sheena wrote about the history of an underwater city hidden below the island and a law enforcement that was carried out by a point system. Gary and Kellie wrote about meeting each other in their separate stories. Mark wrote about a full-scale war with another island, even though I said that I would take a point off for every character he killed (but if I had stuck to that, he would have had a negative final grade). Kevin wrote about a climactic battle with the Fort Jones Ghost atop a castle wall. Jasmine wrote about partying at Hopkins Beach and meeting lots of cute boys. Alaina wrote a play, with the dialogue carrying the story along. Treasure was found via the pirate ship, new languages were created, and a secret passageway was found behind the waterfall. My expectations were exceeded, and over 75% of my students would end up turning in 25 pages or more by the end of the year. When one of my students was expelled towards the end of school for having a knife, the last thing that he said to me was "I'll have someone bring in my Northeast Island story when I finish it."

We had some other fun projects over the course of the quarter, like the time we spent two days on public speaking. We held island elections in each class for a President, Commander and Treasurer. I set up our broken overhead as a podium and the students wrote speeches following a template I suggested on the board. Their promises for the island were creative and hilarious - like when one student said he would be a good treasurer because he had a good grade in math and always paid his friends back when he borrowed money for lunch. Jeryl hurriedly scribbled down his speech and spent the rest of the class making "Vote For Jeryl" flyers to pass out. It was one of my favorite lessons of the entire year. When we got to parts of speech, however, I stopped focusing on trying to make things fun and really got down to making my own worksheets that taught these topics well. The final 100-point test was a paragraph with 100 words underlined, and the students had to identify what part of speech each word was.

I started a new after school club in addition to the reading club - Vocabulary Video Games. I basically wanted an excuse to play video games in school and hang out with some of my students in a non-academic setting, so I brought my Nintendo Gamecube in every Wednesday with four controllers and the game Super Smash Brothers Melee. Before we started playing, I taught the students five new vocabulary words, which we later used while inevitably trash-talking during the game. Daryl, Prince and Sierra showed up regularly, as did several students that I never taught - some more of the "bad kids". One named George constantly cut class and walked by my room every day, sometimes disrupting my class by throwing things. When I was cleaning my room during the planning period one day, he came in and asked if he could help. I guessed that he was better off with me than disturbing another class, knowing that the administration wouldn't suspend him. While he collected some books, we talked about the war in Iraq. It was the single best conversation I had the entire year, child or adult. This disruptive entity became a genuinely good kid when I talked to him one-on-one. When it was time for my 608 class, he said "Thanks Mr. Werner" and shook my hand before leaving. I still saw George in the hallway every day, but he stopped disrupting my class.

During all of this, Northeast was in its usual state of disorder. Ms. Jacob, the woman from Trinidad who was next door to me, had her desk urinated on. The bathroom flooded one afternoon and our carpeted hallway was drenched; the resulting stench lingered for weeks. The single best story of the year, the event that I think best sums up Northeast's troubled journey, was the time when students played tag in our ceiling. That's right, you read it correctly - they entered a vacant classroom, managed to climb up a bookcase, and crawled into and around the structural supports and flimsy ceiling tiles. The classic Mrs. Jones response? "That's just the way kids are." The Fire Marshall came into our school with bolt cutters and snapped open several chains that were locked around doors (he also didn't seem too pleased about the fire alarms going off every day).

And then there was James. A nearby teacher couldn't stand this child anymore and asked to switch him to my class at the beginning of the fourth quarter. I obliged, and quickly understood what she was talking about. He was the kind of child that would apologize and swear he would do better, only to turn back around and do the same thing again. He was a challenge for me over the entire quarter, but ended up becoming one of my favorite students. He once asked his science teacher if he could skip her class to continue writing his Northeast Island story, and she let him. James wrote me a construction paper card at the end of the year saying, "Dear Mr. Werner - You never gave up on me. And I appreciate that. Unlike other teachers, they don't care, you do. If I fail your class it's my fault because you try to help me succeed. Sincerely, James." He also gave me his first "shout-out" when he was interviewed on our weekly televised announcements. He passed.

Ms. Jacob also decided that she was not coming back to Northeast the next year. When the letters of intent came around, we both approached our assistant principal, Mrs. Freeman, and personally told her that we were not returning. She seemed disappointed, but wished us the best. Mrs. Freeman was a nice woman with good intentions, but she was not a strong leader. Like Mrs. Jones, she did not often follow through with her threats and consequences. If a child was roaming in the hallway, they weren't suspended or reprimanded - it was simply an "Excuse me! Where are you going? Go back! Go back!" I heard these empty words often. Ms. Jacob had particularly clashed with Mrs. Freeman several times, trying to find the reasoning behind some questionable decisions. Mrs. Freeman was obviously going through some difficult times after her husband passed away in January - she was out for a couple of months - so I can partly understand why things weren't always taken care of in the way that I expected them to be.

The mother of one of my 608 students came up to school to talk to me one day. I had taught her son Jack at the beginning of the year, but since I was switched back, I found out that he had not shown up to school for close to three months. She looked extremely tired and upset. Jack's mother had just finished talking with Mrs. Jones about trying to get Jack to come back to school, but had been met with the threat of involving child services. Because Jack's mother was not able to control him, Mrs. Jones reasoned, Jack would be taken away from her (the father had walked out on the family a few years before). "You're the only teacher he said he would talk to," the mother said, admitting that she had run out of ideas and was scared of losing him. Jack used to always come to the drawing and reading clubs and was an intelligent student. I told her that I would stop by their house after school the next day, but honestly, I had no idea what I could possibly say or do to bring him back.

I drove up to the house the next day and knocked on the door through a missing glass pane. Jack's younger brother Benjamin answered the door and I walked in. The small house was extremely bare, with a low green couch covered in clothes being one of the few pieces of furniture. Flies buzzed around the dim lights. Jack's mother came down the stairs, smoking a cigarette, and welcomed me. She apologized for a hole in the wooden floor and covered it up with a blue towel. When she called for Jack, there was no answer. We walked outside, and still no answer. Benjamin came around from the other side of the house and said that Jack was hiding underneath the porch. I walked around and heard someone running away. I circled the house one more time until I finally ran into Jack, who stopped in his tracks. "Hey Mr. Werner," he said matter-of-factly. We went inside and moved some clothes away to sit down on the green couch. I talked with him alone for about 20 minutes, telling him about Northeast Island and Vocabulary Video Games. He didn't give a clear reason as to why he had decided to stop coming to school, but he hinted at a few things. School was boring, some kids were picking on him, and he didn't like many people in his class. We talked about his dreams - becoming an artist or a doctor - and how school would help him to pursue them. At the end of our conversation, in front of his mother and brother, Jack promised me that he would return on Monday.

Jack didn't show up on Monday, so I drove back to his house unannounced after school. His mother informed me that he had locked his door that morning and wouldn't come out. There was no way to open the door from the outside, so I went upstairs and sat down beside it. I talked for five minutes, but no response ever came back. I went back downstairs, feeling defeated. Maybe Mrs. Jones was right. Maybe he needed to be somewhere else. Then we heard a crash - Jack had jumped out of his window into the backyard. I walked around and came face-to-face with his dog, who jumped up at me and bit my arm, sinking two puncture marks in my sleeve. Jack peered out from behind a shed and then walked out to calm his dog down. I asked if he wanted to take a walk, and he agreed.

We walked down the streets of his neighborhood, and I let him do most of the talking. He said he had bought his mother a flower and pot for Mother's Day, yesterday. He told me that he wanted to go to school all weekend, but then she took his flower and pot and smashed them onto the ground during an argument. He was so upset that he just locked himself up in his room. I wasn't sure what to say, slowly realizing that I was way out of my realm and had no good answers. We ended our walk by the shed, the dog barking at me behind it. I told Jack the truth - that he was risking losing his mother and brother, and that both of them were scared of it. I said that I was the last line of defense, but if he didn't show up to school, I would have to find some other sort of help. I told him that I cared for him and that nothing would make me happier than seeing him return to school. I asked him what it would take to get him back, and after several shrugs, I asked him what his favorite candy was. Payday. I told him that I would drive to Safeway after leaving his house and pick up a bag of Paydays. All he had to do was show up to school. "I'll think about it," was all he would say. When I bought the candy that afternoon, I was almost certain that it was wasted money. I called Camika that night, and she told me who to talk to when he didn't show up.

The first student in my classroom the next day was Jack. That moment of seeing his face through the scattered partition walls made my year. Maybe it was the bribery with candy, the threat of child services, or the walk around the neighborhood - but something had worked. He ended up writing an incredible Northeast Island story and stayed after for Vocabulary Video Games every week. I don't know if his home life ever got any better, but I was happy to see him back.

I got a letter sent through certified mail saying that my contract for Baltimore City Public Schools would not be renewed because of a missing college transcript and no evidence of working towards my certification. I had sent my college transcript in through TFA at the beginning of the year, but it was apparently lost somewhere in the process. I hadn't officially registered for my certification classes at Johns Hopkins; the reading class had angered me so much that I wondered if it was worth the effort. BCPS sent me monthly notices about my missing documents in the mail and TFA called me a few times, but because I knew that I was leaving at the end of the year, the contract renewal never seemed like a big deal. What surprised me is that I went through an entire year of teaching without the school system knowing I was a college graduate or trying to become certified. What a great educational system that lets you slip under the radar like that, huh?

We were halfway through the fourth quarter, and the guys in suits were coming around more often. Two men in particular, Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Humphries, seemed omnipresent. Then the announcement we had been waiting for all year finally came. Mrs. Jones was gone, sent to a desk job. Mr. Lindsay became the new acting principal and Mr. Humphries was his assistant. Their "emergency meeting" that afternoon was a lot different than previous ones. They talked about having a team of janitors come into the school to clean it up and replace all the broken lights and ceiling tiles. They admitted that there were problems, but that these problems could be fixed. Instead of blaming teachers or using diamond metaphors, Mr. Lindsay joked about how much in debt the school system was in, and that in any other profession, the company would have gone bankrupt long ago. Finally, we had the strong leadership that Northeast desperately needed all year. The problems didn't stop completely, but there was a significant reduction in disruptions. Mr. Humphries and I almost got in a small argument once when he told me in a fairly impolite way that my current seating arrangement was "not a strategy" and to not sit on my desk, loud enough for all of my students to hear ("Are you going to be fired?" 607 asked later).

My perfect attendance streak ended three days later when I called in sick Thursday and Friday. Over the year, I could have taken up to 9 paid sick days off, but I always thought it was better for me teach a bad lesson than have no substitute or an administrator babysitting. But my friends and roommates finally convinced me that I needed some mental health days, so I beat a video game on Thursday and drove home to Burke on Friday. I returned on Monday with less than a month left; the end in sight. Only a few of my students knew that I was not returning the next year. When I told a 608 student named Ian, he was visibly upset. He got out of his seat and went around the classroom, telling his classmates to be quiet or pushing them back into their chairs. "If we behave, Mr. Werner won't leave us!" He said. I knew that I would miss many of these kids dearly.

With the summer heat and the end of school came wilder kids. A firecracker was set off in my room during 607 one day, but I hadn't seen the culprit (although I had some guesses). Mrs. Freeman gave a long lecture to my class about the severe consequences that would take place if someone did it again - not just being suspended for the rest of the year, but possibly weapon charges as well. When I caught the student trying to do the same thing the next day, I handed him over to Mrs. Freeman. Guess who was back in school the next day? Mrs. Freeman's threats of consequences were once again not carried out - he wasn't even suspended for a day. I sent two students who had been fighting to her office a few days later. They were sent back to me five minutes later, their only consequence being a quick apology to me. I told her the names of two students who had walked into my homeroom one morning and disrupted my teaching, but she simply shook her head and said that it was too late in the year. When the last days of school came, I said my farewells to my students and was sad to see them walk out the doors one last time, but I was ready to leave.

School ended on a Wednesday, but the teachers had two additional workdays to clean out their rooms and turn in grades. Because I had done most of these things already, I spent the majority of my time reading the new Harry Potter book. When I left for my very last day on Friday, I knew that something ridiculous was going to happen. I knew that after surviving this year, a fitting ending would certainly take place. Mrs. Freeman called all of the teachers down to the cafeteria, and we were given envelopes and papers for sending report cards and summer school letters. She was almost condescending in her directions, emphasizing how clear her step-by-step instructions were and how only her way to do things would work. She didn't have the correct test scores copied off. When a teacher mentioned how overstressed some people were getting, Mrs. Freeman snapped back at her about how she was acting unprofessionally. Ms. Jacob pointed out that one of the letters being sent home had the wrong date on it, but when she xeroxed a corrected version, Mrs. Freeman exploded on her for not following her directions. I smiled the entire time, thinking how typical this all was while daydreaming about Portfolio Center and anxious to get back to reading Harry Potter. We were supposed to make a list with our stack of letters: students who were passing, failing, going to summer school, or had missing grades. When I finished writing my list, Mrs. Freeman said she needed four separate ones. I sighed and rewrote everything clearly on four separate lists, neatly tearing the paper to make them the perfect size to paperclip onto the stacks of envelopes. Finally, Mrs. Freeman said that these handwritten lists we were writing were the official reports on our students, and that she would be faxing them to the main office that afternoon. When I turned my lists in, she grabbed them back up from the piles.

"Sir, sir, what is this?" She demanded.
"My four lists, Mrs. Freeman." I answered.
"I cannot accept these. You need to rewrite them on the correct sized sheets of paper. You did not follow directions. Go back and rewrite them."
The problem was that the smaller sheets I had written my lists on were not faxable. Another TFA teacher, Andrew, had done the same thing, so he got some scotch tape and we taped our lists on the kind of paper that she wanted.
"I worked in an office once," Andrew said. "We used to do this all the time."
When I went back to turn my lists in, Mrs. Freeman shook her head and waved her hand back and forth in a "no" motion.
"Mr. Werner, what is it going to take for you to rewrite the lists correctly?" She said, frowning.
"I worked in an office once," I said, stealing Andrew's line. "This will work fine."
"No sir, you must..."
The frustrations of the entire school year built up inside of me. Here are your two open-space classrooms. You should have taught them the newspaper gutter. Code Word Buffalo. Thanks to Mr. Werner for being so flexible and switching his classes again. The teachers are not shining the diamonds. Greg is looking down on you and telling you not to roam the halls. That seating arrangement is not a strategy. Go back and rewrite them.

"Mrs. Freeman, we're done."

I tossed the four lists carelessly onto the table and walked out the doors of Northeast Middle School for the last time.



Teach For America Chronicles / Chapter Eight: Leaving

I don't regret my year as a middle school Language Arts teacher. For many students, I was the "cool teacher" who they enjoyed coming to, sometimes even making them laugh. I feel that I helped several kids make solid progress throughout the year, especially in writing. If I had stuck around for another year in Northeast Middle School, that year of experience would have made a huge difference. If I had a different personality, maybe I would have continued to teach at Northeast. But I found myself changing because of what the job demanded of me. As a usually introverted and think-before-I-speak person, classroom B-23 at Northeast often made me act otherwise. I taught in a school where it was an extremely rare occurrence to hear teachers say that they loved their job. As much as I wish that I could say the opposite, my heart was not always with my work. My students deserved a lot better than me, and they certainly deserved a better environment than Northeast.

What's the answer to the problem of unequal education? Teaching for one year in one school in one public school system, I obviously don't have many answers. I can only tell you what my students at Northeast needed, and maybe those observations could be applied elsewhere.

Northeast needed a leader. This was the most basic and most devastating flaw we encountered this year. There was little structure and the students could get away with some unbelievable things without fear of consistent, clear consequences from the administration. Responsibility was always a finger pointing to someone else or an empty promise. When Mr. Lindsay took over halfway through the fourth quarter, there wasn't an overnight change. It was a slow, gradual process, but the climate of the school did eventually improve. Whether it was the principal, an assistant principal, or a highly motivated teacher, we needed someone in charge. Interestingly enough, next year, Baltimore City is bringing Northeast a new principal from out-of-town as part of the "Distinguished Principal Fellows" program. He'll be paid $125,000 and given three years to turn the school around. So there's hope for Northeast in these next few years.

Then there's the case of "social promotion" - passing students who haven't met the requirements to move on to the next grade. By BCPS guidelines, if a student fails three or more classes (that's an average grade of 70 or lower), he or she must repeat the grade. If a student fails one or two classes, he or she must pass them in summer school. On my last day of school, the day where we were stuffing report cards into envelopes, only one student in my 611 class should have technically passed. 11 qualified for (free) summer school and 13 were retained...technically. I'm not saying that every one of those 24 failing students will move on to the next grade. I'm saying that most of my 6th and 7th graders did not come to me with a grade-appropriate reading and writing level, and many of them will move on to the next grade still lacking those skills. It was difficult to assess and measure the progress my students were making when I was given new classes every quarter.

And heck, as a teacher, I did some of this stuff firsthand. I felt incredibly guilty the first time I threw away a batch of classwork without grading it. I would grade a few papers, notice the incredibly low scores, and feel like I hadn't taught my students anything. I'd throw everything away and try teaching the material again the next day. The fourth quarter Northeast Island folders forced me to grade on a daily basis, which kept my standards high. It was also interesting to see so many parents appear towards the end of the school year, asking for make-up work or whatever it would take to pass the class for the year. I put together these ridiculously thick work packets (and only one was ever returned to me). Yeah, I was guilty of changing a few grades and giving out some extra points. I should have consistently stuck to my standards and failed some more students, but I didn't.

There is no easy answer as to why the public school system that I grew up in was better than the one I taught in. Blame the parents, teachers, students, administrators, the system or the inner-city culture, but it's probably a mixture of all these things. I'm leaving teaching with more questions than answers, but Teach For America is a step in the right direction. Instead of waiting around for legislation to be passed or conditions to improve, TFA corps members are thrown into the heart of the problem immediately to fight it head-on. One stereotype that seems to often get slapped onto Teach For America is that of the naive, fresh-out-of-college kid who thinks he or she can save the world until reality kicks in. Critics of the program point to the experience and certification that most TFA teachers lack as causes for concern.

If you ever hear that certification argument again, think about how I could have been magically "certified" by paying money to take those horrendous Johns Hopkins education classes.

Many of the people that TFA brings in would not have taught otherwise. With only a two-year commitment that offers financial assistance for past or future student loans, it's an attractive first job for graduates. Speaking only from personal experience, TFA teachers are some of most motivated people I have ever met. The seven other corps members at my school were incredibly effective teachers, and all of my roommates continue to amaze me with their dedication to their work - they used their own money to do frog dissections with their classes during the last week of school. Teach For America is not for everyone, but for those who make it through the recruitment process and summer training, it's an incredible and challenging experience. The TFA website says: "Since our inception in 1990, approximately 9,000 exceptional individuals have joined Teach For America, directly impacting the lives of more than 1.25 million students, and taking on leadership roles as alumni to increase opportunity for children."

Teaching, even in a better setting, isn't for me. I'm not as passionate about it as many of my friends are. This was the story of my year, but it's not a unique experience. There are thousands of classrooms and schools out there just like Northeast. My roommates could have each written their own TFA Chronicles. It is absolutely amazing to me that some students will come out of this system where everything is going against them, and they will succeed. To me, that's more impressive than anything I can ever hope to do.

Thursday, July 31 at 9:01 PM

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Dan Savage: Something Savage
Kevin Scarbrough: Thin Black Glasses
Scott Schiller: Schillmania
Jason Severs: JasonSevers.com
Anthony Sheret: Work By Lunch
Nick Skyles: Boats and Stars
Sujay Thomas: iSujay
Joe Tobens: JospehTobens.com
David Ulevitch: Substantiated.info
John Verhine: Verhine.com
Armin Vit: Under Consideration
Ian Wharton: IanWharton.com
Roger Wong: One Great Monkey
Clay Yount: Rob and Elliot Comics
Jack Zerby: Jack Zerby Music

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