The job search begins

I guess it didn't matter anymore.  There was no time to reflect, only time to plot my escape.  First, I applied to any job I could find that required a background in education.  I didn't get any responses; I guess I wasn't the only teacher looking for a way out.  It was a friend of mine who gave me the most promising lead.  She had been a teacher before, and she took pity on  me. She worked at an adult school that taught English to immigrants. Adult education seemed perfect: students who paid attention, who didn't yell at you, who even wanted to learn. Each day my friend mentioned another supervisor she had talked to about me, and each day, I fantasized just a little more about how my last day at Daley would feel.  Would I give the principal two weeks, would I send him an email, or even better, would I just walk out in the middle of a particularly bad afternoon.  All great ideas.  I was still praying by the way.  But I was no longer praying to be a better teacher, I was praying to get out.

The adult ed school called and I scheduled the interview for 4:30 on a Tuesday.  This meant I had to leave Daley right after school to arrive on time. On this day, I had colorful marker stains all over my fingers—I spent the day erasing a marked up whiteboard over and over again without an eraser.  The erasers never last more than a week.  Sometimes I would find a broken one under my desk with bite barks on it.

It took forever to get that dry erase marker off my fingers, and I arrived late to the most important interview of my life. The first of two interviews 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 behind my 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. To help students speak English and find a job seemed like just what I needed. I could still teach, I could make enough money, and I could start sleeping at night, and maybe even enjoy my weekends again. Grandma James would understand, she probably would give me a big hug; she had been telling me to get out for weeks. Well, I had given Daley my best shot, but I was beaten. It was time to walk on.

But by my second interview I realized something was wrong. She told me I had to be bilingual.  I actually spoke Spanish, but I was intermediate at best.  My second interview was conducted completely in Spanish, and it was going decently 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 switched to English and started explaining what the job was. It wasn’t a teaching job at all; it was registering new students.  I would be on the phone all day, speaking Spanish with people who wanted to learn English.  There would be no English speaking at all.  She also asked if I had a high school diploma or a GED. As an intermediate Spanish speaker with a masters degree, I was both under-qualified and over-qualified. It also paid an hourly wage right around that of Target; I withdrew my name from the list just to avoid the embarrassment of getting rejected by a job that I couldn’t afford to take anyway. It was back to the whiteboard for me.

Looking For Daley

Martha's House was over, but I had my path, and I prayed for the courage to follow it. 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 determined to teach the poorest of the poor, might as well get my education subsidized at the same time. For the grad school interview they asked if I had any interests in certain areas of education, and I said “urban education."  At the program’s orientation, I asked the teacher supervisors, “How bad are DC schools, really?” Strangely, I didn’t want to come to a Nicaraguan dead end so these schools had better be just as bad as advertised. They were.

In my grad program, as scholarship urban teachers, we turned up our noses at the other student teachers who worried about finding a “good” school.  How dare they. We came to grad school to save the world, how could they possibly worry about finding a school where the cops didn't roam the halls.

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; 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 it didn't make any sense. I had already found a school where I wanted to teach, and 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 was a long time resident of the district. It was exactly what I was hoping for.  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  the worst elementary school in one of the worst school districts in the country. There were many teachers and grad school supervisors who were begging me, "You're going to get eaten alive."  I smiled, thinking I had angels, saints, and even the holy trinity at my back, "I'll be fine," I thought. 

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. When she saw my tie, she thought I was another suit from the central office, but she beamed when I told her I wanted to teach there. 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 already quit. This was clearly not Nicaragua. I walked into one 3rd grade class where the long-term sub was rambling on 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 kept on asking questions—anything was better than listening to the sub. When they ran out of things to ask, I sat down and the kids got rowdy.  She told them all to stand up and stay standing until everyone was quiet.  Instead of getting quieter, they were getting louder.  They were clearly performing for me. The tension in the room was palpable. I thought, how could she do this, she was wasting away their education.  I would never do anything so pointless to gain control, I thought. It was time for me to go, and 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.  I had taken the bait, just a few papers to sign, and the hook would be set.

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 the top elementary school in DC and was asked by Chancellor Rhee to take on a challenge, Daley Elementary. His previous school was the best, but it was also majority white and rich, a rarity for a public elementary school in DC. For me, it was another sign that I was following the right path. Franklin's choice to lead at Daley made me wonder if he was like me, maybe we both thought we were God's gift to the classroom. 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. All of the previous teachers at Daley, except one, 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 read the behavior management bible of my grad school program, 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 teaching, but he was only checking one thing—did I prefer to dominate rowdy children with strict discipline, or did I want to listen to children and teach them how to behave.  A better question would have been: have you ever been suicidal?   And if you haven't, how will you prevent it from happening?