The Whole Story- From Start to Finish

THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED

Red Cruiser Bike

This is a story about a young, idealistic college grad who ventured out from the easy-going suburbs to save the brown-skinned children of a decrepit elementary school, a blameless witness to the homicide capital of the U.S. At first, the teacher is shocked at the fighting and cursing and drugged out parents, but he works hard for his underprivileged students, and soon he finds his way and slowly wins their respect. And after many tears, and hard fought battles, the second graders all beat the odds that society has set, and eventually score 5s on their calculus AP exams. Well, actually, it’s not that story. I mean, I was going for it, but it just didn’t end up like that. It did start the same way…

To go to Daley Elementary, I rode four miles by bike each way, which isn't too much until you understand the bike I was riding. This bike was a gift from my mother-in-law who had bought it at a neighbor's yard sale. It was a bright red and white Cruiser with long, wiry handlebars that arched up like they were from the 50s. In spite of all its style, it only had one gear, and my ride had enough hills that by the last one, I was usually walking.

On the first day of the teacher work week, one week before the kids arrived, I didn’t know where to lock my bike so I locked it towards the back of the school onto a rusted metal railing of an abandoned trailer. There were three unused trailers in the back of the school, and they were all surrounded by knee high weeds. After a day of meetings and teacher-led ice breakers, I came to get the bike for the slog back home -- my new Wal-mart helmet was gone. I wasn't used to biking in DC, and I didn’t know that helmets were an easy steal because even safety scissors doled out by an unknowing first-year second grade teacher could cut the strap. The next day I braved the hills without a helmet, and I locked up my bike again, but this time behind the trailer, wedged up against a chain link fence. Clearly, hiding the bike behind the trailer would be too much for a bike thief. It was a trick I used on our one year old daughter. "Oh, you want to play with the house keys, huh? Well, what if I put them behind this book." Poof - they completely disappeared. Unfortunately, after a full day's training in reader's and writer's workshops, I came upon a group of four young kids with a hacksaw, sawing away at my chain, having a blast trying to run off with the new teacher's red and white Cruiser with the 50s handlebars. As soon as they heard me approaching, they jetted off, smiling and laughing. I didn’t see the humor in it all, and I followed my first instinct, which was to start running after them.

I chased them around a corner, along a back alley, further into a neighborhood highlighted in the Washington Post for its homicide rate. Over the summer, this neighborhood had such a spike in homicides the police department set up checkpoints to block the neighborhood’s entry points. Liberals, living  in the nicer parts of DC, complained about how the checkpoints were a move dreamed up by a police state. The kids ended up leading me to the back of a row house, covered with yellow paint beginning to peel back, in resistance to a summer breeze. Along the street was a huge grayish-pink teddy bear taped to a telephone poll, a memorial to a girl caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wondered when the Washington Post would tell this part of the police checkpoint story. I saw the kids squeeze through the backdoor, while an older grandma with glazed eyes and a nightgown continued hanging her clothes up on a plastic cloth line. Catching my breath, I let her know why I was chasing the kids who just slipped into her kitchen. "They were trying to steal my bike. I caught them sawing my chain off with a hacksaw. I think they also took my helmet yesterday." And without any change of expression, while keeping her eyes on me, she yelled out, "Sheila! Get out here!" The tallest girl walked out, kept her head down, apologized, and shot a smile at her friends, watching through the cracked windowpane. I shrugged, and walked back through the neighborhood to the school, unlocked my sawed up chain, and I rode off on the Cruiser. As I started to walk up that last hill, I got to thinking, “What was I thinking chasing after those kids?”

Nicaragua

It starts with a trip to Nicaragua for Peace Corps. My wife and I were just out of college, and like many college grads without any plan for a career, we thought we could help poor people. You know, I could teach them all the wonderful, useful skills I learned in college from an anthropology major and classics minor. "You see kids, when you read Cicero in Latin, as it was originally written, you can see how his arguments for human rights were completely culturally constructed."  

In reality, it was more liberal guilt than a desire to transfer skills that drove me to the Peace Corps, and if there was something that I was itching to learn and universities were very adept at teaching, it was liberal guilt. I was surrounded by wealth at my high school where it wasn't rare to see a brand-new SUVs in the student parking lot. The high school fit me well; I started on the baseball team, was a captain of the swim team, I got drunk most every weekend, and I got straight As. Things changed when I went to college.

In my first semester, I was one of the freshmen sheep following a fraternity member's younger brother who was sure he could get us into the party, even when our girl-to-guy ratio was completely off. By the end of college, I was walking barefoot with the hint of a beard and a frisbee in my backpack. Hey, barefoot walking kept me grounded, a clean shave was just another form of attachment, and ultimate frisbee practice was directly after my anthropology seminar on the influences of spiritualism on Indonesian tribalism.

9/11 happened the September of my first year of college, and it upset me that, as a country, we were trying to save the world's problems by invading countries instead of actually helping them. So as a peace-loving, frisbee-playing, anthropology major, something like Peace Corps was inevitable. When we went through the three months of training, I was sure we were the most gung-ho volunteers out there, diligently practicing our Spanish outside of class, taking our projects seriously, and smiling smugly at the other volunteers who thought the trainings were too tough. When we arrived at our assigned site, we found a small town filled with fields of pineapples and no apparent problems, but Peace Corps knew what they were doing. Surely, we would find the hidden drugs, gangs, and prostitutes that roamed the streets at night. Well, we found a few teenagers who smoked pot, but they also were said to help out the community. They greeted their neighbors from their hangout, and even cut the grass. When we visited our local school, we found out it was one of the best schools in Nicaragua, a Blue Ribbon school. For their newly arrived American volunteers, they were happy to show off their new computer lab, recently hooked up to the internet.

We were relieved to hear there was an indigenous reserve up along the mountains beyond the pineapple fields. Neighbors told us the people living in the reserve were alcoholics, possibly incestuous, and there was no reason for anyone to visit, unless you were looking for someone to save. We came upon a one room, wooden school with children running outside, playing soccer with a plastic bottle, barefoot. If I had taken a photo of it, it would have been on the cover of Peace Corps magazine. They stopped the game and came running to us, curious about white strangers. We told the teacher we were volunteers and asked how we could help. She told us that they didn’t have any books for their school. You mean, no computer lab?! We had found our spot, the perfect Peace Corps village. Peace Corps had made a mistake, and they were going to be impressed with our motivation to find a new, more deserving site. But when we traveled into the capital to tell them the good news, they were not impressed by our travels into the mountains, telling us that we had to stay put and find work to do in the award winning school. So, in defiance, we returned back to the States.

Martha's House

Our path had hit a dead end, but we had to keep moving, searching for our destined work. Then we found a homeless shelter in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. With their beautiful beaches and mansions, Ft. Lauderdale wasn’t exactly Ghana but we were working with a very needy group, the homeless, and the work suited us perfectly. My supervisor told me how great I was doing as a new case manager, and I thought, “this is only the beginning.” We were still saving the world by helping homeless kids get jobs, and it was nice that people were appreciating our extra work. But something was growing inside me, slowly and unconsciously.

It was a small voice that told me I was special, that I was different from everyone around me. Once, when I was dropped off at a hospital with one of our homeless kids, we were told it would take a while for our ride to come back and pick us up. So we took the bus. The director was amazed that we had taken the bus and mentioned to me how all the employees couldn’t get over it. I started to think, “You are special, you are called to be special, God has something great planned for you.” All this praise was pushing me, pushing me towards a cliff, a cliff called Daley Elementary.

Looking For Daley

When Martha's House was over, I thought I had found the straight and narrow path, and I prayed for the courage to follow it. Instead, I should have been wondering whether it was actually a path at all. My wife and I were deciding between New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. I figured they all had needy public school systems, and we ended up in DC because they were offering scholarships to anyone who would commit to teaching in the city for two years. If I was going to be crazy, might as well earn some money doing it. When I was interviewing for the grad school, they asked if I had any interests, and I only replied “urban education;” it was all I cared about. At the program’s orientation, I asked the teacher supervisors, “How bad are DC schools, really?” I didn’t want to come to a Nicaraguan dead end so they had better be just as bad as advertised. They were.

In my grad program, the scholarship urban teachers had a certain dislike of the non-urban teachers who worried about finding a “good” school to teach at. As urban educators, we assumed they wanted to teach at good schools only because they wanted their teaching life to be easy, and we assumed we wanted urban schools because we were sacrificing the "ease" of a good school for the rigors of a rough school because it was the right thing to do. In any sort of group project, we kept to our own because we were afraid the other group just might mess up our assignment. There was an awards ceremony that our program had at the end of the year, and one of the awards was “Most likely to teach across the River.” The river was the Anacostia River; it was assumed that most of DC’s worst schools were over there, and all of its good schools were west of Rock Creek Park. I won the award, but I had already found a school where I wanted to teach, but it wasn’t across the river; it was in Candler Park, an area well-known for its drugs and homicide rate. One of my classmates shouted out that Candler Park was much worse than any neighborhood across the river. She had been on jury duty multiple times, and she was convinced Candler Park was the real pit of DC. I found this school by looking through the list of city wide test scores. Daley Elementary had a 10% passing rate for both reading and math; it was one of the worst schools in one of the worst school districts in the country. It was just the pit for me.

When I first walked into Daley, I met the interim principal, Ms. Coan, who was filling in because the previous principal had been fired due to poor test scores. She assumed I was from the central office because of my suit, but she beamed when I told her I was there to teach. I told her I was interested in 3rd grade, and as an old 3rd grade teacher herself, she leaned back in her chair, “The best teachers are 3rd grade teachers.” She mentioned most of the classes had long term subs because so many teachers had quit as early as October. This was no Nicaragua. I walked into one 3rd grade class where the long term sub was rambling about homework, and she asked me to step up in front and talk about grad school because “they don’t know what it means to graduate from anything.” I talked a little, and then I took some questions. They asked as many questions as they could think of, knowing that anything was better than listening to the sub's ramblings. When I gave the floor back to her, the kids got rowdy, and she told them all to stand up and stay standing until everyone was quiet. She told me she learned that trick from the military. The students’ were so angry that I thought it was a matter of time before they threw a desk across the room. At the time, it was clear to me they needed teacher like me. As I began to stroll towards the door, the sub asked the students, “Would you rather have me as a teacher, or Mr. Slaughter?” They all began to chant my name, “Mr. Slaughter! Mr. Slaughter! Mr. Slaughter!” Just wait, I’ll be there soon, I thought. This was my school. The bait was placed, just a few formalities now.

Over the summer, I found out a new principal was coming to Daley, and his name was Ryan Franklin. He was previously a very successful principal at one of the top elementary schools in DC and was asked by Chancellor Rhee to take on a challenge, Daley Elementary. His previous school was one of the best schools West of Rock Creek Park, and it should be no surprise it was majority white, a rarity in DC. For me, it was another sign that I was following the right path. I considered Franklin a high performer, and I considered myself a high performer, and we were coming to Daley for the same reason, to be the savior. When I went to the DC Public Schools job fair, Franklin was hiring for eight positions, while everyone else only had one or two positions open. Almost all of the previous teachers at Daley had either quit or been fired. There was a line to speak with him, but I was in front; it was my first and only choice. When he interviewed me, he only asked me one question: “What are your thoughts on behavior management?” I had just reread the behavior management bible of DC schools , and I remembered the term “logical consequences.” I replied, “I believe students should be given logical consequences for their actions.” I thought it strange he didn’t want to talk further about it, but he was only checking one thing, my pulse. It turns out there weren’t many teachers in DC who had my same death wish, and he needed teachers, desperately.

Preparing for Day 1

That summer, the whole staff met together in the library, seated in a large circle, just like the circles talked about in the sacred behavior management book. The majority of last year’s teachers had been fired because the school had been failing for too many years; heads rolled. When I looked around, I saw the new staff included a few of the previous teachers, but now consisted mostly of young, white women. Franklin read us an essay he had written about the seven homicides in the neighborhood over the summer, and proclaimed it was time to turn around our school and our neighborhood. He brought out a detached car seat that had an extra seat belt attached to it; he had found it in one of the storage closets. It left us wondering if the old staff actually used it to restrain children. Franklin was making it clear that our kids had years of baggage coming from this neighborhood and even from some of last year's staff. A young teacher asked me why I had come to Daley. I said, “Well, I think I’m a little crazy.” She smiled, “I think we are all a little crazy.”

I was excited to enter my own classroom, and the first thing I noticed was how dirty everything was. Along with the f-words scribbled on the chairs and the table veneers peeling off, most of the whiteboard was Matted up. The whiteboard took up most of the front wall, and it was sad to see such a wonderful tool all messed up. My lesson objectives, my demonstrations, my guided practice all had to do with a whiteboard; it had to be clean. I went right to work with Clorox, a wire scrubber, and super glue; everything would be fixed and shining when the students came in for the first day, I thought. They would know that this was a new teacher that cared about them, but this was a thought almost every previous teacher had when they first walked into that classroom. What wonderful lessons they could have taught me, but they were gone with only a few scraps left behind, but sadly I wouldn't have listened to them anyway, they had failed, right; now it was someone else's shot. The cleaning and rearranging took much longer than I had anticipated. We were given one week to prepare our classroom, and after a full week of gluing and scrubbing, the room only looked slightly better. No matter how hard I scrubbed the white board, it never shined; most of the old marks still remained.

I spent most of grad school planning for that first day. Every day I studied the sacred behavior management handbook that told me it was wrong to be authoritarian and right to facilitate a safe environment where kids can solve their own problems; I believed every word of it. Their first activity was going to be writing their names and coloring their name tags. It was simple and easy; it couldn't fail.

Day 1

Out on the blacktop, I shook hands with my new students, and it was no surprise they were all black; there were two latinos in the school, and zero whites. There something very odd about how black the students were and how white the teachers were. An uncle walked up to me and gave me three different phone numbers while trying to conceal a concerned look. “I’m Jerome’s uncle. He gets into a lot of trouble. Call me if he starts acting up. Here's my mom's number and her cell if I don't pick up. She lives real close, so she can just come and get him.”
"I'm sure that won't be necessary."
"Just call if you need to."
A woman with an oversized t-shirt and tight jeans turned to me, “I’m Sean’s mother. He is ADHD. I don’t have his medication yet.”
I smiled. They’ll be just fine; I’ll take care of your little babies, I thought. I didn’t know at the time they were less concerned about their kids, and more concerned about me. Too many teachers had come and gone, and now they had a young white guy in a suit with a handbook and a bright smile with little chance of staying past October. Colin was my smallest student and the Special Ed teacher was holding his hand. “He’s a little shy around new teachers; he’ll warm up to you.” Ahhh, I thought, poor little guy, I’ll make sure he has a great day.

When the students came in and took their seats, they were all looking at me intently, in complete silence. They were just staring, extremely carefully just like my old dog, Stoney, froze when he saw a turtle for the first time. Stoney didn’t know what to do - “What is this strange animal? Is it friendly or mean? Will it mind if I pounce on it? Let's find out.” He ended up jumping on it until I had to pull him away fearing he might just have killed it given the chance. My little friend Colin was the first to budge, and he started whispering to a neighbor, “Please be quiet,” I said in my best teacher voice, but it sounded more like a flight attendant. They both looked up and stopped, and I continued with my description of the nametags but then they started talking again. They must not have understood me, I thought. “Voices should be turned off,” I said; maybe a different phrasing would do the trick, fingers crossed. But they kept on talking without even a pause. Then it occurred to me, Oh! They must be bored with what I’m doing, let's hand out the crayons, and then they will be engaged. Engaged was the buzzword of my grad school; it was explained over and over again that almost all behavior issues could be solved by creating an engaging lesson. Their behavior didn't depend on me as a teacher, but it depended upon the lesson that I had written up the night before. It wasn't like they saw me as a young, white, 1st year teacher who happened to be smiling more than their previous teachers. It was more like they were eagerly awaiting my engaging nametag activity. At least, that was what grad school had taught me.

September 12

Here is my first journal entry of the year.

“Things that worked: It's hard to think of things that worked because everything was all over the place... let's see, the morning meeting, spelling test, writer's workshop, math, Read Aloud, none of it worked... I really can't think of a thing... we cleaned up okay (because the security guard made them clean up). Oh, I know, they liked my story of when Abby (my daughter) almost set the apartment on fire. Oh, and the behavior management system was all over the place...”

Grad school had told me engaged kids couldn’t act up. I told a fantastic story of how my daughter put a towel in the broiler part of the oven without my wife and I knowing, and when I turned on the oven for pizza, the whole oven lit up. It was a story that made almost every student silent, and I tragically figured that if only I could make every lesson as fantastic as a real life apartment fire, then they would behave. I followed my journal with a bit on what didn’t work.

“Things that did not work: morning meeting- students were unable to sit quietly at the circle; writer's workshop- students never started writing; incentives- unclear as to how they earn tickets; math- they were only half attentive because they thought they could go to a dance assembly: holding things above their heads, and then not giving it to them only makes them angry...”

It had only been a few weeks of school, and it was apparent that I had the worst class. It turned out half my students had a 1st grade teacher that quit in October, and the other half had a teacher that was on her last year of teaching before retirement. I guess she had a bunch of vacation days saved over the years, and she used them for most of the second half of the school year. The PE teacher told me it was common for him to sit in on the first graders because it was rare for subs to show up. Last year's first graders were known to spend most of the day running the halls, and they even considered themselves a gang, the "baby 12."

This Friday there was a dance assembly scheduled for the afternoon, and the assistant principal, Ms. Coan, told me I should only bring my class if I thought they deserved it. I told the kids if they behaved the whole day they could go to the assembly. They didn’t seem to care, well not until it was 30 minutes before the assembly. It seemed like every 3 minutes I reminded them, “You have to work quietly if you want to go… not everyone will be going you know.” I figured they had done alright, relative to the standard chaos, so I lined them up; I needed the break anyway. Ms. Coan stopped by my room right as I was lining them up and said, “Mr. Slaughter, I think it is best if you don’t bring your class.” So after I held the carrot above the kids' heads all day, Ms. Coan snatched it away. That afternoon I learned a few lessons about behavioral psychology. In my journal, I continued searching for answers:

“What can be changed: when they come back from lunch they need a quiet time activity on their desk so we can get bathroom breaks out of the way; they need labels on their lockers; labels on their tables; clean tables; permanent schedules; more hopes and dreams; a better system for students in time out (they shouldn’t throw things at each other while in time out); more engaging activities; I need spots where I put things; the desk needs to be HANDS OFF. Parents need to be called, GET NUMBERS FOR ALL THE PARENTS, fill out SST/counseling forms for Sean, Wayne, Randy, Lauren, Marlin, and Noah.”

I had never failed anything in my life. In my first year of college when most of the students in my Chemistry class received Cs, or worse, on the first exam I overheard them say they were just not cut out for it. Before the exam, I was studying four hours a night, and a C on the exam only meant one thing: I needed to study more. I made it a goal to stay in the library longer than anybody in my class, and sometimes it meant I had the pleasure of being the first in the cafeteria the next morning for fresh, scrambled eggs and steaming hot apple crisps. I got an A- on the next exam. I didn't care if I wasn't the smartest; I knew I could outwork anybody.

At Daley, I came in to school at 7am every morning, an hour early, and if the custodian had opened the school any earlier, I would have made it earlier. There was no way a class of seven year olds would beat me; I just had to outwork them.

Clipboard

I started carrying around a clipboard with a class list. At Martha's House, I knew documentation was the key to holding kids accountable. Everything that a resident did was documented so that, as case managers, we could make sure we created a consequence for anything inappropriate. With an even more watchful discipline, I documented every time my students misbehaved. I even had my own code: if they were defiant, I wrote down an A; if they were threatening, I wrote down a B; if they fought, I wrote down a C. So this is how it played out:

Lauren gets out of her seat and starts bothering Sean. He’s looking at her strangely, and I say, “Lauren, sit down in your seat.”
“I don’t have to!”
The teacher dutifully writes down A next to Lauren because she was defiant, and repeats, “Lauren, you have to sit down.”
Lauren yells at Sean, “You better shut up or I’ll steal you!”
“Lauren that was a threat!” as if she was unaware, and I write down B next to the A.

When Sean flicks Lauren off, she charges and rams her shoulder into his chest. I run over to the fight to grab her arm and pull her away from Sean while he begins punching me, trying to reach his fists around me to get at Lauren. As I hold Lauren, kicking my shin and screaming at Sean, I awkwardly drag her over to the door to peak my head out of the door and look down the hall for security. Usually there wasn’t anyone because security was always walking from one classroom to the next. So then I turn around and drag Lauren back through the class to an intercom, where I have to yell multiple times over her screams that I need security. By this time, even my quiet kids are out of their seat jumping and yelling in excitement; it was always the best part of the day. Some thirty minutes later, security comes to get her, and with a very shaky hand, I write down a C next to Lauren and a C next to Sean. There were usually between 5 and 10 fights in a day, including times when there were two separate fights breaking out at the same time. I had to hold onto something to keep myself afloat, and the clipboard was an imaginary flotation device. I pretended that my careful documentation might mean future expulsions but it meant very little to anyone else. No one seemed to care about the fights; they were just happy that it was October, and I hadn’t left yet.

Believing In The Dream

Even amid the chaos, there was a significant sense of camaraderie among the staff. Franklin called our first staff meeting on the 6th day of school, and said, “I can’t believe it’s only been 6 days. It feels like it has been a year.” He told us how great we were doing, how difficult this population was, and how if we all worked together we could right the ship. I ate it up, every single word.

Rising Sun

In the fall I was biking to school, but when the mornings were below freezing I had to take the bus. I wanted something to do on the bus, and I picked up an unread book from my wife’s collection called Surviving Auschwitz. As an Auschwitz survivor, the author described how when new prisoners entered the camp, he could tell which ones wouldn’t make it; if they had too much hope of getting out, the hope would crash and destroy the prisoner in the process; if they didn’t have any hope, then they were already dead. It was the small glimmer of hope that kept him going each day. Hope could cause failure if it wasn’t tempered and a quick death if non-existent. Every morning on the bus I read that book, and every morning I walked from the bus stop to the school, praying: “Lord, lift me up with your love.” While the author was in a concentration camp, I was just a 2nd grade teacher; if he could survive hell on earth, then I had to survive a bunch a seven year olds. If a divine being had sent me to Daley, then not only was I going to outwork them, I was going to beat those kids with love. The book mentioned how the man’s hope grew when he finally could see the sun rise through the clouds because it meant that the lifeless, grey winter was coming to an end. In Candler Park, the days were growing longer, and I started to see that sun rise too.

I had put some faith in a line graph given to first year teachers that charted the typical ups and downs, and just like the line graph showed, things started to improve after winter break. Everyone told me the kids would be out of control after the break, but my kids had calmed down. I wasn’t doing anything differently, so I guessed my consistency was finally paying off. I had been doing the “handbook” discipline for 4 months and now it was sinking in. Then the compliments came, “Wow, Mr. Slaugher, your class is really coming along!” At a staff meeting, Franklin asked that teachers offer up compliments to keep the morale up: of the seven compliments given, I was mentioned in four of them. It wasn’t long before I was on top of the world again, persevering through the harshest of conditions, but everything was fine because I knew I was going the right direction. Mr. Franklin walked in the door, saw all the kids quietly writing and announced that my class was his favorite because they had come so far. My destination was unclear, but the path was straightening out again.

Our school was receiving a lot of attention because we were a “turn-around” school with a new and unconventional principal, and there was a writer for NPR writing a story about us. He was interviewing a few of the more successful teachers about the ups and downs of the school, and he also came to me; “Mr. Franklin said I should check out your class sometime.” Just like I had always imagined.

The First Crash

Just then, I started to falter. On my morning walk from the bus to the school, I kept my hope alive, walking around the police tape, believing, “maybe today I will beat them with love.” In the beginning of January, the class started to turn around, and things were finally falling into place; my reasons for taking on Daley were making sense. But without warning, the class turned worse, my facade of purpose started to fade away, and the real reasons for coming to Daley were slowly, painfully, exposing themselves.

After mostly everyone had been praising away at the class' progress, things went bad, and I turned inward. I became increasingly worried about holding it together in the class, and I made sacrifices, leaving some students to fend for themselves. Randy was one of my best students in the fall. He was far from the smartest, but he was intent on pleasing me. Whatever type of incentive program I had set up, he was following through much more than any other student at the time. But something happened in February. He was getting older, and he no longer cared about me or what I thought about him. Randy had a mom who always seemed depressed. Randy's grandmother on his mother's side would come in occasionally, and always blamed Randy's home life for behavior issues. Then there was Randy's other grandma; I loved this grandma. She was Randy’s father’s mother, and Randy’s father was in jail. She lived right across the street from the school, and she had no problems coming into school to set Randy straight. She told me that with his temper he might get himself shot someday; she wasn't joking around in the least. By the end of January, Randy started coming in with dark sunglasses on and one glove on his right hand. He didn’t care about learning to read anymore; he was more concerned about staring down Kyle, a bully who wouldn’t leave Randy alone. Someone was teaching him there were more important things in school than listening to a teacher. I tried to figure out what was going on at home, but mom just looked off beyond me as if she couldn’t explain it to me. When I spoke to Randy, I talked to him like my mom used to talk to me when I was in trouble, “You have changed; what happened to the old Randy?” There was a small glare in his eyes, "He’s gone, Mr. Slaughter."

It went from bad to worse when new students starting coming in. Matt, Trent, and Cole joined the class, and they became the tazmanian devils of the class. At least Sean and Lauren had some desire to do well in class; these three just scattered when I handed out their work. They were already way behind, so I did my teacherly duties by giving handing them out easier assignments that they could handle. I didn't really reach out to them; I pretended like they might reach out to me. They preferred to run around the class. I became less worried about their reading and more about their running. Just how they wanted it.

So when the NPR writer finally came to visit, things were “better” than they were in September, but worse than January. Instead of five to ten fights a day, it was more like one or two, and instead of students running around the classroom, it was more like they got up and out of their seat when they pleased. The writer didn’t quite have my perspective on the class' progress, and our interview turned to how difficult the year had been. I was expecting him to visit again later in the year to see how things had improved. Things didn’t get better, and I’m glad he didn’t come back to see it.

Later that year, it was announced that his report was now a broadcast on NPR. There were five segments focusing on different aspects of the school, with one focusing on student behavior. I was sure this was my moment in the sun, the recognition that I had earned after a year of hard work. The segment started with a recording of a raucous classroom with not a sound of a teacher. He explained I was trying to teach over student laughter as a student who was previously put out of the classroom was now crawling back in and hiding under my teacher table. It was Lauren. I was quoted saying, “I know that some teachers say you either have it or you don’t, and I just hope that some day, I get it.” After hearing it, I thought it was a tempered hope, just the right amount to get me through the multiple years of struggle before becoming one of the greats. Franklin brought it up later and said it sounded more like desperation. Maybe it was, maybe the hope was gone, maybe it was just a matter of time now.

End of 1st Year

By May other teachers were always asking me, “Are you coming back for another year?” and containing a small smile I replied, “Maybe.” In reality, I had made no other plans, and things could only go up; it wasn’t possible to go down. On one of the last days of school, I took the kids to the computer lab. I leaned against a wall and watched the students play their computer games; there was no fighting over the computers this time, just smiles. They were cute, and for a moment, I remembered they were just seven and eight year olds. I thought, “See, I can do this.” It was one of the rare instances I thought like that, and it was just enough to convince me I was at the right place. Things had fallen apart after January, but maybe I was still fulfilling my destiny, and maybe I just had to wait until next year.

When the school year finished, I left the white board even dirtier than before because we were moving to a new school, with a new name, and a new start.

Great Expectations

I had been obsessing about next year's first day of school for most of the summer because this year, everything would be different. When the first day came, this time I had already assigned and labeled the lockers and tables days before any student walked in. This time, when they walked in, I didn’t wait for them to measure me up, I measured them up. “Put your backpack at #4. Sit at table D; you should see your name. Welcome to Mr. Slaughter’s class.” And this time, I cornered any parents who showed up, wrote all their numbers on a master list, and I taped that list above the class phone. This year we had a class phone, and I expected to use it the first day. I was ready, ready for the Colin who might start talking, or the Sean who might bother a neighbor when there was work to do, or even the Lauren, the queen bee. I was still heavily leaning on my handbook, but the words “never again” felt like they had been tattooed on my forehead. I even followed them to their specials just to see how they act with other teachers; I took zero breaks the first two weeks, and every time I packed a lunch, I ended up eating it on the ride home.

Those first two weeks everything was going just as planned. I saw Mr. Franklin in the hallway at the end of my first week, and I smiled, “I have a really good bunch of kids this year.” “Good, you deserve it after last year.” For the first time, I looked forward to walking my kids down the hallway. We were receiving so many compliments that I told them for every compliment we heard, we got an extra minute of recess. There were days when I stopped counting.

On the 6th day, when I asked the students to come to their assigned seats on the carpet, Laila scrunched up her face when she saw who she was sitting next to. His name was Donald, and he looked like a Donald. “There is no way anyone does that in my classroom. Apologize.” She just sat there. “Well, you’re not part of the class until you apologize; go back and take a seat at your table.” She slowly stood up and walked backwards to her seat, but she didn’t sit down. She grabbed her pencil from her seat and then stood up against the back wall with no intention of sitting down; it seemed like a duel. I wrote her name on the board, “Your name stays up until you apologize, and if it's still up there at the end of the day, I am calling home.” I came back to my lesson, and after a few minutes, she interrupted, “Mr. Slaughter, I’m ready.” Just as she was walking up to the front of the class, an administrator from downtown walked in with Ms. Coan. I crossed my fingers. I had been warned about Laila; I was told she was much worse than Lauren. Lauren might tear up your class in a fit of rage, but then she'd hug you the next day because she was sorry. I was told Laila would still tear up your room, but she wouldn't apologize for anybody. She did apologize, and everyone was all smiles, but it wasn’t until that afternoon that I found Laila’s writing on the back walls of the classroom. When she was hanging on the back wall with her pencil, she was actually scribbling her name over and over again. It was a new school, and Laila and I were in a turf war.

I knew the first two weeks were a honeymoon period, and I also knew when it ended, eleven days. It was better than the few minutes I got my first year, and I figured it was a good sign because they kept it together for much longer than most of the other classes. So as they started to chat it up, I barked loud, trying to reign them back in. When they cut up some more, I barked even louder. When they continued to cut up, I barked so loud that I lost voice. In the beginning, I lost my voice on Fridays, but by mid-September, I was losing my voice every single afternoon. Things weren’t going the way they were supposed to go, but my handbook said that I had to be very consistent with the behavior management for six weeks, and then the class would be ready to teach. This was the same myth that I believed my first year. The six week Matt was right around my birthday, September 29th.

“I want to quit teaching”

After the first six weeks, my class was not magically ready to be taught; in fact, it seemed like each week they were getting worse. They may have started their mornings quietly coloring in a rainbow with addition problems on it, but after everyone had been dismissed, there were only balled up papers and broken crayons left behind. Don’t get me wrong, it was still much better than my first year. The majority of the students did their work, and they did it well, but most afternoons things got nutty, and there was very little I could do to settle them down. It seemed like each day it was getting nuttier and nuttier. My wife wanted to do something especially nice for my birthday because she knew my class’ behavior was getting to me. She asked me to take off half a day, and she didn’t tell me why; it was obvious she had a big surprise in mind. She called my mom to drive up the three hours and babysit, and when we walked down the sidewalk to the car, my mom yelled out, “Have fun at the concert!” My wife’s jaw dropped, and I could only smile, “So what concert are we going to?” “U2.” “U2!” It was one of our favorite bands. We never did things like this; we had a rule we couldn’t spend more than $30 on a gift, and she must have broken it…substantially. As she put the car in drive, my smile faded and forehead tensed up; I was consumed by how bad my class had turned, but also desperately trying to be happy. “Let me just tell you what happened during the day, and then it will be off my chest, and I can enjoy the rest of the night.”

No matter how much talking I did, nothing was leaving my mind. My wife had not only gone through all the trouble of tickets, parking passes, and a babysitter, but she was also hopeful, hopeful that one great night would break me out of the tailspin. Instead of imagining Bono screaming Sunday Bloody Sunday to a sold out crowd, my thoughts were more like this: “What are we going to do tomorrow? I should have called Ryden’s mom, he did get in a fight… Adam should have lost his recess… He’ll probably do the same thing tomorrow… I don’t want to go in tomorrow… I feel sick.” It seemed like an incredible concert: Bono was singing Sunday Bloody Sunday with pictures of the Iranian protests in the background, the crowd was singing along, pounding their fists in the air, and I was with my best friend. But no matter how many times I told myself to enjoy it, I couldn’t. For every fake smile and shout, there was a glance at my watch and a yawn, and I thought, “It’s getting late. Do we have to stay for the encore?” Tomorrow was looming; six weeks in, and my class was getting worse. I was getting worse.

The next day I typed, “I want to quit teaching” in Google just to see what would come up, and I smiled; there were plenty of results. There was a pleasure in reading about all the teachers who hated their jobs. I wasn’t surprised by all the first year teachers who hated it, but it was the others that made me feel like I had company. I read about a fourteen-year veteran who regretted he didn’t get quit earlier. I read about a teacher who had already quit, and he was so happy even though he was barely getting by on unemployment checks. Then I found a website designed for frustrated teachers that listed all the reasons why I should stick with it, but at the bottom of the list it said if you really didn’t like the kids you should get out. Come to think of it, I thought, there aren’t many kids I like. It seemed the answer was clear. It was time. Time to get out.

My first year I always kept the hope that things could only get better; there was still a good chance I would pull through, turn the class around, and become a good teacher in the process. I imagined stations of collaborative groups, I imagined facilitating conversations in book groups, I imagined using egg cartons to teach multiplication. I knew it wouldn’t come easy, but I assumed it could only be a matter of time. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be teacher of the year after one year, maybe it would take quite a few years. But I could get there, as long as I kept trying.

Something snapped, my second year. Just trying hard wasn’t working, and I started wondering, what god would send me here, if I was only to fail?

Job Search

I started applying to vague educational jobs on idealist and craigslist, but my most promising lead was with a friend of my wife who sympathized and asked around for a job at her adult educational charter school. Adult education seemed a good fit and the way our friend was talking, it would only be a matter of time before I could leave Daley. If I was praying for God to lift me up with love my first year, now I was praying, “Please get me out.” I’m not sure who I was praying to; I would have prayed to Zeus if I thought it might work.

Out of all the job postings I applied to, the only interview I got was with the adult education school because my wife’s friend had pulled a few strings. I scheduled the interview for 4:30, so I had to leave Daley right after school to arrive on time. I had colorful Matter stains all over my fingers because I spent the day erasing a Matted up whiteboard over and over again without an eraser. Every day was the same; I spent the mornings writing down letters for good behavior, and I spent the afternoons erasing them. By 2:00 that day, I was taking away letters so frequently that I had no time to use an eraser; I didn’t even know where my eraser was. It took forever to get that dry erase Matter off my fingers, and I arrived late to the interview. My first interview was just about my resume, and I felt great discussing all the nice volunteer jobs I had before Daley. She asked why I was leaving the second graders, and I kept myself from disclosing the real reason, that it was a struggle to show up each day at work because I was starting to hate it. I just told her second graders weren’t motivated to learn, and she smiled, “I know the feeling. I started as a high school teacher, but teaching adults is much more fulfilling.” The interview was going just fine. Teaching Spanish speakers English and how to effectively job search was becoming more and more appealing. I could still teach, I could make enough money for my family to get by on, and I wouldn’t have to worry so much about behavior any more. I’d even experience the pure joy of giving Franklin my two weeks notice. Grandma James would understand; she had been telling me to get out for weeks now. Well, I had given Daley my best shot, but I was beaten. It was time to move on.

It wasn’t until my second interview that I realized something was wrong. She told me I had to be bilingual, quite a surprise, but I had spent 6 months in Nicaragua, so I could call myself intermediate. My wife’s friend told me the schools said employees had to be bilingual, but she barely spoke any Spanish, and the person who was leaving the job didn’t speak any Spanish either. My second interview was conducted completely in Spanish, and it was going okay until she started asking me about the attendance programming system we used at Daley. I didn’t even know the answer in English. Then she started explaining what the job was about. It wasn’t a teaching job at all; it was answering the phones and registering new Spanish speaking students. She also asked if I had a high school diploma or GED. As an intermediate Spanish speaker with a master of education degree, I was both under-qualified and over-qualified. It also paid an hourly wage right around that of Target so I withdrew my name from the list just to avoid the embarrassment of not getting hired by a job that I couldn’t afford to take anyway. I guessed it was back to the whiteboard for me.

Creating Space

When the doors to potential jobs closed my anxiety only got worse, and it started to affect my home life. If it wasn’t about school, I wasn’t really talking with my wife anymore. She seemed worried and told me I should see a psychiatrist, and even though I imagined it a waste of time, I knew I had to reach out for help because I was approaching somewhere I had never been. I had no space in my life when I wasn’t thinking about why Ryden was screaming or why Laila couldn’t read or why Ms. Price stopped talking to me (she was the other 2nd grade teacher). Each night I sat at the dinner table with my beautiful daughter and wife, and I put my head in my hands, wishing that everything would go back to normal. I didn’t want to think about work anymore, I just wanted to enjoy my family. I started to brainstorm ways of escape; if I couldn’t find another job, maybe there was something else.

On my bike ride to school, I wondered what would happen if I was hit by car. It would hurt a lot, but only temporarily, and maybe I’d be in the hospital for the rest of the year, eat microwaveable dinners, and watch soap operas all day. It sounded like a little slice of heaven. But then, I could risk getting paralyzed or go in coma. What if I died? As soon as I had the thought, I tried to silence it. “Don’t think that. Whatever you do, don’t think that.” With my head in my hands at the dinner table, instead of imagining a new life free from Daley, I started wishing for an end. I guess I needed to see a psychiatrist. I tried to make an appointment, but all the local clinics were booked so I made an appointment that was weeks and weeks away in a clinic requiring a 40 minute commute. Options were running out, and I needed a solution, today. My wife mentioned journaling.

I had already written what we grad students called teacher reflections about what was and wasn’t working in the classroom, but it had been years since I truly wrote in a journal about how I was feeling. Once I started, I didn’t want to stop writing. Everything that had been filling my head, I started to put on paper. After writing an entry, it seemed I had created a little space, just enough space to breathe again.

Grandma James

By November, teachers were pretending like they didn’t see me. They knew my class was one of the worst in the school, and by the look on my face, they figured it was only a matter of days before I quit. There was only one person in the school who had my back and that was Grandma James. There was a group of grandmothers who worked in our school, and almost every teacher in the lower grades had an assigned helper. The classroom grandma I had last year spent most of the year sitting and falling asleep in a corner, so when Ms. Coan asked if I wanted another grandma in the class, I initially said no. By mid-October, I had changed my mind; at least there could be a witness to the chaos, I thought. When I first saw her, I had just walked my class into the library; she told me Ms. Coan assigned her to work with my class. She walked slowly into the library and kindly asked me if we could talk, “Could we discuss a few things first?” She was an older lady, maybe in her late 70s. I didn’t notice her shaky hands, but she told me right off that she had previously suffered a stroke, and her memory wasn’t so good. Considering her condition, there was no way I would put her directly in the line of fire; she came to tutor kids, not restrain them. I told her she could meet with kids in the halls and read books with them. Each kid had a baggy of books that were picked based on the student’s reading level. She told me she taught her 5 year old granddaughter to read just by using flash cards with sight words on them. It didn’t seem like flash cards were considered best practice, and so I asked her just to try out the books. On her first day she couldn’t find the time to tutor anyone.

With a new person in the room, I hoped the kids might act just a little differently, but they didn’t. Gracyn slid a chair across the room, and it almost hit Grandma James in the leg. It reminded me of my first classroom grandma who was hit in the face by an errant pencil; it was one of the few times she got out of her seat. After the chair incident, I wondered if she would be coming back. She told me later that when she took the bus home that day, she was praying, “Please, Lord, get me out of that class.” But she had come to that school because she wanted to do the right thing; too many had given up on those kids, and one chair was not going to stop her. There was a time when I told myself the same thing, but by mid-November, Grandma was telling it to me straight, “Mr. Slaughter, you have a pregnant wife and a little girl at home, and there is no sense putting yourself through this. Every morning you come in with bloodshot eyes, and by mid-day your face is red and your voice is hoarse. Your hair is falling out and your belt doesn’t keep your pants up anymore -, you losin’ weight? Mr. Slaughter, you need to get out before you have a stroke.”

I even beat myself up at home because I was sure my wife no longer saw me as responsible. I was journaling, but I was still making unprofessional decisions, like taking unscheduled days off, and there was no real hope of another job when the economy was this bad; there weren’t even other teacher openings. We decided it was best to add up all our savings and calculate how much money we needed to get by until my wife found a job. Our second daughter was due in December, and she would be with the baby for at least the first 6 months. Without my salary, we could have lasted 3 months. I never looked at a position at Target, but I would easily have swallowed my pride and taken it if we had enough savings. She kept on saying, “It’s just one year. You can make it to June,” but June was a four letter word I couldn’t bear to hear.

Counting the days until Thanksgiving

Weekends meant I could write everything down, a needed mental release, but it didn’t keep Monday from coming, and this Monday morning I felt ill. There was no fever, and no other signs indicating a real sickness. I had seen the nurse enough times to know the sickness wasn’t real, but it sure felt real to me. My stomach ached, my forehead was sweaty and all I could think to do was run past the nurse’s office, through the halls, open the double doors and sprint to my car. If there was a pill that could have given me a fever, I would have taken it. Better to be sick and get the days off, then never to have been sick at all.

It was a 3 day week until Thanksgiving Break, and I pretended 3 days were nothing. I had gone through months and months of this crap; 3 days would be over before I knew it, I thought.

Journaling was now less soothing and more addictive; if I felt the anxiety building, I sat down and wrote. When I sat down with my cereal and morning coffee, I wrote. When I walked into the classroom at 7 in the morning, I wrote. As I walked down the halls to pick up the kids, I pulled out my pen and half a torn hall pass and wrote, “Get me out!”

This Monday morning, I lined the kids up without word, but there was an unmistakable grimace on my face. Gabe was my youngest second grader, and it was difficult for him to sit still. This morning he was eagerly lining up first, with his hands behind his back and his chest puffed out. He was one of my most difficult kids, and he was trying his hardest to impress his teacher. I just glared at him, thinking, “Now you are acting like an angel after you have driven me crazy. Now you stand up straight because the other teachers are here. As soon as you walk in my door, you will go right back to acting up!” Ms. Vaughn, a perky, young Teach For America teacher, looked at me with shock in her eyes and motioned to Gabe, “Wow!! Gabe, you are doing such a great job lining up!!” It was like a caption in the handbook, “Don’t focus on the negatives, give specific praise to build them up.” I had been specifically praising all year, “You are doing a great job sitting still, Gabe! Wow Gabe, you are raising your hand so patiently, I appreciate that. Gabe, I’m glad to see you started right away on your work.” It wasn’t working. He was still struggling to be the best line leader he could be. But in my state, I couldn’t even muster a smile.

The CHOICE room

I decided to personally “escort” misbehaving students out of the classroom to the bad kids’ room. We called it the CHOICE room.

The CHOICE room was a place for kids that misbehaved so much they couldn’t be in the classroom. It was one of Franklin’s best ideas; he called it a release valve for when classroom pressure reached dangerous levels. I already had a reputation for using the valve the most because it seemed like mine were the nuttiest. I was such a frequent caller that I tried not to call until there was something really serious, like Gracyn throwing a chair across the room. So after each time he slung one across the floor up unto a wall, I walked across the room and called, and then he ran from one side to another as I tried to corner him by sliding empty tables in a way that he might get trapped. If I did catch him, then I had to hold him by the wrist until security got there. By this time of the year most students were used to Gracyn, so I simply dragged him to the front of the carpet and continued the lesson where I left off, while he hung near the floor, yanking my wrist as hard as he could, yelling, “Get off of me, white b----!!” It was just like Sean from first year, but Gracyn must have weighed another 50 pounds.

If Gracyn happened to have escaped out the door, then I had about 5 minutes to get my class back on task before he would run back in the room, yell, “f--- you!” and then slam the door to thunderous applause from my class. I could only call security again, “It’s Mr. Slaughter, Gracyn is in the halls again.” By this time, my voice was breaking up and roars of laughter were in the background. That was a typical day.

I actually preferred when students made it out the door before I could get to them. By mid-September I was so frustrated with some of my students that I just let them go out the door, like a matador using the door as a red cape, and I locked the door behind them, hoping not to see them again for the day. Other teachers hated it because my kids would go into their classes and yell obscenities at them. I felt bad, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I mentioned to the other teachers that they should just lock their doors too so the kids would have nowhere to go. Then, the kids ran the halls and became the administrators’ problem. Eventually, I realized that an administrator’s problem was still my problem, so I went to Franklin, told him straight up that my actions were no solution to the problem, and I wondered what he would suggest. He told me my actions were unacceptable and then saw me out the door; I knew that I was in the wrong, but I wanted to change, and I still wanted to get better. Something had gone sour in our relationship.

My decision to stop calling security several times per day and personally take kids to the CHOICE room was a much smarter move. I was no longer waiting on the enforcers because, now, I was the enforcer. With my increased anger and exasperation, the class was behaving better, and unfortunately, I started to positively correlate my anger and my class’ improved behavior. Some of them were acting better, but I still hated it.


Dead Man Walking

At the end of one of my bad weeks, I saw Franklin chatting with a few students after school, and I asked if there was a good time to meet so we could talk again. It seemed like things were only getting worse and I figured it was best he knew it. Our last meeting hadn’t gone so well, but I was willing to give it another shot. I had been wondering why he hadn’t sought me out earlier. I mean, it was obvious I needed help.

I was looking for a boost of confidence. I always enjoyed our meetings my first year because Franklin was encouraging even when things were ugly, “Mr. Slaughter, I know it seems like things are going downhill, but those kids have come a long way.” This year I considered myself a complete failure, but maybe it was in my head; I was working hard, it was only my second year and maybe with a few changes, things could get back on track. When I met with him, I told him how some of my kids were still out of control, but I tried to stay positive. “It’s amazing that my class is so much better than last year, but I’m still stressed because I know they can do better.” My class was a lot better than last year. Instead of daily fighting, there might have been one fight per week. Instead of no time on task, I had the kids working hard around half the time. I knew it was still bad, but I was moving in the right direction. I was trying to feed him the script, “Mr. Slaughter, I know your class is filled with quite a few challenging students, and I know we can turn them around. I want to observe you teaching this Friday and we’ll start meeting more often to get everything back on track.”

It didn’t go like that. More like this, “Mr. Slaughter, you’ve been a disappointment. Your behavior management sucks. Your class is not filled with particularly challenging students, and the chaos has been your own doing. You need to shape the class up, or we won’t be needing you next year.” I could feel the skin on my face drop; wasn’t it only November? I thought I was the one who wanted out, but now he was the one who wanted it? At that moment, my thoughts raced about what he was telling me, it’s funny he doesn’t know I how much I want to quit. He ended with, “I’m sure we can count on you giving your best for the rest of the year.” I said, “Of course, you can,” but my smile said, “good luck without me, a--hole.” Now, I had to find a job, because after that meeting, a large part of me had already left. I was dead man walking.

Ryden

After slowly walking from the main office to the art room, I saw half of my class out of their seats. Ryden had a bottle of red paint, and it looked like he was trying to spray anyone who got close. He had already torn up Austin’s painting because Austin wouldn’t give him the red.

Ryden always acted up in the afternoon. I knew Ryden was a strong reader and he was quick in math, but he always seemed angry, and he just got angrier and angrier as the day progressed. I thought it was school that was making him angry, but it took me way too long to figure out he just did not want to go home.

Towards the end of the school year, Ryden was playing football with his little brother in front of his house, he threw it over his head and his little brother went to chase the ball into the street. The four year old was struck by a car, and he died, right in front of his seven year old brother. Ryden sprinted back to his house, screaming at his grandma, “my brother is dead!” His mom wasn’t at the house; no one knew where she was. I was told later that she might have been at a crackhouse.

When the funeral was announced, I was planning on attending. Grandmother James said she wasn’t going to go. She had recently lost her own son to a rare blood disorder, and she had had enough of death; she said, “have you ever been to a black funeral?” “No.” “Well, you will have quite an experience.” I was one of 5 teachers who attended. I rode in the car with the other second grade teacher Price, her best friend Ms. Vaughn, and two other teachers. They spent the whole car ride talking about how much they didn’t like Price’s student teacher. I liked her student teacher, and I knew she liked Price, she even wanted to be Price’s co-teacher the next year at Daley. She was in for a big surprise.

When we walked through doors of the small, crowded church, I could see the open casket from a distance; it was small, too small. Right in front of it was Ryden and his family, and I walked up to see him. Ryden and I had such a horrible relationship, but even if it was one of my better kids, I’d still have trouble knowing what to say. I only said, “Hi, Ryden,” he smiled and gave me a hug. It’s the first time he ever hugged me. I gave the mom a half hug, and I stood there for a little, with my back to the four year old, not knowing what else to do, so I bent down, and I asked Ryden to come a little closer so we could at least talk for a little. But when I motioned for him to come nearer, he turned away, and I walked back to my seat.

I was surprised to see how many preachers were there; I think there were five, and they all were given an opportunity to speak. They kept on saying his brother was so young, but it was God’s plan, and now the little boy was happy because he was with God. It was hard to believe it was God’s plan for a 4 year old to get hit by a car, but I was in no mind to decipher God’s plan; there was a time when I thought it was God’s plan for me to teach in Candler Park. Ryden’s 9 year old sister got up in front of everyone and sang “I Got Shoes,” a joyous song about walking around in heaven. Ryden’s aunt came up to speak; she couldn’t have been older than 20. “I know I’m not supposed to cry because he is in a better place, but I don’t care. He’s my baby nephew, and he’s dead.” She made the most sense to me. Ryden’s mom and her two daughters sat up in the front, right next to the preacher. Ryden sat by himself, left behind.

Ryden was already diagnosed with attachment disorder, he already had a bad home life, and now this. I don’t know why but his brother’s death didn’t seem to affect his behavior at school. It seemed like things were same as they ever were, but the reality was it was drastically different at home. After the accident, all three children were sent to live in a foster home. After a court case a few weeks later, it was the two daughters that came back to live with mom, and it was Ryden who stayed at the foster home. His mom never had a good thing to say about Ryden, and after what I saw at the funeral, it must have been as clear to Ryden as it was to me; his mom had left him, this time for good.

To be honest, I tried not to think about Ryden’s home life because, well, it didn’t seem to matter; he was running circles around me. At the end of the day, whenever he started to get out of his seat and jump around his table, I chased him in a way that herded him out the door. Once he left his seat, there was no bargaining to get him back in it. I even kept an eye on where he placed his backpack and jacket, and when he ran out the door into the halls, I put his backpack, jacket, and math homework just outside the door for him to get later; I called it an early dismissal. But there was nowhere he wanted to go. It wasn’t long before he discovered my game.

So on this Monday, after the principal told me I really was a failure, and after watching red paint splatter all over Austin’s white T shirt, I walked my kids up to class, and I found Ryden’s backpack and jacket. I gave him our afternoon math work, and he went right to his work. Sloppy and quick, he tore through the pages, one after another, and I kept on checking and waiting. “Mr. Slaughter! I’m done!”
“great, Ryden, let’s look at your work.” Each page looked good until I got to page three. Instead of subtracting, he was adding. “Ooooh, it looks like you’re adding when you should be subtracting, see?”
“I’m still done.”
“No, you need to go back and fix these.”
“F--- this.”
That’s when it started. “Well, with language like that, you need to go to time-out.” My words were just a formality; he, I, and the rest of the class knew he wasn’t walking to time out. “Ryden, if you’re not walking to go to time out, then you’ll have to go to the CHOICE room.” Also a formality; he wasn’t going to CHOICE unless security got up to our room before the bell rung, and that almost never happened. As I walked towards him, he got up out of his seat, and I angled myself in such a way as to direct him out the door, just like always. When he thought he had successfully outmaneuvered me out the door, he realized that was my intention all along. As I went to lock the door behind him, he tried to squeeze himself back in the door, but I stood at the doorway blocking his entry. Now it was clear that he wasn’t escaping; I was kicking him out. I locked the door, checked the time (it was 5 minutes before the bell), and I brought his things to the door. He wasn’t running the halls, he was just waiting. “Here are your things, Ryden. You can’t act like that in class, we’ll try again tomorrow. You can go home now.”

First of all, it’s never good to tell a kid to go home at Daley, especially Ryden. He reached his arm way back, and he punched me in the stomach as hard as he could. It definitely wasn’t the first time I had been hit, but this one was different from all the rest. When kids hit me, it was usually an accident while in a fit of rage, but Ryden’s punch was purely intentional. I told Franklin about it after school, but he was nonchalant, “I’ll talk to the discipline administrator about it.”

Ms. Johnson

Ms. Johnson was one of the young, white women that taught at the school, and she was across the hall from me with the first graders. She was usually negative about the omnipresent chaos at Daley, but she didn’t pretend like she didn’t see it, and I respected her for that. She wasn’t really nice to me, and that was what made her different. When she invited everyone to a Christmas party, she didn’t realize I would be bringing my wife and daughter, “You brought your baby to a bar?” This year she was pregnant, and I already knew what to say if she brought the newborn to the Christmas party. Other teachers smiled big smiles when they saw me, but I guessed they said mean things behind my back. There were three teachers with classrooms near mine: Ms. Johnson, Ms. Price, and Ms. Jannsen. Ms. Price always put up a façade of kindness, and Ms. Jannsen, the other 1st grade teacher, was new to the school. She was a veteran teacher, and she had taught at Franklin’s previous school, the successful, mostly white, and west of the park one. She was like the new kid unsure of which kids she should befriend, and I was an unknown. Needless to say, she kept her distance.

When I pushed my children out the door for dismissal, laughing and yelling, Ms. Jannsen just looked down, Ms. Price’s smiled and waved, and Ms. Johnson came knocking on the door. “What happened to your class? They are off the walls!” I told her it wasn’t the laughing and yelling ones that I was worried about, at least they were walking in the right direction. It was the five kids who were still in my room, refusing to come out, that were troubling me. They were the ones tearing posters off the wall, turning over the tables and scaling the lockers to rip open my bag of pretzels. I told her I could walk the majority of my class to the front of the building for dismissal and leave the five to tear apart my room, or I could stay in the room, try to push the five out, and let the majority of my class do whatever they wanted in the halls. I decided for now on, I should stay with the majority, and then it would be less humiliating. I thought, everyone notices a class of students shouting and laughing through the halls, but only the janitors notice the destruction left behind in a classroom. Ms. Johnson was kind enough to tell me to send kids to her room if I needed to; she had quite a few of them last year. It was in the middle of November when she had her baby and took 3 months of maternity leave. I was sad to see her leave even though the occasion was a happy one. The one teacher who told it to me straight had now left the building.

Tuesday

After a Monday afternoon that included one punch from Ryden and another from Mr. Franklin, it was hard for me to put the journal down without feeling the surge of failure rise again. It wasn’t helping me that Tuesday was coming. I wanted Ryden to be suspended for punching me; it would send a message, a message I could post above my door: you can run around the class and not listen to me, but if you wind up and punch me in the gut, then you’ve gone too far. That might not fit though, maybe just: Don’t Punch Me. Ryden was there bright and early the next morning…so much for the suspension and so much for the message.

At school Tuesday morning, I passed by Mr. Franklin in the office, and I asked him if Ryden would be suspended. He replied, “Well, you told me yesterday, right, and I haven’t seen the discipline administrator since then, so…” Right, I thought. Thanks a lot. I rarely pushed for kids to get suspended. In fact, I never did. Kids would spit in my face, and Franklin would come and ask if I wanted them to get suspended. I always said no. He didn’t like suspending kids, and I assumed it was never the right thing because it meant less time at school and more time at home, a place that was rarely a positive experience. Since then, I had learned something from Grandma James: every consequence or lack of consequence was a message to every kid in my class. If Ryden didn’t get suspended, it meant that kids could do anything they wanted in my class and not get punished. I was begging Franklin for a suspension, but he didn’t seem to care, and I started to hate him for it.

Relative to Monday, Tuesday actually was a “good” day, good because even though I was losing my mind, no one punched me. Franklin was added to the list of staff that I thought was supporting me, but now, wanted nothing to do with me. My kids were acting marginally better, but they still didn’t know what to expect from me. It seemed I was always on the verge of full tilt rage. In circle time, I had the kids greet each other by saying good morning and then shake hands with their neighbor. Quint was next to Amelia, and after he shook her hand, he wiped his hand on the floor. Amelia didn’t see it, and I was willing to let the thing pass unnoticed, until Evan said, “Quint wiped his hand on the floor; he needs to apologize.” Dammit. I also knew there was no way Quint would apologize on the spot, in front of the whole class. He was volatile, especially first thing in the morning. “Alright Quint, go ahead and apologize to Amelia.”
“No!”
“Then, walk back to your seat.”
“I don’t have to.”
“Fine! If you don’t move, then I’ll move you.” By this time, my eyes were glaring and my muscles were tight. I swiftly grabbed his wrist and dragged him across the carpet, onto the floor, and out the door.
“I’m telling my mom!”
“Tell her.”
I slowly walked back to the carpet, sat criss-cross, and started a song about friends.
“What was that about?” murmured Grandma James.
“I have no idea, Quint’s always like that.”
“No, I meant about you.”

So Tuesday was a brief hiatus from the normal chaos, but I thought it was the anger that was changing things for the better. One of my new strategies was to pick on the better kids in the class. If Ayden laid his head down, I told him I was going to call his mom, in front of the whole class. I knew that Ayden’s mom would immediately take the bus to get to school, and then she dealt with him. Ayden had a good fear of his mother, most kids didn’t. Now if Adam laid his head down, I pretended like I didn’t see him because life was so much better when Adam wasn’t bothering me or any other student. Adam was also one of my crazies, and if it happened to be a bad day, one small reprimand could set in motion a tornado that would end with Adam crying on the floor and half a dozen chairs scattered around the room. It was kids like Ayden that still made me feel like a teacher with some control, but it was my crazies who had the control. My messages were clear: “I won’t bother you if you don’t bother me.”

I had no love for anyone in that class. I saw them as kids who were actively trying to make my life hell; how could a teacher love them for that. My first year I thought that love was the reason that I was going to succeed after so many teachers had failed before me. This year there was only anger: “How dare you treat me like crap! I will tear you down!” I got into teaching to prepare underprivileged kids to take on an unfair world. I read about the teachers who only wanted to keep their kids quiet, and it was those teachers who were the problem. They didn’t care about their kids getting smarter, they only cared about keeping their life in the classroom manageable. I had become that teacher.

Counting Down To Thanksgiving- Wednesday

My first year of teaching I loved falling into bed, with my head in the pillow, then drifting into sleep, effortlessly. It was my favorite 7 hours of the day. Sometimes after dinner, I let my face sink into the carpet and just passed out while my daughter crawled up and over me again and again. This year, I feared my bed. I knew that another day was coming, and I couldn’t stop hearing the tick-tock of the damn clock telling me that each second, I was getting closer, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I’d scream in my head, “Stop thinking of those damn kids, go to sleep!” Now it was Wednesday night, I had made it through to Thanksgiving Break, and I still couldn’t sleep so I got up, left the bed, and I wrote it down, everything that was eating away at me. It was a mental detox, and there was a stench that exited my head and left itself on the paper. Journaling was becoming therapy.

I wrote about how two of my crazies, Gabe and Ryden, were absent and it had made the day so much more bearable. Absences were one of the few things that made me hopeful during a workday. There were quite a few students who didn’t show up on time, but my crazies usually showed up early, every day, even with nausea and high fevers. Typically, when I didn’t see one of my crazies at the cafeteria, I just pretended like I didn’t notice. It was a game I played by letting my happiness slowly seep in, like an IV drip. It was a slow and cautious happiness because deep down I knew they would just show up late. But on this Wednesday, two of them didn’t show up at all, and the day almost felt normal.

That afternoon, I got my results from my first observation of the year. This was the first year for Michelle Rhee’s new evaluation system which, by the end of the year, would tell me if I got fired, suspended pay, a standard raise, or a bonus. I figured that I would either get fired or have my pay suspended. This one was the first of two announced observations so I had the opportunity to carefully plan out the lesson. I even brought in a carrot to visually show how reading can be like eating; when you come to a big word or a big piece of food, you can break it down into parts. I thought it went well because everyone was seated perfectly, with their eyes on me, except for Gabe who was rolling the edge of the carpet around his body as if he was rolling himself into a human burrito. By this time in the year, everyone had learned to ignore Gabe because it was obvious something was just wrong with him. The lesson ended with Ms. Coan, the observer, physically restraining Gabe by bear hugging him, while seated on her chair so that she might continue observing me. I received a 2.44 out of 4, which meant that I was on track to get my pay suspended. It was hard to be relieved to get one out of the way because it was one of my two announced observations; there were three unannounced ones that were sure to sink me.

I had already been given feedback from the other announced observation, and this one was conducted by an “independent” evaluator from downtown. This observation, I at least knew that I had tanked it because I spent half the lesson in a corner, begging Gabe to take a few deep breaths so that he could stop trying to hit Evan and just do his work. I didn’t realize until later the teachers in my hall had an elaborate plan to trick the evaluators into thinking they had well behaved children. If a teacher saw an evaluator in the building then she would text her other teacher friends. When it was clear whose class would be evaluated, the teacher sent her trouble kids to another teacher ready to watch them during the observation. I was kept out of the loop, leaving me with all my crazies. The independent evaluator gave me a 2.0, and now I had an average of a 2.2. It was embarrassing, and I didn’t tell anyone. It didn’t matter because I was leaving in a few weeks anyway.

Even though some things were improving, I was conflicted. I knew that I had given up on my class, but giving up wasn’t making my life any easier, I think it was making it harder. Maybe if I wanted to start feeling better, then I needed to take responsibility for the class, and if I wanted to do that, then I needed to care. I wrote down reading goals in my journal for each kid, but writing down goals didn’t help. They may have been nice goals, but I still didn’t care if they reached them, I was leaving anyway.

THANKSGIVING BREAK

I got to spend the Thanksgiving Break with my wife’s family, and it was the first time I experienced a slight pause in the constant flow of school-related thinking. I was watching football while my wife went shopping with the girls, and instead of thinking about Ryden, I was thinking about Detroit, who were bound to lose because they always lost on Thanksgiving. Things actually had gone slightly better that previous week, but to anyone who might walk in, it was still chaos. On the last day before break I had a cupcake party for all the kids who had earned enough stickers over the month. This party included almost the whole class because even when kids rarely earned any stickers, I usually forgave them if they acted nice to me the day of the party. It was another teacher sin that my kids were all too aware of, all of them except Gracyn. Gracyn had spent most of the day in the CHOICE room, and he was excused to my room right at the end of the day. Because he broke the cardinal sin of being mean to the teacher on party day, I refused to give him the coveted cupcake, and tears trickled down as he left the classroom. I was impressed; I had stuck to my guns, and he backed down. When I told him no, I was sure Gracyn would just push past me, pick up the tray of leftover cupcakes, and then run away from me around the room, simultaneously stuffing crumbs in his mouth. Then, half a dozen kids would shout to Gracyn for cupcakes as he would gleefully throw the cupcake chunks, over my head, to their outstretched hands as I, now the enraged teacher, would try to corner him, just like always. I would give up because the bell would ring and then I would dismiss the kids in a frenzy because, not only had they gotten extra cupcakes, but they also saw a great show. Then I would spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the smeared icing and cupcake bits crushed into the rug, too embarrassed to leave any of it for the custodians. But this time, there was no mess to clean up, at least, not one that was visibly smeared on the floor.

By now, my wife was very pregnant, and it was hard to ignore the fact that my life was going to change once again. I was counting on my newest daughter’s arrival to make me happy again because my family would take the forefront, and school anxiety would be pushed aside. But I still found a way to let anxiety affect even the positivity of a new daughter; I fantasized about staying at home with them instead of working, and I even worried that my anxiety would make me a bad dad to our new daughter. Maybe with a new daughter, I would be the great provider, thinking “who cares that work sucks, that’s life.” It was nice thinking about that on a 4 day holiday, but no matter what perspective I constructed, Monday was still coming; nothing could stop that.

Ms. Price

The break gave me a chance to step back for a moment and notice there were things that just didn’t seem right. By now I knew the administration was not there to help me, but why did I feel more comfortable talking with my principal than with the other second grade teacher? Ms. Price was my co-teacher, and after meeting her, you might think, “what a wonderful teacher!” She was a younger white woman who never told anyone her age; she didn’t even let on how many years she had been teaching. She started out as a Teach For America teacher at another school, and she had been recruited by the principal, 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 who I would rather be my partner. They both seemed like good teachers. I told Franklin I didn’t have a preference, 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, let me vent about the day, and then offer one or two things to try out. She was a mid-30s, well-rounded, black woman, and she had a grace about her. I knew I could not have Ms. Lee as co-teacher because she was staying with her grade, but I told Franklin I wanted whichever teacher that was more like her. Ms. Price was Ms. Lee’s co-teacher. He picked Ms. Price.

As soon as we both found out, we excitedly sat down and started planning out dates to 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 territory. 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 scribbled 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 definitely 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’d see 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 slight smile on her face. It was like my class, but I had trouble smiling about it.

She had her own problems, and I had mine, but she always kept her distance. When the crap hit the fan last year, Ms. Ward, my old co-teacher, would run 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, but she always talked about how much her kids were learning. In the midst of a storm, how could she talk about how lovely it was? So I started to blame her. She was picked as a veteran to mentor me because I was the struggling newbie who had a waste of a first year. Why was she leaving me to fail? I didn’t find out until spring, but there were some things she wasn’t telling me.

Sunday, November 29th

Thanksgiving break was great, but also quick. The first day of a long and full week was approaching like a battering ram. I had planned out the week, still trying to believe that the better the plans were, the better my class might behave. It was a belief that was drilled into my head every day at grad school, “you won’t have to worry about behavior management when your lessons are engaging, trust us, we know.” After a few weeks of trusting them, I learned that engaging lessons failed just like boring ones, but with a bigger mess to clean up. When I read over my plans a second time, it was like I was right back to where I started, my first day as a teacher. Things had changed in my class, and not because I had changed lesson plans, but because I had changed. If I wanted things to continue improving, then screw the plan, I had to ratchet up the wrath. I would be the Hulk if it meant people would shut up and go to work.

I mentioned to my wife that maybe the anxiety was passing, and there was no need to see a psychiatrist. But her look told me I might be wrong. She knew how bad off I had been and said it would only take one bad day to send me right back into the same hole. I had to stop the 7 and 8 year olds from controlling my life, but I didn’t know how. If I wanted to be happy, then they needed to be good, and if I wanted them to be good, then I guess I needed to be mean.

THE FULL WEEK

Monday, November 30th

Unfortunately, my wife proved prophetic and that Monday turned out to be the bad day she was talking about. I started the morning by talking about the huge Christmas Party that we would have in the middle of December. I told them they had to earn 3 stickers per week to go to this party of all parties, but by this time of the year, they knew better: just don’t piss off Mr. Slaughter on party day. For most of my troublemakers, stickers meant nothing, but it meant just a little to Adam because his mom picked him up from school and sometimes she asked him to see if he earned the sticker for the day. So I always reminded him about his mom picking him up to keep him motivated, but this Monday he was not going to earn a sticker. In my class, if you were going to fail, might as well fail big. A story about Adam getting into trouble usually starts with Ryden.

Ryden was smart, but when he came to something he didn’t know how, he would never ask me, he just copied someone else’s work. Amelia was quietly doing her math, when Ryden wanted to cheat over her shoulder, but she pulled out a folder to block him. So then he ran from table to table, trying to find the answers. Adam thought this was a fun game so he got up also and started bothering other tables. His table was the most boring table, filled with non-talkative do-gooders. “Boys, if you don’t take a seat, then you will receive a 0 on your work.” Bad move, don’t threaten something you don’t want to do. They ignored me, all eyes on me now. “Alright, you are both getting 0s, and that means I’ll have to talk to your parents about your grades in math.” Adam turns to me, “I don’t care.” And he ripped up his math packet. Sheets all over the floor, and then Anna rolls her eyes at him, he picks up her packet and starts running around the room with it. He and Ryden play monkey in the middle with Anna and her math packet, and Evan yelled out, “Ha Anna, you too slow!” Now Evan liked Anna, and like most 2nd graders, he thought that teasing her was the best way to show her he cared. Anna glared at Evan, “You shut up!” That was a major no-no in Daley. Evan steps out of his chair, “No, you shut up.” Evan moves towards Anna, but it’s obvious he doesn’t want to fight with the girl he likes, but her public insult has left him no choice. Anna went charging at Evan, fists in the air, and I have to jet in between before something horrible happens. Evan is a crazy fighter, but it’s Anna who just might claw his eyes out. So I end up putting Anna in time out, while Ryden and Adam jumped up and down because now they had taken Amelia’s paper. And I called security, but security never came.

By now, most everyone didn’t care about their math work anymore, so I yelled above the chaos that all their parents were coming next Monday for Parent Teacher day, and their parents would see how badly they had done. I had a behavior chart that Matted their daily progress, and all the parents would see it. Unfortunately, we all knew that there parents weren’t planning on showing up on Monday.

Monday (Part 2)

With half of my class off-task already, I was happy to line the kids up for afternoon PE. But PE only lasted until 2:30, leaving me with 45 minutes before the dismissal bell. By this time Ryden and Adam had had their fun; now it was Laila’s turn and she had her scope set on Tybee, both the smartest and the smallest girl in the class. Tybee sat towards the back of the room and just quietly did her work. She rarely asked any questions because she almost always knew how to do it, and she never complained. She would finish whatever work I had given her, then she would spend the remainder of the lesson making cards for her mom, or brother, or really anyone who wanted one. For the past week, she had been talking a lot with Quint, and Quint was a popular type, quite different from Tybee. Most people just accepted the way it was now that Tybee was sitting next to Quint at lunch, but Laila couldn’t turn a blind eye.

Laila was one of my most difficult kids. She was a fighter, but she was less emotional than the others and more calculated. Teachers had told me that she wasn’t coming back to Daley so I didn’t need to worry about her, but by the second week, she was there. When I talked to Laila’s mom about her fighting, she kept on saying, “I don’t know what to do with that child.”

During PE, Laila had told Tybee she was ugly, and there was no way that Quint could like her. Now they were both in class and Laila stared at Tybee from across the room, patiently waiting for her to make the first move. Tybee finally yelled, “What?” Laila responded, “How about you shut up before I make you shut up.” There was a quiet “ooh” that flowed from one side of the class to the other. I guessed it would end there because Tybee was too tiny to take on Laila, and Laila was a proven fighter. But then she uttered, “You can’t tell me to shut-up, you’re not my mom.” All of a sudden, everything slowed down. Everyone’s look said the same thing, “did she really just say that?” All eyes were on Laila now, and this was her moment. She knew exactly what to do because she had been doing it her whole life. She shot up out of her seat towards quiet Tybee as I pushed through chairs and tables to reach Laila before she got to Tybee. I was too late. Tybee had turned her chair away from Laila to avoid a direct punch, but Laila just pulled her braids down, so hard that she pulled her down to the floor, then jumped on her stomach and started choking her. Laila was actually choking her; she had her hands around Tybee’s neck. But she wasn’t squeezing. You see, Laila was only doing it for the show. She showed Tybee that she could hurt her, and she showed the whole class that no one talks back to her.

That evening at the grocery store I decided to check my blood pressure. My reading was at 160/80, meaning I had stage 2 hypertension. Not too much of a surprise. Grandma James had been telling me I was on my way to a stroke.

My Management System

When I started my second year, I set my rules, I set my consequences for breaking the rules, and it was working. It was so simple, and it was working, so I stuck to it. But then there were so many infractions, I became overwhelmed with all the consequences. Students were asked to apologize, shake hands, hug, make apology cards, and clean up messes, but the consequences weren’t affecting the behaviors. In fact, things were only getting more out of control. So after three weeks, I switched up. I brought in the elaborate system of stickers, rewards, and phone calls. Everyone’s name was on a board, and I wrote a letter for each time students did something great. If they earned five letters by the end of the day, it would spell GREAT, and they would get a sticker on a chart. If the students received three stickers in the week, then on Friday, they got to pick something from the magic grab bag. If they got twelve stickers in a month, then they received a ticket to a class party. When they were bad, I erased letters. When all their letters were erased, then they got an X, and after three Xs, it was a phone call. I tried to run this system as perfectly as I could because I believed it was the system that would save me. I let the system dictate how I managed the class because I couldn’t trust my own instincts; I had failed too many times before. It worked for some, but it really didn’t work for most.

Ryden was a student who was smart enough to use GREAT to play me. When I took away one of his letters, he would slam both hands on the desk, gripping the corners tightly as if he was holding himself back from charging me and stuffing my dry erase Matter down my throat. He would yell, “Put back the letter!” Any normal teacher would say, “You don’t demand anything from me, you sit down and do your work or it’s another letter!”

The problem was that I had already done that so many times. I had called Ryden’s family again and again, but they weren’t answering the phones anymore. There were was one day I left three messages for three different instances of extreme behavior. One time, when I called his mom, in front of him and the whole class, I left the message, and then, he smiled, “She doesn’t give a s--- about your phone calls.” I called her right back and left another message, “Ms. Valrie, I just thought you should know Ryden just told me and the whole class you don’t give a s-h-i-t about my phone calls.” Ryden had reduced me to a twenty-seven year old tattle tale.

Plus, losing letters only caused Ryden to get more enraged. The assumption behind the system was that misbehaving students wanted to earn their letter back. When the teacher erased a letter, then the student would get right to work to earn it back as quickly as possible. For my most of my students, losing a letter was a public slap in the face, and the only response they knew was to retaliate. I was trapped in the logic of the system so I tried to negotiate a truce, “Alright, Ryden, just sit back down, get back to your work and you’ll get your letter back…” He would sit down, slowly, with his eyes still on the board, making sure I honored the promise. And just as his pencil touched the paper and the dry erase Matter left the board, he crept back out of his seat, and the game began again.

Tuesday

First thing Tuesday morning, the kids had a library special, so I walked them up to the room to drop off their coats and book bags, and then we turned right back around and walked back downstairs to the library. I was silent the entire time; I was pissed off. The previous afternoon was really bad, and there was no way I was going hide exactly how I felt about it. We had horrible afternoons all the time, and each time I had a similar attitude for the next day, “here we go again.” But this time it was different, I let the bitterness and anger shine through. It seemed like most kids didn’t even remember what happened on Monday, probably thinking, “Why is he angry now? We’ve been doing this to him all year.”

However, after the huge dip on Monday, Tuesday was a good day. After coming back from the library, we sat down on the carpet, read a story, and I had the students copy a paragraph-long writing prompt from the board onto lined paper. I told them to take their time, write with good handwriting, and think and respond to the questions I had asked. All of these were normal teacher expectations, but I never really expected them to do it. As I paced the room with a glare in my eye, the students kept their eyes on their work, and there wasn’t a sound. Silence in the first five minutes wasn’t too shocking because they were only copying what I had written. When they were silent the second five minutes, I guessed they had listened to the book and knew some answers to put down. When they were silent the third five minutes, I didn’t know what to think. It was the longest moment of complete silence I had ever had over two years of teaching.

The Full Week- Pushing Through to Friday

Wednesday

On Wednesday the roller coaster swept right back down to Monday’s low. I thought it was my anger and negativity that caused the golden 15 minutes of silence so I ratcheted up the hostility even more. If I was pissed off on Tuesday, this morning I was on fire, yelling and screaming at every little thing, “Keep your eyes on the book! Do you want recess?!” The kids were less confused and more despondent, and I was losing my own sense of control. Grandma James pulled me aside, “Calm down, Mr. Slaughter. All you keep on yelling is ‘SILENCE!’ Let the kids be kids. They are going to talk a little.” During my lunch break, I started thinking about my job search again, and I widened my search to more obscure jobs. I even applied to a job at the Zoo; I’d happily pick up poop every day. I wrote it over and over again in my journal: “I want to be home.” At least I was being honest.

I could tell you a hundred reasons why my behavior system was failing, but there was no way I could view it rationally. My fear of complete failure was making me second guess everything I was doing. It was fear that told me every inch that I gained was precious, and if there was any slight slip, I just might crash down. I had read and reread at least a half dozen self-help management books telling me all the different things I should try out, and then there was my insane class screaming that those methods meant nothing. I just inched myself along the tight rope with an abyss below and a shotgun behind.

That afternoon actually went better. The journaling was helping me calm down, and somewhere along that roller-coaster ride, my kids figured it was time to take a break. Maybe they were getting just as dizzy I was.

Thursday

By Thursday, I was getting closer to the end of the week, and I couldn’t even think about reaching it, out of fear that I would jinx it. Due to a combination of holidays and mental health days, I hadn’t made it a full week since the first week of November. Everything was going decently until the afternoon. Laila was back from her suspension for choking Tybee, and this time Laila was going after Anna. Anna was another cute girl in the class who had a lot of the boys’ attention. In the beginning of the year, I didn’t really like Anna because she couldn’t stop talking. By this time, I had moved her to a corner all by herself; she still managed to write notes and make hand gestures just to keep up with the latest gossip. At recess, she loved to lead cheers with the girls on the sidelines of the boys’ football games. Laila tried to take over the cheer game, but her cheers weren’t that good, and Anna left the game with most of the girls following right behind her, leaving Laila alone. When they were back in my class, Anna kept on looking up from her writing to bat eyes at Evan who sat right next to Laila. It was too much for Laila, and she leaned up on Evan, “What do you think of my drawing?” Evan ignored her.
Then Laila announced,“Evan wants to kiss Anna!”
“No I don’t!”
“Did you hear that Anna, he doesn’t want to kiss you because your breath stinks!”
Anna muttered under her breath, “Not like your momma’s.” Too bad it was just loud enough for half the class to hear it, including Laila.

Laila walked up to Anna’s desk, threw Anna’s writing on the floor, and stood there right in front of her desk. It was clear as daylight, Laila wanted a fight. But Anna didn’t flinch. She might have been holding back tears, but she kept her head up. As I was calling security, Laila raised her shoe and smudged dirt on Anna’s desk. Laila was practically begging for a fight, but Anna continued to just sit there. “Anna how about you sit with Tybee until security comes.” I let them excitedly chat about whatever they wanted to, but it was still too much for Laila to see Anna with such a bright smile. She walked over to Anna’s new table and raised her foot again. I secretly wished Anna would grab that foot and yank it over her shoulder, but Anna kept on talking with Tybee. With Laila’s back to me, I managed to sneak up behind and grab her wrist. Security arrived 30 minutes later and Laila was kicking and screaming obscenities at Anna while I was holding her on the carpet. Even though my anxiety was clouding my vision, something positive was emerging in the classroom. My good kids were trying to stand up to the bad kids; at least, someone was trying to.

After Thursday was done, there was just one more day to finish the full week, and I started to think about ways to get out again. In my journal, I wrote “We should do a map tomorrow and math games... I don’t think I can make it. What I would do just to escape…” There was one voice trying to stay positive, “you can do this!” but the other voice knew it was a lie. I had promised myself that I would be honest in my journaling, and it appeared that there was one safe and mandatory choice: I had to quit.

Friday

It was 8:37am, and I had to pick up the kids in three minutes. I wrote these exact words in my journal “I WANT OUT. GET ME OUT! ANXIETY IS KILLING ME!! Calm down… calm down. It’s going to be okay. It’s only one day. On Monday you’ll have the pyschiatrist. It’s okay.” I had an appointment with a psychiatrist on Monday, and I hoped the appointment was just the thing to save me. The morning went decently, but I had to get treats during my lunch break for the grab bag that afternoon. As I was in the car driving, I wrote in hardly legible writing, “I’m in the car, and it’s back!! I need to QUIT. Come on Slaughter get a grip. Don’t let 7 year olds ruin your life… YOU CAN DO THIS!” Not only was I driving, but I was also stuffing a sandwich down with one hand, and writing with the other. I was in Memento, but instead of trying to find a killer, I was running from one.

I made it through the afternoon, and yes, I made it through a full week. Instead of cheering after getting off the roller coaster, I threw up. I knew that it was only two days before I had to get right back on it.

Adam

That night I started planning for the next week, hoping I could motivate my crazies to be less crazy, and an amazing thing happened; I started to see my crazies as kids. Adam was one of my top three crazies. It seemed like he hated school because he never smiled, and he had no friends. He was easily set off, and he could tear apart the classroom with swiftness. On one particularly bad day I had to call his mom three times to get her to come and talk to him. I had sent him to CHOICE three times already, and after each break, he was worse. At the end of the day, I sent him to time out for yelling at a classmate. Abigail had told him to shut up, and he told her he was going to slap her across the face. At time out, he got up out of the chair and ripped my class calendar in half, and then dumped the trashcan and spread the pencil shavings all over the carpet. He was standing there crying as she walked in. With a look of embarrassment, she said, “I’ll talk to him.” When I explained everything that happened, she asked why Adam had threatened Abigail, “well, he was bothering her and she told him to shut up.” Her eyebrows rose just like those of my students when someone told them to shut up. She took her son in the hallway and told him the next time that girl told him to shut up, he should hit her. The security guard told me every word of it that afternoon.

Adam also always wanted to be first. He didn’t care at all about how his writing sounded or how his pictures looked because those things took too much time; he just wanted to finish it, whatever it was. Every day we did writing, and every day I gave him a pre-stapled stack of three sheets that had about five lines on each page. Every day he wrote the same story: “I went to the playground. It was fun. I went to the pool. It was fun. I went home it was fun…” He wrote in huge letters so only a few words could fit per line. At first, I was sure he wanted to finish so he could have time to goof off, but he usually didn’t goof off when he was done; he would just space out. When he finished, he looked around to make sure everyone else was writing. Then, one of his tablemates would mention, “Wow Adam, are you done already?” He would smile and shrug his shoulders. When I could get him to sit on the carpet, he would rock back and forth with his hand raised whenever I asked a question. If I called on someone else, he would yell out the answer as soon as I motioned to the other student. As I thought about him that night, I put the pieces together and realized he was just trying to impress me, not make my life miserable as I had originally suspected.

That weekend I changed my mind about the psychiatrist. The appointment was Monday morning, and I could have easily shifted my workday to fit it in because it was a teacher workday. After finishing a full week, I was feeling a little cocky about my mental stability, and I decided I would just push off the psychiatrist so I could come home earlier. I thought journaling alone would hold me over until I could quit. I also thought it would only be few more days until my extended winter vacation. If my wife had the baby on Thursday (a week before her due date), then I just might have four days of teaching left!

Mr. Barcik

There was only one teacher in the building that I smiled at when passing him in the halls; it was Mr. Barcik, the music teacher. Partly because he had just as many behavior problems in his classes as I did, and partly because we were both awkward white guys, I was often called Mr. Barcik and he was often called Mr. Slaughter by both students and staff. There was a moment our first year of teaching that I think solidified our relationship as the white guys who had no idea what was going on. There was a security guard, Officer Morrison, who took me under his wing to teach me the ways of his behavior management. His way included a strong yell and phone calls home; both were big no-no’s in my handy dandy handbook.

One day during music class, Mr. Barcik called security for help because my kids, as usual, were terrorizing his classroom. Colin had grabbed one of the cymbals, and he was running around the classroom banging it as Lauren and Sean gleefully slammed their hands down on the piano. Just like me, Mr. Barcik would run after Colin a few times, trying to corner him unsuccessfully and then, defeated, he would call security. I happened to be walking upstairs to pick up the kids, and there was no mistaking which room my kids were in. When I arrived, security hadn’t come yet, so I tried to line up some of the saner kids to go even though it was clear they would much rather be in Mr. Barcik’s room. So when Sean wasn’t looking, I grabbed him and dragged him towards the line while Mr. Barcik grabbed and dragged Lauren. At this very moment, Officer Morrison came in, yelled, “What are you all doing! Get in line!”, and they all looked up and then straightened up, well, except for Colin, but by now everyone knew Colin was an exception. Colin was one of two kids in the whole school that was actually classified as emotionally disturbed. It was quite an honor to be his teacher. So when Officer Morrison saw the children line up so easily without complaint, he had an epiphany. Why did the kids act up with Mr. Slaughter and Mr. Barcik, but they listened to me? His answer was written on our faces; we were white, and he was black! So with any new discovery, you have to share it with everyone, including the 2nd graders. As he started explaining our racial backgrounds, they nodded repetitively. “You see, there is a certain way that black people talk, and both Mr. Slaughter and Mr. Barcik talk in a white way, a more educated way.” This was when Mr. Barcik and I started to wince. He continued, “you all should listen and learn from them because they’ve come here to teach.” Both Mr. Barcik and I were too embarrassed to react; Officer Morrison both described himself and the black race by default as uneducated and pointed us out as the white teachers who deserved respect. Mr. Barcik and I pretended like it never happened.

This year, we were struggling again, and Barcik mentioned how my class had steamrolled him last week. I asked him, “Is my class the worst in the school?” He smiled, “Two years in a row.” At first, I took a little pride in the statement, and thought, “It isn’t me, it’s those darn kids.” It was a classic teacher line, and I was sticking to it. But it didn’t have the same crunch as last year, the line had gone stale.

Parent Teacher Day

I came in early for Parent Teacher day to make packets for the kids so they would have plenty of work when I left for paternity leave. I was holding back a goofy grin while making those packets. They were the physical evidence that I was leaving, and I hoped that they were the last copies I would have to make. Ever. I was still banking on finding a job during the combination of paternity leave and Winter Break.

For my very first parent teacher day, I spent hours preparing portfolios for all the kids, planning on all of the parents showing up. One parent came. So this year I spent my time scrubbing off Matter stains and making copies, but this time, instead of one parent, seven parents came. I guess the constant phone calls were becoming too much. So much for the portfolios; I had to just wing it.

My first parent conference of the day was an embarrassing one, with a mom who demanded her daughter, Abigail, be more challenged. She was afraid that Abigail might not be prepared for 3rd grade. I completely agreed with her because there was a secret that I wasn’t telling any parents. Too many times, I let the slower kids dictate the pace of the class because they were the ones who gave me the biggest headaches; it was the smarter ones who were left with their wheels spinning. Abigail was extremely smart, but I just treated her as a girl who liked to talk and more importantly, as a girl who didn’t like to fight which meant she didn’t get much attention. She had also been held back, and she was the largest kid in class. She was a new student and with every new student, I judged them on their propensity for getting into fights. When a new kid walked in for her first day, I would protect her from the crazies for at least the first few days. I would sit the new kid in the least warlike table; sometimes I would put a sweet girl on both sides of the new kid. I would find a friend for the new kid, someone that was marginally cool with the bad kids, but was good enough that he would also listen to me. Then, over the next couple days, I would carefully watch the new kid’s reaction to the inevitable teasing. If she was quick to fight, I had to play prevent defense, and if they avoided fighting at all costs, then they didn’t get as much attention. Abigail didn’t get that much attention.

I suspected a few parents weren’t happy that I was teaching their kid, and Evan’s mom, Ms. Lee, was the worst at concealing her disgust. According to Ms. Lee, Evan had been a well-behaved boy in 1st grade, and she seemed unconcerned he was such a problem now. If he truly was a well-behaved boy, then it was something I was doing wrong, she thought. In September, when he was upset, he liked to push back his feet, slide back on his chair and then topple over to the floor. He may have started out upset, but by the time he was swimming on the floor, he was smiling; the class was his audience, and he was the star. When I called home, this was her response, “I don’t know why he’s doing that. He didn’t do that last year. Is the other 2nd grade teacher a man also? Oh, she’s not. Ok.”

By this point I was starting to get a sense of the kids’ home lives, which gave me insight into their erratic behavior in the classroom. There was one time I called Evan’s mom, and I could only hear a man screaming at her in the background; I asked if I could call her back another time. Grandma James was convinced she was on crack, just by her appearance. When Ms. Lee came to school, she walked unsteadily with mangled hair and black rings under her eyes. Grandma James kept on mentioning how surprised she was that Evan wasn’t worse off. By this time, Evan was respecting me, and he was back to his pre-corrupted 1st grade behavior, I guess. However, Evan was still a fighter, and when his buttons were pushed, he went all out. When I broke up one of his rare fights, Evan started punching me. It wasn’t the first time he had done this, but I had to bring it up with her again, even though I knew it wouldn’t be worth it. After giving her the full details of what happened, including how her son hit me, she said, “Well, you shouldn’t ever lay hands on my boy anyhow.”

When Ryden’s mom came on conference day, I told her about how I caught him climbing a locker to pull down a bag of snacks during dismissal. I told him that he had to clean it up, but he refused, and so I told him he couldn’t leave the room until he cleaned it up. He pulled down all my book shelves and scattered my categorized books all over the room. I still wouldn’t let him leave until he picked up everything. I had to wait until his mom’s girlfriend came to pick him up an hour later before he actually cleaned everything up. As he was leaving, he stared me down, and it looked like he was going to spit in my face, but he held it back. He had learned nothing. In fact, he was getting meaner. When I told his mom the full story, I was really hoping she would be shocked. Instead she told me he does that kind of thing at home too. When he was upset, he liked to punch holes in her walls; she said she had seven holes so far. She was relying on school to get her son back on track; that’s ironic, I was relying on her.

Baby Watch- Tuesday

I had already figured it would be best for me if my new daughter was born either Thursday or Friday so paternity leave would combine with Winter Break, but just as I started to walk down the halls to pick up the kids, I changed my plans; I wanted to get that phone call today. It no longer mattered how many days I would get off, I just needed out now. But then, when I saw them line up so nicely in the cafeteria, I realized my kids were trying. When they started on their morning work, I noticed Gabe sitting up straight and silently raising his hand for a pencil. Usually, Gabe spent the morning swimming on the floor, and then I’d bend down to pick him up, ask him why he was on the floor, and he’d smile and say, “I don’t have a pencil.” I did meet with Gabe’s mom on Monday and told her that I was afraid he had ADHD, but I used teacher-speak, “Gabe has extreme difficulty focusing on his work for more than a few minutes. I’m afraid that his lack of focus is poorly affecting his progress, and I’m not sure if he’ll be prepared for the 3rd grade.” It would have been clearer to say, “Your son is driving me nuts, please medicate him.” She was defensive like she had heard it all before and she told me how smart he was, and how he was reading chapter books at home. He struggled with Dr. Seuss; there was no way he was reading at home. I guess mom told him to straighten up, and it looked like he was at least trying. Unfortunately, the peaceful morning came to a regrettable finish. Ryden was out of control again in the afternoon. He was swinging his jacket in Amelia’s face because he thought she had taken one of his cut outs, but it was really lying there just behind his seat. After I repeatedly asked him to hand me the jacket, and I stared into his eyes with big teacher scissors in hand, “Do you want me to cut your jacket!?” Luckily, he gave it to me.

That night my wife was starting to have contractions, and I was getting hopeful that Wednesday might be my last day.

Wednesday

The contractions amounted to nothing. That afternoon, Asia’s mom came in early to pick up her daughter. I always got really nervous when parents came in to pick up their kids and saw the chaos first hand. My first year, Camryn’s dad always came in early to pick his daughter up, and he just stared in the front window with a clear frown on his face. There would usually be at least one fight happening at the time; he must have been thinking about his daughter and wondering how she could be learning in a class like this mine. When Asia’s mom came in, there were no fights to be seen, but still, barely anyone moved from their seats when I told them it was time to line up. Asia’s mom yelled, “You all need to listen to your teacher!!” Excuse me, Ms. Simpson, but you should know these students don’t need to listen to their teacher because he is satisfied as long as they aren’t trying to punch each other.

Thursday

Thursday arrived and still no contractions. I came to pick up my kids at the cafeteria, and they were particularly chatty. I noticed that the principal, Franklin, had visitors with him, and he was showing them around the school. The school was under a microscope because it was a turn-around school, and it was common for visitors in suits to stop by and see if we were actually turning anything around. Previously, Daley had a justified reputation as a school filled with poorly performing and violent students surrounded by defeated adults. As I was trying to walk my kids down the hall, they were chattering more than I could handle and because my patience was always paper thin, my voice went from a stern reprimand to a shrill yell, “Keep your eyes forward and stop talking!!” I looked up and saw Franklin and his visitors turn towards me with their eyebrows raised. Whoops.

Friday

Friday morning came. Throughout the week I carried my cell phone in my front pocket, and during every small break I would call my wife to see how she was doing. Sometimes if the kids were quietly doing their work, I’d sneak back and give her a call. Each day there were fewer and fewer contractions, but when I woke up to get ready for work that Friday, she was feeling them again. They weren’t consistent, but they were painful and that was enough for me to call Franklin. My wife had no illusions, she knew they were probably nothing, but my mind was made up. I had planned it out carefully: if she didn’t have the baby today, then she would definitely have her over the weekend, and if the baby still wasn’t here by Monday, then I would just show up at work and tell Franklin it was false labor. I even entertained the idea of completely lying about the birth to stay home for the rest of Winter Break. How would he ever find out? The idea made no sense to my wife. I had forgotten that I was taking days off to help her with the new baby, not so I could get a break from my class. She asked, “So if the baby isn’t even here yet, why would you waste paternity days staying home?” She didn’t understand that I would happily donate a kidney just to get the week off.

The second time around, lying and taking the day off had gotten easier. It just took a quick phone call, a lie, a few minutes of feeling bad because my kids would probably run the sub out the door by lunch, and then I relaxed. This day, I read an email from one of my good friends, Matt, who told me there was an opening at his school for a 5th grade teacher. Without caring about the details, I picked up the phone hoping to talk to him before he arrived at school. I was prepared to drive to his school that day to try and land the job. I was sure anything had to be better than what I was doing, but when I talked to Matt, he told me how the previous teacher was a veteran teacher who had been run out by a group of very rough kids. It didn’t seem like a great idea to jump from one sinking ship to another. Needless to say, I didn’t meet my daughter that Friday, and on Monday morning I told Franklin it was false labor.

Campbell

One of my more difficult kids was a boy named Campbell. In the beginning of the year, he was one of my favorites. He always came in with the same untucked uniform shirt with patches of dirt all over it. His old shoelaces were frequently untied, and it became clear to me that he had no idea how to tie them. But, he usually had a smile on his face, and he was a good reader. He had “my little project” written all over him. He always brought in action figures to play with after school. He didn’t have a backpack so he had to fit them in his pockets. Their heads usually peaked out of his pockets when he sat down, which was just too tempting. Whenever I caught him hopping them across his desk, he just handed them to me, right away, with an embarrassed smile on his face. One day, I forgot to return them to him, and when I found him in aftercare, he yelled out, “Mr. Slaughter!! You have my toy! I knew you wouldn’t forget. You are the best!” He wrapped his arms around me, and the aftercare teacher told me how much he talked about “the greatest teacher ever, Mr. Slaughter.”

By now, things had changed dramatically. Campbell still didn’t have any friends, and he was picked on everyday. After he learned that there wasn’t much I could do to protect him, he defended himself and turned bad. He was tiny, but he scrapped when he needed to, and he spent too much of his class time crawling on the floor, hopelessly trying to entertain his classmates and aggravating me. I spent the first two months telling his mom how great he was, and now I was telling her just the opposite. By December, he was out of the class and running the halls. He had found a few 3rd graders that always ran the halls; none other than my friends from my first year, Sean and Colin. And he joined them, like a stray cat joining a pack. Today, he ran out in the halls only to return a few minutes later to peek in through a crack in the door. I welcomed him back to class with a wave and a faked smile because I knew that there was little chance of him getting to work. He sensed my hesitancy, and he just scattered down the halls again, looking for another adventure or even another teacher, someone to give him the attention he deserved.


Giving Up

When I started journaling, it felt like my life was improving. Progress was slow, but it was going in the right direction, and that was all that was important to me. I convinced myself I didn’t need to seek outside help; my coping methods were working just fine. By now, I started to come to realize that journaling wasn’t going to solve all my problems, and unfortunately, I had already cancelled the psychiatrist appointment. If I was to schedule another, I would have to wait at least a month. Things were still really bad at school, and it seemed like there was no hope of it getting better. I had run out of ideas, and there were no more replies to my job applications. So on Sunday afternoon we went to the Catholic Basilica for mass like we normally did. It was a towering church, and there was a large mosaic Jesus covering the front wall. This wasn’t a Jesus on the cross with his head turned down; this Jesus was pissed. He was rising through the clouds with blood on his hands, and it seemed like he was glaring right at you. Since college I always enjoyed church because it felt like a recharge for the week, but by now, church felt hollow. It was a reminder that there was either no God or God had abandoned me. That Sunday, I muttered into my hands, “I give up.” Struggling to stay afloat and waiting for a rescue had finally become too much; there were no other branches to hold. There were no administrators or teachers trying to help me out anymore, and I was tired of trying new management techniques. It felt like I had let go of the branch, leaned my head back, and allowed myself to drown.

I knew quitting was best for me and even for my students, but quitting wasn’t working, and I didn’t know what else to do. When I whispered those words, “I give up,” I started accepting that I was no one special. I did not have the power to change the world; I did not have the power to change my classroom; and, up until then, I didn’t even have the power to change myself.

I came to Daley to be a great teacher, a teacher that taught underprivileged kids how to overcome the challenges of their world, but I also imagined success: Teacher of the Year and award speeches. That desire for success was hidden; I wasn’t aware of it because I didn’t care about looking for it. I thought I had the right reasons for teaching at Daley. I was a smart kid, and I worked hard; the rest would figure itself out.

But I became aware that I thought I was different from other people. I thought I was special, and I figured when others had failed before me, it was a sign that is was the right job for me to do. But that job had led to complete destruction.

Hell was not Candler Park or Daley or the administration or anyone really, it was what had happened in my mind, what had happened to my life. If the road to hell was ominous and jagged, maybe I could have avoided it, but my road was paved and quick. As a teenager, I liked to skateboard down the steep hills of my neighborhood. I had a longboard, and the only one way I knew how to stop was by jumping off. Whenever I tried out a new, steep-looking hill, about half way down I thought, “I’m going too fast, this is going to end badly,” and it usually did. Maybe there were signs that told me I was going in the wrong direction, but I wasn’t looking for any of them. Maybe there were onlookers who told me to think twice about the path, but I was too busy telling them I knew exactly where I was going.

By the end of my first year, things started getting better, and I thought it was a sign that I was finally coming around as a teacher. The kids started to line up better, and we even learned a rap to perform to anyone that might come in the doors. On the last day, I had a big party to celebrate, and I planned it for the middle of the day - one of my many teacher mistakes. Always have parties at the end of the day. After we had the cupcakes, almost the whole class was up out of their seats, flying around the room, and there were still two hours to get through. Instead of yelling and chasing them down, I just took out a chair and sat down right in the middle of the room. I called two nice girls up to the front of the class. I let them pull up their chairs so they could sit right next to me, and I told them they were the only ones who had my permission to go outside. Because they had been so good the whole year, it was now up to them to decide who was allowed to go out. The others slowly lined up to apologize. Each kid lined up and eventually pleaded his/her case to the girls. Not much of a surprise, but everyone was forgiven, and by the end of it all, everyone was quietly lined up. I had successfully lined up a crazy class hyped up on sugar and the excitement of the last day of school; I must be on my way.

When my second year started, I was in control, much more so than any moment in my first year. My class walked the halls with their eyes forward and their arms behind their back without a word. When an independent evaluator visited the school, he left a note on my desk saying how impressed he was with my class, and how he was looking forward to the first observation. I was going from the worst class to the best, and once again, that voice started getting louder, “Keep pushing, keep pushing, this is it, you are finally fulfilling your destiny.” It seemed like a long journey, but I had made it; I was the teacher I always wanted to be. But I started getting tired, and my command started to slip. Things went from bad to worse quickly, and this crash was much harder than any other crash I had experienced. As first year teachers, we had been told countless times about the ups and downs of the first year, but by my second year it seemed there were no excuses anymore.

So when I finally gave up, I accepted that there was no escape, that I was stuck. And for some reason, the following week went by just a little bit easier.

Baby Time

My wife finally had my daughter 9 days late, early Saturday morning. I had taken that Friday off again, but this time even my wife wanted me to take it off. We spent all of Friday walking from one store to the next, preparing for the impending blizzard. First we walked to the local movie shop just in case we got snowed in, and then that evening we walked a mile and a half to Wendy’s. As we were sitting there watching the local news, something was happening. Her contractions hadn’t stopped. We knew the plan was to stay at home as long as possible before going to the birth center, so we put in the movie but neither one of us was really watching it, “Are they still consistent?” “Yep.” I smiled, “I guess we might be having this baby tonight.” “Yep.” It had been snowing for over an hour, and there were already two inches on the roads. So we called the midwife, and she told us to hurry over to the birth center before it starting getting ugly. Our friend had an SUV, and she drove us through the then six inches of snow. The ride normally took thirty minutes, but in these conditions, it took an hour. My wife wasn’t talking anymore. She had brought a pillow, and she spent the whole ride with her head down, breathing heavily. When we got there, I wanted to get the hot tub ready because she was in major pain, but the midwife said there was no use, our daughter was coming. Twenty minutes later, Neve was born. Both mom and daughter were beautiful, and I was grateful that I was a part of it. My wife was a warrior, and I got to be the dad and husband that I wanted to be. While she lay on the bed exhausted, I got to put Neve in her very first outfit. It was hard pulling her tiny little arms and legs through the holes, and of course my wife just had to pick something with tons of buttons. But I did it. And I picked her up and sang “Ba Ba Black Sheep” until she calmed down.

We were hit with 26 inches of snow, and our new family made it back to the house that same morning, just before the brunt of the storm hit. Winter Break was everything I needed it to be. I also had the added comfort that I would take my paternity leave the first week of January.

I came into work the first day back from break just to set everything up for the rest of my paternity week. I still needed to make some copies and finalize my notes for the sub. I figured I could handle just one day with the kids to ensure I wouldn’t get any phone calls from the school about how all the subs had walked out on my class. To my surprise, Franklin had already called in my sub. I asked him if that meant I could leave early to be with my wife, and he said it would be fine. It was her first time with both kids alone, and I was more than willing to leave work and spend the remaining part of the day with her. As I quickly ran over everything with the sub, the class saw that I wasn’t paying attention, and they started getting rowdy. I yelled: “If you hear me, clap once!” Nothing. “If you hear me clap twice!” Only a few kids clapped. “If you hear me, clap three times!” No one clapped. After trying several things to get their attention, I gave up and told them I would be back the following week. As I walked out the door, I heard Mr. Preddy yelling, “If you hear me clap once! Why aren’t you clapping?! You are supposed to clap!”

Back at home, my wife was giddy that I was coming home early. Already the kids were taking over her life. She happened to read that Montgomery County was hiring teachers, and I anxiously waited for her to leave the computer so I could see what she was reading. Montgomery County was a much better school district than DC, and any school there would better than Daley. It occurred to me this paternity leave was perfect for job searching. I could call up one of the hiring schools today, and then go out and interview tomorrow, maybe have a second interview by Friday. I could be hired within a week or two. But hadn’t I just given up on escape? I applied for the position anyway, and I tried as hard as I could to forget about it. But I couldn’t. I called the HR office the next day to see my status, and it turned out the job openings were for the following year. That didn’t help me at all.

Over break, I met up with my teaching buddy, Matt. He had spent the previous year with a bad school, and now he was enjoying life at a new school as a math and science coach. I mentioned to him how anxious I was; he told me that he had the same issues the previous year, and I needed to get out. I already knew that, but he actually meant that I needed to get out after I made it through June; he didn’t know I was trying to get out before the upcoming Monday. He told me I could approach the next 5 months like a marathon; slow and steady wins the race. I counted the remaining days left in the school year, 97 days, divided it by 26.2 and found that every 4 days could be equal to one mile in a marathon. It was the first time I had ever allowed myself to think about June, and I was starting to think about how to get there. Up until this point, I never thought about June because I was planning on quitting before then. Now that I had given up on the struggle, I was coming to terms with reality. I just might make it, one step at a time. I even signed up for a marathon in Vermont on May 30th just to have a symbolic finish to my two years of hell. When Sunday night came, I knew I had 97 days left. I guessed that the hardest step of a marathon was the first, so I closed my eyes and took it.

When I walked in the building on Monday morning, each teacher I walked by welcomed me back, but there was only one thing I wanted to know. “Did he make it?” He did. Not only did Mr. Preddy show up every day, but there was no screaming heard in the halls, no fights in the line, and nothing was missing from my desk. Naturally, I had mixed feelings: it was a good for the kids, it was a good week for Mr. Preddy, but he exposed me. If they could be good for him, then I was the reason for their behavior. It wasn’t long ago that I would have beaten myself down in this situation, “You see, you are a failure. You need to get out now!” But I had a marathon to run and a new thought came instead, “So they CAN be good.”

So why the attitude change?

I had already given up on being the superstar teacher I planned to be. That happened in the fall, when the class started getting worse, and I decided the best thing to do was quit. Now I had been job searching for two months, and my hope of escape was causing more anxiety instead of alleviating it. I had to accept that I wasn’t escaping; I had to accept that a new teaching method would not make my class any better; I had to accept where I was and what I had to do. I was in that classroom until June, and there was nothing to get me out of it. I finally stopped trying to avoid the pain, and I decided to live with it. I accepted that I was stressed and that it might never get any better. To make it to June I could either be a zombie or a teacher. As a zombie, I could give up completely, still coming in every day, but I would bring in movies, let the kids do what they wanted, and take them outside when it got to be too much. I could show up late, leave early, “forget” about cafeteria and recess duty, and I could stop planning completely. Or I could teach. But I had been trying to teach for a year and a half now, so why keep trying when I knew there was no point?

The importance was in the “why.” In October, I thought I had to take back the class to make my life easier. If I could get the kids under control, then I wouldn’t be so stressed, and life would get better. But now I knew that my attempts weren’t helping anything; my life was only getting more difficult. I also expected a few pick-me-ups along the way like “Wow, you are really trying hard, keep up the battle and they’ll turn around soon.” But now, despite my efforts, it seemed like most staff had stopped talking to me completely. There was a huge problem with relying on future improvement and positive reinforcement as motivation for teaching; it was contingent upon victory, and when victory didn’t come, then the only thing left was defeat. I was already consumed by failure, so much so that I thought the only solution was to escape it by any means. My failed classroom directly made me a failed teacher, which directly made me a failed person, or so I thought. I needed to separate my class’s performance from my worth as a person in order to see things a little more clearly.

To teach right, I had to stop caring what others thought about me. When an administrator walked in the class when everyone was doing their work, I expected them say something like, “I’m glad to see them so focused on their work.” But when I got nothing, I turned to Ms. James, “Why don’t they say anything?” She responded, “It doesn’t matter what other people think when you know what you’re doing is right.” I could only teach, and teaching was the right thing to do no matter how others had judged me. I knew that failure was a reality, but I had let failure be defined by others. If I taught, then I could neither be a failure nor a success, just a teacher, and there was nothing wrong in that. I also knew that if I became the zombie and gave up on the kids, then I would walk away in June - maybe with a broken will, but I would still walk. For the kids, a failed teacher meant a lost year, maybe the beginning of many lost years, and maybe the lost chance to make it out of Candler Park. They deserved a teacher, not a zombie. I decided to just give up on the escape, not the class. It was time to do the job, and let people say what they wanted to say.

Day 1, First Quarter Mile of the Marathon

Every day, I had demanded they work silently when I handed out their work. There were teachers who told me it was hard for 2nd graders to be completely silent while working. Even Grandma James questioned why I cared so much about silence, but I felt any chatter could only lead to a major breakdown, so I spent my most of my time hopelessly hushing students. I decided to try something new. There were times when I really needed silence, like silent reading, and then there were other times when I decided it was okay to chatter a little, like writing. It made sense that someone might see their neighbor’s drawing and ask, “What are you drawing?” On the other hand, I took silent reading time very seriously. I put chairs in each of the corners of the room, and anyone that even seemed like they might talk, I sent to a chair…and then there were my more difficult kids. I knew Ryden wouldn’t move to a corner chair at his own will, so when I had to, I moved anyone that he talked to. It usually meant Ryden would get a full table to himself, but he was left with no one else to bother. For Laila, I knew she wanted to seem the best, so I told her to read five books silently, and then she’d get to sit on the carpet with her books. And for Adam, when everyone else was silently reading, he would just fall right in line and silently read with the rest of them. I started by telling them how much time they had to read silently; when I heard chatter, I stopped the clock, waited until they were silent, then I started the time again, and we didn’t stop until we hit the goal for the day. I even placed silent reading twenty minutes before recess so that any time that they wasted meant less time outside.

There were positive changes afoot, but things were still ugly. A new girl, Zoey, had come to the class, and she figured if she wanted to be cool then she had to be friends with Laila, who was still a powerful leader of the dark side. As the class was dismissing, Laila told Zoey to hit Abigail, as some sort of a rite of passage. Abigail was the biggest girl in the classroom, and Laila wanted to know if Abigail liked to throw down without incurring any of the risk herself. So Zoey punched Abigail in the arm for no reason, and Abigail turned to Zoey with a look of shock and started crying. Zoey had done exactly what Laila wanted, and as they walked out together, Zoey leaned up against Laila’s shoulder and started to laugh just as a friend might, but by the time they were down the stairs, Laila was done with Zoey. She picked up some snow and stuffed it onto Zoey’s face, and now it was Zoey crying. To some it may have seemed like justice for Zoey, but all I saw was two girls crying, and Laila laughing, running away from her teacher, down the sidewalk and into her neighborhood.

Towards the end of the year, Laila was getting worse. Her bullying Anna was becoming a daily occurrence and even though I wrote everything up and sent it to the office, no one seemed to care. She was just as bad in the CHOICE room (a.k.a. in school suspension); she screamed and threw books all over the room. Principal Franklin made a decision that she could no longer go to CHOICE because she was such problem there, so from then on she was sent straight to the office whenever she was out of hand. That wasn’t working either. Whenever I sent her I imagined her sitting on the nice chairs, waiting for an administrator to smile and say, “Okay, it says here that you were trying to stab Anna with a pencil. Why did you do that?”
“She made me mad.”
“What should you do the next time you are mad?”
“Tell a teacher.”
“Right, do you think you should apologize to Anna?”
“Yes.”
“You think you are ready to go back and apologize?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, I don’t want to see you again, ok?”
“Yes, ma’am.”

When she came back, she walked right at Anna with her fist instead of a pencil. By the middle of March during one of my conversations with Anna’s mom, she said she was tempted to tell Anna to just beat up Laila because nothing else was stopping the bullying. I was at the point that I almost agreed with her. I had talked with the principal, assistant principal, social worker, discipline administrator, and most of the teachers in my hall, but this time I talked with the school’s police officer about my frustration with Laila, and she said she was going to have a talk with Laila’s mom. I left messages with mom at least three times per week, but she always acted like she didn’t know what to do. It turned out that the police officer had already driven Laila home multiple times, and whenever she dropped her off at the door, mom never allowed the officer to come in. She told me it was a classic sign there was something bad going on at home. So she told mom she could either make an appointment at Children’s Hospital for Laila, or she would call social services. There was an appointment the next day. After the appointment, I was told to call a counselor if there were any more problems with Laila, and it wasn’t long before Laila threatened Anna again. I called, and the counselor came to pick Laila up from school. She was at a psychiatric hospital for the next two weeks.

After she returned, I got to speak with Laila’s mom about her visit. She told me she wasn’t able to visit Laila, but she did talk to her on the phone. Mom said she was doing well, but she was still the same old Laila, even in the hospital.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, she told me that she hadn’t fought with anyone.”
“Okay, that’s good.”
“Yeah, then she said she only locked a girl in a closet.”
“Okay…”
“Yeah she said that the girl had slapped her so instead of hitting her, she locked her in the closet for the afternoon, I mean, at least she didn’t hit her back.”

When Laila came back, she was medicated, and she was well-behaved for the first day. The next day, she threatened to slap Anna, and the psychiatrist eventually doubled her prescription. It was clear that mom didn’t want to give her daughter medication, so she decided not to refill the prescription when it ran out.

Afternoons

Afternoons were always rough, and usually, I over-planned them, taking the kids endlessly from one failed activity to another. So in February I tried something different and I spent all of my planning time on one really engaging activity, making Martin Luther King, Jr. books. The book was about 10 pages long, and I copied enough for all the kids. I even individually cut them and stapled them to make booklets. The activity seemed beautiful because of its simplicity. At 2:00, with approximately an hour until dismissal, I would sit the kids down and read the book aloud. Then, because the book was a reading level just under their grade level, I could have them take turns reading it aloud. Then, the best part, the books were in black and white, and after reading, they could color it! With over 10 pages, the coloring would take the whole afternoon, and it would run me right through until dismissal, easy.

So as the afternoon showed its first signs of deterioration, I brought out the book activity just a little earlier than planned, more like 1:45 instead of 2. No big deal because it was such a long activity anyway. I sat down all the kids, started to read the book, and they seemed happy to follow along with their own books. I didn’t have any class collections of books, so it was a big deal. Now, as I was reading, I noticed they were getting fidgety on the carpet, and I decided the story was a little long anyways so I stopped it short, “Let’s leave the ending for a surprise, now, you get to read the story; let’s all turn back to page 1…” Now some kids were getting really fidgety; they didn’t want to read anything, especially aloud, and Adam and Ryden started rolling up their books to use as bats, so I shifted gears again. I was great at shifting gears, just not driving, “Well, I think we have read enough on the carpet, guess what!? Now we get to go back to our seats and color them!” It was now 2:05, and I was praying that the coloring would last, but I forgot that my most difficult kids sprint through everything, especially coloring, and after ten minutes, Adam yelled, “I’m done, Mr. Slaughter!” Ryden chimed in, “Me too!” That meant there was a full forty minutes until dismissal. There were no worksheets to complete, no games set up, and no stations planned out. I told them they could spend the time reading their books or writing in their journals; no surprise that running around the classroom was much more fun than any of that. It was too late to escape it; I could only hold my hat for the tornado, but instead of thinking, “those darn kids,” I thought, “I won’t make that mistake again. They’ll never have a spare moment again.”

Even now, afternoons were still rough, but something had changed. Suddenly it didn’t matter if it was the kids’ fault or the parents’ fault, Price’s fault, or the principal’s fault, I was the damn teacher. I was the only one who could do anything about it. So after one particularly bad Monday afternoon, on Tuesday I kept the whole class in for recess, by myself; 25 versus 1, the odds weren’t good. Taking away recess was one of the classic teacher punishments that I could never do right. At first, I tried walking the whole class to recess and then escorting the trouble makers back to my room. As I dismissed all the good kids, the bad kids of the day just eyed the door. One would break for it, and as I would go for his arm, then the rest would break free - a classic jail break. Other times, I put the bad kids in the back of the line (always a bad idea), then after letting the good ones out to recess, I moved myself in front of the door to block anyone trying to make a break for it until I felt like they had served their time. But this was my break time too, and I started worrying more about the copies that I needed to make rather than the punishment I needed to dole out. There were other times when I was really upset with a certain student, and knowing he or she was incapable of walking with me back to class, I would physically drag him or her back; I just kept my head down, avoiding the stares from my fellow teachers and administrators. When Grandma James joined my class, my problem was solved: she could take the good kids to recess, and I could just stay in the room with the bad kids while getting my work done. But then I discovered that a group of bad kids could be tear apart a room really quickly. Then I finally conceded to staying back with just one kid, but even then there were times I had to sit at the door as the kid would repeatedly ram his shoulder up against me to break through. Taking recess was taking too much effort, and when it seemed like it wasn’t working I avoided it at all costs.

However Tuesday was a new day; I would hold the whole class in for recess. It could be the end of me. I just kept them busy with work, allowing each lesson to run a little long, and I didn’t mention a word about recess. Every few moments, I nervously glanced at the clock waiting for one of my smarter students to yell out, “Hey, aren’t we supposed to be outside?!” But nothing happened, and when I finally walked them down to the playground with only three minutes left of recess, I very calmly announced, “You only have three minutes left of recess because you were so horrible yesterday afternoon.” They seemed confused; I had never done this, and they must have thought I was lying. But the whole class was upset when I picked them up after lunch. They seemed ready to get their revenge by making my life hell for the afternoon, but then in my snootiest teacher voice I told them, “Well, you all lost your recess because Monday afternoon was so bad. Let’s see if you all need to lose another recess.” And they didn’t, at least not for that afternoon.


Walking Without the Crutch

By the end of February, Grandma told me her son was really sick, and she was going to leave for a few weeks to take care of him. I was by myself again, just like the fall when everything fell apart. But this was going to be good for me; I was leaning too heavily on her anyway. I relied upon her to do all things that could mess up a well-planned lesson, like handing out pencils, giving out bathroom passes, and even chatting it up with a student when something seemed wrong. When she left, I had to do everything she was doing and teach, and it left me exhausted, but I was also impressed that I could even do it by myself. She did come back after a month, but it was with bad news. Her son had passed. I felt it was her right to be done with volunteering in my class, but she cared too much about me and those kids to leave; she was there to stay. “You got to keep on living, Mr. Slaughter.” Amen to that.

When the class was behaving better in March, she told me about the conversations she had in the teacher’s lounge; I never knew what went on in the teacher’s lounge because I always stayed out. “Mr. Slaughter, I keep on telling everybody how great the class is doing, but nobody believes me. Then, when they do believe me, they don’t give you any credit. They think I’m the one who deserves all credit.” I’d smile slightly, “It doesn’t matter what they think, remember?”

Even though I tried hard not to think about it, it was strange that no one mentioned the turn around that happened in my class. Well, there was one person, the nurse, “Mr. Slaughter, I just have to tell you; your class has really turned around, and I know you have been working hard to get them back on track. You are doing great.” If the nurse noticed it, then you would have to guess that at least the teachers in my hall noticed it, but nothing was said, at least not to me. It all became clear when I spoke again with Principal Franklin.

Walking Out

When spring came, I had my third of four observations, and this one was done by the principal, Franklin. It was unannounced, and I was doing a writing lesson at the time. As Grandma James circulated and handed out pencils, I sat down at the teacher table and had conferences with kids, one by one. I thought it went really well; I received 3.28 out of 4 points, which was a huge improvement from my twos in the beginning of the year. I had gone from Needs Improvement to Meets Expectations. When I went to meet with Franklin about it, I had some news to tell him. I talked it over with my wife, and we both agreed it was time to tell him I wasn’t returning to Daley. I was excited to do it because after such a horrible year, I could finally leave on a high note, walking out on my own terms.

I anticipated that Franklin would be generally kind, and express his regrets that I was leaving. We had some ups and downs, but I gave him everything I had those two years. You know, something like, “Wow, just as you are really turning the class around. That’s too bad.” At the very least, he could just fake it, “sorry to see you go.” But instead, when I told him the news, he said, “Yeah, I think that is a good move.” He asked me if it was alright to tell other teachers that I was leaving. “Sure, but why?”
“Ms. Smith has told me she won’t come back next year unless she gets a full-time teaching position, and she is really interested in partnering with Amber.”
Amber was Ms. Price. Really, I thought.

After our meeting was over, the wheels in my head started turning. Since my first year, Ms. Price was always great friends with Ms. Smith; they carpooled together, and they almost always spent their lunches together. I also knew that Ms. Price was friends with Franklin; Franklin had recruited her from another school, and I knew they jogged together on the weekends. The news that Ms. Smith wanted my job and had told Franklin tied these three together in an ugly way.

So I tried to piece the puzzle together. When things were really bad in September, Price kept her distance and never reached out to me; she never even attempted to plan with me even though we were expected to plan together. There were a few times I walked over to her classroom so we could plan the next unit together, but the result was usually the same, “I’ve already planned out that unit; if you want, I can make you a copy of the plans?” Even in the worst of times, when I must have looked on the verge of a breakdown, she never even asked me how I was doing. When I thought about Franklin, I remembered he started the year as his normal cheery and supportive self, telling me that I was doing great with the new set of kids. But when things went south, he was ugly towards me even when I reached out to him for any sort of help. So why weren’t they supportive of me? Why did they not seem to care if I succeeded?

I knew Price and Smith were always friends, even last year, and it made sense they wanted to be partner teachers. Last year, Price was a fourth grade teacher, and Smith was a first year special ed teacher. I had no reason to know she really wanted to be a classroom teacher. So last year when my partner teacher left and there was an opening in second grade, Price took it, and it meant there was no opening for Smith so she stayed in special ed. But when things got chaotic in my classroom, on one of their morning drives to school, Price and Smith must have seen the opportunity at hand. If my class drove me out of the school, which seemed likely, then Smith could take the vacancy, and they could work together as a teaching pair. Maybe even Price had mentioned the idea to Franklin during one of their weekend jogs. So through the fall, it was must have been a waiting game, Price would just keep her distance, and Franklin had decided I wasn’t the teacher he wanted anymore. But I kept on, and by spring, it didn’t look so good for them. So then Smith met with Franklin directly and told him she was going to another school, unless she got a classroom, and “oh by the way, I would prefer to be with Amber.” Franklin had no reason to fire me; I was doing better, my class was doing better, and maybe I was just crazy enough to stay. But when I informed him that I was packing my bags, he couldn’t even pretend that this was bad news. His mind went straight to Ms. Smith.

Now, maybe this was too much of a conspiracy theory. Price had a really rough classroom, and she had enough problems of her own, so I shouldn’t have blamed her because she didn’t find the time to reach out to me when her class was already so demanding. Plus, I didn’t think elementary school teachers could be that mean and secretive, maybe Price just had a stand-offish personality, and maybe she didn’t know what to do when she saw me drowning. I mentioned the meeting to Ms. Johnson, the straight talking first grade teacher, who was surprised I didn’t know, “They’ve always wanted to teach together, they’re butt-buddies.” After telling Johnson, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the whole hallway of teachers heard that I just found out what everyone else already knew.

The next morning in cafeteria duty, Ms. Smith saw me and told me she wanted to talk, no doubt Ms. Johnson informed the duo what I had heard from Franklin. “I just want you to know that I had no intentions of taking your job. I can’t believe Steve told you that I wanted your job. That was so unprofessional.” Unprofessional, but it was still true. That afternoon we had a staff meeting, and Price sat right next to me, almost leaning on me. The whole year Price would never even sit at my table during professional development, a clear sign to every other teacher that she had nothing to do with me. Today she was uncomfortably close, and as I pretended to listen to the speaker while finalizing some cut-outs, she leaned over and scribbled something on my notepad; it was a smiley face. Huh? After a full year of ignoring me, you break the ice, with a smiley face. It seemed like I was in seventh grade again. Then, I knew it wasn’t a conspiracy theory at all. She didn’t have to ignore me anymore because it was all an act. An act to get me out, and well, I guess it worked.

Field Trip

In the beginning of the year, the 1st and 2nd grade team wanted to go on one field trip per month. Our first field trip of the year came in May. We were scheduled to see the play, Knufflebunny: A Cautionary Tale, and despite our progress, I still feared my kids would be a spectacle. I imagined them in and out of their seats, yelling obnoxious things to the actors, and then security would ask us to leave. That actually happened last year. I had taken my kids to see the monuments in downtown, and there was an incident at the World War II Monument. It was a really hot day, and I hadn’t brought any water. We walked from the Washington Monument to the World War II monument because I thought there might be a water fountain there; there wasn’t. They took off their shoes and put their bare feet in the water to cool off, and then Randy pushed one of my girls in the water. I knew they weren’t supposed to be in the water anyway, but it took a park ranger to yell at them, “Hey kids, get out of the water, have some respect for the monument!”

So this time I had been talking to my kids about the field trip for a month. I kept on telling them I was only inviting the kids that deserved it, and this time I meant it. I only took 15 kids, and I left 6 kids behind. My class was on the bus with Price’s 2nd grade, and I finally got to hear her in action as a teacher. She was fierce, “If you want to go back to school, keep talking! Ms. T will walk you back. If you think I’m playing, try me.” Ms. T was the student teacher, and she didn’t have to walk anybody back, thankfully. Then Price sat next to one of her more difficult kids and fed him grapes each minute that he behaved. She smiled, “He loves grapes, only way he’ll behave.” It appeared my kids weren’t the crazy ones everyone looked at all of a sudden; I mean it was the one and only field trip of the year so they were just happy to have been invited.

When the bus pulled into the front of the Kennedy Center, each teacher lined up their class and did the headcounts. There were several buses from different schools, and it was obvious we were all from the same school because everyone was black, except for the teachers. We walked up the spiraling steps to our seats in the balcony, we took our seats, and I moved my eyes up and down the rows. I started from one kid and worked myself down, “Kevin, feet off the chair, Evan, stop the rocking.” After only a few reprimands, the class had settled, and they were seated chatting quietly, waiting patiently for the show. Just as my class settled, I looked at the other teachers in the building. Two of them were texting, not noticing the two boys, out of their seats, yelling across to each other. Two of them were talking to one another, letting their teacher assistants do the dirty work, and there was another teacher, seated right behind me, hopelessly trying to quiet down her kids. It looked like a 2nd grade class, and it happened that all the kids were white. They were rocking in their chairs, feet up on our rows’ chairs, and obviously not listening to their teacher, but after a few tries, she gave up and turned to her cell phone. When the play started, my kids were silent during the quiet parts of the play, they laughed during the funny parts, and they sang when the actors sung; it was a completely normal class on a completely normal field trip. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel great.

The last two months flew. All of a sudden, it was June. I could not stop saying it, letting it roll of the tongue, savoring it, like an expensive wine, June.

End of the year… my last journal entry.

“I just got my final observation by Ms. Coan, and Grandma James wasn’t there so that made it a little interesting. It starts with Ryden snickering because I went to the trouble of putting real student names in the word problems. Each time I read the word problem out loud, he’d laugh when I came to someone’s name. I hurried up the lesson knowing that my score would be docked but I refused to let Ryden get another student upset, and then sabotage the whole thing. I handed out the work. I rushed out with Ryden in hand, passed him to principal Franklin, who happened to be walking the hallway, he took him to CHOICE and then I’m was back on my game. They got started quietly because I think they knew it was a big deal with Ms. Coen in the room. Then, I started shuffling them into stations. I rarely did math stations, but I knew Coan loved them. While everyone was doing their work, I kept on glancing at the clock, hoping that nothing catastrophic was going to happen. Fifteen minutes left, ten minutes left, whew it’s been forty-five minutes! Why is she still here!? That’s how all my observations go. I just hold my breath… expecting the worst. Fortunately, nothing tragic happened and Coan was all smiles, “I’m so proud of you Mr. Slaughter. You have really turned it around. They are all on task! And doing multiplication! They are doing problems the third graders can’t handle. Great work!” Ms. Coan was the first one to interview me for Daley, and after two hellacious years, finally, she was smiling.”

Two years of almost complete devastation and just as I was walking down the halls through the front double doors, once again, I could hear the soft whisper, “See, you are special. It took you two years, but now you’ve got it. You can’t leave now!” But I had done the job, and now I had to walk away and leave it be. And I did.