Ms. Price

Thanksgiving break gave me some perspective. I stepped back and noticed there were something that just didn’t seem right. By now I knew the administration had given up on me, but why did I go to the principal when I should have been talking with the other second grade teacher, Ms. Price?  After meeting her, you would think, “what a wonderful teacher!” She acted older than her age and she never told anyone hold she was. I'm sure she had dreams of being a principal. She was probably 28, but she wanted to be 35. She started out as a Teach For America teacher at another school, and she had been recruited by Franklin to come to Daley.

My first year of teaching I knew Ms. Price was a great teacher because whenever there were visitors to the school, they were directed to her classroom. She also seemed great with her kids. She was so close with one of her tough kids that he came to school during the teacher work days just to spend time with her. At the end of the year, he came into school to help her pack away all the teacher materials for the new school. That was when Franklin told me that both Ms. Price and Ms. Johnson wanted to teach 2nd grade with me, and he asked me who I would prefer.

They both seemed fine, but I did tell him there was one teacher I really admired, Ms. Lee. My first year she was a frequent visitor at my door to see how I was doing. She let me vent about the day, and then she offered one or two things to try out. She was a mid-30s, well-rounded, black woman, and she had a grace about her.  Ms. Lee was staying with her grade, but I told Franklin I wanted whichever teacher he thought was more like her. Ms. Price and Ms. Lee both taught 4th grade. He picked Ms. Price.

As soon as we both found out, we sat down and scribbled down dates when we could meet over the summer to plan out units. I barely did any planning with my first co-teacher because we were both drowning, so this was new for me. I knew Price was a solid teacher, but she had never taught second grade, so I figured our planning sessions would be a nice back and forth discussion about what was best for second graders. It wasn’t; she talked, and I wrote down notes as fast as I could. Whenever there was something that I wanted to add, she’d usually say, “Well, you can do that if you want.” Still, we were determined to make the second grade the best grade in the school.

But by October, our two classes combined made us the worst. She had a class full of troublemakers much worse than my own; hers had been in so much trouble that they already had reputations and labels before they stepped in the door. One day, I could see through the door window that her class was quietly reading on bean bags, and then I heard a book fall and a loud scream, and then her front door slammed. It was one of her tiny boys, Nico, who must have been teased about something. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, and he was screaming, a high-pitched scream that should have caused teachers from every room in the hall to come running out, but no one did. By now, they knew Nico and his piercing scream. Then, I saw Price look through the door window with her cell phone pressed upon her ear. Her door was already locked, and she purposely made the phone call right by the door window so he could see. Then Nico picked up the abandoned security chair and threw it at her door. She just pointed at the security cameras with a smile on her face. It was like my class, but I couldn't smile about it.

She had her own problems, and I had mine, and she kept her distance. Whenever the crap hit the fan last year, Ms. Ward, my old co-teacher, ran over to my room during her lunch break, “Did you hear Daniel screaming this morning?! That boy is driving me insane! I can’t sleep, Jeremy. Even my family is wondering why I’m wasting my time here.”

But Price never opened up about how horrible things were going in her class. It was strange because she wasn’t hiding anything; we all knew it was bad. She overemphasized how much her kids were learning. In the midst of a  shit storm, how could she talk about how wonderful it all was?

So I started to blame her. Franklin picked her as a mentor for me because I was the struggling newbie who had a waste of a first year. Why was she smiling as I was drowning? I didn’t find out until spring, but there were something she wasn’t telling me.