Taking One For the Team

“If we want to keep you on, I need a favor.”

Sometimes staying part of the team means sacrificing your greatest passions in hopes of supporting the people you care about the most. In my case, I got a call exactly nine days before school was set to start to take one for the team. Due to restrictions in the budget and our current team of special education staff, we had a surplus of humanities, literacy, and English Language Arts (ELA) specialists and a demand for support in mathematics—which is where the next part of my journey takes place.

Let me first explain my history with the world of math.

• In middle school, I got kicked out of math for sticking my gum to the desk and passing notes to friends, making the teacher turn as bright as my Big Red.
• As a lower-classman, I had to work extra hard to achieve passing grades; staying after school for help and hiring my aunt as a part-time tutor.
• Let myself flunk a semester of Math B (the old school version of beginning trig/geometry)
• Discovered the relationship between fractions and division in the 11^th grade
• Got kicked out of pre-calc my senior year after scheduling all of my student council meetings during that period and subsequently missing the first two weeks of the course. I believe the teacher’s words were, “Ashley, I have dropped you from this course, please go sign up for College Algebra and I think you will find more success there.”
• Didn’t take a single math class in college due to my pre-calc teacher’s great advice.
• Can’t balance a checkbook to save my life.
• Still do my nines times tables on my fingers.
• Carry a pocket calculator everywhere for configuring tips and discounts at Jimmy Choo’s.

The list goes on.

So as I received a phone call from my principal’s cell phone on that hot August day, I was waiting for the worst news and scrambling to come up with ideas for my next steps. He explained to me that because our budget was so limited and that we had only one special education teacher who specialized in math that he would need to be hiring a different person who was willing and capable to teach that subject. He said, knowing my background was ELA, he wasn’t sure that I would be able to do it. Then, he added the “if.”

“If we want to keep you on, I need a favor.” These were the only words I needed to hear. There was hope and there was possibility that my desperation for this job and these kids would keep me in their lives for a little bit longer. I had spent the summer worrying about this job and if I would ever make it back to my chicken nuggets who would soon be eleventh graders. I was in no position to pass up a job since I hadn’t made any moves toward finding a new school. I put all of my eggs into the basket at Coalition High School and just said yes. The principal had described my new role as an Integrated Co-Teaching (ICT) teacher as an opportunity to grow as a special education teacher and help the team. I would be co-teaching several sections of geometry, possibly some algebra, and was I ready? So I thought to myself, ‘Self, you can do this!’

The kids already knew me. They had already felt abandoned by other teachers who walked in and out of their lives at random. How could I let them down? How could I just say no to them like everyone else who they’ve ever trusted?

After I hung up the phone, feelings of excitement, joy, happiness, and vomit all rushed in at once. How could I teach math? I was the poster-child for a non-logical thinker! I hadn’t done high school math since high school and I knew it had to be more difficult than when I left. My nine-year-old sister was dividing fractions already and I was no use to her.

I ran to the computer to download the NYS Common Core Standards for Mathematics Britannica for myself and quickly emailed all of the math teachers I knew at school. The horror of quadratic equations and area of 3-Demensional figures blurred my brain to the point of cocktails. Yes, a nice celebration drink is what I needed to get my mind right and ready for this fall. As I called up the girls to meet at our favorite bar, I thought to myself, this is something to write home about.

The One Phrase You Never Want To Hear

“As of right now, we do not have it in the budget to keep you here next year.”

Before the final bell rang on the second to last day of school, the principal called me to his office to discuss the reason why I had not yet received a teaching assignment for next year. He explained that because of budget constraints, the school was not certain that they were going to keep the Resource Room going and that those kids would have to move to a more restrictive environment or transition out of services and the staff would have to make it work. I sat in disbelief because I knew that many of those kids weren’t ready to transition out and that integrated co-teaching classes would hold the rest of them back. I was furious and scared. Would they ever see me again after I promised them I would never leave while they were still around? I was just getting into the swing of things and so were they. I felt like the rug had been ripped from underneath us. The hopeful tone in his voice reassured me that he would fight for me. He even said he’d try to move some money around to keep me on. Where would he find the money to move? Did he have a magic hat? I didn’t know how any of that worked and I was too sick to my stomach to ask for an explanation.

This was the first moment that I witnessed the true ugliness of the system first hand; the unfair, mistreatment of students with disabilities for the sake of money and politics. How could they cut the resource program if so many kids needed it? I had a full schedule with back-to-back resource classes; I saw at least 40 kids per day. That was roughly 10% of the school’s population that was doomed to be under-serviced and held back in some way or another.

I started to consider, what was more important to the Board of Education; saving a few bucks or the futures of these kids and mine? Sure, there would be the instant gratification of saving a teacher’s salary but they would have to deal with the long-term cost of losing an entire group of kids in measurements of graduation rates. This would slowly decrease the school’s rating and inevitably close the school down the line. It’s a stretch, but the factors that contribute to schools closing add up quickly. When dealing with the city’s lowest third of the population, both academically and socioeconomically, budget cuts happen left and right to save a few thousand here and there. This should’ve been my first indication of where the school and system was headed.

Forget about the fact that I would potentially lose my first big girl job after only six months of working there. I already felt like I had spent a career there but I wasn’t ready for my first layoff. These kids were about to have a miserable few years ahead of them. None could afford outside tutoring. Their parents weren’t proactive enough to sue the Department of Ed for making unethical decisions. Most parents weren’t even active enough to help with homework. So there they would stay until they either aged out or flunked out. It was a vicious cycle and now I was also caught up in it.

The principal encouraged me to seek other jobs just in case. He said that he would call the moment he knew for certain whether or not I could stay.

“I can’t guarantee one way or the other,” he said, “But I hope I see you next year.”

“Me too,” was all I could reply, unenthusiastically.

Defeated, I returned to my desk in the resource room and buried my face in my hands. As the bell rang and my last group of kids came in, I wiped the tears from my eyes and decided this was nothing to cry about but instead something to write home about.

Starfish (part 1)

Some people say that your first few years of teaching can mimic the effects of a hurricane. Lucky me, I got to teach amidst a real one. Hurricane Sandy, which hit NYC in the fall of 2012 left New Yorkers and their homes in a state of panic, dismay, and destruction. The waves, rain, and floods came and New York sank. The island of Manhattan, Long Island’s South Shore and Rockaways, the New Jersey coastline, and Staten Island were completely submerged and without a home for months.

On the eve of the storm, I received phone calls from family back home. While my dad calmly advised my roommate and I to stock up on water and food, my mom panicked and warned me to stay indoors. My uncle checked in to make sure I had enough whiskey for the week. My friends all posted on social media, wishing me luck by candle light. My grandma shortened our weekly phone chat in order to “preserve the battery on my cell.” I told them all not to worry and that I should be safe and sound in my little second floor Queens apartment. I didn’t want to believe what I was in for so I left a half tank of gas in my car and went about my night.

The days that followed left the city in a post-apocalyptic scene that could’ve been ripped from the pages of a Steven King supernatural horror. Buildings were gutted from the ground-up. Streets were soaked in debris and filth. The subway was flooded, shutting down the underground public transit to and from the South end of the city and parts of New Jersey. Schools were shut down for days and when they reopened, many teachers and students still couldn’t make it in. My office-mate was displaced from his home while my co-teachers were either trapped in their building or locked away by lack of transportation access.

My best friend, Tara’s house in Fire Island, NY, off the South Shore of Long Island, was completely destroyed. Over the next year, I would sit by her side as she remotely reconstructed her home-away-from-home. Countless phonecalls to the contractor, trips to the tiling store, and arguments with the insurance agency later, her house was almost back to normal. But at this same time, I was far from my normal self; sinking in work and in need of my best girlfriend. As I sat in her office, completely breaking down I convinced myself that this was nothing to write home about.

The year had taken so much out of me with co-teaching several subjects to students who could barely read and were expected to perform at grade level and pass the NYS Regents examinations. The challenges of being a first year teacher were coupled with the crippling system and decaying structure of the city as it rebuilt from Sandy.

The spring brought test results and graduation predictive data that wasn’t good. It was like a tidal wave of bad news after bad news. Administration poured on the guilt about lack of student achievement despite the exhausted efforts of the teachers amidst one of the toughest years that the city has faced since 9/11. As the last public school left in the building (because of a muscle-out movement of the charter school initiatives), the staff was in a frenzy over the numbers. Rumors about jumping ship floated between bells. To top it all off, one of my nearly-non-verbal kids approached me in the weeks prior to his tests to tell me a horrifying story of how he was jumped the night before.

The foundations of my faith in humanity and “change the world” attitude were slipping out to sea. All of the modifications and differentiation in the world weren’t helping the test scores. No matter how many rescue boats we sent and no matter how strong the emergency taskforce, I felt like I was drowning in failure every day. As I sobbed like Alice in a concrete Wonderland, Tara told me a story that would give me the strength I needed to weather the storm called “teaching in NYC” and ultimately something new to write home about.

To be continued…