Jessica Ramer
ABCs of a Failed High School Teacher
Afraid of getting kids beaten, I never call parents. My classes are the school’s noisiest,
ruckus audible at the other end of the hall. A student wraps metal in paper, lobs it at my head. Two hours later, my scalp still stings. “We didn’t tell you this because we didn’t want to scare you off,” another teacher tells me, “but you have some bastards in your classes.”
Brian grimaces when I ask my Algebra II class on the first day if anyone wants to be a teacher. “Miss, if I couldn’t make it as a bum, then I would try teaching,” His reason: “If I was a teacher, I would kill those kids. If I kill them, I would go to prison. I don’t want to go to prison. Therefore, I will not be a teacher.” Quod erat demonstrandum.
Chronically short of markers, teachers run out before the first term is over. I buy my own.
“Never spend your own money on school supplies,” my boyfriend tells me.
“Ask for paper instead of plastic at the grocery store. Tape the bags to the board;
write on them with charcoal scrounged from grills at the beach.”
Daily flag salutes precede announcements broadcast over CCTV. My kids never watch it—
recruiters prowl hallways for green card troops—except one time I couldn’t avoid it.
Twenty-eight ESOL students—Haitians, Brazilians, Argentinians, Mexicans—jump up,
hand over heart, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance from memory.
Enlistees during my last year include Albert, my best algebra student who needed a green card, Randy, Anglo, fatherless, underage—his remarried mother signed for him—and Diego, class clown and perpetual troublemaker. International Baccalaureate students go to Notre Dame, Duke, and University of Florida. My students go to boot camp.
Fist in air, Pierre yells “Sue Ellen, I’m going to have sexual intercourse with you until
your genitals fall off.” Anyone who works with teenage boys recognizes this as a paraphrase. Instead of calling security and having them removed, I take them outside, make them apologize. Later, when I collect his paper, Pierre whispers, “I love you, Miss.”
Gwen, a guidance counselor with bad teeth and no husband, knocks, asks if she can tell my kids about the PSAT. The military recruiter hiding behind the door enters, tells students the army pays 100% of college tuition for soldiers in the reserves. They leave. I tell them if they enlist, they will be fighting in Iraq, not studying in Florida. I wait to be turned in, fired.
Holding his Samsung, Daniel says, “You can use my phone. I’ll even dial the number for you.” I had threatened to call home after he had tossed books across the room and dropped trousers, parading in boxer shorts. He punches in a number; hands me the phone. Grandma speaks only Creole. “Daniel est très mauvais. Il a jeté des livres dans la class.” His eyes widen.
In a basic geometry course, I prove that an exterior angle is congruent to the sum of two remote interior angles: < 1 + < 3 ≅ < 4. An administrator misreads the equation as 1 + 3 = 4, points toward the board and yells “This is spoon feeding.” He asks me to define “hypotenuse.” I dummy down the lesson just for him. He accuses me of not teaching at a high enough level.
Jackson, the star running back, arrives in my class bearing a backpack, “Real N – – – a Shit” written on the back in black marker. Gang violence claims two of his friends. Years after I leave, Prosecutors charge him with a revenge shooting. An unarmed teenager in his front yard. The victim lives. Jackson gets 25 to life. I wish he had enlisted in the army.
Kids can’t add three-digit numbers without a calculator. I forbid their use. Anne screams, “The school lets us use calculators for the FCAT. Are you better than the school?” “As a matter of fact, I am,” I reply. She stares, lips parted, not knowing Bart Simpson’s “I am so great” theory of American social relations.
Larry burbles with joy over the invasion of Iraq, happy as a kid who just lost his virginity to the head cheerleader. “I teach my students how to pay for college. I’ve brought in recruiters from the Army, the Marines, the Navy and the Air Force.” When a recruiter asked him to join, he replies, “Are you crazy?”
Memorized multiplication tables, grade-level reading ability, fraction skills— all missing in action at this school. Pictures of the school mascot, a buck, hang in a school most of whose students emigrated from Haiti or Mexico and live in the city’s public housing. “Buck the FCAT,” read banners suspended from ceilings. Some administrator being clever.
“Novels are books with two hard covers,” the reading coordinator tells us during a block buddies meeting which consumes our entire planning period. We grade and plan at home for free tonight. Newsweek writes that our school is among the top four hundred nationwide: without the International Baccalaureate program, we would be an F school.
Oranges, cake, individually wrapped candies and soda sit on my desk, party food for the last day of school before Christmas. Tenise frowns. “We don’t deserve a party. We’re a bad class.” I stand in the doorway until the tardy bell rings, turn around to see the Gang of Four— Freddy, Daniel, Jimmy, and Talese—hurl fruit across the classroom.
Pierre falls to the floor, clutching his groin. “She hit me in my balls. She hit me in my balls,” he groans, elongating that last word into three syllables. “She” was Sue Ellen. “Dear God, please don’t let the principal walk in right now,” I pray. She didn’t. I do not sleep well that night. If Pierre hits Sue Ellen, he will be led away in handcuffs.
Quarters and Quartiles dominate school life. The fourth-quarter loss in the game’s last second knocks us out of the playoffs. The bottom quartile of students failed to make sufficient progress. We are still a D school. The principal hires a consultant. We spend six hours learning to teach test-taking strategies: guessing after eliminating obviously wrong choices and back-solving.
Relationship etiquette is MIA, too. “Look, Miss,” Rosa whispers, gesturing behind her. Two students sit French kissing as the rest of the class giggles. She dumped him. He punched another kid. She took him back. He tattooed her name on his bicep. She got pregnant. He left. She gave birth at sixteen. “My pregnancy was a mistake but my baby is a gift from God.”
Student graffiti: American-born kids write slang for intimate body parts using substances the color of feces; immigrants write parodies of school life. “Fight: Sue Ellen vs. Pierre. After school on the football field. Free Tickets.” A Brazilian student writes, “Jesus died for you. Respect that.”
“Teacher Appreciation Day” posters invite us to lunch. Isn’t it nice the administration cares enough to do something nice for us. I smile benignly at my administrator-nemesis. Lunch is sponsored by the army. In exchange for hot dogs and potato salad, they want to recruit our students. Mr. Cohen tells them he will never agree to it. I remain silent.
Underwear displays are a thing here. José stands in the back of the room and lifts his shirt, revealing pants hanging at mid-thigh along with oddly cut briefs. I thought about saying “Mr. Gonzalez, your underwear is completely old-fashioned and out of style,” but didn’t. They were not American, one of the few things he still owned from his country.
Vandalism—someone wrote that a student was “a bout it ho” in the girls’ bathrooms— causes the principal to ban bathroom passes. Students wait for security guards to escort them. Kids with long after-school bus rides beg me to break the rules. I do. Still, I wonder about the girl who was slut-shamed. Had she been abused, too broken, to resist advances?
Word walls, once confined to first grade, sprout up in our D-school classroom, ordered by the principal. I create placards: Parallel, Perpendicular, Obtuse, Acute, Equation. Some student pencils his own word wall: the S-word, the F-word, the N-word, the MF-word, and a fifth, forgotten word. “This is disgraceful!” I yell. Years later, I still admire the kid’s gift for parody.
Xenophobia bubbles like an air pump in a fish tank, unheard most of the time. A student tells me he is writing the names of his homeboys on the board. “Jerrod, you can’t write the names of your homeboys in math class.” A white kid responds, “That’s “neighbors” to us.” Students stare at their desks. I write James Garfield’s proof of the Pythagorean Theorem on the board.
Y?—text-speak for Why? Why does Rosa have to wait two years to be evaluated for learning disabilities? She drops out, surrenders her dream of an army career, a green card. Why did Patrice’s father shave his head as punishment? I report it—maybe the only thing I have done right in three years. He goes into foster care, comes by every day to give me a hug. Zo-zo, zo-zo, zo-zo chants a student in a sing-song voice.
Zo-zo. Zo-so. Zo-zo. His off-key singing continues for three days. On the third day, I blurt out, “What does zo-zo mean anyway?” A student points to her lap. “It’s this, Miss.” Creole slang for the penis. I loved every student in that class for not laughing at me. Zo-zo is still the only Creole word I know.
Jessica Ramer is a third-year PhD student in poetry at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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Amy Gordon is the author of numerous books for young readers, including When JFK Was My Father (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House, 2014), both works of historical fiction haunted by helpful ghosts. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aurorean, Plum, Blue Nib, and in the anthology Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2018).