Chapter 1: Arrival
It began with green and brown paper covering otherwise empty bulletin boards. There was a square room with a broken air conditioner, and an odd hissing sound coming from what should have been the thermostat by the door. Flies buzzed in through the wall of windows that made up the room’s east side, and dust filled the damp air. A clock hung for show at its station next to the door, though immobile arms rendered it somewhat unhelpful in telling time. Hissing seemed to be the “thermostat’s” only function; heat would soon burst through the vents at unbearable levels beginning in October. The heat wouldn’t cease until late April, despite my and my students’ repeated efforts to quell belching of this steaming dragon.
When I first came to the PS/MS 29, scaffolding covered the majority of the building, leaving its face in shadows. From without, one could only see three levels of bolted metal shafts covered in blue and black tarp, with the occasional glimpse of building showing through. Construction crews walked heavily on creaky slabs of wood over the heads of those passing below. The front entrance of the school faced Courtlandt Avenue, and the dismal façade of the notoriously violent Jackson Projects.
Upon entering the building for the first time, my growing nerves about being the only 22 year old middle-class white girl for miles were at once put to rest by cheery bulletin boards that I saw adorning the hallway. (Incidentally, I must have been blending in well walking through the South Bronx in 95 degree weather wearing my tan pant-suit and stiletto heels.) Fortunately here, covered in bright yellow and blue paper, the bulletin boards seemed to say “Welcome, new teacher, it is safe here. Brooklyn is scary, but the Bronx is not. Stay. Teach.”
Only a few teachers and administrators were at school at the time I arrived. Still—I swear that when I got there, the inside of the school emitted a sort of warm glow. Something—a prophetic instinct?—beckoned me, whispering: “this will be your happy home for the next two years.”
If only my inner oracle had realized that it needed glasses.
I stood in the classroom for the first time five days before school began. Did I mention that I was hired just a week before students would to start to matriculate for the 2007-2008 school year? So much for planning, much less tackling that elusive beast known as “backwards planning” that my six weeks of Teach for America training had drilled me to expect from myself.
Teach for America had only managed to secure me three interviews all summer. The first interview I attended was before Institute (TFA’s teaching crash-course, known to this Corps member as a young Type-A’s personal Hades). I proceeded through that interview having no idea what I was talking about regarding children, much less teaching. To the second interview, I am embarrassed to relate, I arrived an hour and a half late. This was a consequence of my unsophisticated attempts to navigate the New York City MTA (colloquially known as ‘the subway’). Despite four years of college, a successful return from exploring multiple European nations, an internship on Capitol Hill, and acceptance into Teach for America, I was nevertheless reduced to rubism when it came to executing the multiple bus and train transfers required to travel from Queens to Brooklyn. Needless to say, I was not hired for that teaching position.
In fact I only made it to the Bronx on time for my third interview by leaving several hours early. Two days later, I returned to the school and found myself staring around at the consequences of my success. There I was in my classroom, and it was time to step into the shoes of a seventh and eighth grade Social Studies and English teacher at PS/MS 29, The Melrose School. There was no turning back now.
For several moments I just stood, looking around the muggy, fly-infested space, trying to come to grips with the fact that—all too soon—I would have the responsibility of actual minds dropped into my lap. I was at a loss for any preparation that might even come close to readying me for my coming trials.
I decided to move some desks around, so I got to it. Then I scrubbed off some shelves. The thought of planning my first unit overwhelmed me, since I had no curriculum to work with and I knew nothing about the students coming into my classroom. Mostly, I still really didn’t know how to plan in any time-effective kind of way. Teach for America had taught me about classroom management. It hadn’t taught me about teaching. So I resolved to use some opening activities that I’d learned in TFA on the first day, and to leave the rest to fate. I would write my first lesson plan up shortly before the first day of school. For now, however, the little part of me that procrastinated when confronted with an overly daunting workload had the better of me.
I left the classroom. It was a little more sparkly than it had been when I’d first walked in, so I’d accomplished something at least. Not terrible for a first day’s work. As long as I was accomplishing something in the classroom I was doing my job, and I could feel good about that. Right?
It seems prudent here to pause for a moment and reflect upon what I’d looked like on my way to the school that first day as a hiree. Thinking back, I am certain that I represented the very picture of a naïve, recently-post-college, partially brain-washed idealist. I’d contentedly walked by row after row of projects that morning, oblivious to how absurd I looked cast against the tired faces of the Courtlandt Avenue delis in my co-ed attire. (I’d worn purposefully ripped jeans and bright green tee-shirt with pretty pink letters spelling William and Mary on the front as I pushed a giant blue shopping cart brimming with school supplies in front of me.) I’d possessed a slight spring in my step as I moved, and had a big, shit-eating grin on my face when I looked at anyone so that if they were wondering, they would know: Yes, this young white girl pushing a big cart of Lord knows what up the street actually means to be here.
“God Bless you Teacher,” I remember a forty-looking woman calling as she sat on the steps of a nearby bodega. A wave of bliss overcame me and I smiled at her. See? My noble mission to teach The Children of this struggling neighborhood had already endeared me to someone in the surrounding community! This might not be so bad after all.
