[Editor's note: Yo Mista is the pseudonym of a fourth-year teacher in a high school in Queens.
Part 1 of this story is here.]
During lunch I went to see my payroll secretary to find out if she knew anything about why I had not received the compensation for coaching that I was supposed to get three months earlier. For weeks and weeks she was telling me to be patient — “It may come in the next pay period,” she kept saying. Well, I kept waiting and it kept not showing up, and by now I was annoyed.
I knocked on her open door. “What do you want,” she asked ever so sweetly. I want my damn money, now where is it already, I imagined myself saying.
Instead I said, shyly and softly, “Oh, just checking to see if you found out anything about where that check is.” I had learned quickly to tread lightly around the payroll secretary and not do anything to get on her bad side.
“Oh yeah, that,” she responded. “It got lost, I stopped payment yesterday. It’ll be six to ten weeks before you get it.”
Fantastic, I thought. The bank that owns my house will definitely accept that explanation instead of my mortgage payment this month. I said, “Thanks,” and turned to leave.
“You know if you went down to Court St. in person they probably would have cut you a check right then and there, but it’s too late now,” she said as I began to walk out. I seethed in anger when I heard this, I wanted so badly to give her a piece of my mind, ask her why in god’s name she didn’t tell me that before she stopped payment but I didn’t have the time or the nerve. Besides, I had bigger fish to fry.
The rest of the afternoon I was inundated with transition paperwork, pulling my head up for brief intermittent moments where I actually got to talk to and work with students. Before I packed up to walk down to the tennis courts for my team’s first match my phone rang.
“Hi, it’s me. So what are we gonna do about this kid? Did you find him? Did you find anything for him? We have to move along on this — now he’s on the principal’s radar and the last thing I need is her breathing down my neck about something else.”
I wanted to slam the phone down and go to tennis. “I will speak with the student and get in touch with the parents and see how we can help him, I didn’t get to see him today,” I calmly replied, while choking down my ire.
When I got to the field where the courts were my student-athletes were ready to play, dressed in their bright whites, reviewing proper tennis etiquette and excitedly preparing for our first match. As we began to set up the courts I noticed a crowd gathering in the field next to the courts. Any teacher would instantly recognize it; a fight was brewing. I told my players to stay where they were, away from the fight, and I walked over to try and disperse the crowd expecting to find school safety officers joining me in my effort. I walked up to the growing crowd and spotted not one or two but three separate fights occurring simultaneously and there was not a safety agent in sight. I realized the fighters were not students but older kids from the nearby projects. I heard from the crowd, “I got a knife” and I immediately pulled out my phone to call 911. As I brought the phone to my ear an angry young kid rushed toward me, fists up, beads dangling from his neck and a bandanna in one hand: “Yo, you better put that s#!% down, you about to get popped!”
My heart raced and for a second I genuinely feared for my life as I slid the phone back into my pocket and backed away for the tennis courts. Out of sight I called 911 and reported it, but the fight was long over before the authorities showed up. Thankfully no students were hurt, but I couldn’t help feel anything but anger. Where was security? I thought. Just two days earlier I had gone to my principal to tell her about the open drug use that was occurring all over the field in broad daylight, with no security in sight. She promised me she would make sure security were there when they were supposed to be.
I was heated over the situation and after the day I had I couldn’t help but feel the weight of the world coming down on me, crushing my will, crushing my idealism and crushing my belief in my own ability to change anything for the better.
My team and I had a lot of fun in our first match — we lost, but we had fun. I was much more calm after the match and reflective on my ride home. I thought about the series of frustrations I went through during the day and how my day ended. I was tired and beaten but not broken. Thinking about it on the way home I realized it was actually a fitting way to end my day. It was a real, visceral reminder of the struggle in which I am engaged with my students. Working with administrators who don’t share your vision, navigating a stifling bureaucracy and rising above the negative influences that are present in our school communities are struggles we share with our kids.
But still, I couldn’t help but think to myself, It’s days like these that cause the city to lose new teachers.
1 Comment:
1 Alistair
· May 20, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Thanks, Yo Mista. I completely relate to that story. I coach tennis at an urban high school in the Bay Area. Once last fall, while I was feeding balls to one of my players, she shrieked, “Eww! A condom!” Sure enough, just inside the baseline was a used condom. On another occasion, one of my players asked me to quiet a group of students who were disrupting her match. As I approached the group, I realized they were passing a joint. They saw me coming and didn’t even attempt to hide their behavior. One kid looked at me and generously asked me if I wanted a hit. I politely refused and asked them if they wouldn’t mind moving away from the courts. They moved. As the graduate of a suburban high school, this kind of behavior is CRAZY. I would’ve been expelled for something like that. But these kids didn’t even blink an eye when they say me coming. And why should they have? I didn’t know their names. I wouldn’t be able to pick them out of a crowd. But that’s teaching at an urban school. I’ve learned to just laugh this kind of thing off and focus my energies on what I can affect, the students I see every day.