Mr. Babylon

The Ax
I've been excessed from Shitty High School. I found out via a letter in my box a few weeks before the end of the year. About half the staff was cut along with me (based on seniority or lack thereof) to make way for expanding mini-schools, but it's still kind of a kick in the nuts.

Believe it or not I'd grown sort of attached to the place. Yeah, it was a disorganized, ineffectual, frustrating mess of idiocy, bureaucratic red-tape, and gang-flags. But it was my disorganized, ineffectual, frustrating mess. Its chaos afforded an anonymity and freedom I was only just beginning to learn to negotiate and exploit.

And, despite everything that's happened and anything I might have written here, I love the kids.

Fittingly, my last day at Shitty High was a rough one. The preceding weeks had been cake. Classes were done, and I was a lame-duck, so any pretext of giving a fuck whatsoever was tossed out the window as soon as I handed in my final grades. I would come in late, do a minimal amount of what can only loosely be described as work, and then cut out early. At the most I'd have to proctor Regent's exams for three or four hours (there was no way anybody was conning me into grading those things, though) usually I'd just come in and move some books from one classroom to another, drink some crappy coffee, shoot the shit for a while and then head across the street to the Dominican restaurant (or, alternatively, down the road to the Irish bar) to drink ice-cold beer and watch the World Cup. I did end up staying until seven one evening when one dedicated, desperate young thug refused to give up on his Global History Exam. I was supposed to cut him off at 6:30, but he'd been busting his ass for so long I didn't have the heart to not let him finish.

The last day was different. We had to be there at 7:45 to give out report cards form 8:00 to 9:15. The fact that actual students would be in attendance tugged on some vague vestige of a sense of duty deep within me, and meant that I felt I needed to show up as well, so I was up at 6:15 and out the door a few minutes later. That's early no matter what. When you've been up until 4:00 smoking 40s and drinking blunts it's absolute Hell.

I made it, though, swallowed a couple of gulps of coffee and, for the last time at Shitty, set up perch in my classroom doorway. The kids slowly began to straggle in, and by about 8:30 I had a dozen or so students in my room (maybe half of whom were supposed to be there) sitting around on the desks, joking and laughing and clowning each other over their report cards. I gave them the bad news that unless they got out of ESL they'd be stuck with Ms. Kuntstein next year, shook a lot of hands, accepted a few hugs, wished everyone good luck, and realized I would probably never see any of these young people again.

I will miss them.

The adults, not so much. As soon as the distribution period was over my hangover attacked me with a vengeance. I t wasn't so much the nausea or the splitting headache, as it was an inability to form a coherent thought other than "water..." and an undeniable physical revulsion to sitting around chit-chatting with any of the crazy-ass teachers prattling on about the summer or next year or whatever.

So I left. No good-byes, no last, long, lonely walk down the halls. Nothing. I didn't even stay to pick up my check.

I don't know what I'll do next year. I can always come back to Shitty and substitute, hoping to become ensconced a la Ms. Wayne as a permanent do-nothing, as opposed to being sent somewhere else of the Region's bidding. I've been looking closer to home, and I'm trying to weasel my way into some ore progressive and productive places, but those kind of schools reek of pressure and scrutiny and having to spend way too much time doing what someone else tells me. Part of me wants to find somewhere even worse off than Shitty where I can apply what I've learned and once again attempt to surf atop the tsunami of shit.

I hear there's a job opening at the academy on Rikers.

Still Got It
I wore a tie to work the other day, something I haven't done since my first day nearly three long years ago.

A green tie with blue stripes, I bought it for a wedding a while back. It's a nice tie.

I don't know why I did it. I hate dressing up, but that morning something compelled me to look sharp, sort of an anti-Casual Friday thing.

It was a hit. All my girls oohed and aahed and "iEpa! Meester, you look nice!"

With that I would nonchalantly brush of my shoulders and adjust the tie, and act as if I hadn't heard.

"Huh, what's that? Did you say something."

We all got a laugh out of that.

The other teachers were even more surprised. Ms. Kuntstein was especially impressed.

"Ohhh, Mistah Baahbylon, you look so handsome! I love a man in a tie."

She coyly crossed a swollen ankle over a vast expanse of vericosed thigh as she spoke, her off-white support 'hos straining with the friction.

"You know my fathah used to weah a tie everyday..."

Who knew? Ms. Kuntstein is a daddy's girl.

Gross.

A First
Three years at shitty High School and I’ve never had a fight in my class. Never taught an illiterate kid to read either, but we’ll take our victories where we can. It’s not the kind of accomplishment I can put on my resume, but it’s something. It’s been close at times, but somehow I’ve always managed to shout or stare an aggressor down, to step in between potential combatants, or to slam the door in the face of interlopers on the prowl for a box. Three years.

I had a coverage the other day. No sweat. Once terrifying, coverages aren’t much problem for me these days. I’ve been around long enough that I usually know at least a couple of the kids in every class. Come in, pass out some busy work, catch up with an old student or two, and let the kids chat quietly until the bell rings. It’s an easy extra thirty bucks, and usually the worst thing that happens is a couple of would-be bad-asses try to leave the room without a pass.

This was a third period coverage, which is usually a good thing. It’s early enough in the morning that everybody’s tired and relatively calm and nobody’s too hungry and ornery. It was an English class, and a couple of the girls were actually current students of mine in an upper level ESL class. Business as usual.

Visitors from the Regional office were in the building that day, assessing Shitty’s status as an “Impact” school, the designation a scarlet letter indicating, among other things, that the place is dangerous enough to require the presence of extra armed police officers.

It’s always a ridiculous scene when these suits from on high visit, with all the school-aides scrambling to push all the clutter under rugs and pretty up long neglected bulletin boards and walls with lame inspirational posters of kittens and race-horses and sailboats or whatever, administrators hounding the teachers to sit the kids in groups so it at least looks like there’s some “cooperative learning” going on, and teachers looking over their shoulders in fear and whispering to each other, “Did you see them? Did they come by your room?”

The regular teacher of the English class I was covering had been aware of the visitors’ expected presence, and left instructions that the busy-work he had provided would be counted as a quiz, hopefully insuring a studious and wholesome scene were anyone to walk by and glance in the room.

And everything was fine. It was a big class, people were chatting quietly and not everyone was doing the work, but they knew it counted and they weren’t acting up, so I wasn’t worried about that. By thirty minutes into the period things were so calm that I’d grown bored, finished my own copy of the student questions about the Holocaust, and taken to wandering around the room reading the student work on the walls and talking to some weird boys in the back about the time I saw David Blaine walking down the street doing card tricks and stealing people’s watches.

If I’d had a crossword puzzle, I‘d have pulled it out and been halfway finished before the bell rang.

Then a little argument flared up. I missed the beginning, but heard clearly when, firmly but quite calmly, a serious looking young black man said, “Shut the fuck up, bitch.”

Before I had a moment to react or even figure out who he was talking to, a girl stood up, walked across the room, said, “Don’t ever fuckin’ call me that,” and calmly slapped the guy in the face.

Shit. I hesitated. I knew I had to do something about this situation, but wasn’t entirely sure what the appropriate course of action was. I didn't even know these kids' names. I knew I had to go get a Dean, but didn’t want to, because I knew the girl would get suspended and that’s always a pain to deal with. I was also worried that the guy would react, so I went over to him, and told him not to do or say anything.

He nodded, calmly, licked the tip of his pencil, put his head down and went back to his busy work.

Okay, this is under control, I thought. I checked that the girl was back in her seat and went over to the door to see if there was a Dean within shouting distance.

By the time I got to the door I turned to see that the guy and girl were back at it. Jawing again, this time both standing in the middle of the room.

“G’head, hit me again,” he said. She was not a small girl, her short dark arms thick and toned and adorned with a heart-shaped tattoo featuring the name “Derrick” in a flowing script.

She slapped him pretty good. His head snapped to the side. He was tall and slender, about 6’6” with big square diamond earrings and concentric stars shaved into the crown of his skull. I recognized him from the basketball team.

He wiped his lip, nodded slightly, reached back to the full extension of that 6’6” wingspan, and slugged her square in the mouth with every ounce of his strength.

She hit the floor. I screamed for help. By the time security got to the room she was back on her feet, blood painting her chin red and splattering all over everything as she thrashed about the room, knocking over tables and chairs and screaming death while two female security guards and a female school aide held onto her for dear life.

He stood in the same place his hands at his side. Calmly.

Normally when there’s a fight at Shitty the kids go wild, running towards the fray, crowding in and cheering for more. No-one said a word. No-one rushed forward. No-one crowded in. Everyone retreated to the walls of the room, their eyes wide and their jaws agape.

The girls I knew from my class stood behind me clutching each other's arms.

No-one finished the work that was supposed to count as a test. Shitty is still an Impact school. The girl went to the hospital for stitches where her teeth split her face. Derrick spent the night in jail. I finally had a fight in my class.

Grid-iron
I’m not a violent guy, really.

I used to be, though. I used to be.

I saw a Leovardo Tapia fight once where the guy was undersized, out-quicked, and generally overwhelmed. He was getting his ass beat all over the ring, but he wouldn’t go down. Finally after a vicious combo to the head his eyes were swollen half-shut and his nose was crushed. He dropped his guard. He stuck out his chin. Go ahead, hit me. He smiled, and that toothless bloody grin did more damage to his opponent than any punch ever could have.

Back when I was 15, I’d have worshipped the guy.

Adolescence was tough on young Babylon, and young Babylon was tough on adolescents. I was an angry kid and strong for my age. On the blacktop I’d block your shot and bounce up in your face screaming “get that weak shit out!” like I was somebody. Neighborhood football, I was looking to stick somebody, and lowering my shoulder and stepping in if you were coming at me. I got in fist-fights. I started more than a few, finished some too.

Some might have called me a bully, but I was egalitarian in my distribution of intimidation and smack-downs. You were bigger than me? All the better. I guess you could say I had something to prove.

I chilled out, though, sometime in between when I started getting buddha-blessed and when I finally figured out how to talk to girls.

So, the point is that when I played in the student-teacher flag football game the other day I was mostly trying to avoid injury, but I wasn’t mad at the kids for trying to get their licks in. I understood the visceral joy of the rage and slam and adrenal rush of knocking somebody ass over head and out of their shoes in that perfect bone-crunching hit.

Flag football is, in theory, a non-contact sport, but as executed on the softball field down the street from Shitty High can actually be kind of rough. Blind-siding, pancake blocks are relished, and while out-and-out tackling is technically illegal, if someone’s got the ball it seems to be general policy to knock them on their ass any way possible without actually wrapping-up (not that anyone would look twice if an old-fashioned textbook shoulder-lead, bear-hug takedown was delivered). It’s not Smear the Queer, but it’s close.

The student-team had plenty of advantages. They play every day in gym class, so they’ve got their timing and patterns down, and they actually run a pretty well-organized zone defense. Most importantly, they’re young and quick and spry and a little blood-thirsty. Plus their bench was stacked 25 deep.

The staff squad was over-the-hill and undermanned. Only nine brave souls stuck around after school to battle it out on the grid-iron, so we recruited a couple of students to join us old-timers and fill out the squad. Fatigue would be a factor. We would be rusty and slow, that we knew, but we also would be smarter, less selfish, more patient, and could rely on hidden wells of that mysterious power known as “old-man strength.” You might be able to bounce your pecs and have six-pack abs, young-blood, but these old arms will surprise you.

The game got rolling, and we were having fun. The kids were hitting pretty hard, but it was all good, clean football. Esteban, a muscular and rather testosterone-fueled young man who I have failed a couple of times in English class, bull-rushed straight through me a couple of times leaving me on my ass, and he seemed to enjoy that. Adalberto, the fat-bastard who single-handedly keeps the school supermarket in business, kept coming at me and I kept spinning around him into the clear. I enjoyed that.

We were too slow to do a whole lot on defense, but the kids were impatient and couldn’t make much work. On offense we would methodically march downfield with short to medium passes, the receiver swarmed and knocked to the ground immediately after the grab every time. The kids would screw up a couple of times in row then get the ball to some thoroughbred Jamaican dude in a head-band and a Strahan jersey with 4.5 speed, and he’d turn the corner and take it to the house, the Jamaican Jerry Rice.

The score was close at half-time, 3 scores to 2. I had a couple of receptions and one tackle and had a done a pretty good job of mostly not embarrassing myself.

First drive of the second half I started with a nice catch I had to lay out on my stomach to grab. Sweet. Then I had another catch, this one from my knees. I wasn’t blowing anybody away with bursts of athleticism or hard-fought yards after the catch, but I was finding some openings and holding onto the ball, the consummate possession receiver. Not bad considering I was still wearing my boots and belt and dress-slacks from the school day.

The end-zone was approaching. First down. I faked towards the left corner and crossed over the middle and DeRonn the security guard/QB tossed it, a little high and behind, but I got up off the ground, stretched out, and snagged it. This was my drive. I was hit pretty good in the legs and went down, right on the goal-line. Somebody else hit me as I hit the ground, but I didn’t mind. Touchdown Babylon!

I stood up and an argument broke out over whether I had crossed the goal-line or not. The cones weren’t quite even so it really could have gone either way.

“I broke the plane, forward progress,” I stood up and was pointing and talking out of my ass to no-one in particular, enjoying the banter, when, wham!, somebody cracked me from behind right in the small of the back. The ball went flying, and I hit the ground hard, face-first.

It was a dirty play, as late as a hit could possibly be. The ball was dead. Play was stopped. I was pissed. I forgot where I was for a second, and could think only about the cheapness of the hit, the breaking of the unwritten codes of a game of controlled violence, how I could have re-torn the ACL on my bum-knee. I was no longer a teacher, the kid was no longer a student. I was just a dude on a field and that punk was a cheap-shot artist. I jumped up and lunged towards the guy.

“Motherfucker!!!” I yelled in as deep and guttural and I’m-gonna-beat-your-fucking-ass a way as possible, and someone grabbed me from behind and wrapped me up to hold me back. It was the Jamaican Jerry kid. He wrestled me back and told me to relax, but it was unnecessary. I didn’t have it in me. As soon as I’d yelled I lost all my anger. I didn’t want to beat some 17 year old kid up any more than I wanted to get beat up by one.

Everyone, students and staff, started yelling at the kid that hit me, pointing him off the field, and he stalked off, trying to look hard, but clearly a little freaked out, probably scared he was going to get suspended.

He came up to me about 10 minutes later with a sheepish grin on his face and his hand extended in apology. I smiled back, shook my head tsk-tsk, and accepted. What was I going to do, hold a grudge?

The student team won the game 6 to 5. Jamaican Jerry came across the middle on a crossing pattern, turned upfield, and that was game.

There’s a rematch coming up. We’re working on a defense to neutralize their speed and stop them from turning the corner. There’s no way we lose again.

She Looks Pretty Tall, But Her Heels Are High
It’s easy to call in sick to Shitty High School. You just leave a message the night before with your name, department, and shift. You don’t even have to talk to a person, and try to sound like you have a cold or something.

You’re supposed to leave “emergency plans” in a file folder for whoever covers your class. A lot of times even that doesn’t happen, but when it does these invariably consist of nothing more than Xeroxed worksheets from a set of 15 year old “Skill Builders” workbooks. I was running a set off the other day when a kid in the office saw me.

“Oh no, Mister, again? I done that page like 20 times!”

Oh well. The times I’ve known in advance I would be out and actually tried to leave work that was somehow relevant to what we’d been studying, it was ignored by the sub altogether (might have required some actual teaching,) and the kids never do any work for the substitutes anyway.

The problem is that Ms. Wayne is still around, still without a teaching position, and still hanging around the office crushing bay-leaves in her tea and complaining about the kids and the Union and the heat and the ventilation and anything else she can find to bitch about. Her non-working, always-complaining ass even has the nerve to put the student aides to work printing up the flyers for the vocal performances she puts on at her church.

She must have pushed one of those flyers on me half a dozen times now (in a half a dozen different colors and snappy lay-outs too). Yeah, sure, right. I’d love to come up to your kooky born again church and listen to your crazy ass caterwaul about the end times. Someone call Kirk Cameron, the Rapture is nigh.

Because Ms. Wayne gets paid to sit around the office doing nothing all day, she’s the one who is called first when a coverage needs to be done. So whenever I’m out, she covers my classes, and without fail, every single time, there’s some kind of incident.

I’ll get back to school and my mailbox will be filled with copies of referrals and letters home and phone-logs, and, whaddayknow, here comes Ms. Wayne to tell me how disrespectful this kid and that kid was, and how she had to take whatever disciplinary action she took, and blah blah blah, and I don’t even listen anymore. The Dean’s office doesn’t either; a referral comes in with Ms. Wayne’s name on it, and it goes straight in the garbage. My AP even tried to ban her from calling kids homes, she threatened to go to the Union, though, so the AP had to drop that.

It’s become a running joke between me and my kids. Okay guys, who got a referral yesterday? Some of my kids, my good kids even, just turn around and leave when they see Ms. Wayne in the room. They don’t want any trouble.

Don’t get me wrong, believe me I know these kids can be real assholes, but obviously her current tactic of constantly writing referrals and whatnot isn’t working. That, coupled with her complete inability to control a class at all or get along with any student ever seem to be a strong indication that this woman needs a new line of work. I once walked into a class she was covering and not only were the kids throwing dice in the back (“ashy to classy!”) but there was a fresh DDP tag on the chalkboard. In spray-paint.

Seriously. It was like a Meth and Red movie in there.

She covered my class last week, and as per usual, there was a stack of referrals in my box, which I ignored, and everything was running as smoothly as things at Shitty ever run, when right before my 7th period class Ms. Wayne popped in my room and pulled me aside for a little chat.

In between barking at every student that came up to me to say hello or ask a question (“two adults are speaking here, you need to give us our privacy!”) she informed me that Ramon, a tiny little hyperactive kid who looks like he’s 8 years old, had been repeatedly “breaking wind” in class the day before, that the students had left the room to get away from the odor, and that this, clearly was inappropriate behavior and I need to speak with his parents.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor at the ridiculousness of it all, I mumbled something non-committal about taking care of it and ushered her out of my room. A minute later, as my students were filing in, a young girl approached me.

“Mister, Ms. Wayne kept throwin’ farts yesterday, and she said it was Ramon!”

I believe the kid.

Snacks
There’s a supermarket tucked in an out of the way corner in the basement of Shitty High School. I’ve mentioned it before. My first year in the building I’d only heard rumors of its existence. I tried to find it once or twice, got lost, and ended up smoking cigarettes and listening to sports-talk radio with the custodial staff down in the boiler room.

Last year I had the fortune of teaching a couple of classes right across from the store, and finally got to check the place out. Officially, it’s some sort of business vocation class for the Special Ed. department. The kids learn how to take inventory and use a cash register and make atrociously spelled hand-lettered “maximum occupancy” and “employees must wash their hands” signs.

The place was filled with a half dozen Special Ed. kids laying about listening to Hot 97 or La Mega, and the shelves were lined with dusty, out-of-date, economy-size packs of diapers and tampons and tooth-paste and laundry detergent and cereals and other random crap that no-one would ever have need to buy in the basement of Shitty High. They made cookies, though, Otis Spunkmeyer, sweet and aromatic and gooey, just like at Subway, and those things sold (and continue to sell) faster than coco hielos at a baseball game

This year is different though. Some enterprising Special Ed. teacher looked at that decrepit old supermarket with its stock of useless crap gathering dust and saw dollar signs. The supermarket was reborn. They would have chips and sodas and candy bars, but that wasn’t all. They would have hot food too. Hot Pockets. Beef-patties. Cup o’ Soup. Chef Boyardee ravioli. Sausage biscuits. Frozen White Castle burgers. If you can microwave it, and it’s loaded with chemicals and generally terrible for you, they would have it.

I must admit I have succumbed to its hot, greasy temptations. I’m hungry. I’m tired. I’m lazy. It’s right there. It’s quick. It’s cheap. It’s 750 calories. It’s a mozzarella and meatball Hot Pocket. It is better in theory than conception, but somehow I always go back for more.

I am not the only person at Shitty high who thinks this way. The revamped supermarket has been a rousing success. The supermarket is constantly a bustle. The staff of layabouts has multiplied. There are surly, sour-faced girls in pajama pants whose entire job it is to grudgingly pour hot water into your Ramen noodles. I love them.

The line to get in is five wide and extends down the hall past three or four class rooms. Towards the end it grows chaotic and sprawling as kids socialize and fight and try to get someone who actually has a hall-pass (ostensibly a requirement for supermarket entry) to buy them something or, if they’ve already bought them something, to give it up along with whatever change might be owed. I’ve heard rumors that the endeavor, despite its high traffic, is not a money-maker due to high rates of shoplifting, but profitable or not, it’s definitely a hit.

This goes on all day everyday in the hallway right outside of classrooms. I teach in those rooms in the afternoon, and my hungry, pain-in-the-ass, kids are constantly bugging me for a pass and/or sneaking food into my class. According to Dominican folklore I ought to have a golf-ball sized sty on my eye by now for all the pregnant girls whose hunger cravings I’ve denied.

At least they ask, though. God forbid I’d have to physically snatch food from the hands of a pregnant teenage girl. The boys however, especially the fat ones, are a different story. Know this; if you’re a guy and you’re tying to eat in class, Mr. Babylon will snatch your snacks.

Adalberto Caba is one of those kids that slips through the cracks. He is neither clever enough nor annoying enough to attract my attention. He sits in the back. He is quiet. He never does any work. Every now and then I make a perfunctory stab at motivating him, but mostly I just mark down his zeros and move along. He’s a pudgy guy of some girth, but he’s still a little dude. The other day, he waddles into class with a bag of cookies in his hand. I tell him he can’t do that. He ignores me. Sits down. Squeezes into the desk. Eats his cookies. Tosses the wrapper on the floor. Reaches in to his big black coat. Pulls out a can of Pringles. Eats that. Washes it down with a 20 ounce Hawaiian Punch. For dessert, pulls out a king size Snickers bar. Starts in on that.

Would it have been wrong had I became exasperated at the sheer slovenly enormity of his gluttonous sloth? Would it have been hypocritical if I had yelled, harshly, for Adalberto to take the candy bar out of his fat mouth and take out his notebook and do some work so that he might not fail and maybe would be able to afford more junk-food crap with which to stuff his fat mouth in the future?

Did I actually say all that? Buy me a Hot Pocket, maybe I’ll tell you.

Do Later
There’s one every semester, the kid that for some reason just rubs me the wrong way. He’s not necessarily the loudest kid, or the laziest, or even the most disrespectful, but there’s something about the guy that’s just completely and utterly unlikable.

This year it’s Ulises Guzman, a squinty-eyed portly little dickhead with a perpetual shit-eating grin plastered on his acne-spotted mug. Every day he walks into my class, screams “Hey! Babylon! No work today!” at the top of his lungs, walks over to the board and changes the words “Do Now” to “Do Later,” then sits down and proceeds to carry on a constant low-murmuring conversation, still smirking the whole time, with no-one in particular.

Every single day.

That “Do Later” joke was funny the first time I heard it in a Level 1 ESL class. Hell, I thought, at least they’re learning something. In an intermediate level class, for the one hundredth day in a row, not so much.

I won’t even go into the myriad disciplinary techniques I’ve tried with this kid, but suffice to say nothing makes a difference, so I’ve taken to simply drawing a deep breath, muttering “serenity now,” and calmly informing Ulises that I fail to see the humor in his repetitive, obnoxious, and disrespectful behavior.

He doesn’t get it.

So at some point in class I end up screaming at the kid to shut up, singling out his beady-eyed face despite the fact that there are plenty of other kids acting up. I feel a little bad about it, especially after he informed me that he’s diabetic.

He didn’t actually tell me he was diabetic, he wrote it in an in-class guided composition on the mid-term (tests being the only work he actually completes.) The kids were supposed to pick a theme that runs through a few of the stories we had read, and some of the options we had discussed (read: I had drilled into their thick skulls) were dishonesty, insanity, and death.

What can I say? I don’t write the stuff.

Anyway, Ulises chose the theme of “death” in his glorified fill-in-the-blank exercise masquerading as an essay, the conclusion of which asked the kids to connect the chosen theme to their own lives.

“I have dealt with the theme of dead in my own life when the doctor tell to me I will cause my sugar.”

So I feel bad about the way the kid gets under my skin (like a bamboo shoot under a fingernail,) but come on, really, I’m sure plenty of assholes get diseases too. Just because he’s got problems all of a sudden I’m supposed to like him?

The point, such as it is, being, as I’m sure you’ve guessed already, Ulises pissed me off the other day, and I crossed some kind of line.

He walked in and started in on his usual routine and, it being the end of the semester, I was in an unusually chipper mood.

“Ulises,” I sighed, shaking my head and smiling, a last futile attempt at the killing-‘em-with-kindness technique. “I’m gonna kill you… siddown!” So maybe kindness is a strong word, but I said everything good-naturedly and it was pretty obvious I didn’t mean it literally, just that he was, once again, getting on my last good nerve.

Ulises laughed, and continued to write on the board.

“You want I kill him, Mister?” asked Emilio, a hard-working but smart-assed little lambon.

“Please…” I implored exaggeratedly exasperated.

I turned around, went to my desk and began organizing my attendance and handouts and whatever else I had going on over there. I looked up half a minute later and Emilio, ever diligent, had Ulises up against the wall

I ran across the room and broke them up before any real harm had been done. I have to admit, though, for a split second there, I hesitated.

Movie Time
We recently finished reading “The Pearl” in my upper level “transitional” ESL class and I was at a loss as to what to do next. I liked “The Pearl” a lot, and it seemed pretty appropriate as far as vocabulary and themes and whatnot. I loved digging into all the socio-economic status and racial exploitation and pacification of the poor type issues, and was consistently impressed, once we’d talked about things for awhile, with my kids’ ability to wrap their heads around what I considered to be pretty eye-opening ideas.

In lieu of a test or essay, for the big “assessment” I had the kids adapt a scene from the book into play form and set it in modern times right here in the Boogie Down. All in all I considered the experience a moderate success.

The students? Not so much.

“Mista! ‘Da Pearl’ again? Pearl, pearl, pearl. All the day ‘The Pearl.’ I go the bed at night I see ‘Pearl.’ Morning again, ‘Pearl.’”

“Indira, I uhhh…” I tried to interject, but she was on a roll, and I…

“Mista. When your wife wanna go out… Dinner? Movie? Da Club? Naw… you say ‘Da Pearl?’”

Ouch. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, and though they managed to do it without humiliating me quite as thoroughly, pretty much all my other students said the same thing. “The Pearl” was boring.

We were supposed to read “Of Mice and Men” next, but I decided maybe that wasn’t the best idea, and I ought to find something that would pique the kids’ interest a little bit more. My options were severely limited, though, by the fact that we don’t exactly have stacks of wildly entertaining books lying around the Shitty basement.

Even the boring old books we do have are in short supply if they’re even accessible at all and not buried in a mildewed box in the back and bottom of an impenetrable stack of mildewed boxes in the converted bathroom that’s serving as a temporary book repository.

What then to do? The solution, of course, was obvious; I’d show the little ingrates a movie.

After an exhaustive perusal of my cinephile upstairs neighbor’s DVD collection I settled on “To Kill A Mockingbird” because it’s a classic I’d been wanting to watch again, and because it was the only movie the guy had that didn’t prominently feature French or Danish subtitles or exclusively star women with enormous breasts (Russ Meyer, holler!).

It took some wrangling to get the DVD player, but get it I did, and we were off. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

“To Kill a Mockingbird’s” opening title sequence may be famous, beautifully shot, and highly influential, but it’s not exactly action packed. I made them watch it anyway, thinking it’s got to be good for them, then wondering when did I become such an old codger, boring kids to tears by forcing them to watch black and white footage of a ball slowly rolling past a bunch of knick-knacks?

The chorus of complaints began right away. Black and white, rather than being a strike against the film, more than an obstacle for these young children of the information age to overcome, was a straight up deal-breaker.

No, my students are not really feeling film-noir. Chiarascura? Forget about it. I might as well have been showing a silent film about Norwegian existentialism.

We persevered through that, though, as we did over the “why she dress like that?” hump and the “they talk weird” setback, and day after day, forty minutes at a time, we watched the story unfold. The kids complained. A lot. And I thought the pacing might be just too damn slow for them. People slowly amble to and from cars (when’s the last time you saw that in a movie?). Scenes of complete silence, reaction shots, go on for minutes. Character traits are revealed through subtle facial expressions and things unsaid.

Boring.

Right? Not exactly.

They didn’t get everything, of course, especially finer points of plot.

“Who that nigga?”

“That the girl’s dad. That nigga drunk.”

“No, not that nigga. The other nigga. The black nigga!”

But they got the gist. Maybe because my kids don’t speak English as a first language, so the slow pace was actually a benefit, maybe because the movie and the acting is just that good, but the kids really got it. They may not have enjoyed it (or at least to let on as much), but when asked to describe characters, the kids were nails.

Atticus wasn’t just a father but “a good father,” which might seem obvious, but under normal circumstances would have taken some seriously leading questions (and perhaps even some “coaching”) to elicit. So “Atticus good father, lawyer, miss he wife, brave man” isn’t quite, “He is a man of quiet dignity, possessed of subtle strength and deep moral convictions,” but it’s better than the nothing I so often get. Gregory Peck, apparently, is a much greater communicator than I.

So things were rolling along. It was taking a while to get through, though. With 45 minute class periods, and a 129 minute movie, we should have been through the thing in 3 days, but after getting the kids settled and the DVD set up, and with occasional pauses to make sure the kids were following, it took an entire week.

Pushing that giant, unwieldy television cart through the crowded hallways every morning I began to feel like a bit of a slacker.

“Showing a movie again, huh, Babylon?” teachers would ask as they pressed themselves flat against the elevator wall to make room for my giant portable entertainment system their derisive sneers touched with more than a hint of jealousy.

Things took even longer because of an unexpected delay. I decided to buck the system (and avoid the elevator) a little bit one day by leaving the DVD player/TV overnight in the room where I would need it in the morning. I also, in order to prevent myself form leaving the movie at home or something silly like that, decided to leave the DVD itself in the machine. Naturally, in the morning when I came in, it was gone. I scrambled around running up and down stairs and from class room to classroom until I finally found the machine, hustled it back down to my room in the basement, and then discovered that my movie was no longer in the machine.

Without the movie I had a classroom full of increasingly restless kids, a big-ass TV, and no lesson-plan. Ever resourceful, I didn’t panic, I just reached in my bag and grabbed the other DVD I had borrowed from my upstairs neighbor, this one for my own personal edification and enjoyment.

The “Cool Hand Luke” experiment was not completely unsuccessful. The carwash scene, as one might expect, went over huge.

“Damn, son, she know what she doin’?”

“Of course she know what she doin’ nigga! Tsk. Boys be so stupid…”

After that bout of suds-drenched, bazoomaba-filled, inappropriateness, I thought I was prepared for anything, but was caught off-guard again when one of Luke’s fellow prisoners was sent to the box. My Muslim girls all dutifully covered their eyes when I ordered the class to do so at the last minute before the relatively tame obverse male nudity, and disaster was averted.

I fast-forwarded through the part where Luke’s creepy mom sparks a doob while laid out in the back of a pick-up and picked up in time for the fight in which Luke keeps getting knocked down and getting back up. Luke’s gutsy, relentless performance in the ring was a hit, although the general consensus seemed to be that, “that nigga retarded.”

Plus I’ve got about a dozen guys who are convinced they can eat 50 eggs. I was all ready to stage a contest the day before vacation, but after considering the potential for massive- serial-vomiting thought better of it.

So, after that little detour we were back on track to finish up “To Kill a Mockingbird.” I’ve mentioned before that I am not one to break down in tears at the workplace, or anywhere else for that matter. I have also mentioned that my one weakness in this department is books, and sporting events (especially if they trot out some badass old-timer for a rousing ovation,) and movies.

Well, it happened. I knew it was coming, the end of that damn trial scene, and I was holding it together pretty well. The verdict came down. The courtroom crowd gasped. The judge stormed out. Terrified, Tom Robinson, was led out the door. Everyone in the downstairs of the courtroom audience left. Slowly, oh so slowly, Atticus gathered up his things, said a word to the court reporter, and began to make his exit. Scout, Jem, Dill and all the black folks in the balcony were still there. They rose to their feet.

It started to get a little dusty down there in the basement of Shitty High, but still I was maintaining most of my composure.

The big one hit, “Stand up, Miss Jean Louise, your father’s passing.”

Boom. What a line. What a scene. I swallowed big, and my vision was getting pretty cloudy, but still I maintained.

Then out of nowhere came a second bomb. Somewhere behind me a perfect little female voice called out in a hushed tone, “they showin’ they respect, right, Mista?”

That did it.

Hello
Is this thing on?

Ho-tep
Sorry about the bitter and unnecessarily cryptic nature of that last post. Everything is fine, I had just had a bad day, that's all.

But, I’m gonna be closing up shop here for a little while. I’ve got too many other things I’m trying to work on, so unless somebody wants to pay me to blog, I’ve got to step away for a minute.

I’ll leave the site up, so feel free to browse the archives or argue with Pistol in the comments board, and do check back from time to time, you never know when something ridiculous will happen at Shitty and I’ll get a wild hair to write it down.

Also keep an eye out for exciting future Mr. Babylon projects including Mr. Babylon the book, Mr. Babylon the graphic novel, and most incredibly, Mr. Babylon the dancehall-crunk theme-song.

Thanks for reading and sharing, see you soon.

Nevermind.
All that sunshine and flowers crap I was spewing the last few weeks, forget it. I suck. Shitty sucks. Kill me now, preferably by forcible drowning. Whiskey drowning. Cheer up? Fuck you.

The Light
Signs I am slowly getting better at this teaching thing.

1) During distribution periods I managed to keep thirty-odd kids I’d never met before seated and relatively quiet for the entire forty-five minutes. If that isn’t amazing enough, the teacher next door—a wonderful Puerto Rican woman with this highly effective, sweet-yet-firm, motherly teaching style that I’ll never even begin to approach—walked over and mouthed “what the fuck?” (she’s cool like that) and pointed to all her charges streaming out the doors and raging down the hall.

2) A large percentage of the kids in the rigid Ms. Swiss’ class have circulated and signed a petition asking to be switched into my class. I suffer no illusions that this is not due in large part to me being a slack-ass pushover and never remembering to collect the homework or even if I assigned any homework or especially what number homework assignment we are on.

3) However, Ms. Swiss--who last year never spoke to me at all except to offer, in a tone meant to reflect her infinite patience with my incompetence, that perhaps I should try to prevent my students from destroying her property in the classroom, and that maybe, just maybe, there were some children in my classes who were a little, err, wild—actually approached me the other day and expressed admiration for my “technique.”

“You seem to have the whole class engaged and trying to answer questions.”

This “technique,” of standing in front of the class and talking and cracking stupid jokes and asking questions is, apparently, highly unusual.

4) And, a couple of students in my over-sized pain-in-the-ass Level 4 class where we never get anything done because I’m so busy trying to make everyone shut up and sit down have begun attending both that class and my afternoon 9^th period class, where I let them hang out as long as they behave and do some work.

5) That 9^th period class is a total blast. I’m always exhausted by then, so I tend to deviate from the lesson plan and do things like letting (and in fact encouraging) Pablo Pernil to beat-box or repeat everything I say in a Donald Duck voice, or letting Fernando Tejada teach me Spanish tongue-twisters* or pontificate on the origins and meaning of his rather horrible, self-inflicted Latin Kings tattoos. It’s all-good though, because as silly as these kids are, they’re always engaged. They know enough English to carry on a conversation with me, and, shocker, they’re actually interested in learning more, constantly asking me how to say this or pronounce that, and when we do get down to business, they work. Amazing.

6) Finally, the ultimate sign things are going better, good stories to tell on this here blog are becoming fewer and farther between.**

*With how many planchas did Pancha plancha? Go ahead, aks me.

**Famous last words, right?

The $3 ID
I’ve never cried at work. I’ve never even cried about work.

I don’t know why, considering I’ve been known to get all misty reading the last chapter of Friday Night Lights or watching pretty much any movie about a boy and his dog, but that’s just not how I deal with my workday stresses and emotional gut-punches.

I’ve had pregnant girls, jail-bound boys, kids with severe learning disabilities who might never read. It’s terrible and sad, but it’s never brought on the water-works.

I know a lot of female teachers (and I’m sure some men too) who’ve been known to break down in tears just from sheer exhaustion or frustration at the kids not listening. Me, I usually just come home and kick the dog.

I imagine that if I taught younger kids and they all came up and hugged me and said they loved me at the end of the year that might be a little tough, but the way high-school is set up with Regents testing and all that, there’s really no big goodbye, things just sort of peter out.

I lost it the other day though.

I had to cover a class of beginning ESL students. They were all sweet and cute mostly, but then a few minutes after the bell this kid named Jorge Valdez walked in escorted by a Dean. Jorge is, along with the raging asshole who kicked my trashcan last year, pretty much the most notorious jerk at Shitty high. I’ve never had him in my class, but I’ve seen and heard him screaming and spitting and hurling obscenities left and right, sometimes even in my doorway, his eyes ablaze with blunts and rage.

It’s not just that he’s loud and obnoxious and rude, though, the kid just has a real nastiness about him. He actually set a fire in a locker in a classroom in the middle of his 2nd period class some time last fall.

I was not thrilled to see him in my coverage. He came in yelling in rapid-fire Spanish and immediately refused to sit down. When I gave him his worksheet (the “lesson plan” kindly provided by the class’ regular teacher) he sneered and let it float to the floor.

He eventually settled in and spent most of the period chatting with another young punk. I made a half-hearted attempt to get them to work, but mostly just let them be and helped out the kids that were working.

As required for coverages, I passed out an attendance sheet for the kids to sign and give back to me. When the sheet was returned Jorge had failed to provide his 9-digit ID number. I asked him to fill it in.

“I no got ID.”

“You don’t have an ID? Why not?” I didn’t believe him.

“No got it. Puntapinchemariconependejo, blah, blah, blah…”

We went back and forth like that for a minute before Jorge looked me in the eye.

“Gimme three dollar, I get the ID.”

I’m pretty sure Jorge lives in a shelter. I know that for awhile last year he had been sleeping in a stairwell until some man took him in under what I can only assume were not the most wholesome of conditions. This all came to light last year sometime after he set the fire, so, hopefully, somebody got him into a shelter after that. I really don’t know. He still smells terrible.

“It costs three dollars to get an ID?” I hadn’t known that. I left unspoken the second half of the question, “and you don’t have three dollars?”

He nodded, and went back to screwing around with his friend, and I went back to helping the other kids with their worksheet.

When class ended I called Jorge over and told him if he wanted an ID I would take him right then and get one for him. He followed me up the stairs and through the halls in silence.

Near the metal-detectors I found the desk where the ID photos are taken and as quietly as possible told the school-aides sitting there that Jorge needed an ID but didn’t have the money.

“Oh yeah, right!” one of the women snorted. “Please. He doesn’t have three dollars!? Hah! I know this kid, he and his friend were in the office the other day cursing at the secretary. He’s playing games. Playing games.”

“Wha? I no have ID, I need…” Jorge blurted.

“He lives in a shelter,” I stepped in front and quietly interjected. “He’s not playing games.”

“Oh, we know these kids, it’s all a game to them…”

I stuck my three dollars in the woman’s face. I couldn’t listen to her shit. I'm sure she deals with some real ingrates on a daily basis, but she couldn’t stop power-tripping for thirty seconds to help out a homeless teenager, because he lacked manners?

Finally, one of them grudgingly took the money, handed Jorge a printout, and told him to come back the next day for the ID. I said thanks, none too friendly mind you, then patted Jorge on the shoulder and walked away.

Poor kid. I’d be a real dick too if my whole miserable life nobody had ever bothered to give a shit about me.

The Others
No longer marooned all alone out there in TV-land when it comes to my LOST obsession, I'm about to be LOST blogging along with Chris Lemon-Red and Jon Caraminica over at Flight815. Seriously check it out. Those guys are the real deal, I'm just an extra.

Fast Times
No fun. Today I got sent to the Principal’s office where I endured an interminable lecture, choked back many a smirk, and was even put on the spot about what I thought the punishment should be.

Just like old times. Seriously, I might as well have been 14 all over again and sitting in front of Disciplinary Committee for tagging homophobic epithets (I ain’t proud, just saying…) all over the car of some poor dude who pissed me off.

The day started off routine enough; My 8:30 class are all nice kids, especially when they’re still half asleep, which is always. In fact the only annoying kid on the whole roster is a Vietnamese super-student who’s constantly correcting my spelling and reminding to collect the homework. He’s not even the most outstanding student I the class either. This cool, quiet, little Armenian girl consistently turns vocabulary homework into Dave Eggers’ quality perfect sentences. I finally thought I caught a mistake the other day when she had a comma where a period would have been better.

“Very good. Very good. Wow. These are great… Oh!” Secretly delighting, I crossed out the comma. “That should be a period, because this is its own sentence.”

“No, Mister, no that’s not a comma,” she replied as gently patient as she could be. “That is a, how do you say, half comma?”

“Half comma?”

She pointed above the comma to a little dot.

“A semi-colon?”

“Yes, Mister, a semi-colon.”

A fucking semi-colon. What is this, Stanford? I’m pretty sure she used it perfectly too, although, I must admit, I really have no idea.

After my morning class I was unceremoniously given a coverage of a beginning level ESL class, which, while screwing up my schedule for the day, went just fine. There was one obnoxious jerk in there who just about broke my heart*, but all the other kids were shy little cuties, and I had fun pantomiming and drawing and talking real slow and doing all the beginners’ stuff I never have to do anymore now that I’m teaching intermediate and upper levels and can actually carry on a conversation with my students.

My giant class got even bigger (it’s up to 41 kids now,) and that went the way it always goes; I got nothing accomplished, but kept order, barely, which is an accomplishment in itself. Actually, I did teach two new vocabulary words the big group of chatter-boxes. Ask any of those 41 Level 3 ESL students what “closet” and “sauna” mean, and they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.

It was my upper, transitional, level class of juniors and seniors that did me in.

There are a couple of dudes in this class that have big old chips on their shoulders, right above the glittery snowmen. They stroll in late, sit in the back, and refuse to do any work. One kid, Felix, is all arms and legs and goofy smiles. He’s remarkably good-natured about never shutting up or doing a goddamn thing I ask.

Then there’s his buddy Johan. He’s a lot quieter than Felix, but his vibe is straight animosity. Every time I look at the guy, let alone ask him to take out his notebook or remove his hat, he’s staring at me with cockeyed with his lips all twisted up in the ultimate version of a screwface.

It’s so exaggerated and obvious that he’s putting on a front that it doesn’t freak me out the way Gerrardo’s intense stare did, but it’s still not cool.

Anyway, at the beginning of class today I was doing my thing, checking homework and goading the class along into doing their “Do Now” while Felix and Johan did their things in the back, when the door opened and my AP walked in. She actually didn’t make it all the way in because the chord of the big industrial fan I poached from a science lab the other day was blocking her way, causing quite a commotion as she almost tripped and half the class screamed out in warning.

She made it in unscathed, followed closely by Principal Popeil.

Shit.

“Oohhhh fuuccck, look at this corny-ass nigga!” Pedro exclaimed, and steam immediately began screaming from Popeil’s ears.

He launched into a lecture about who were the adults and who were the children, and in between breaths began barking orders at me to give him the students’ Delaney cards.

As I stammered to explain the fact that I don’t, ahem, actually use the Delaney cards, Popeil was set off anew by the fact that Johan and a couple of other guys in the back around Pedro were cracking up over some, apparently hilarious, thing.

Popeil was livid. As he ranted on and on, Johan let go with low, guttural, and completely heartfelt, “ma me cueva”(sp?) which sent Popeil on yet another diatribe about proper behavior and respect and “vulgarities” before he finally took his leave, leaving orders that the offending youth, including the peanut gallery, to see him before the end of the day or else.

See, I’ve been trying to be real patient with Jorhan and Felix. I explain the way things should be, remind them whenever they deviate from the program, and sit back and let them fuck up as long as they’re not disturbing the rest of us. The theory being yelling or getting all hot and bothered is exactly what they want, and writing a referral (in addition to being completely ineffective) is just going to piss them off.

My theory didn’t take into account Popeil walking into the middle of class completely unannounced.

I yelled at everybody for a minute, unsuccessfully tried to revive the aborted lesson, and before I knew it the bell rang. When class was over I gathered my stuff, fought back the urge to put a dent in a locker with my fist, stuck my chin out and marched up to Popeil’s office to try to explain that, actually, my classroom management is one thing I’m feeling pretty good about this year. To my surprise, Felix and Johan and their cronies were in his office, sitting on a couch getting talked at.

I inquired if I might join and spent the better part of the next hour sitting silently while Popeil went on and on with his lecture, which from what I could tell, was the major component of the kids’ punishment. The worst part was he kept trying to drop the street lingo, but was way off base, and even if he had it right, was so condescending I wanted to throw up in my mouth.

“I speak one way when I’m hanging out with my buddies on the stoop… I mean, I don’t use vulgarities but… I speak differently in public. Right? What’s up with that, dude?”

Right, Spicoli.

I was sufficiently chastened. By the end I’d have punched myself in the face to get the guy to shut up.

“Was that fun guys? Did you enjoy that? Good times?” I enquired of my students after pulling them aside when we finally made our exit.

“Yeah, me neither.”

As calmly and in a fashion as far from lecture as I could muster, I attempted to explain to the guys that I was not their enemy, that all I wanted was to teach them a little something so they could graduate and hopefully make some money or something. That when they came into class combative from day one, I wasn’t going to fight back, that they could win every daily battle, but would fail my class and be right back where they started in the end.

I’m not sure if my words were persuasive or if it was just so completely obvious that I had been as miserable sitting in the Principal’s office as they had, but it seemed to work. We shook hands and agreed to start over. Johan, who had dropped his screw face around about the time discussion of not graduating came up, even looked up from his Jordans and looked me in the eye as he apologized for his behavior.

We’ll see. We’ll see.

*More on that later.

Front-runners
Unfortunately or not for everyone involved, many of my favorite students from years past are not in my classes this semester.

I still see Roulo in the halls, and we exchange pounds, but that’s it. Same for Christopher and Tony. Elvis too.

Colombia, last I heard, is in jail, as is Frankie. There’s been no sign of P-Yayo so far. Perhaps the City finally opened up a Dipset themed mini-school.

I do have the pleasure of teaching the one and only Animal Boy, Pablo Pernil, who is as charmingly scruffy and goofy as ever. Even better, I have tiny little Popsoul aka Soulrock in my class, although he seems to be regressing slightly, now channeling way more Young Buck than Hugh Masekela. He now desires to be called Soul-G, and refers to his native land of Guinea as “G-U-nie.” He’s also in my big class of 37 kids, and he’s way more advanced than any of them, so as much as it hurts, I’m probably going to recommend that he be moved to a higher level.

Not to worry, though, I have a bunch of new candidates for most entertaining student status.

Another likable young fellow is Kevin Soto, a big, dark-skinned kid who’s very much a gangster. I had him in a class I took over halfway through the semester last spring and he showed up twice at the most, but he was always quiet and respectful, man enough not to have to prove anything in English class.

He seems to be trying to get it together this year, and has showed up every day and even did some homework. He’s all around a pleasure to have in class, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if one day he stood up, walked out of class, put on a pair of brass-knuckles, and donkey-punched somebody in the back of the head.

We were doing group-work today--reading, answering questions, then reporting on various Katrina survivor’s stories photo-copied form the pages of People magazine--and I spent the first part of class going over the jack-booted group-work procedures.

Everybody must participate and do their job. Listen to your classmates. Respect them and their ideas. Stay on task. No talk of girls. No talk of boys. No Yankees. No Daddy Yankee.

Things went just fine. Some of groups took a little longer than others answering the questions though, so I put off the presentations until tomorrow. Kevin’s group was finished and were chatting quietly in Spanish. Class was almost over and it was 9th period, time to go home, so I was letting it slide.

“Yo Mister, “Kevin called me over, a big grin on his face. “It’s happening, Mister. It’s happening.”

“Huh?” I was confused.

“It’s happening like you said, Mister. These girls talking about Daddy Yankee.”

Fernando Tejada is a stylish, cocky, kid. He’s not a jerk, he just has that swinging swagger and smirking confidence of any teenage boy who’s cooler and smarter than everyone else and knows it.

He was being a little difficult at first, clowning a little and showing off, but I figured out he was smart as soon as I looked at his program. I look at all the kids’ programs on the first day, ostensibly to make sure they’re in the right place, but really to kill a little time and figure out a little bit about what kind of student the kid is.

If he’s a junior and in Math 2 and Living Environment, he’s probably not the studious type. If she’s a native Spanish speaker and still in Spanish 1 or 2, she’s most likely illiterate.

Fernando is taking French, AP Physics, and AP Spanish.

“Hey Mister,” he asked me as class wound down this humid afternoon. “You like to teaching?”

Yeah, yeah I do. Most of the time.” I gave him the short, sunny, answer.

“But don’t you be mad when you talking and to talking and all the people they no listen?”

Uncanny. It’s like he’s inside my head.

Go Crazy
After three mostly wasted days last week, the kids finally started showing up in significant numbers yesterday. Things are going just fine so far, considering, and there has been a notable lack of the usual first week gang violence. Maybe it’s the absence of new freshman this year, or maybe they’re just waiting until they’ve all turned in their all-important lunch-applications so they can get their Metrocards (which determine how much money Shitty gets per pupil and are now being used as blackmail.)

I spend my free-periods keeping up with grading (that won’t last) and un-stacking and unpacking boxes and boxes of books. My classes are pretty well behaved—a couple are great, like perfectly frightened little orphans—and we’ve been practicing our soul-killing procedures and having spirited, productive, discussions about Jabbor Gibson and Deamonte Love. Even my stifling hot, packed tighter than (and smelling like) a cross-town bus, class of 37 young learners is relatively calm, if chatty and understandably grumpy. We don’t get anything done, and it took me an entire period to get halfway around the room checking homework, but there has yet to be a riot.

In fact, if it weren’t for the physical conditions and a few notably difficult and disagreeable folks, my job would be dangerously close to tolerable.

There is the AP, of course, who, straight beastin’, has banned the infamous coffee-maker from our tiny new department digs. She doesn’t want her bosses coming by and seeing things in a clutter.

Principal Popeil is still around too, though we don’t see much of him down amongst the roaches in our out of the way little hole.

A more constant annoyance is Ms. Wayne. You remember Ms. Wayne? Ms. Wayne, who as a farewell gesture on the last day of school, in a moment so sublimely awkward it could have made David Brent blush, serenaded our entire department in an operatic style? She’s back.

She told everyone she was leaving, volunteered to be “excessed,” and then showed back up at the beginning of this year as if nothing had happened. I suspect it is an elaborate ruse to work as little as possible, and it seems to be working. She has nothing to do, no classes to teach, only to sit all day everyday in the department office snacking on Kraft Singles and bitching and moaning and complaining about every little thing while around her everyone else busily goes about their day.

If anything could be more awkward than sitting through Ms. Wayne’s horrendous musical performance, it is sitting in the office as she blathers on and on and no-one so much as grunts in response.

In the classroom so far--and we are, admittedly, barely out the gates--my consternation is much less than last year. Take the example of one rather large young man who scared the living shit out of me yesterday as I scribbled vocabulary words on the board.

His jaw was set, quivering slightly with the force of the tension with which he held it. He stared at me, unblinking, his narrow black eyes boring into me with such intensity I thought he might rip the top off of his desk right there and begin to savagely beat me over the head with it.

I was terrified. I moved to the left a few feet and his eyes followed me without missing a beat.

“Is there a problem, Gerrardo? Are you ok?”

He nodded, barely, never deviating from his stare of death.

I had no idea what was going on. It was the first day, I couldn’t imagine what I had done to anger this kid so much that he was ready to murder me right there in front of God and the rest of his transitional ESL class. Had I unknowingly committed some sort of grievous cultural taboo? Was he that offended by being asked to raise his hand as opposed to calling out?

I continued to teach, moving around the room, my eyes every so often darting over towards Gerrardo and quickly looking away upon confirmation that he was still glaring at me like I’d just pissed on his mother while wiping my ass with a Dominican flag.

By the end of class I was ready to dive out the window to escape the violent beat-down I was sure to suffer at the hands of this hateful kid, but managed, after I wrote the homework assignment on the board, to sneak one last look his way.

He was staring with that same concentrated intensity, the entirety of his will focused, only this time his angry laser-vision was boring a hole into the chalk-board as he painstakingly copied the assignment.

Gerrardo wasn’t mad at me, just real serious about paying attention in class.

There is one kid who really is a problem though, a tiny little punk in a glittery snowman tee who never shuts up, never stops stepping to me and popping his collar.

I'm firm with the little dopeboy. I'm patient. I give him a look when he mouths off, a little hand-gesture to sit when he's out of his seat. I show him the zeros he earns at the end of every class. I even pulled him outside and calmly explained how things are gonna be. So far, nothing works.

I’m trying to remain tough yet cool-headed, but it's kinda hard to be a hard-ass, when that little shit won't stop being an ass.

The Dust Clears
Morale is at an all-time low at Shitty High. Two more mini-schools have been moved in, forcing massive relocations of all Shitty departments and requiring extensive construction work over the summer, work that is, of course, not quite done yet. The scaffolding is down, though, and the building façade has a fresh coat of paint, as do many of the new classrooms, which look great.

Too bad we don’t get to use them. We’re down in the basement, right by the supermarket, and on the same hall where I saw my student brain somebody with a padlock. Home sweet home.

Down there, amongst the peeling, tagged-up paint of the tiny classrooms with eight-foot ceilings and exposed piping and ductwork, the true nature of Shitty’s renovations is revealed; lipstick on a dieing pig. The stench of the pig’s rotting corpse is palpable on the breezes that waft through this forgotten corner of the basement’s too-small windows. Wait, no, that’s just the dumpster, right there outside the classrooms, surrounded by piles of broken desks, blocking out the sunlight, and reeking of fish.

We finally got our schedules and room assignments sometime yesterday afternoon--less than 24 hours before the first kids were to arrive, and after an interminable and hoaky speech from Principal Popeil about his immigrant, illiterate coal-mining grand-parents and his heartfelt love of education (no-one clapped, not even a 'Nolia clap)--so yesterday was spent scavenging these parking lot refuse piles for salvageable tables and file-cabinets. I made some pretty choice furniture scores, and even found a stash of about thirty brand-new graphing calculators which should be making their way onto Ebay any day now.

We don’t have a book room anymore, instead our books are packed up in cardboard boxes, forty pounds each, packed six deep and twelve high in a couple of out-of-the-way stairwells. I spent an hour or so yesterday grunting and sweating and tossing those boxes around, taking down one stack and re-stacking it somewhere else, ostensibly looking for the books I’ll be using, but really just getting out some frustration and making as much noise as possible, especially when Principal Popeil strolled by.

He didn’t look my way.

Mounting Up
Yesterday was our first day back. The kids come in on Thursday, although most of them won’t show up until Monday. Why bother with a short week? Especially when their schedules will all be wrong for the first few weeks anyway.

We spent the morning eating complimentary mini-muffins and listening--once some interminable PowerPoint technical difficulties were resolved, and after an overwhelmingly self-congratulatory home movie (dramatically scored by the stirring anthems of late-period U2) about a group of principals’ trip to a conference--to a motivational speaker who affectionately referred to us, his audience, as his “high school buddies.” A few too many goofy puns later, and before another moving PowerPoint presentation, this an ode to the “Noble Teacher” and soundtracked by Bette Midler’s maudlin classic “Wind Beneath My Wings”*, our motivational speaker’s point became clear…

Good teacher’s establish procedures and stick to them. Procedures. Routines. Order. Fascism. It works. I’ve seen it happen. Kids, especially the wild-ass kids at Shitty, respond real well to routine. It works, but it’s not me. Assigned seats. Procedures for turning in papers. Procedures for how to raise your hand. Procedures for how to ask for the bathroom pass. I hated all that shit when I was in school, and I hate it now.

I like freedom. Creativity. Poetry. Music. Birds. Nature. Puppies. All that hippie-dippie crap. “No hats in the classroom.” Man, I don’t care if you’re barefoot as long as you’re curious or something. It's not that I want to be the "cool teacher" or something, that's just pathetic, but I really am at my core a disorganized slacker type dude. Shit, I haven't brushed my hair in years, not even for my own wedding.

It hasn’t worked for me so far though, my lackadaisical style. Kids wile out, I tell them to quit. Kids go bananas, I tell them to quit. Kids do whatever the Hell they want, I start screaming and yelling like the scary dad from an after-school special.


*At this point does anyone out there not know that they are Bette’s hero?.

What I Had For Dinner
Peep this article in today's New York Sun profiling yours truly and other NYC blogging teachers. You have to subscribe to read the whole thingThe author was kind enough to forward me a way around the subscription, but NYC folks can should pick up a copy for a quarter. Support! This rag is way better than the Daily News (I wouldn't even line a bird cage with the Post).

Is This Thing On?
Back. Like what? Cooked crack? Nah, more like Sparks, two cans for $6; I’m there, and I’ll do the job, but I ain’t what the fiends are after.

I try, don’t get me wrong, and that’s more than a lot of folks. And I manage to develop a pretty good rapport with my kids. We like each other, and they generally trust me, which is something. I can’t control the little bastards though, and more than that, I’ve yet to really stir up any love of knowledge, any real curiosity in anybody. More and more, I think that’s what it takes to be a truly great teacher, and it takes a truly great teacher to do that.

Either you got it or you don’t.

I don’t think it should be that way, and I don’t think it has to be. If we put enough of that war money and resources in the schools I think we could make them competent and exciting enough that a regular dude, with a little hard work and some training, could succeed just fine. Right now though, us regular teachers, try as we might, either end up quitting or miserable, and that’s a fact you can see in the empty seats where my young colleagues have all disappeared, and in the weary eyes of those older folks who are sticking around complaining about the boss and counting the days until retirement.

I’m sticking with it; I’m a stubborn kind, but this summer has been one of wondering if I really have what it takes. These aren’t the heated, emotional, feelings of wanting to quit after a terrible week or on a particularly dreary Monday, these are the sober (well, not exactly) musings of one whose spent the better part of two months sitting around in his underwear listening to southern black folks rap about selling cocaine and waiting for the new season of LOST to premier.

And that’s the thing, that’s how I know I don’t have the magic. I care deeply about my kids and the plight of our nation and its youth in general, but when I’m not at school the last thing on my mind is curriculums or lesson plans or teachable moments. I’m too busy obsessing about college football, rocking out to the Caps and Jones Lemon-Red mix, or lately, working myself into a desperate rage over this hurricane and Mike Brown and Barbara “Marie Antoinette” Bush and the subsequent politics of abandonment Katrina has exposed in the worst possible way.

I’m passionate about a lot of things, including my students. I’m just not sure I’m passionate about teaching, not in the way the great ones are at least.

Somebody Holla at P-Yayo
Diplomats week, all Dip-set, all the time over at AllHipHop.com. Dyiiip-Setttt!!!

Touch and Go
You’re not supposed to touch the kids. Everybody tells you this, over and over. It makes sense, I guess, what with our litigious society and the nature of the teacher/student relationship. Some crazy or vindictive kid is going to make something up sometime, eventually.

I'm not out there screaming for a return to corporal punishment, but I don’t worry about getting in trouble. I touch the kids all the time. You've got to. In some of the really tiny, crowded classrooms, you practically have to get freaky with someone just to walk down the rows, so it’s often unavoidable, besides it being an essential part of human communication, especially when there's a language barrier.

I try to make sure I’m never alone in a room with a kid, especially a young lady, but I touch the kids all the time. I place a hand on their shoulder as I lean over to check homework or answer a question. I shake hands, or, more often, participate in all kinds of no doubt gang-related hand-jive.

When the kids crowd me at my desk I’ll playfully shove them back. If somebody gets out of line I’ve been known to give a little smack to the back of the head. I’m often tempted to peg someone with a little chalk nub when they’re not paying attention, but usually refrain just because I’m trying to squelch the throwing meme altogether.

One move I haven’t used yet but look forward to trying is the “grab-the-brat-by-the-earlobe-and-pull-them-out-into-the-hall-for-a-lecture twist.” That shit is straight gangsta, but requires a real authoritarian air to pull off properly.

Maybe next year.

Why Are You Here?
Summertime and the living is slo-o-ow. That’s good for me, bad for the blog.

With no new stories to tell, I‘m gonna have to rely on the fickle powers of memory to keep things rolling. I’ve got a few stories in the pipeline, including maybe a “Day in the Life” series featuring the imagined (or not) doings of Pedro, Roulo, Popsoul, Christopher, Maria and the rest.

In the meantime I’ll hit you off with that amusing yet desperate ploy of many a burned out blogger; funny things people searched for that led to my site.

I get a ton of hits from aspiring little gangsters looking for “Crip” or “Latin King” beads. Interestingly the majority of these hits come from IP addresses in lily-white suburbs and even, gasp, Wall Street.

I can’t help you wankstas out with the beads, but maybe somebody here or here will be able to tell you something. Good luck!

Other up and coming gang-bangers are less interested in fashion than dance-floor smashing. For those of you looking for a “how to crip walk” tutorial, look no further.

Some folks who stumble my way are just plain confused.

As much as I’m sure he’d love to be included, Sasha Frere Jones is not “your nigga” and has never been a part of Dipset!

And I’m sorry to tell you, there’s nothing here for those interested in “sexual chewing gum.”

Finally, I had no idea when I wrote this, that I would be forever inundated with readers on the prowl for “young Russian guys in tight shirts.” Fuck out of here with that, this is a family site.

School's Out For Summer
The last few days of school are a big joke. The kids are gone. The tests are graded. The books returned. The bulletin boards down. All the crap boxed up. There is not shit to do. We’re supposed to put in six and a half hours—8 to 2:40—but even that is a struggle.

I straggle in late, praying the payroll-witch hasn’t pulled my time-card, sucking it up and marching in to get it when she has. I’ve done my best all year to butter her up, knowing situations such as this would arise, but even I can’t flirt with a middle-aged woman obese and bald with the temperament of a DMV worker. She’s like Patty and Selma crossed with Jabba the Hut.

I once tiptoed into the Payroll office to deal with some insurance paperwork I had filled out improperly (a cardinal sin,) to find the dragon breathing even more fire than usual, because her decrepit old PC was on the fritz. Seizing the opportunity to score some brownie-points, and utilizing my considerable technical savvy I identified the problem and promptly corrected it. (The machine had been unplugged, I plugged it back in).

Since then, I’ve been in her good-graces, such as they are. I still get yelled at, but she doesn’t actively try to prevent me from getting paid or getting the proper things filed or whatever. So this past week I straggled in late those last few days, stood there and took it while she lectured that “teacher-time is eight o’clock,” and then found some way to amuse myself until I deemed it safe to break out for home.

One day I came in over an hour late, turned around and went to the diner for pancakes and bacon, came back and did a crossword puzzle, then crept out two hours early.

The last day I came in around 9:00 and went down to the library (it’s been down-sized and relocated to the basement to make room for more attractively named mini-schools) to chill in the AC and read some Newsweek back-issues or something. Some teachers from the English department were down there playing Scrabble and arguing something fierce, and one guy had the TV out and was watching the “Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 1” DVD. I joined him, and was so caught up in the Bob Odenkirk as ex-porn-star episode (“My life likes to say, ‘it’s the house that cum built’.”) that I was 20 minutes late to our 10:30 department meeting.

Not that I missed anything. We didn’t get our schedules for next year. No room assignments. We don’t even know what classes we’ll be teaching. This end-of-year meeting consisted entirely of our doddering old AP complaining about our office being moved to the basement (this does suck) and then blathering on a tangent about her phobia of mice, roaches, and, inexplicably, frogs. It’s as if she has no plan as to what she’s going to say in these meetings, but just gets up there and rambles, playing up this sweet, old abuela thing and bullshitting until she feels like she’s used up enough time for it to actually qualify as a meeting.

She actually had to be reminded to say anything about all the people that were leaving, including a couple of teachers who have taught at Shitty for over ten years, and two people that were retiring after over three decades on the job. When she did acknowledge their departures it was purely perfunctory. People were visibly hurt by the lack of recognition.

Then the meeting took a turn from the useless and disrespectful into the realm of the truly bizarre. Ms. Wayne, the uptight, overly proper disciplinarian who can’t seem to stop the kids from throwing spit-balls at her, and even had the nerve to complain about my angel-class after it was given to her, wanted to say something. She has volunteered to be excessed and will not be at Shitty again next year.

She said how much she enjoyed getting to know everyone, and how much she would miss us all. I guess sitting in the office filling out referral after referral and bitching about the children being animals (“This will not be tolerated!”) and how the school ought to be shut down was her way of cozying up and making friends. Who knew?

Her little speech was strange enough, but she then proceeded to serenade us with a goodbye song. With many flourishes of the hands, and in an operatic style and a key so high many of the notes were barely audible, she forced out a very long, very repetitive song, somewhere between an aria and a sea-shanty, about God blessing us in our futures and our roads being bright ahead.

It was perhaps the most awkward six minutes of my life. Everyone just sat there, crammed into the little student-desks in the bare-walled, stifling hot classroom, staring at the floor. Despite my embarrassment, I made the difficult decision to look up and watch Ms. Wayne, just because I thought this was not the kind of thing one experiences more than once in a lifetime.

I was wrong. As Ms. Wayne finished and nodded and grinned at our awkward applause Ms. Kuntstein stood up, motioned for silence, and clasped her hands in front of her disturbingly low-cut blouse.

“It’s been quite a while, but okay, okay, I’ll sing one too,” her nasally Bronx brogue was joyous and confident.

“This is a favorite tune of mine from the musical ‘Oliver’.”

What the fuck?

She did it up, Broadway-style, and it wasn’t half bad. Left-field as all Hell and still awkward, but decent.

These people are lunatics.

Summer vacation. So necessary.

One Day You're Here...
I had a job interview last Thursday. It’s for a teaching gig at one of these mini-schools, an international high school with less than 200 kids and maybe a dozen teachers. Every one I met seemed really cool and enthusiastic and like the kind of people I could actually get a beer with and maybe even to whom I could confess my love for Lil Weavah (shawty).

It’s all super progressive and interesting; English is taught through the different subjects, and the kids are from all over Latin America, Asia, and Africa. To qualify the kids just have to test at a beginning level of English and have been in the country less than four years, but obviously only kids with motivated, involved parents bother to try.

Discipline is not a problem. Resources, while not on a Prep school bounteous abundance level, are not scarce. They have computers, big classrooms, and tons of books. There are no overseers form the Region trying set anybody up to fall. Inter-departmental backstabbing is non-existent. Morale is high. This place is thriving, not dieing.

It’s pretty much the exact opposite of Shitty High, so why am I so conflicted about whether or not I want the job?

I promised my kids I’d be back. I couldn’t help it. It breaks my heart how every decent teacher these kids ever have breaks the fuck out as soon as the getting is good. And you’re crazy if you think the kids aren’t fully aware of that trend. I’d love to see (and help) some of these little bastards grow the fuck up and actually manage to graduate. There’s always more kids, I know, but I’d definitely miss my people.

Moreover, I’m getting more and more comfortable with Shitty. I know most of the kids, and even if I don’t exactly command their utmost respect, the vast majority like me and treat me a whole lot better than they do some other teachers. Now that I’m (sort of) done with grad.school I’ll have time in the afternoons to start that chess team, get in on some flag football action, maybe even get together a street-art club.

Plus I can get away with murder. Shitty is so big and disorganized and inefficient that as long a student doesn’t leave my room bleeding, no one’s really going to hold me accountable for anything. I may not officially be supposed to, but nobody bothers to notice if I teach lessons that have nothing to do with the curriculum. Hell, as long as I keep things relatively quiet, no one really cares if I teach anything at all.

Finally, there’s a part of me that feels like the kids at the “good school” have already made it. They’ve got parents who give a shit. If I don’t work there somebody just as (probably more) qualified and dedicated than I will. They’re going to learn no matter what. They’re fine. Not that I’m single-handedly turning things around up at Shitty, but with a lot of my kids, if I don’t teach them something, nobody else will either.

What to do?

I haven’t even been offered the job yet, and if I am there’s a strong possibility Shitty’s principal won’t release me (despite the fact that Shitty is “phasing out” and we’ll all have to go somewhere soon,) so this could all be irrelevant anyway.

Your Tax Dollars At Work
I proctored a Living Environment Regents exam today.

The students were all Special Ed.

Six of the twenty kids scheduled to take the test showed up.

Of those one girl was an hour late and then left after twenty minutes to “go to her counselor,” because she didn’t feel good. She left her test on her desk and assured me she was coming back, but did not.

It was blazing hot in our dingy little room. We had a fan but I turned it off because it was so loud I could not be heard.

Heard, you ask?

These kids, though normal in appearance and speech, couldn’t read. At all. So I was instructed, curtly I might add, to read the entire test to them, all 75 questions. I did so. It took me well over two hours.

The kids were to sign their names in at least three different places and were supposed to write the answers to questions 1-38 (Parts A and B-1) on an answer sheet, then copy them over to a Scantron. In Pencil. The rest of the questions (Parts C and D) were to be done in pen. In the test booklet. This was extremely important.

It took at least twenty minutes to get everyone situated with a pen and pencil and all the testing materials.

It was all very confusing.

“Yo, Mista, why I gotta do it twice? Which part I use the pen? I already signed. I gotta sign again?”

Of the 75 questions I’d say I knew to answers to approximately a dozen. Maybe not the MCAT, but this shit was hard. The most confusing part was how it just jumped from subject to subject with no context for anything.

It also didn’t seem to have a lot to do with knowledge of the environment, or science at all, but simply tested whether or not you understood all the big biology words it threw at you.

When all the kids were done and the missing girl didn’t show up I returned the tests and the answer sheets, snuck out a side door of the basement, and came home.

For Ever Dog
I've still got a few more weeks to grind out until Summer vacation, but yesterday was the last day of school for my students. Many still have to come in and take Regents tests (don't worry, I gave them a crash course in all things smoked brisket,) and many will have to attend summer school, but for the most part we're done.

The last few days after Finals are Hell. It's hot, and the kids pretty much refuse to work once they've handed in those last tests. I worked up some Michael Jackson-based vocabulary lessons (germphobic, pedophile, surgically-altered freak, Quincy Jones, disco-classic, crotch, etc...) but mostly was just baby-sitting and trying to keep things relaxed in order to prevent any heat-induced riots.

The last day was cool, though. Not that many kids showed up, and everyone who did was in a great mood, including me. We just sat around and shot the shit, talked about our summer plans, and said our goodbyes. Lots of kids said wonderful things to me that made me feel all warm and fuzzy, even if they were just kissing ass.

Pedro from Harlem showed up for a minute but took off early, forgetting his pencil. I kept it as a souvenir.


Halla[sic] black to my nigga Cam'ron


To my nigga Juelz and Jim Jones


Dipset "Bitch" for ever dog

Nerd Rap
Shitty HS sports squads have been ripping it up of late. I'd love to go into greater detail about this, but the details are so phenomenal that it would immediately send up red-flags all over the interinternet and set off a chain-reaction that would quickly expose my hidden secret-identity.

I went to a lot of the games, but when the girls recently had a big one down in Shaolin I couldn't go.

Mercedes, a student in my extra-class (the one where we studied the Common Sense tune, "I Used to Love H.E.R.") and a star-athlete, was giving me a hard time about not coming to her game.

"C'mon, Mista, you went to the boys' game. "

"I can't, Mercedes, I'm sorry. It's too far. Don't you have to take a boat to get there or something?"

"Damn, Mista, you grimey. They's a bunch of people goin'. We takin' a bus."

"I know, Mercedes, I know. No really, I've got something to do on Saturday. I'm busy. Believe me I'd like to go."

"You busy? Whatchu gotta do?"

It was at this point that I informed the class that wifey and I were throwing a little dinner party on Saturday night, and I'd need most of the day to prepare.

The kids had fun with this.

"A party? You throwin' a party?" They chuckled for a minute at the thought of me partying, and then a kid named Kelvin delivered this zinger, which set the whole class rolling in uncontrollable fits of gut-busting laughter...

"Yo, at Mr. Babylon's party they gonna be listening to... Common Sense!"

The thought of a bunch of twenty-something white-folks sitting around drinking and listening to Resurrection was apparently the funniest thing these kids had ever heard. I assume they imagined us all high-fiving and head-banging every time someone identified a literary element.

Poor Lonnie Rashied, if he only knew.

Love Me Tender
If I had to describe my number one strength as a teacher, I would say it’s my ability to get along with the kids. It might also be my number one weakness—I’m often way too lenient and inconsistent with discipline and the enforcement of rules—but so it goes. I like the kids, even the little bastards that piss me off everyday usually manage to crack me up too, and are often the first to give me some dap in the hallway or on the way to and from the train.

In my two years teaching at Shitty, out of at least 300 different students that I have taught, I can think of only a couple that I couldn’t find a way to get along with. I have one such student now.

Elvis Sosa is a good-looking kid, or the girls think so at least. He has a handsome chocolate face, and big almond eyes with long, feminine, eyelashes and little gangster lines shaved into the eyebrows. His braids are always tight, and he’s always immaculately pimped out in the latest color-coordinated street gear and kicks. He’s thin but lean; cut.

I think he’s kind of funny looking, though. He’s short, and his head is way too big for his body. He moves awkwardly, stiff, as if he’s always doing the robot. He’s got a silly little Prince-ified pencil moustache, and, like so many of the budding young thugs I deal with, his feet are strangely tiny.

He started off innocuously enough. After completing his first writing assignment of the year, he immediately began badgering me to read it.

“Yo, Babylon, you read my paragraph?”

“Not yet, Elvis, I’ll read it tonight. Promise.”

“Read it. You gotta read it, Babylon,” Elvis had a very strange look on his face as he told me this, a sort of bemused, evil smirk.

“It’s funny, huh, Elvis? Allright, I can’t wait.”

“Yeah, it’s funny, Babylon, you better read it.”

I took this as a good sign. The kid was excited about his writing. When I did get around to reading his paragraph I was a little confused. It was basically just a string of mean-spirited, but not particularly funny insults directed towards my favorite sports teams. Oh well, I thought, so the kid's no comedian, at least he’s writing.

It was like that for most of the year. Elvis was pretty quiet in class, but every now and then would turn in a piece of writing wherein he robbed my house or stole my wife out from under me or both. Lots of kids incorporate me into their stories, and lots of kids make fun of me, and there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy ribbing, but with Elvis there was always something a little more sinister there.

Most kids would write that they came to my house, broke in, realized it was me, and then we all laughed and ate some pizza or played basketball. With Elvis he knew it was me the whole time, and then he stabbed me in the gut.

I tried to get him to tone things down, told him I was glad he was using his imagination, but I didn’t think it was funny. I don’t think I really got through.

“Yeah, OK, Babylon, just give me my credit. Ya heard?” He’d insist as his big melon head rotated and lead his little body back to his seat in the back of the class.

Sometime maybe halfway through the year he started growing bolder with me.

“Yo, Babylon. I did my work. You better give me my credit. Don’t give me no zero.”

I’m accustomed to kids badgering me for credit and pleading not to get zeros for the day, and I dealt with Elvis the same way I dealt with everyone else.

“Sorry, Elvis. You got a zero today. It’s good that you did the work, but that’s only half of your job. You were talking the whole time, and you got up and walked around the room, and then you threatened to punch Tony and called him a pussy-ass nigga.”

Elvis’ tone was always a little different than the other kids. He never begged or pleaded. He never whined. He just demanded. Combined with the bug-eyed, unsmiling look in his eye, it was almost a threat.

His jabs at me became verbal and not just written. He cracked me up once by grabbing a finger full of my copious arm-hair and suggesting I get it braided. At least that was actually kind of funny I thought. But he wouldn’t let it go. He began to make the same crack every day, and once again, though it sounded like a friendly barb, his demeanor was much more threatening than comedic.

I chalked it up to his poor comic delivery, but I wasn’t so sure.

Then, a couple of months ago, the kid began to straight up threaten me.

“Yo, Babylon, don’t be ridin’ the train #8 home. I see you up there, it’s on.”

Once again I didn’t take the kid seriously at first, but he kept up with it.

Initially I just laughed him off.

“Yeah, okay, Elvis. I ride the train everyday. I’ll be there.”

That didn’t work. Neither did explaining the inappropriateness of his comment.

He grew even more brazen in his threats and taunts. He began to get under my skin. I began to try to be at the station at the same time as him just so he wouldn’t think I was running scared.

“Yo, Babylon, I didn’t see you on the train yesterday. You scared?”

“I told you I take the Z on Wednesdays, Elvis. I’ll be there today.”

"Yo, Mr. Babylon, you scared of Elvis, right? That why you don’t be takin’ the train when he do?” other kids began to ask me.

I was determined not to back down to this punk, which I was sure was all he wanted, but as he kept it up day after day I began to wonder. This kid is weird. What if he does try something?

I was pretty sure he was just bluffing. The couple of times I did run into him at he train station I said hello and gave him a pound then walked to the quiet end of the platform just like I would with anyone else. He reciprocated, and didn't say or do anything, but wouldn’t stop with those threatening bugged-eyes and raised, sculpted, eyebrows.

The next day would be more of the same. “Yo Babylon, why you went to the end of the train yesterday? You scared right?”

The kid was really starting to piss me off, but the last thing I wanted was an actual confrontation with this little shit-talking ghetto-Napoleon. The little punk might just be crazy enough to stab me or something.

Finally last week I ran into Elvis on the stairs on the way up to the station.

“Babylon. What’s good?”

“Just going home Elvis.”

“Yo, Babylon. You gonna pass me this marking period?”

“I don’t know Elvis. It depends on how you do on the Final.”

“But I do all your work...”

It’s true. The crazy punk doesn’t read or write very well, but has a pretty good record as far as completing his assignments.

“You have been working hard. I know that. But you have a lot of zeros. You can’t keep talking smack to me in class. And you still probably have to pass the Final.”

“Yeah, okay, Babylon. I’m gonna pass that Final. Ya heard?”

“I hope so, Elvis, I hope so.”

After that, the threats stopped. I have no idea what happened. The next day someone made a crack about me being scared, and Elvis corrected them.

“Nah, we cool, me and Babylon ain’t got beef no more.”

I wasn’t really aware of any beef in the first place, other than the fact that Elvis wouldn’t stop poppin’ off at the mouth to me, but I was glad to hear that it was squashed. What the Hell happened? Did I handle the situation properly? I have no idea. As Frizzle would say, there’s no manual for situations like these. But I didn’t back down and I didn’t get stabbed, so I guess we’ll call this one a success.

The Double Truth
Hot. Shitty High School is hot. Sweltering hot. Hot when you wake up hot. Three showers a day hot. Stick to your desk hot. Mr. Babylon teaching with the lights off hot. Hot. Kids falling asleep during their final exams hot. Mr. Babylon skipping the coffee and deigning to bend over and slurp out of that spit-encrusted water-fountain hot. Hot. Every kid in class waving a folder or half a Styrofoam lunch tray in their face to cool down hot. Mr. Babylon waving a folder too hot. Step on gum and scrape it off with a paperclip hot. Hot. Latin Kings stripping down to their wife-beaters hot. Domincanas with their shoes off hot. Mr. Babylon teaching with the doors open so a steady stream of nameless hall-roaming punks strolls through disrupting class and talking smack hot. Throw a trashcan through the window of Sal’s Famous hot. Hot.

The Injustice of It All
I'd just like to take this opportunity to extend a big, fat, middle-finger to whomever made "Brooklyn/Queens Day" a holiday. Where is the love for the Boogie Down?

Return of the Pistol
Faithful readers may remember the time last year when I journeyed out to the OP to cheer on my friend the Pistol in his school’s student-teacher basketball game. Good times. This Friday, it was time for the sequel.

The Pistol kind of caught everybody by surprise last year, though, so this year’s game was going to be a little tougher.

For the past couple of months the Pistol insisted that he’d been training for the game. He was worried, he told me, that all the student players were just coming off of track season, and were going to run his ass out the gym. The Pistol talked a lot about getting in shape, but when pressed for details could only offer that he was “up to 3 pull-ups, now” and had really torn up the court against some co-eds and Asian dudes one afternoon at the LIU gym. Whenever I saw the guy he was smoking cigarettes, drinking Presidente, and eating Pringles.

From the start, the game was frustrating. The Students did a decent-enough job locking up the Pistol, the few 3s he got off didn’t drop, and every time he took it to the hole they shoved him out of bounds before he could get a shot off.

The Pistol hit the boards pretty hard and got off a couple of spectacular passes (promptly fumbled by his team-mates,) but for the most part couldn’t make a whole lot happen.

It wasn’t entirely his fault. Once again, the Teachers implemented the Mighty-Mites Rule when it came to playing time, and thus were often effectively playing with three or four on five. Yeah, sure, it’s funny when the five-foot tall Dean of Security runs around in circles and dribbles off his leg or chucks a shot over the backboard, but the dude doesn’t need to play half the game.

Worse than the Security dwarf and the other Teachers who knew they sucked and didn’t care, were the jack-asses from the PE department who didn’t know they sucked and ended up playing pivotal roles in the offense.

This short, blond-pompadour-ed Vinnie Barbarino guy from the PE department insisted on running the point despite the fact that he couldn’t dribble or shoot, and the Students were running a full-court press. This Vinnie Barbarino clown would just put his head down and bull his way forward, muttering Hail Mary’s to himself in desperate prayer that he could just make it over half-court. If he did actually get the ball across the time-line he’d either launch a long-range two-handed push-shot off the back iron or pass to his similarly coiffed friend, completely icing out the Pistol for the entire first half.

It wasn’t all frustration though. The Pistol got it going a little bit in the second half, hitting a couple of threes, knocking down a sweet turn-around jumper off the backboard, and finishing a couple of nice moves to the hole. Trained observers might also have noticed a friendly little trash-talking tete-a-tete between The Pistol and the Students’ best player, a solid, speedy point guard who lit up Vinnie Barbarino all night long. The Pistol had a great behind-the-back move on the end of a coast-to-coast play where he seemed to go simultaneously over, around, and through his rival, get fouled, then somehow hang in the air until he reached the other side of the basket where he flipped the reverse over his head off the backboard.

It was a beautiful move, but it didn’t drop. The and-one wasn’t meant to be. The crowd gasped then groaned, and the Pistol nailed his free throws. It was just that kind of night.

Finally as the clock wound down under two minutes, the Pistol curled around the top of the key on an inbounds play and cut straight to the basket. Barbarino tossed a less-than-perfect but adequate lob and the Pistol rose up for the alley-oop. He cocked back for the tomahawk, but the ball slipped through his fingers and he came down hard on the rim with both hands but no rock and landed. Once again the crowd let out a collective groan of anticipation turned to disappointment. The Pistol came up limping. His calf had cramped up just as he went to jump for the ‘oop.

Next year I’m in charge of his training. I’ll have the Pistol chopping down trees, painting fences and waxing floors, and chasing chickens down the beach at Coney Island. He’ll be ready.

The Glamorous Life
I was wandering around downtown today, picking up some hot-sauce and hot kicks that can’t be had in my neighborhood, and everywhere I went I kept seeing these dumpy, frazzled-looking folks huffing and hustling their weary ways through the streets and subways and all wearing these silly paper painter’s hats emblazoned with a big blue “Contract Now!” logo.

“Who are these poor working stiffs?” I wondered. “Custodians? Sanitation Workers? Hospital Cafeteria Staff?”

Finally, crowded onto the train on the way home, I got a good look at one of the flimsy little hats as it sat perched oh-so-rakishly atop the liver-spotted wispily-fringed chrome-dome of one very tired looking man.

Madison Square Garden. June 2nd. UFT. Rally.

Of course. How could I forget? (Perhaps taking the day off to nurse a post-Devin hangover had something to do with it?) There was a great big teacher rally today at the World’s Most Famous Arena.

Woo hoo. Fuck the man. Resist. Fight the Power. Shuffle home to your cramped apartment and your miserable children, get up again the next day and every day for the rest of your sorry career until the disrespect, the constant yelling, the bureaucratic morass, the dirty halls and the crappy food, finally get to be too much and you cash in your meager pension only to return the next year as a substitute, because you need the bread and besides you’ve figured out how to fire out these days and weeks and months and years without even thinking about anything but your weekend trip to Jersey to see the in-laws.

I have seen my sad-sack future, and it ain't pretty.

Pastrami-gate Part 2: The Proof

People's Exhibit A; kickin' the truth to the young blog youth.

Quoth my new favorite person (hereafter known as "Deep Brisket"):

...the hell thinks someone's going to fake it?

i got proof yo

First these people making fun weren't there to hear the kids asking me "what's pastrami" and "is that cheese" Kids who put it's cheese do 3 times 3 times 3 and get 27 for the total combinations instead of 24.

I saw it's out of 4, not 12. 12 on the question sheet was for all 3 part II questions. The lady who graded it stuck her neck out and gave them 2 out of 4.

Also this is Component Retesting not the real Regents. They gave these last week to Juniors and Seniors who got between 48 and 64 on the Math A Regents and took it at least twice. If they do well enough on the components they pass them for their Regents requirement with either 55 (for graduation) or 65 (for real)

Deep Brisket also sends along a link to a pdf of the scoring rubric on the state website.

I don't understand any of this gibberish--this stuff might as well be the Omega Code to me--but I trust those with more sense than I will be able to decipher something, and even us dummies have to admit it's real.

Resurrection
For the past three weeks I’ve been teaching an extra class. After my last experience with an extended coverage, a nightmarish descent into the heart of evil, I vowed never to subject myself to such torture again, but for numerous reasons I just couldn’t say no.

It’s a second period class, so I have to come in about an hour earlier than usual, but I don’t lose a free period, which is a major part of what almost killed me last time around. Plus, a closely guarded secret of bitter, old, veteran teachers is that, compared to their later counterparts, early morning classes are relative havens of peace and tranquility. The trouble-making kids are either home sleeping or too sleepy to cause any kind of ruckus.

More importantly this class is an upper-level ESL class, all juniors and seniors, which means they’ve passed a number of classes to get there, and are for the most part a hard-working, mature, and respectful bunch. (We’re speaking relatively, of course; recent Saturday Night Live is funny as hell, when compared to McNeil Lehrer). Finally, there’s the money. This is New York. I’m on a grind.

I’ve had these kids for three weeks now, but hadn’t actually taught a damn thing until this Monday, because I’ve been administering battery after battery of standardized tests. There’s only two-and-a-half weeks left until Finals now, so I didn’t see any point in going back to their books. Instead I figured the time was ripe to resurrect a Mr. Babylon golden-oldie, the kind of lesson I naively assumed I would spend all of my time on back when I first got into the gig. We’re writing record-reviews.

I’ve tried this a number of times before and it’s always been an absolute abortion, but not only am I a bit older and wiser now, so are the kids in this class. I figured it was worth a shot.

I burned a CD, busted out the boom-box, and made the poor kids listen to “I Used to Love H.E.R.” (an organic metaphor set to beats and rhyme by the artist formerly known as Common Sense--this song came out well before the LSD in Erykah Badu’s vagina caused him to lose his Sense) about twenty times in a row, until we had transcribed all the words. I still don’t know what “sittin’ on bone” means. We guessed it meant his ass was skinny and poor.

We learned all sorts of great vocabulary --periodically, afrocentric, preaching, leisurely, gimmick, Glock (couldn’t believe they didn’t know that last one; we’ll have to listen to some Cypress Hill remixes next)—but this was all build-up for when I popped the big question, the stumper, “Who or what is Common Sense talking about here?” I’ve tried this before, and the kids were always completely flummoxed, even after having the none-too-subtle last line, “who I’m talkin’ about y’all is Hip Hop,” pointed out to them.

These kids were sharper than that.

“Aww, pshhh,” they groaned. “It not his girl. He talkin’ about Hip Hop. This mad corny, Mista.”

“Yes! Yes!” I was impressed. “And what do we call that? What is he doing? What literary technique is he using.”

“Symbolism?”

“Yes, what else?”

“Metaphor?”

“Exactly. What kind of metaphor?”

“He sayin’ Hip Hop a girl, Mista. He Personificatin’.”

Feliz Cumpleaños Morado
Pedro aka P-Yayo from Harlem had a birthday today. He's dip-teen years old.

Pastrami?
Here is a blatant example of cultural bias on a New York State math Regents exam.

Click for full size.

Understandably, the kids from the 'Hood who took this test had no idea what pastrami was, and the problem depends on you calculating it as a "meat." The kids either left it blank or guessed that it was "cheese," and all got zero out of 12 points for the section.

Pastrami? Are you kidding me? On a math exam? I can see if it was a Social Studies class and you had been studying the history of smoked meat ("Coopers to the Carnegie: From the Hill Country Pit to the Manhattan Deli, the Succulent Journey of the Brisket in 20th Century American Life,") but come on, really.

To even things up the next test ought to require the Suburban kids to draw on their familiarity with 25-cent "juices," tiny motorcycles, the menu at Kennedy Fried Chicken, and the Chinese lady on the train selling bootleg DVDs and "Baaaaaa-taaa-rieeees!"

Key Indicators* That You May Not Be Cut Out to Be a Gangster

1. You enjoy playing with Yu-gi-oh cards, yet find their many rules confusing.
2. When asked to work in a group with a couple of pretty girls who (understandably) find you annoying, you throw a tantrum, refuse to join them, and pout in the corner.
3. You have a voice comparable to, but (if possible) even more annoying than, that “So Lonely” song.
4. It is debatable whether or not you are over five feet tall.
5. Your lip quivers and you tear up when your teacher (in a moment, soon deeply regretted, of misguided and less than professional playfulness meant to be taken in the friendly spirit of good-natured ribbing) calls you “El Camarone Diablo.”

*None of these Indicators, apparently, as evidenced by the case of 15-year-old "Roberto Delgado," are actually significant enough to exclude one from full-fledged, official banana, yellow bandana, contractually-bound membership in the Latin Kings.

Pull Your Chain 'till it Pop
Pedro from Harlem got his chain pulled the other day at the train station. I was right there, but didn’t see a thing.

I had just bumped into Pedro by the turnstile where we exchanged friendly words.

“Yo Mista, what’s good?”

“Hey Pedro, how ya doin’? You taking my Underground Escalade home?”

I don’t remember exactly how it started, but somewhere along the way the kids and I have developed a running joke that the subway is my “Escalade.” I think a few months back some punks were giving me a hard time about not having a car, and instead of explaining my belief in the economic and environmental benefits of public transportation, I lied.

“I do have a car. I just got some new rims on it.”

“Yo, f’real, Mista? What kinda car you got?” These kids’ll believe anything.

“I’m tippin’ down the Cross-Bronx in my Escalade,” I told them. “All day, e’ry day.”

They exchanged quizzical looks.

“A '#8' Escalade,” I clarified, referring to the particular train I usually take to school. “You should know. I saw you riding in my Escalade this morning.”

This is the kind of thing my kids don’t forget. We could go over nouns and verbs and past participles every day for a year, and they’d still get confused, but they’ll go to their graves crackin’ wise at me, “Yo Mista, I saw you sleepin’ in your Escalade this morning!”

Pedro wasn’t up on the "#8" Escalade station platform, but underground, a few blocks away at the "Letter Z" Escalade station. I take the Z home a couple of days a week when I have to go to graduate school.

Pedro and I exchanged a few good-natured barbs and I wandered off, down to the other end of the platform where I could read my book in peace. A minute or so later I heard a commotion a split second before a five-foot tall streak of black lightning in a red du-rag went sprinting past me down the platform, cackling all the way and almost knocking me onto the filthy tracks (there are rats on my Escalade).

I looked up and saw big-ass, pear-shaped Pedro down at the other end of the platform, biting his lip, stalking back and forth, stomping his boots, one fist swinging low, gorilla style, and the other hand holding the back of his bloody neck. He looked scary, but there were tears in his eyes.

He got yoked by a kid half his size. The little bastard came up from behind and actually sat there playing with the chain for a minute before he grabbed it. Pedro says he thought it was one of his friends, but I think he was just scared.

How scared? That scared.

Pedro from Harlem isn’t actually from Harlem. He lives in the Bronx like everyone else. He just says that shit to sound cool or hard or as an excuse (not like he needs one) to holler, “Dipset!” in the middle of class. He’s not really hard either, although he is big.

Case in point: I’ve started making the guys in my 9th and 10th period class do push-ups when they piss me off. It started when one kid who usually behaves himself and pays attention was bouncing off the walls. He’s a nice kid, and we joke with each other a lot, so it seemed pretty natural for me to make him drop and push a few out. He clearly had energy to burn, and it seemed to work. Everyone else was so amused, though, that ever since then whenever somebody acts up, somebody else is right there to remind us, “Yo mista, that’s ten push-ups! You got push-ups, nigga!” I even banged out a set myself the other day after I accidentally knocked all my papers to the floor and let slip a four-letter word.

When one day, as was inevitable, Pedro wouldn’t shut up, I told him to drop and give me ten. He hemmed and hawed for a while before finally acquiescing in his best Tony Montana, “Thass okay main, thass okay, I’m P-Yayo, I got dat.”

He then proceeded to drop to his knees and dip (heh.) his chest and shoulders towards the floor ten times, looking back and forth with a big, brace-faced, sheepish grin while the rest of the class and I looked on in puzzlement.

Pedro stood up, brushed off his giant clown-jeans, adjusted his big, gaudy, silvery NY chain for what must have been one of the last times, and went back to his seat. I sidled over a minute later and discreetly inquired, “Hey Pedro, how come you were doing girl push-ups? You’re a strong guy, (Pedro often flexes in class, and the kid’s got some guns,) you can’t do a real push-up?”

“I’m two-fitty, Mista, it’s hard.”

“I know Pedro, I know,” I replied, wishing Christopher Wallace could have been there to commiserate, “It’s hard for a big person. You be sweatin’ and breathin’ hard. Shit’s real.”

Pedro is doing okay after getting his chain pulled the other day. His neck’s cut up pretty good, and his pride is probably bruised something fierce, but he was back in school two days later with the creative energy to pen the beginnings of another inspired piece of literature.

I had to give the kids a practice test for some upcoming state-required standardized testing, and the last part of it was the writing section. The kids were to look at a cartoon picture of a cracka-ass white boy chasing a dog down a sidewalk on an idyllic suburban street. The kids were supposed to tell a story about the picture.

Pedro’s tale was much like many of the other kids’ writing samples, except for the names and a little dialogue. His semi-autobiographical tome had the boy, “P-yayo,” chasing the dog, also named “P-yayo,” down the street to the park where they both “got they hustle on.”

“Pedro, this is fine,” I told him. “But what are you doing man? I’m confused. Why is the dog named ‘P-yayo’ too?”

“Naw Mista, you not readin’ my writin.’” Pedro’s writing is rather sloppy. “That say ‘P-Yoyo.’”

The dog was named P-Yoyo. Of course. I should have known. He’s the Purple City Dip-dog.

Peace in the Hood
We recently read Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in a few of my classes. It was in their book. Next to the poem was a poorly done watercolor of a dirt road forking in a meadow, one path significantly bigger than the other and both leading to a “yellow wood.” Why the road wasn’t in the woods or covered with leaves untrodden like in the poem I don’t know, but it was close enough.

Before we read the poem I asked the kids to look at the picture, describe what they saw, and tell me which path they would rather take and why. Most kids described the meadow fairly accurately, but Pedro from Harlem had a different take.

“What do you see Pedro?”

“Thas the Hood.”

“The Hood, Pedro? Are you sure? That doesn’t look like the Hood to me.”

“Thas the Hood before. Back in the day. It was peace in the Hood back then."

Black Like Last Time
The same crappy book that had the “Waves” chapter also has a chapter called “Making Decisions” which contains a short, crappy, historically ridiculous play about the Underground Railroad. This play stars Harriett Tubman, Frederick and Anna Douglass and their two sons, and eight unnamed “fugitive slaves.” The play is but a brief scene in which Harriett, fugitives in tow, arrives at the Douglass home, eats some soup, gets a hunch, and decides they ought to immediately head to Canada by boat instead of waiting for the afternoon train on which they had planned to stowaway in the baggage car. The play ends with Harriett and the eight slaves boarding a small boat and heading out onto the lake.

Despite the play’s lameness the kids seemed to enjoy reading it aloud in class, so I decided they should all write their own endings to the drama, crossing my fingers that despite the dullness of the original their versions might actually be somewhat, you know, dramatic.

The results were neither as prolific nor as entertaining as the horror stories I recently solicited, but the kids seemed to have a pretty good time performing them. I had a few artistic kids draw “sets” on the board - a boat, waves, mountains, trees, etc. – cut the lights, and off they went; giggling, goofing, screaming, and heckling, but performing and paying attention just the same.

Then my afternoon class rolled around and things didn’t go quite as well. I’ve had these kids all year long, and except for the brief tease of the few weeks when my schedule ruled, I’ve had them for two periods, the last two periods, a day. This means I’ve been the only English teacher these kids have had all year. That sucks… for them and me.

They’re a real tough group. I recently found out that they’re all Special Ed students, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense due to the fact that I’m not a Special Ed teacher, Special Ed. classes are supposed to contain no more than a dozen or so students (I’ve got thirty on my roster,) and no-one has ever mentioned anything about how or why I’m supposed to deal with the situation.

Out of the thirty kids in the class, one girl (an adorable little sweetheart with a degenerative, disfiguring, craniofacial disorder and the melodious name of a tragic Shakespearian heroine) actually managed to get the grades to pass.

I gave a few others the nod based on effort or latent ability, but I still ended up failing a vast majority of the class. I didn’t have much choice. About a quarter of the class never shows up. Ever. There are a number of kids in the class that I’ve never laid eyes on. Some are straight up truants, others come to school in the mornings but - due to work, family, or crack-smoking obligations - can’t stay until the tenth period. Another quarter of the kids show up when they feel like it, which isn’t exactly on the regular. I’ve written referrals, I’ve called parents, I’ve had heart-to-hearts; nothing works, and at this point I’m honestly relieved. I have my hands full already with kids that are there.

The other fifteen or so kids that do show up are some of the most distracted, lazy, obstinate, obnoxious bastards I’ve ever come across. Still, I can’t help but feeling that the fact that they’re all going to fail is somehow my fault.

Anyway, only four or five of them actually wrote their Harriet Tubamn/Frederick Douglass/Underground Railroad play, and of those only two managed to follow directions and turn in something resembling a script. One of those two students was Pedro from Harlem, creator of the Dipschool, who now insists on being called “P-Yayo” (I struggle to refrain,) and delivered a rather amusing product. He was a little confused by the concept of a narrator, but I think it works. Here it is, transcribed in its original form (my scanner’s broken), warts and all. It is untitled.

Harriet = I see the C-Squad
P-Yayo = don’t warrie I will take care of them
Narrator = I got an idea, lets run
Frederick Douglass = lets fight back
Anna Douglass = I said whatever second narrator said
C–Squad = put your arm’s up
Harriet = will be black.
Harriet = now that 4 year passes were back on the game.
P-Yayo = Yeah were black like last time, but better
Frederick Douglass = If C–Squad comes there going down
Narrator = I’m hungry
Harriet = shutup Narrator
Narrator = you shutup you old human
P-Yayo = don’t you talk to my mom that way
Narrator = if you said something ells I will slice you
Harriet = iOkay, This is enough!
P-Yayo = lets just be peace
Harriet = Were almost there
P-Yayo = Mom were save
Frederick = Yeah
Narrator = yes were finally free.

Pedro, by the way, is one of the lucky few who will pass my class.

Peace
The last of the scaffolding, the long black veil that has draped the Shitty High School façade since I have been there, came down over Spring Break. There is still an excess of cyclone fencing, random piles of dirt and rubble, and big swaths of muddy ground, but the building now breathes free. Faded tags spray-painted on the paint peeling walls squint and blink under the first sunlight they’ve seen in years. The ginkgos flower and stink. The dogwoods (There are dogwoods! Who knew?) are exquisite. We are done with mourning though death is yet two years away. Now that the death sentence is official, things have calmed down. The alarms no longer bleat incessantly. The police are fewer and spend much more time outside smoking cigarettes, munching on Subway, and flirting with the female security guards than they do harassing hat-wearing hooligans or rattling and stomping after pink-clad gangsters through the labyrinthine basement corridors. Fights flared up the week after the machete murder, but no-one else got stabbed, no-one got arrested. We’ve left the ICU. This is hospice care.

All I Ever Wanted
Mr. Babylon is on vacation. Look for him soon in a Chingo Bling/Paul Wall "Kingz of Spring Break" video. He'll be the guy with the cup of lean in his left hand, chalk in his right, telling everybody to sit down and be quiet.

The Horror
It's been a month or so since I got my two new classes, and they're going fine so far.

One of the classes was previously taught by an over-achieving super-teacher, the type of woman who says things like, "I just wish the periods were longer, we were getting so much done!" and who finds "classroom management issues" to be simply incomprehensible. Her class is like Switzerland. She has molded them into a rigid, well-oiled machine, making my life that much easier for the forty-five minutes a day that is 5th period. Still, I secretly despise her.

The other class was taught by the infamous Ms. Wayne, and although she's just as anal as Ms. Perfect, she's not nearly as effective, and these kids hadn't done jack-shit all semester beyond advancing to the latter stages of a high-stakes, emotionally charged, in-class dominoes tournament. Both groups seem to appreciate my own comparatively laid back, "Yo, Mista Babylon been smokin'?" style.

I started off both classes reading an abridged version of "The Cask of Amontillado," the only halfway interesting story in their book. Somehow, in the midst of in-class readings and comprehension questions, in a fit of improvisation necessitated by failed lesson-planning, I decided to begin what will undoubtedly be an egregiously incomplete study of genre, beginning, obviously, with Horror. I laid out five, wholly self-proclaimed, "Qualities of Horror" - Suspense, Surprise, Violence, Death, and Scary Imagery (which started out as "Gore." "Villains/Bad Guys" also made an appearance on the list in the early stages of theory development.) I had the kids discuss how Poe utilized these qualities, and then, brilliantly, decided the students should write their own Horror stories.

For a week I had the students write a paragraph a day as homework, I instructed them to try to incorporate my "Qualities of Horror", but wasn't much of a stickler about it, and I told them again and again, "make it scary." They did not disappoint.

Many of the stories, in a sort of urbane, post-modern take on the "Alien vs. Predator" concept, blended icons of cinematic scream and splatter with fictionalized versions of characters from the kids' daily lives. "Chucky vs. Freddy." "Mr. Babylon vs. Jason." "Mr. Babylon vs. Chucky." I am happy to report that despite numerous gunshot wounds, stabbings, eviscerations and even one decapitation, I (or my fictional counterpart) emerged victorious in almost every one of these bloody sagas.

The exception to this string of triumphs came from the pen of Juan, a budding erotica scribe, who delivered another classic in "Sex on the Bathroom," a somewhat misleadingly titled epic (seven pages!) in which he got me drunk on "Blue Label" and buried me alive because I had stolen his girlfriend, Jenna Jameson.

A number of girls wrote startlingly realistic tales of domestic abuse, infidelity, and jilted lovers' revenge, displaying a familiarity with and firm grasp of both the "psychological thriller" drama and the ins and outs of unhealthy sexual relationships.

One girl either wrote a brilliant character description and deep psychological probe of a mother murdering sociopath, or she’s about to actually commit matricide. This story was so vivid and frightening, ("I look down at the blood in the nife and laugh, ja ja, ja, she can't never tell me to clean my room again...") that i would have reported her to social services, if she hadn't followed my assignment so perfectly. I gave her an A+ and commented, "Good job, this is really, really scary!"

***

On Tuesday, the day after I gave the first drafts back, a fifteen year old student from a nearby high-school was murdered at the train station on his way to school. In an apparent dispute between two Dominican gangs, Trinitarios and DDP, he and two friends were jumped and attacked with machetes. His friends escaped, wounded but alive. He died of stab wounds to the head and back. The suspects are rumored to be Shitty students.

Pipedream
I could spend all day enumerating the myriad indignities I suffer every day due to lack of space, lack of funds, administrative buffoonery, and kids… Who. Just. Won’t. Shut. Up. I could tell you how I spent an hour today - when I should have been correcting and responding to the truly frightening Horror stories I solicited from my kids - running off and collating copies of a short story because we don’t have enough books. I could describe in lurid detail the sounds of toilets flushing and pipes gushing that permeate one of my basement rooms, located, presumably, beneath a sewage treatment plant. I could try to convey the absolute insanity that jumped off today when some assholes bullied a nerd into trying to urinate in my classroom. But that would depress us all, and I try my best to spread sunshine around here (can’t you tell?) so today we will focus on one specific beef, one small wish that if fulfilled would my make my job infinitely more effective.

I want my own classroom.

I’m sick of running form one far-off corner of the basement, through the filthy, crowded, insanely loud students’ cafeteria, up three flights of crowded stairs, and through another crowded hallway (often while trying not to spill my coffee) to get from one class to the next between the bells, and with enough time to spare to scribble the “Aim” and “Do Now” on the board whilst somehow ushering the less-than-eager students into the room.

I’m sick of being harassed over the state of my non-existent, out of date, or not appropriately perky, bulletin-boards in rooms I share with five or six other teachers. Rooms that are never empty (or clean) during the day, leaving no time during the day to perform this perfunctory decoration without disturbing someone’s class.

I’m sick of walking into classrooms to discover the desks in complete disarray, to step into the stench of garbage and the sticky mess of a giant Kool Aid spill, to find obscenities scrawled on the board and the various surfaces covered in chalk-dust, or worse, ink.

I want my own classroom.

I want somewhere halfway convenient to keep my coat, somewhere quiet to get some work done during my free periods. I want a bookshelf, equal parts great literature, comic books, glossy magazines, and trashy “Urban Fiction.” I want to be able to use my CD player without carrying it around with me everywhere I go all day long. I want to hang up posters; Woody Guthrie, the Clash, Goodie Mob, Tego, Futura, Banksy. I want a whole wall devoted to student art/graffiti (keep that shit off the desks, yo.) I want some fucking houseplants. Hell, I might even hook up some mood lighting.

El Jefe
The ESL/Foreign Language department at Shitty High School is stumbling towards death like a blind old drunk who‘s managed to wander out into oncoming traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway. We started off the year down six teachers from last year, and since then one more has quit out of disgust, one is out indefinitely with Crazy-ass Bitch Syndrome, and now another has gone missing, and rumors say he’s been suspended for the unsolicited rubbing of a rash on a female student’s lower belly.

We had a couple of vacancies already, and now with these added holes in the schedule to fill, the office is abuzz with a steady stream of bored, confused substitutes wandering in to pick up “lesson plans,” which are nothing more than manila folders filled with Xeroxed worksheets, worksheets poor Mrs. Robbins has to scramble around all morning to run off.

If all that weren’t bad enough, the AP is a doddering old fool.

She’s absurdly short - under five feet - with a short, curly perm of unnaturally red hair, and big, ‘70s, Grandma Magoo glasses. She spends her days puttering around the office, muttering to herself, napping, and misplacing things. She’s a sweet old bird, mostly, but she’s pretty useless, and actually manages to do more harm than good.

She speaks to the kids exclusively en Espanol which wouldn’t be a problem if the kids actually heard English anywhere other than in their ESL classes, but they don’t. She also never fails to take the students’ side in any dispute with a teacher, so, for instance in my first weeks at Shitty, when I wrote a referral for some aspiring young fast-baller who had beaned me in the back of the head with a spitball, and that young man’s mother came in to insist that her little angel would never do any such thing, I got sold down the river.

She’s almost zen-like in her adherence to the path of least resistance. When she does flex her puny administrative muscle to forbid teachers from using her mini-fridge or keeping their coats or papers in the office, she makes the lovely Mrs. Robinns be the bearer of the bad tidings. Her conflict avoidance is what leads to situations like Kuntstein’s attempted usurping of my class, but it also means as long as I fly under the radar, I can do whatever the hell I want. I think she’d grade me “Satisfactory” on an observation if I was doing a crossword puzzle while the kids ran a train on each other to the tune of 2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog’s “Doo Doo Brown,” (a song that turned one raunchy 2 Live Crew lyrical couplet - “lick my asshole up and down/lick it ‘til your tongue turns doo doo brown” - into a Miami bass, dance-floor anthem.

These “satisfactory” observations are sporadic and spontaneous, when she does bother to warn me that she’s going to observe she doesn’t show up, (I learned not to do any extra planning after the first couple of times this happened) and are then followed by long months of silence. When she finally does get around to going over the observation with me, it’s been long enough that she has clearly forgotten everything that she saw. She’ll ask a few leading questions, which I’ll answer politely, and then she’ll have me sign the necessary paper-work, back-dating of course, in order to comply with the myriad rules and regulations she is no doubt in violation of.

Her aversion to food or clothing or any other sign of actual human presence in the department office has but one notable exception, her rambunctious little three and half year old grand-daughter spends every afternoon in the office, clambering atop the copier, banging away on the file cabinets, pasting sticky notes all over the walls, and generally bugging the fuck out of me.

The little girl is actually quite a little cutie, and makes for a great procrastination device. I go into the office after lunch to make some copies, sit down for a second to rest my weary bones, and all of a sudden there’s an adorable little toddler in pigtails leaning on my knee and badgering me to draw pictures of her pets.

I oblige of course. What am I an asshole? How could I not? Besides, can you imagine a better way to score Brownie points with la hefa? Whatever it takes to keep those “satisfactories” coming.

RIP Hector
If Francisco Garcia isn't the toast of New York, he should be. That's the American Dream right there, y'all. Go Cards. Go Francisco. Do it for NYC. Do it for the Boogie Down Bronx. Do it for your Dominicanos. Do it for Boquita.

Tardy
One of the toughest parts of the daily grind of being a teacher is that you can never take it easy, never half-ass it. If you’re tired, upset, hung-over, or even just afflicted with spring fever, there’s nowhere to hide out, no way to make it look like you’re working when you’re not. You can’t sit at your desk on the internet surfing gossip blogs all day. You can’t make frequent and unnecessary trips to the break-room (in my under-funded and over-crowded school, I have no access to a computer, and there is no break-room). If you come in and just go through the motions, if you’re unprepared, you still have to be in that room with all those kids for the same amount of time, and if you’re not on top of them they’re going to eat you alive (even more-so than usual).

There’s also no cutting out early, or sneaking in late. Bell to bell, you’ve got to be there, and day in and day out I am.

Yesterday was a first for me, though. I was late for school. I’ve managed to make it on time to Shitty High School, an hour from my apartment, every day for the entire year and half I’ve been teaching. Although it is an accomplishment, it’s not quite as amazing as it sounds. I’m on the late-shift so don’t start until 9:25, and I’ve been known to take a sick day in order to nurse a particularly nasty hangover. Still though, I go to work most every day, and I not only get there on time, I’m usually early.

I hop off the train and stop at the snack truck where Fabricio, the truck's mustachioed proprietor, without fail greets me with uncommon friendliness.

“What’s happening, how ya doin’?” I’ll grumble, fumbling for my banana-nut muffin and huddled against the cold.

“Like a young man!” He’ll reply, bursting with energy and grabbing my hand in a strong embrace. “But not as good as you! Ha!”

It’s hard not to like the man. He even insists on giving me extra muffins on Fridays when they won’t last over the weekend.

Muffin secured, I head inside where I have enough time to shoot a couple cups of coffee, make any copies I need and finish up (okay, start) my lesson plans for the day.

Not today though. In an act of pure malevolence the City required us teachers to arrive at 7:45 this Monday after Easter. Over the weekend I had rented a car and driven to visit the in-laws. We got a late start back on Sunday, and traffic on the Turnpike was at a crawl, so I figured I’d just return the car in Manhattan in the morning. The rental place was, after all, on the way.

Big mistake.

I left the house a little after 6:30, figuring a conservative 30-40 minutes to get the three miles into Manhattan was plenty, and from there I’d hop on the train and be on my merry way. Nope.

Everything was gravy for a little while. In my shiny new Malibu, I cruised the rain-soaked streets of Brooklyn bumping some Chingo Bling and thinking I could get used to having my own ride. Then I got on the bridge and everything stopped. And stayed stopped. I did get to pull over a couple of inches in a vain attempt to let a screaming ambulance by, but there was nowhere for the bumper to bumper traffic to go, so it just sat there, siren blaring and lights flashing as the rain came down.

That lasted over an hour, but I did eventually make it off the bridge, to the car return spot and onto the train, resigned now to my tardy fate. The ride up was uneventful - save for a crazy woman, dressed in grimy sweats and a Captain D’s hat and clutching tight to an ancient cassette-deck walkman - who got on the train singing in a painfully tuneless, and embarrassingly uninhibited, warble and was still belting them out when I got off.

No one stared or said a thing, but a couple of other passengers and I did giggle a little when we finally recognized this classic:

“Only when I'm dancin' can I feel this free.
At night I lock the doors when no one else can see.
I'm tired of dancin' here all by myself

Tonight I wanna dance with someone else…”

It was odd though, those banal words, coming from a woman who had probably never danced with anyone else besides herself, rendered themselves transformative, and through that poor, crazy woman’s bleating (and without benefit of that irresistible, '80s disco beat) I suddenly remembered what it was like as a child to hear sexy, catchy, pop music. I remembered that spell that songs could cast, when a lyric about dancing with someone else or seeing a fire in someone else’s eyes seemed to offer a glimpse into a magical fantasy world of adults, a world some of us apparently never learned isn’t real.

Anyway, I finally made it up to school a few minutes before 9:00, got yelled at by the payroll dragon (I’d like to think the stress I caused her helped further along her female pattern baldness, if only by a couple of wispy strands,) and dashed upstairs about twenty minutes late for my first class. I found my kids there, unattended and sitting quietly, looking bored but quite peaceful. Two girls were playing a game of hangman and the hidden answer had almost been revealed…

“D_nd_ _sta t_ lat_ pass?”

From the Mouths of Babes
My students have been abuzz all week about the end of the world. It’s coming sooner than you might think, tomorrow in fact, Good Friday.

These are the facts as I know them:

• Sometime last week a baby was born somewhere in the Dominican Republic.
• This baby was not like other babies. He was big - thirty pounds by some reports - and bearded, with a full set of snaggly teeth.
• Upon sight of him the nurse who had assisted in his (no doubt extremely painful) delivery dropped dead, as did all the other patients in the hospital.
• The doctor lived long enough to report that the unusually large, hairy, and toothsome baby possessed the power of speech, and that he had prophesized doom on the 25th.
• The doctor and the baby both died soon after this portentous news was reported.

There you have it. It’s been fun. I’ll see y’all in Hell.

I Ain't Mad Atcha
I have been known, in my classroom, to do and say things I am not supposed to do. Sometimes I cross lines because it is unavoidable and seems like the right and only thing to do. Sometimes I cross lines because I like my way better and don’t feel particularly compelled to give a fuck whether some administrator or other teacher might disapprove. Sometimes I just screw up.

Christopher is a big kid, if I had to guess I’d say he goes about 6’1”/200, and although I’ve never seen him in action, I know he’s been in his fair share of scraps. He’s got a big, c-shaped scar on the brow above his right eye, another on the back of his head, and the knuckles on his meaty fists are scarred and swollen into smooth, round discs. His dad is in Federal prison down in Alabama, and Christopher mentions him often in his writing. I asked Chris what his dad was in for, and he told me his father was in “wrong place, wrong time.” I left it at that; I’m not sure that Chris knows any more details himself.

Chris can barely write and is a big pain in the ass – always throwing something, yelling obscenities out the window, or turning his desk into a makeshift drum-kit. He needs a ton of attention, and will often only work if he’s sitting at my desk. He’s also a real charmer, and can be a genuine sweetheart - a big, burly teddy bear. I’ve caught him writing on the board before, “Mr. Babylon is…” with the rest covered up by his big, beefy frame. I’ll roar at him and come over ready to spit fire and he’ll giggle and run back to his seat revealing the punch line, “best teacher.” He’s also been known to take a random homework assignment and turn it into a typed and illustrated epic.

Tony, a block-headed kid with an under-bite, is a different sort altogether. He’s not stupid, and is in fact the best, most fluent reader in the class, but he’s stubborn as a mule and has far less common sense. He’s the type of kid that will tell me he’s done his work, show me something from a completely different class (often en espanol) and then insist that he’s right even after I call him out on it. I’m always catching him throwing something at somebody, and, without fail, the other guy “started it.” I’ve tried explaining how in basketball it’s always the guy that retaliates that gets caught by the refs. Maybe if he was old enough to remember Dennis Rodman it would have caught on. As it is, it did not.

The other kids screw with him constantly, partly because his reactions are so predictable, and partly because there’s something about the kid that just grates on the nerves. He sure gets on mine. I frequently find myself snapping at him or giving him a zero for the day in situations where I would be much more patient with anyone else.

I don’t know what he did, but the other day he pissed Christopher off something fierce. It was the beginning of class, and I was just getting everyone settled down, when I heard the eruption in the back of the room.

A desk crashed over and Chris was up and in Tony’s chest, red-faced and spittle flying, “Fuck you, nigga! Wha? Wha?”

Tony, hard headed as ever, didn’t back down. “Fuck you, nigga,” he jutted out and tilted his big, square chin for effect, but his eyes betrayed his fear.

By the time I got across the room shoves had turned to punches, and arms were flailing. I didn’t hesitate for a second. I went straight at the real threat. I slid in between the two of them and got right in Chris’s face, with Tony behind me.

“Stop it. Sit down.”

They continued swinging at each other around my head, so I put my hands in the middle of Christopher’s spongy barrel of a chest and shoved. I don’t know if I tapped some heretofore hidden reserve of grown-man strength or if he didn’t resist out of respect, but he went backwards, and I followed him, pointing him into a chair where he sat, breathing through his broad, pimply nose and fuming like a bull.

“Oooh! Oh shit! You see that, nigga?” the class reacted, but not to my heroics. “Tony pushed you, Mista. Whatchu gon’ do?”

“That nigga push Mr. Babylon.”

In the heat of the moment I hadn’t felt a thing, but apparently, in a moment of cowardly opportunism, Tony had shoved me in the back while I was saving him from a severe shit-kicking.

Since I hadn’t felt anything and didn’t feel like dealing with it, I left it at that. I stuck him in a corner, marked both kids a zero for the day, and tried to continue my lesson.

The next day Tony was at it again, mule-headed as ever, refusing to move from a desk by the window where he kept playing with the shades. This is where I said something I regret.

”Get up and move, you stubborn little punk. You need to learn some respect." Here it comes. "I should have let Christopher kick your ass yesterday.”

Oops. Oh well.

Christopher came up to me after class. I was tired and surly, and didn’t bother to look up at him as I gathered my stuff to go home for the day.

“Mr. Babylon, you gave me zero yesterday?”

I nodded barely, giving him the silent treatment.

“Cause I was fighting?” His voice was soft, almost babyish.

I bit my lip and nodded again, this time looking him in the eye.

He nodded as if to acknowledge the fairness of my mark.

“You good teacher, Mr. Babylon. See you tomorrow.”

See how easy it is, kids. Don’t be a punk, and Mr. Babylon won’t hold a grudge.

Back To Square One
Well, they changed my schedule after all. Kuntstein is still out with her phantom injury, and the change is for some other, random reason, so at least it wasn’t because of her. There’s a moral victory, I guess.

I’m losing both my favorite class and my nightmare class, which sounds like an even trade, except for that we’re a third of the way through the semester, and I had been feeling reasonably confident and successful in the classroom for the first time in these two long years, staying organized and on top of my planning and grading, and even sometimes proceeding with the semblance of a plan. I’m going to have to start from scratch with two new classes and lots of new kids, and all the progress I’d made and relationships I had begun to forge with my current kids will come to an abrupt halt.

Of course, I’ll miss my small, respectful, hard-working class. I’ve been having lots of fun down in the basement with them drawing on the dry-erase board, far superior to the traditional chalk in all my other classes. In fact I had just spent a good chunk of Teacher’s Choice money on a 30 pack of dry-erase markers – I’ve got colors you couldn’t even name – and was going totally nuts with the myth illustrations when the fateful knock on the door came. In protest I quit teaching, and obliged my students’ somewhat inexplicable requests (if they were attempting to flatter my frustrated artist’s ego in order to get me off-topic, it worked) for me to draw “Big Mac and french fries!” I should have lectured them on heart disease and obesity and corporo-fascist brainwashing, but they were so cute that I just shook my head and laughed as they pretended to be desperate with hunger and clapped and cheered and sang “I’m lovin’ it.”

I’m sure, most days, I’ll be glad to not have to deal with the Class from Hell, but I’ll even miss them a little bit too. The few students in there who do act halfway decently from time to time are really cool kids, and I’d even made a little progress in reprogramming both Santiago and one of the Devil girls. That class was a challenge (in much the same way that standing up under torture in Abu Ghraib is a challenge,) but part of me relishes such adversity, or at least wants to see if and how I survived it.

The big rusty gears of Shitty administrative incompetence lurched forward another notch, and once again it was my sleeve snagged, my hand crushed and mangled by the big, unfeeling machine.

True Romance
We’re just now finishing up that chapter on waves in our crappy textbook, and the last thing we did was read a short (page and a half) play about Poseidon and a Dolphin. We spent a couple of days on that, and then I had the kids write their own myths. I gave some suggested ideas: How’d the turtle get his shell? Why do monkeys like bananas? How’d the snake lose his legs? Etc. I got some funny responses, some half-assed responses, and plenty of kids didn’t bother to do it at all.

A number of kids didn’t quite understand the assignment. One kid named Juan took things to a whole other level. This is my second semester teaching Juan. I had him in a Level 1 class a year and a half ago when we were both new arrivals to the City and Shitty High. He’s always been a funny kid. Back then, before he knew English mind you, he insisted – with a dramatic flourish and an over-the-top “thassa spicy meat-a-ball” Italian accent – that his name was not Juan but was in fact “Ricardini.”

He was a real pain in the ass back then, though, it’s great to see him now; he’s learned a ton of English, passed all of his classes, and is now a Junior and well on his way to graduation and (if there are no immigration issues) a local Community college.

“How I Am Me” he wrote, and proceeded, in only slightly less than lurid detail to tell the tale of his conception.

Sixteen years ago Juan’s mother, a twenty year old virgin, lay naked on a beautiful and secluded Dominican beach. His father, thirty-five years old and a man of not inconsiderable success and experience, stood nearby staring at the lovely and innocent young nude.

At this point in the story, I paused in my reading, and asked Juan if he was sure this wasn’t a “dirty” story.

“XXX?” I clarified further. “Porno?”

He assured me it was not, but our little exchange had gotten the entire class’ attention, and they looked on eagerly as I continued to read. I made a big show of getting all hot and bothered; looking around uncomfortably, bugging my eyes, exhaling dramatically, unbuttoning my collar, clearing my throat, muttering, and fanning my face with my undershirt.

I went back to the story and found the man still staring at the nubile young lass, quickly falling in love with every smooth, ample curve and dark, mysterious recess on her glistening mocha-colored body.

At this point I actually was beginning to feel a little flustered, but I soldiered on.

Soon the man removed his swimsuit approached the woman with a simple, unspoken proposition. He was a man, she a woman. They were alone on the beach. They were nude.

Nature, as it is wont to do, took its course. They made and fell in love. They went back to town and met each other’s parents. They were soon married, and nine months after that fateful day on the beach Juan was born.

Soon We'll Find Out Who Is
(The ideas in this post have been bubbling up for awhile, but thanks to Jeff Chang and his incredible book for bringing them to a boil.)

I teach in the birthplace of the biggest cultural movement of the last thirty years. Hip Hop was born in the Bronx.

Kool Herc was living on Tremont Ave, still a 15 year old Jamaican kid named Clive when he figured out how to jerry-rig some extra juice out of his dad’s sound system, started throwing parties, and shortly thereafter – in a moment as miraculous as when Charlie Parker forgot about chords and invented Be Bop – figured out he could send dancers to another level and keep them there if he isolated instrumental breaks on his records and juggled back and forth between two copies, extending the climax as long as he wanted.

Afrika Bambaataa was less than 20 years old and living in the Bronx River Houses projects when his imagination transformed a film of British sentimentality for the glory days of Colonial Empire into the seeds of a collectivist, pro-black, manifesto, when his leadership and charisma turned enemies into party-people and gangs into a collective of forward-thinking stylistic mavens, when his ear for all things futuristic and funky added Fela and Kraftwerk to Herc’s formula of endless breaks.

Thousands of other kids were right there with them; the first to rock an end-to-end-burner, the first robotic wild-style, the first to fly off the floor in a helicopter, the first narrative rap, the first to drop a multi-syllabic internal rhyme, and on and on, and it don’t stop.

I look at my kids and I don’t see it. I dig and dig. I poke and prod and pry. They can bang a mean beat on the desk, but only one they’ve heard before. They can crip-walk and booty shake and meringue their asses off, but their moves are mimics; they wouldn’t make much loot on a subway car. They tag all over the walls and stairwells, but there’s no style to be seen, no craft, no technique, just territorial pissing. They spit rhymes down in the teacher’s cafeteria at the monthly open mic, but aren’t saying anything new. They’re talking loud, ain’t saying nothing.

I try to challenge their preconceptions, to encourage real, deep, thought. I have them look at where they are as opposed to where they want to be. I have them look at what the newspapers and radio-stations are saying about them and their community. I have them write poems. I have them write short stories. I have them draw. I have them sing and dance. They’re smart kids mostly, and funny as hell. Many are hard-working, mature and responsible. Most are incredibly generous.

None are innovators, none are leaders, none are revolutionaries.

Will the cycle come back around? Are - like their fore-runners in the Young Lords and the Ghetto Brothers and Bambaataa the Black Spade - the shifting, nebulous identities of the gangs about to blossom into organization, into forces for positive change? Is there a new music waiting to burst forth from their endless Fitty and Reggaeton and Dipset derivations?

Not yet.

Living the Dream
I have a recurring anxiety nightmare. In it I am back in high school. I’ve never left, I guess. I have an AP European History final exam. The problem is that I have skipped the class every day for so long that not only am I completely unprepared for the final, I can’t even remember where the class meets. I wake up in a cold sweat every-time.

It’s a silly dream, fueled by a personal history awash in irresponsibility, but it’s never actually happened. I’m coming close this semester in Grad School, but I actually attended my classes (well, one of them anyway) last week, and still have time to get things together.

For many of my students, though, that nightmare is pretty close to reality. I have kids that show up once a week, once a month, once a marking period, once a semester, and some not once at all. They'll show up a week after a test with no excuse and ask if they can make it up.

Some of them have legitimate reasons for missing class so often. They are poor and have jobs and can’t make afternoon classes, or they are poor and have night jobs and can’t make morning classes. Some kids, because of over-crowding, don’t have lunch scheduled (or have it 9:00 AM) and leave to go home and eat. Others have “Random Family”-style lives so fucked up I couldn’t even begin to understand what kind of things they’re dealing with. Some kids just like to roam the halls banging on doors, smoking trees in the stairwells, and running from the cops.

I am supposed to encourage all of these kids to attend my class, to hound them, to talk to the counselors, to call home. I rarely do. No Child Left Behind? Whatever. My classes are crowded, wild and tough enough, the last thing I need is more kids in the room. The smaller my classes, the better they go, and that’s a fact.

Ironically, when I got into teaching after a short time working with drop-outs in a GED program, I thought I would be the teacher that didn’t let the kids slip through the cracks. I thought I would be the one teaching the big crazy gangsta, the kid all the other teachers were afraid of or prejudiced against, to read. I’d worked with those kids before – homeless and court-ordered and violent – and had gotten them to learn. I was sure I could do it again. I even wrote a couple of essays to get into the Fellows about it.

I was a fool. I don’t have enough time, energy or resources for the kids that are there, let alone the kids that aren’t. I'm not about to encourage young Javier to come to my class when every time he does he tries to start a fight with me. Only when I really like a kid, or they’ve previously shown me the desire and ability to learn and not step up in my face and call me "white boy" when asked to take out a piece of paper, do I make an effort to rein in their rampant cutting.

I saw Ivonne, a teeny-tiny, adorable and apparently quite feisty little thing who impressed me greatly with her intelligence and maturity the two times she attended my class, walking in the hall the other morning.

“Howdy stranger,” I offered.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Long time, no see. You coming to class today? Where’ve you been?”

“I suspended, Mista.”

“Suspended? I haven’t seen you in weeks. What have you been doing, fighting?”

“Naw, mista. I not fighting. Is just… girls be pickin’ on me.”

“So you fought them?”

“Naw, it’s just, they was messin’ with me.”

“Alright. Anyway, come to class today, okay. I have some stuff to give you. Your writing is really good.”

That afternoon as I was taking attendance, I noticed Ivonne was nowhere to be seen. My other students told me she’d been suspended again for fighting. It’s not easy being cute and 4’11” at Shitty High.

The Stoke
The book we’re using in my Level 4 ESL classes has a chapter entitled “Waves.” It talks about all different sorts of waves –from emotion to immigration - has a poem and a play about waves, and then moves on to some other topic, chosen, it appears, at random; nutrition I think.

I’m all for teaching English through content (ie just teach the kids something, and by being forced to read, write, and talk about it, they’ll learn the language,) but I don’t see the point when the content is as lame as this stuff, and there’s no attempt at all to connect it with grammar or vocabulary.

As far as I can tell the book is mainly useful as busy work, and even that’s a stretch. Still, it’s all we’ve got, so I try to use it often enough to plow through a couple of chapters every semester, and I usually try to connect whatever else we’re doing to its themes, such as they are.

So, today, while the book said we were supposed to be calculating the wavelengths of a piece of a string, we watched “Step Into Liquid.”

I showed the original “Endless Summer” last year, a classic early 60s film of idealistic youth, shimmering sunsets, and perfect waves. I was soothed and enchanted. My kids were bored to tears. They actually asked if we could do work instead.

“Step Into Liquid” was a little more their speed. It doesn’t look 40 years old. It’s faster paced. The waves are bigger, the action more “extreme.” One guy from Texas, when describing how badass it is to surf the wake of a supertanker five miles out to sea, even says “no bullshit,” which went over big.

“Oh shit, nigga said, ‘no bullshit.’”

Reactions to the movie in general varied widely. A few kids, despite my best efforts to remain vigilant and drop books next to their desks or stick pencils in their ears, managed to catch a nap. A few kids chatted amiably throughout. One group of girls wouldn’t stop chanting “Machete,” to the point that I wished I had one of my own, and one amorous young couple made it halfway around first base before I could separate them.

Barely anyone followed my directions to take notes. Mostly, though, the kids paid attention. I decided not to stop them from yelling questions at me, or even directly at the TV, as I figured being engaged was more important than behaving decorously. It was like my own Magic Johnson theater.

“Ai, Diablo!"

“Run nigga! That wave gonna eat you!”

“Oh, hell no. 100 miles in the ocean? Not me. I don’t be fuckin’ with no sharks”

They oohed and aahed over the giant curls, vicious wipeouts, and death-defying rides. They learned all about how funny sounding Irish and Australian accents are. They got to compare and contrast Oahu with Lake Michigan (and buff, tan surfers, with fat, pasty ones), and the ladies were quite taken with the California thuggin’ white-boy good looks of Jesse Billauer. They were appropriately shocked when the camera panned out to reveal him to be a wheel-chair bound paraplegic, and they seemed genuinely moved by love and friendship of his surfer friends who helped him to ride the waves again.

All in all, I was pretty stoked.

No More Mr. Nice Guy (You Don't Know Me)
When it comes to my co-workers, I try to be a nice guy. It’s not that hard; the people I work with are by and large a friendly and decent sort. I’m sure they think I’m somewhat of a freak - what with my earrings and facial hair and rumpled clothes and aversion to ties – but they are mostly women, and all older than me, so I just smile, mind my manners, make polite chit-chat, refrain from discussing my affection for the new TI album, and we get along just fine.

I’ll share an anecdote or two from my classes and maybe make a crack about the ineptitude of the security, but I try not to bitch and moan, and I’ve never officially complained about anything. I’ve been denied use of the VCR, told I can’t keep my lunch or my coat in the office, had rooms and classes switched on me mid-semester, even been asked to take on an extra-class of known hellions, and I’ve never said a word other than “yes’m.” Even in my second year, I know I’m still the new guy, and I’ve never seen the point in complaining about these inequities big and small, when everyone is dealing with plenty of problems of their own.

There’s one woman in particular who gets on my nerves. She’s an older lady (she actually attended Shitty sometime in the early part of the last century). We’ll call her Ms. Kuntstein. She wears lots of bright lipstick, sloppily applied, and in a vibrant hue of pink offset blindingly against the ghostly pallor of the rest of her face. Students have been heard to whisper that she has a dick, and they might know too. She reportedly sits in class with he legs up on a chair, control-top ‘hose exposed for all her unfortunate students to see.

Aside from being ugly, she’s a terrible teacher. She misses weeks of school at a time with phantom injuries. When she is around it’s not much better. I shared a room with her last semester, and would often arrive before the change of period to find the floor trashed, the room stinking of garbage, and kids running wild as she, oblivious, lectured some poor little trouble-maker …

“Don’t ever stand up in class. You can’t leave your seat. It’s inappropriate. You can’t stand up…”

She bleats on and on in her nasally Jewish Bronx brogue, repeating herself incessantly in that way New Yorkers have when they’re saying something disagreeable, as if repeating it enough times will somehow make it more palatable. Then after lecturing this kid well into the start of my class, she'll take another couple of minutes to gather up her myriad totes and folders and plastic bags full of papers.

This was annoying, extremely so, but I grinned and bore it, smiled and said, “How are you Ms. Kuntstein?... Oh really, not so good huh? Kids misbehaving… Oh well, have a nice day.”

So, when Ms. Kuntstein approached me last week and asked how my classes were, once again, I played nice, delivering a canned response about establishing routines and needing books, etc.

She wasn’t interested in what I had to say, though. She had plans.

“They were barking like dogs,” she informed me of one of her classes, the word dogs coming out like “du-wogs” in her whiney accent.

“I’ve never heard such a thing. Like dogs they were! I called for security five times.”

I commiserated as noncommittally as possible.

“Sounds rough, yeah. They can get pretty crazy, huh? I’ve got some tough classes too.”

“Well, I talked to [the AP] and she says since you have only the one prep, she’s going to switch this class with your 3d period. Your’ right there in the next room, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Yeah, right. No problem at all, lady. I’d love to give up one of my best classes for one your shitty ones. How about you take one of my shitty classes? Why don’t you do my Grad. School research project while you’re at it?

Unbelievable. This woman has been teaching for almost 30 years and she still hasn’t figured out how to control a class, or at least deal with it.

So I brushed her off, and hoped she was blowing smoke. I had yet to hear anything from the AP. When the AP did approach me a few days later, she mentioned the possibility of a change, and, as politely as possible, I indicated that I would rather not change, even going so far as to suggest that I am not exactly an exemplary disciplinarian myself. The AP said she would observe Kuntstein, and would probably just assign a para-professional to the class to help her out.

I was off the hook, I thought, until Monday when I came in and grabbed my weekly attendance folder and the 3d period bubble-sheet was missing and had been replaced with Ms. Kuntstein’s sheet, still bearing her name.

I was worried, but I hadn’t heard anything further about the change, so still held out hope that it was some kind of mistake. I asked around the office, and no-one had heard anything about a change, but the AP was absent, so no-one was sure.

I went to my class as usual, welcomed all the kids back from, and was beginning to return a stack of quizzes I had graded when Kuntstein showed up.

“You’re supposed to be next door. [The AP] switched our classes.”

“You sure? “ I asked. “She hasn’t said anything to me.”

“No. The change has been made. You have the bubble-sheet.”

Right. The bubble-sheet. I didn’t see any use in arguing further, but I was pissed.

“Here,” I said to one of my students, “hand these out. I guess you have a new teacher.”

I handed her the corrected quizzes, and gathered up my things in a huff. The kids looked shocked, both by the news and my obviously sour mood. I went next door and improvised a lesson on class rules to my new class of wild-ass illiterates.

After class I went to the office and inquired as to what the fuck was going on. No change had been made. Kuntstein had taken matters into her own hands, gone into my box, and switched the bubble-sheets herself.

I’m through being polite.

Mr. Cam'ron Class
As part of my ongoing quest to politicize my students I had my kids describe and draw their ideal school and then compare that school to Shitty, thus, hopefully, making them aware of how far from the ideal Shitty actually is.

The results were predictably disappointing. The kids' ideal schools were typically a two-dimensional rendering of Shitty with perhaps the idealized embellishment of a few flowers. Here's an example:



All day long, no-one came up with anything more interesting than having automatic doors or a Jacuzzi in their school, until the tenth and final period.

A feisty young girl named Heidy in whom I'd previously noted a certain artistic aptitude in the Sharpie letter stylings she scrawls all over her desk and notebook; "Bang Bang Girl 171," and the like, came through with some higher order thinking.

"What we gotta do?" she gave me the screwface when I explained the assignment.

"I 'on't know. I 'on't care. I hate school."

She didn't want to participate.

"Good," I told her. "If you hate school, then draw me the kind of school you would like. C'mon. Anything you want."

She mulled that over for a minute and then declared, "I'ma draw the school burned down."

"That's great," I responded a little too enthusiastically. "That's the most creative, original idea I've heard all day! Draw that."

This is what she came up with:



The dots represent all the kids in the world doing "anything they want," after the schools have all been burned. She's a regular Rothko.

Meanwhile Pedro from Harlem, normally one of my more annoying kids, was working diligently in the corner. He conceived of and designed a blunt-smoking, nerd-killing, Diplomats Academy, the Dip-School:



My favorite part is the kid on the left who "Got that Yayo."

My Bad Day
Things are going very well for me so far this semester. I somehow lucked into having only one prep (down from five last semester,) am no longer teaching the extra class, and have a couple of really good groups of kids.

It’s great. I prepare one lesson for each day, refine it as the day goes on and get to see how different groups of kids react differently and have an easier or harder time with certain things. I have time to stay caught up on all my correcting, and have refined and been diligent about keeping a grading system that centers around the pedagogically innovative concept of giving kids zeros when they won’t shut the fuck up.

I still have my two worst classes from last semester, and I have a few new kids who particularly get my goat, but overall, even as Shitty gears up to shut down, things are looking up.

That doesn’t mean my days are without their annoyances, and it doesn’t mean I’m all smiles all the time. Monday afternoon I had a little meltdown.

There’s a new teacher in my department, filling one of the many vacancies. Ms. Wayne is a very proper woman of Caribbean descent. She’s buttoned up so tight her magnificent and highly rouged cheekbones verge on explosion, and she’s always huffing and puffing and over-enunciating about unacceptable behavior and how things are going to change im-med-i-ate-ly. It’s fine with me. I think the kids need to learn how to deal with an authoritarian bitch just as much as they need to learn how accept their own responsibility in my relatively freer classroom. And if she can shape these kids up, more power to her.

Ms. Wayne has all the kids in my 10th period class in the same room right before I do, so when I arrived to class on Monday I expected her to have them cowering in their assigned seats, ruler welts raised red on their freshly reformed knuckles. Instead I find them running around in circles climbing on desks and hanging out the windows as Ms. Wayne, who hasn’t erased the board or straightened the desks or picked up any of the dozens of scattered paper-ball projectiles, calmly gathered up her stuff.

I was annoyed, and grew more-so when I noticed three kids who I’d never seen before leading the rampaging pack. I stood in the door and simultaneously tried to usher some stragglers in, calm down the kids in the room, and get the interlopers to leave. The first two interlopers left immediately, but the third decided to give me a hard time. This gangly punk, gangsta beads swinging, hopped up on a file cabinet.

“Time to go,” I said.

He kicked his legs, banging his Timbos against the file-cabinet.

“Now,” I said.

Other than kicking the cabinet again, he didn't acknowledge me at all.

I walked over and got in his face. I was pissed. I bit my lip, cocked my head, and bugged my eyes.

“Let’s go. Bounce.”

He got up, puffed his chest out, and bobbed and weaved a little.

“Chill out, nigga. It’s all-good.”

“Yeah, It’s 'all-good.' Get out.”

He began walking, sauntering really, towards the door, mouthing off the whole way about how he was from the streets, the school of hard knocks, etc. He finally made it to the door where he stopped.

“Aight, mista. Just chill. I’ma stay here.”

I held the door open, clenched my jaw, and pointed for him to leave.

He mouthed off a little more, then began to slowly back out of the room. As he stepped out into the hall and I started to turn around, he jumped back into the room and kicked over a small metal trashcan which went clanging out into the hall as he ran away whooping and screaming.

I stepped into the hall and watched him skip away. A few kids looked on and giggled, but there were no Deans or Security to be seen. I reached back into the room for the phone only to discover that the handset was missing.

That’s when I snapped. If the little punk had been in front of me I would have punched him the neck. He wasn't, so I did the next best thing. I inhaled, stepped into it, reared back and booted that goddamn trashcan as hard as I could. It went flying down the hall with papers and candy wrappers scattering everywhere. It hit the wall and bounced about twenty more feet before it spun to a stop.

The kids in the hall stared at me wide-eyed. I turned and walked back into my class to see all my kids scrambling for their seats with a mixture of fear and bemusement in their eyes.

“Mista, whatchu gonna do to that kid, you see him on the street?”

I sighed wearily, and shook my head.

“Mista, you need to calm down.” This was said with a mixture of reproach and genuine concern. I managed a weak smile.

“Mista Babylon be havin’ a bad day.”

The Thing More Important
Finally plowed through all those writing samples, and uncovered this gem from a boy in my nightmare class:

What I did in the another week
is.
I play alot basketball
I pla a lot of play station. I wend
to a lot of party, I smoke a lot weed. And the thing more
important. I fuck a lot and drink.

Lucky kid. I can't imagine a more perfect weekend.

Santiago, the distinguished author, is not a good student. Santiago cuts class. Santiago is often disruptive.

The other day Santiago, in response to me asking him to please sit down, replied, in so many words, that he would prefer to punch me in the face.

I walked over next to him and offered up my chin. He chickened out, but not before he thought about it.

This kid, it would seem, has some serious problems. You might expect him to spend a lot of time alone, brooding in the corner, wearing a black trench-coat, and building pipe-bombs.

Nope. Santiago is pretty popular. He joins in on all impromptu sing-alongs. He flirts with and pinches the screaming, cackling girls. He huddles in the hall joshing and flexing with menacing groups of guys. On the rare occasion when I’ve attempted to lead some sort of game in his class, he is an eager, enthusiastic participant, jumping up and down with excitement, slapping hands all around and even giving out the occasional bear hug.

He appears, in many ways, to be a happy, well-adjusted kid. A happy, well adjusted kid who spent last week drinking and fucking and smoking weed, wrote me a paragraph about it, and wants to punch me in the face.

A Vision Softly Creeping
A very odd thing happened today during my 9th period class. This class is in an icy-cold, cavernous room in an out-of-the-way corner of the basement behind the nurses office. It’s a small class – less than twenty kids – and the room is huge. It doesn’t have to be so cold. There’s a switch that activates the heat, but along with the stuffy hot air it blows out a sound not unlike a school bus being forced through a garbage disposal.

So we sat, chilly and sleepy in the big room on this hidden corridor underneath Shitty’s auditorium, and I had the kids fill out their Delaney cards so that I could be sure to tie the cursed little slips of cardboard up with a rubber-band and throw them in a box never to be seen again until I have to return them at the end of the semester.

Then I passed out a “Class Contract” which I had banged out in a brief fit of new-semester enthusiasm the other night. It asks the kids to pledge to, “at all times respect themselves, their classmates, their environment, and their teacher, Mr. Babylon.” It goes on to give a number of examples of specific things they will and will not do (all violated repeatedly in the pages of this blog,) all the while emphasizing that these are but examples of disrespect, and just because an act has not been listed does not mean it is permissible. Finally it asked the kids to write down a goal they have for themselves in the upcoming semester. It’s all very authoritative and patronizing and the kind of thing I would have scrawled an anarchy symbol on, stuck a knife through, and left dangling from a bulletin board back when I was a kid.

Everything so far was going fine. A little effeminate hyperactive boy named Alejandro kept standing up and fidgeting, and a slightly cross-eyed gangster kid named Angel (never a moniker of good omen,) kept asking me questions about how much homework we’re going to have and how much it counts. He was worried he said, because “he don’t do homework.”

Finally, I asked the kids to write a quick paragraph about what they’d done during Regents week, standard practice with a new class to see where their writing abilities are (or, more often, aren’t) and make sure nobody has been misplaced too egregiously.

My first shock came when they all immediately pulled out paper and something to write with. No-one got up and grabbed my pencil off my desk. No-one shouted across the room that they needed paper. No-one tossed a pen with wicked velocity at anyone else.

They crooked their arms, put their heads down, leaned in and began to write. All of them, and they didn’t stop. No-one whispered. No-one giggled. No-one got up and began throwing things out the window. The room was completely silent save for the barely perceptible scratching of pens on paper. The hallway was silent too. Not a soul around.

I looked on in awe for a minute, and then felt strangely uncomfortable. With no-one to tell to sit down or shut up, and no-one badgering me about how to spell every other word they wrote, I didn’t know what to do. I was just standing there. I walked over to my desk, sat down and shuffled some papers. I double-checked my attendance. I stood up and paced the front of the room. I walked up and down the rows looking over the kids’ shoulders as they determinedly wrote away. I walked over to the window, leaned on the sill, and watched last week’s snow melt.

My legs began to sweat. I fought the urge to slam a drawer, or drop a book, or yell “boo yaa!” at the top of my lungs.

I might have a whole new set of problems on my hands here.

Down Here, Where We’re At
Shitty is a failing school. I don’t mean that in the “they schools ain’t teaching us what we need to know to survive” way. Nor do I mean that no matter what we do those darn test scores just won’t come up. That’s all true. Kids are disillusioned. Test scores are low. Graduation rates are worse, but to some degree that’s the case at all urban schools. That’s a bigger problem.

Shitty is failing in a much more tangible sense. The city wants to phase Shitty (and most other large high schools) out in favor of the romantic ideal (and Bill Gates billions) of mini-schools. In the mean time they keep sending all the kids none of these selective schools want our way while denying us the resources, space and support we need.

It’s a set-up. The sooner and more completely we fail, the easier it will be to kick us to the curb. What they think will happen to the thousands of kids currently attending, and the thousands more coming unwanted form the middle schools and over the counter from the DR, I don’t know. I’m not sure they do either.

That leaves me, struggling away in the classroom trying to tune out the chaos in the halls, trying to work without enough books (and no good ones,) having to let kids in my class (the tiny, fetid one in the basement) no matter how late and disruptive and stoned they are because security has bigger Gs to fry.

The Spring semester starts tomorrow, and I still don’t know what classes I’ll be teaching. Instead of preparing for the week or setting up a room (or helping out whatever overworked scheduling schlub can’t work a spreadsheet) I spent today doodling through a workshop about Accountable Talk, which is a useless euphemism for having decent, thought-provoking classroom discussions, something which I was already aware was a good thing.

On my way out of the building today there was a big, mangy New York City squirrel in the stairwell. It saw me and darted into the hall. I jumped, then followed excitedly with a big goofy grin on my face. A woman in an office squealed and I winked at her, then jumped again when the squirrel came out from behind a trash can. Another woman emerged from across the hall bug-eyed and arms akimbo.

The squirrel turned and ran back towards me, heading for the girls locker room. I stomped in his path sending him scrambling left, back into the stairwell and towards the nearest exit.

“What are ya doin’! Ya idiot!” screamed the bug-eyed woman in a nasty Bronx brogue. “You’re scarin’ him! Idiot!”

I politely explained that I was trying to help the little creature get back outside, told her to fuck off and kiss my fucking ass, and left on my merry way.

Anyway, all this is just to provide a little framework for my whiny rants about annoying kids. I’m not trying to complain all the time, just telling it like it is, and it hasn’t been good lately. Here’s hoping the Spring semester goes a little more smoothly.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Ricky Martin
I have a lot of students. I have a lot of students who get on my goddamn nerves. There is one kid, however, who somehow manages to rise above all others, to elevate the art of driving me crazy to heights heretofore unimaginable.

Jose Ramirez is one very peculiar guy, and I suppose that if he never opened his mouth I might find him somewhat amusing. He does, though, too often, and I do not.

Loyal readers may recognize Jose as the boy who shrieked like a woman from my last post, but that brief snippet revealed only one tiny facet of his infinitely infuriating being.

Jose is not like other children. He is 19 years old for one thing, by far the oldest kid in the class of mostly freshmen, although his mental age is closer to that of a 2 or 3 year old crack-smoking vervet.

He doesn’t dress like the other children either. No oversize red or pink t-shirts, no giant blue jeans adorned with patches, no big, black, Northface, no laser-stiched leather, no fitted cap, no Jordans, no Air Force 1s. Nope, Jose dresses like a Latin Pop star. He slicks his hair back, gooped in gel. He wears skin-tight black or green pants, covered in zippers and cut with a sort-of cup to accentuate the crotch. His shirts are skin-tight as well and always “distressed,” ripped, faded, or paint-splattered, in one way or another. He tops it all off with a big, ugly pair of bug-eyed Bono wrap-around shades.

His pop-star persona is completed by the fact that he fancies himself quite the singer. He’s always singing to himself, closing his eyes and emoting and really looking the part as the sound of cats being strangled pours from his throat. I had him last Spring, and he pestered me everyday for a month to let him sing in front of the class. When I finally acquiesced he stood up, cleared his throat, closed his eyes, snapped his fingers, and froze. He stood there in awkward silence for a good two minutes before leading the class in a tuneless yet riotous version of some Bachata classic.

Jose arrives three or four minutes late everyday.

“You’re late. Again. Every day, Jose. Why are you late everyday?” I glower at him when I open the door, blocking his way for a moment in a pathetic show of false power.

“I no late, Meester.” Jose invariably replies, in direct defiance of reality.

“You’re late. Why?”

“I go the gym, Meester.” While this is technically true, Jose does have gym before my class, and that is the reason why he’s late, it’s still not a valid excuse. The gym is not far away. Neither does the gym teacher keep students late. The problem apparently is that it takes Jose significantly more time than it ought to change clothes after gym. Perfecting the sleazy Latin pop star look is not a quick job.

Inevitably I let Jose in, and inevitably, as he stalks across the room to his desk, someone screams “Ricky Martin!” or “Aventura!,” and the class breaks out in hoots and catcalls. Sometimes if I am in a particularly good mood I will introduce Jose as such when I open the door for him.

“Ladies and Gentlemen… Enrique Iglesias!”

Once Jose arrives the real fun starts. When Jose is working he begins by pestering me for a good ten minutes, “Meester, I no understand,” before he’s even read the assignment or directions.

“Okay, Jose, okay. Read me the question.”

“Wha…?”

“Read, Jose, read. Leer.”

When Jose reads aloud in English what comes out is only a vague approximation of the correct sounds.

“What was the weather like outside yesterday?” becomes “Wha wa de weed li ousy jestadie.”

It took me a long time to realize that this is not because Jose can’t read, not in the way you would think at least. He’s struggling a little with English, sure, but the problem is that Jose can’t talk. He’s got marbles in his mouth, in English or Spanish. It’s not just a speech impediment though, I’m pretty sure Jose hears things the same garbled way he says them.

“No not jestadie, yes-ter-day. Yes-ter-day. Say it with me, Jose, you can do it. Yes-ter day,” I will cajole, seeing as how the whole y’s-don’t-sound-like-j’s-in-English thing ought to be something he can learn. Especially living in New York and rooting for the New York Yankees.

“Jestadie.” He says it the first time. He says it the second time. He says it the hundredth time. At some point I begin to suspect that Jose is fucking with me, then I look at his writing. A garbled, hastily scrawled, mess of error-ridden and barely incomprehensible chicken scratch, it is a surprisingly accurate representation of his speech. It’s as if the marbles in his mouth – and there are apparently some big old cat’s eyes in there - also clog his ears and even form some sort of barrier between his brain and the outside world.

Jose does fuck with me though, all the time, so it’s hard to tell where his developmental problems stop and his behavioral ones start. On test days he walks in (late) and feigns shock that there is a test going on.

“We hay tesh? No Meester, you no say we hay tesh!”

This is absurd. Of course I told him and the rest of the class that there would be a test. We spent the past three days reviewing for it. No matter, though, Jose persists in his denial for at least 15 minutes, refusing to begin his test and distracting me and everyone else while he does so. Again, I begin to wonder if maybe Jose really was somehow unaware that there would be a test.

Jose is at his worst when he wants something that I am unable or unwilling to give, say for instance the bathroom pass. He asks for the pass everyday. If I’m in a good mood and he’s completed all his work I will let him go. More often than not though, especially with his chronic tardiness, I tell Jose no.

Jose is always persistent. Sometimes he is straight up insane.

“Meester. I nee pash. Ahvul. Ahvul. You know what’s da?”

“Sit down Jose. Do your work. You don’t even have your notebook out. Where’s your notebook?!”

“Ahvul, Meester. Ahvul.” Jose then pulls out a small zip-lock baggy containing a few Advils, and I understand, sort of. Unsure if perhaps Jose does actually need to take his pain-relievers, I allow him to go to the bathroom during the five minute break between the first and second half of the double period.

He returns to class, sits down, begins unintelligibly singing to himself, and soon turns to me.

“Meester, I nee pash now. I go.”

I’ve been handling things well up to this point, taking everything in stride, but this immediately sends me over the edge.

My face turns red. My eyes bug out. Veins on my neck swell and quiver. Now I know he’s fucking with me. I stalk over to Jose, pick up his back pack, take his notebook out and slam it onto his desk, thinking maybe if I choked him I could convince all the other kids to testify that he had it coming.

Jose persists in asking for the bathroom pass, blabbering about being sick, and saying I lied to him. I rudely shush him every time he opens his mouth, and other than that ignore him as I go about trying to get the kids to understand that Martin Luther King isn’t just “for the blacks.”

Jose keeps yammering on about needing his Advil and eventually stands up, crosses the room, kneels down by the trashcan and begins to retch violently. It is a highly realistic performance. His shoulders convulse. He gags. He gulps. He emits the guttural sound of digestive demons.

I’m not buying it though. I’ve had enough, so I let Jose be as he retches and groans on the floor. At some point he stops, still seething with resentment towards me, and returns to his seat.

He approaches me again a few minutes before the end of class.

“Meester, I sing, you hay me sing da class. Is good.”

The Last Party
The semester ends this week. It’s already over for all practical purposes, since I’ve already given my Finals, and the kids aren’t about to do jack-shit after that.

“Meester, no work today!”

“Meester, watch the movie! Why no, Meester?”

“Meester, the party! Please, Meester!”

“Yeah, c’mon mistah. Can we have da Cookie Party? C’mon! Idongivafuck, nigga.”

I tell them no every time. I would tell them no even if I was planning on giving them a party, but, unfortunately, there will no more parties in Mr. Babylon’s class this semester. Not if I can help it.

I did allow a party before Christmas. I wasn’t feeling particularly festive, or generous, because the kids had been really getting under my skin for the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure that they were acting any worse than usual (although I’m sure their behavior and work ethic certainly hadn’t improved any,) but I wasn’t handling it well. Call it stress, burn-out, bloodlust, whatever, but situations that I’d normally laugh off or ignore had me raging on a daily basis the last couple of weeks before the break, and I don’t make a good asshole.

Don’t get me wrong, I can be mean, exceedingly so, but I can’t do it consistently, and it’s not effective at all with any but the most spineless of students. It makes things worse, I’m sure. They feed off my stress and enjoy getting a rise out of me, basking in the animal fever of their nascent power. Once I get pissed and the troublemakers start really fucking with me a mob mentality takes over, and everyone gets in on it. The regular kids turn into screaming, shrieking, jerks, and the good kids start chatting or sleeping or doing their math homework or something.

That was happening, in one form or another, pretty much everyday, but I let the kids have a party anyway, mostly because I didn’t have the energy to try to make them do something educational, and didn't feel like lesson-planning. I didn’t buy them any cookies, or candy, or bring in games or music or anything. I just gave them free-time, and they didn’t seem to mind.

Things started off just fine. Roulo and Colombia and Frankie weren’t there, and I naively assumed that they were cutting, it being the last day and all. Without those three, everything was nice and calm. All the girls were sitting in a circle in the back eating cookies and candy and chatting amiably about novellas and novios and whatnot.

I gladly took a cookie and sat down with Animal Boy and a few other guys who attempted to show me how to play with Yu-gi-oh cards. All was well. Everyone was pleasant and quiet and having quite a nice time, until about five minutes into the second half of the double period when the gangstas strolled in.

Roulo, Colombia, and Frankie did not, as one might expect of a tardy student, quietly sneak into the back hoping to escape the teacher’s notice. No, these three stroll up, kick the door – hard – and make a goddamn entrance.

Their smoked-out eyes lit up like kids at Christmas when they saw that everyone was just chilling.

“Oh shit, nigga! We have party today? Idongiveafuck!”

They danced across the room, clapping and shouting, and giving dap to all the other students who stared wide-eyed at their brazen antics. Roulo and Colombia sat down on top of a couple of desks and began to bang out a rather hot reggaeton beat along with which they began a well-received call-and-response chant.

Condon. Condon. Condon, condon, condon.

This was disconcerting not only because it was loud, but because I had no idea what was being chanted, and could only assume it was offensive.

As the rest of the class got more into it Roulo dropped the bass on the beat by kicking the side of my desk cum 808, which made quite a racket. The class went nuts. One boy began to shriek at the top of his lungs like a frightened woman. Everyone was hollering and banging and chanting along, and it actually sounded alright. Loud, but alright.

The teacher next door, unfortunately, did not agree. I was told to, “Stop the banging,“ and I suddenly realized that perhaps this little mini-riot I had going on in my classroom was not entirely appropriate, even if it was the last day before vacation, and homegirl might ought to relax a little bit.

I had no idea, but things were about to get much, much worse.

I yelled and waved my arms and clapped my hands and flipped the lights, vainly trying to get the kids’ attention and calm them down.

“Just please stop the banging,” I implored. Do whatever the Hell you want, just don’t get me in trouble. Aight, kid?

The banging died down briefly but was quickly resurrected, this time with a new, much more disturbing, twist.

Roulo and Colombia got the beat, an impressive hands-and-feet “Gasolina” interpolation, going again, then let the rest of the class hold it down while they stood up, and began to dance more than a little suggestively. They then began to play “paper, scissors, rock” with each other, only in thier twisted version, whenever someone lost, they would remove an item of clothing. That's right, “Strip Paper, Scissors, Rock.”

First they stripped the laser-stitched leather jackets, then the oversize t-shirts, and finally the last layer of decency, the wife-beaters, which were halfway off by the time I realized what was going on and got up and across the room and in their faces.

Nose to nose with Roulo, who had a crazed, ecstatic and very far-off look in his eyes, I poked my finger in his face and told him, “Put. The Shirt. On. Now!”

He pulled the wife beater back down, and I turned around to deal with the shrieking boy, who was at it again, this time even louder and higher-pitched than before. I lost it a little bit on shrieking boy. He doesn’t understand English, so I let fly with a little blue language right in his ear.

“Jose! What the fuck is your problem?! Shut the fuck up already. At least the other kids are making music. You’re just squealing like a stuck fucking pig.”

Shrieking Jose, wasn’t sure what I had said, but my intentions were clear, and he clammed up fast. My problems were just beginning though. While I had been hissing wildly un-teacherly things to Jose, Roulo and Colombia had again removed their shirts, climbed up on their desks and were now stoking the frenzied crowd by slowly removing their belts and letting their giant clown jeans fall to their knees in an elaborate strip-tease.

I was fucked. Livid, then panicked, and ultimately completely helpless. Beaten. In my first moment of rage I considered kicking the desks out from under my little gangsta Chippendales, but somewhere deep inside a voice of reason told me that would end with me in a courtroom. I went to pull one of them down, but didn’t want to grab either of these gyrating 16 year old kids by their boxer-shorts, and abandoned that plan as well.

I screamed. I yelled. I gesticulated wildly, to no avail. At some point during all this the next-door teacher came by again, looked around, looked at me like I was a steaming pile of shit, told me to shut my kids up, and walked away.

I have never been more relieved when a bell rang, or when a party ended, in my life.

Airing of the Grievances
Mr. Babylon is going on a much needed vacation. I'll try to post a couple of times over the break, but you know how that goes.

Keep an eye out for exciting future stories from the inside including, "My Arch Enemy," "Squirrel In The Classroom," "Mista, You Used to Smoke Mad Weed, Right?" "I'm A Grown Ass Man, And You're A Punk Little Boy!" and "Roulo, Get Off the Desk and Put Your Pants On!"

Also Mr. Babylon has made it his New Years Resolution to refrain from posting while drunk and emotional. Your support in this difficult endeavor would be appreciated.

Happy Festivus y'all. Good luck in the Feats of Strength.

Lessons
Things I learned (or was reminded of) at my department's holiday dinner:

Teachers like to hear themselves talk and are unaccustomed to letting others have their say.

A male teacher at Shitty recently punched a female student.

There is a large group of kids at Shitty who actually try to get sent to Detention every day so they can link up with each other and then pursue further nefarious activities.

Shitty’s college counselor only helps “island blacks” and reportedly encourages others to pursue less extra-curricular activities.

An effective way to stop students from stealing peanuts from your bag is to replace your regular peanuts with an extra-spicy kind. “Eso pique! You Mexican!”

I can eat a shit-load of baked clams.

I can drink a shit-load of crappy red wine.

I can discretely throw up in the bathroom and then come back for another round of food and drink.

Many teachers find off-color jokes, involving tampons and dildos in conversation with one another, to be offensive and not the least bit funny.

I’m not proud. Or hungry.

Tough City
Colleague, classmate, and friend, this guy will be greatly missed. Rest in Peace, brother.

Dotted Line
I talk a lot about gangs at Shitty, but I really don’t know exactly what’s going on with them. The kids all say that gangs are a big problem, and that there are a lot of them.

There’s certainly a lot of gang graffiti scrawled on the desks and doors and walls. "Somebody Bonez." Latin King crowns. "Bloody This" and "Bloody That." Red B’s or blue C’s with an upwards pointing arrow piercing their hastily scrawled loops. DDP (Dominican’s Don’t Play) is a common motif, and in out of the way corners I’ve even noticed a few pitchforks, six-pointed stars and other, more explicit references to People and Family.

When it comes to which is which and who is who though, things become much less obvious. Kids wear all red, kids wear long white tee’s, kids wear beads and braids, and I honestly don’t know what’s what. I spent the better part of last year thinking their was some sort of “pink gang” running around the Bronx, until I realized they were just jocking Dipset and Kila Cam’s trendsetting styles.

My confusion is mostly due to my own ignorance, but some of this stuff is just mixed up. The Bronx is rough, no doubt, but this isn’t LA, we don’t have drive-by’s, and I’m not sure how organized or cohesive any of these gangs really are. Kids do get shot, stabbed, and beat down, and I’m sure there’s plenty of low-level drug-slinging and small-time robbery, but Shitty kids aren’t running any major schemes. I just can’t see it.

I’ve been curious as to Roulo’s gang affiliation for a while now. He regularly wears Latin King beads, and has proudly shown them to me along with a couple of LK hand-signs. He’s also prone to Crip-wlking quite adeptly across the classroom floor, often while rapping the Crip-centric lines from Snoop and Pharell’s mega-hit, “Drop it Like it’s Hott.”

Which is it? Crip or King? Are they mutually exclusive, or in cahoots?

Roulo and Colombia strolled into class together ten minutes late today, just like every day, boldly ambivalent to my ire. They settled in to their seats with relatively little fanfare and began to intently study a yellow sheet of paper.

I strolled over and snuck a glance, curious as to what other teacher’s homework might have them so enthralled. It was a contract, professionally rendered as far as I could tell from my quick glance, for entrance to the Latin Kings.

Roulo, I guess, is not certified gangster quite yet after all. I called him over to my desk after class, I had to return the cell-phone I had confiscated from him yesterday (he kept playing his “Gasolina” ring-tone) anyway. I’d like to say I did something profound like rip the contract to shreds, or make him rip it to shreds, but I didn’t. I told him I knew what it was.

“How you know what’s dat, Mista?” he asked, visibly nervous.

“I’m not stupid, Roulo.” Mysteriousness is always more menacing than literacy.

“Don’t do it, Roulo. You’re a good kid. You’re smart and funny. I don’t want to see you in trouble…”

“I not get get in trouble, Mista, I…”

“I don’t want to see you in jail. I don’t want to see you in the hospital or…”

“I just looking it, Mista, I just want look.”

“Don’t do it, Roulo.” With that he left.

Attrition
Like rats from a sinking ship, or cockroaches from behind a pissed-upon classroom radiator, teachers are leaving Shitty in droves. The ESL department is three teachers lighter than it was last year, despite the fact that there are at least a hundred more students. This means whole classes have been being taught by substitutes all year long. It’s kind of funny when you ask a kid who his English teacher is, and he furrows his brow and replies, “Meester Vacancia,” but it’s totally unfair to the kids, and certainly doesn’t help with the generally pervasive level of I-don’t-give-a-fuck around the building.

Well, one more teacher quit a couple of weeks ago, an enthusiastic young woman fresh off a couple of years in the Peace Corps. She had actually lined up a job at another school over the summer, but Principal Popeil refused to release her, setting the stage for a series of increasingly hostile conflicts between the two and culminating in him cussing her out for sending “unauthorized” letters home to her students’ parents.

She left. This was a good move for her, but it’s bad for me. I picked up one of her classes. This puts me over some sort of contractual limit on hours of teaching, so I’m making a nice chunk of extra money, but I’m earning every penny.

Teachers throw around a lot of words to describe their students, words that those that don’t deal with the little brats on a daily basis might find a tad insensitive. “Animals” and “Monsters” are the two you hear most often in reference to a particularly unruly and disrespectful bunch. I try not to repeat the “animal” invective, because I feel like it often has unsavory racial implications.

The children in my new 7th period class are Demonspawn. Satan’s Minions. Other teachers complain of their students talking too much, sleeping, or, Heaven forbid, getting up and walking around the room. I’ve got girls singing Daddy Yankee tunes while they projectile vomit and violently masturbate with a crucifix. And those are the good ones.

Paddy Wagons Are Not AWD
It’s been a crazy couple of days at the Shitty Educational Campus. I should have known things would go badly when three trains passed me by in the morning, too full to board. A freezing rain was coming down in sheets, and the wind blew out my umbrella when I finally made it up to the Bronx. I was soaking wet and shivering when I scrambled into my morning class, operating sans coffee and my morning muffin, as the late bell rang.

Things were nice and calm for awhile. The rain had the kids sleepy, and Roulo and Colombia and Frankie (there’s been no sign of Maria for weeks) were so enthralled with the packets of condoms, lubricants, and dental dams they had all somehow acquired from the clinic that they weren’t distracting anyone but themselves.

Once the second half of the double period rolled around, though, things started to pick up. Kids began coming by and poking their heads in my door’s window, and as soon as they did Roulo and Colombia began asking me for the bathroom pass. I wasn’t dumb enough to say yes, but this action in the hall gave birth to new life in my students, and the noise level began to rise.

Roulo held up a tube of strawberry flavored lubricant.

“You know what’s dat, Mista?”

“Yes, Roulo,” I nodded.

“What’s dat? What’s dat is, Mista?” Roulo persisted. Perhaps he had seen the beginnings of a flush flooding my cheeks and ears.

“Lubricant, Roulo. It’s lubricant.” I decided the fact that it was flavored lubricant was extraneous information.

Roulo most likely knew damn well what the tube was, but I figured I might as well be honest with the kids about this stuff. They obviously need all the help they can get.

“Why you need that, Mista?” Roulo now had a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

I began to attempt to explain why one might need a tube of Astro-Glide, when Colombia stood up, removed the dental dam (a safe-sex tool I myself was not before familiar with) and held it up for all to see. He glanced back and forth between the instructions, which showed the crudely rendered outline of a naked woman with a shaded rectangle over her genitals, and the fruit roll-up looking piece of plastic, then screamed, “Ewww!”, and tossed both to the floor.

Roulo retrieved the dental dam and held it at arms length with his nose upturned.

“Wha de fuck?!” He yelled. “Mista, you know what’s dat?”

This one was going to be even tougher to explain.

“It’s to prevent getting an STD from oral sex,” I attempted, and thirty kids stared back at me blankly. Normally in such a situation I would attempt pantomime to get the meaning across, but felt that might be inappropriate in this case.

Mercifully, I was once again interrupted, this time by an announcement on the loudspeaker stating that no passes of any kind were to be given out and all “comp-time persons” were to report to the halls. That’s code for some serious shit is going down, watch the fuck out.

A few minutes later another announcement crackled forth. No passes were to be given for the rest of the day, and comp-time people need to get to their positions now. Something REALLY bad was happening.

Gangs were rumbling. Bloods vs. Bonez. Blacks vs. Dominicans. Fights broke out all over the school all day long, over a dozen in all including a massive rumble in the lunchroom. A number of kids were sent to the hospital, including one poor soul whose eye was impaled by an umbrella, and at least as many kids were arrested and dragged off in handcuffs by the police.

The cops were everywhere, at least a dozen on each floor, strapped, and dressed to the nines in their bullet-proof vests.

I dashed out during my free period to catch some air and grab a sandwich from the bodega and saw police cars parked everywhere, stopped at all sorts of odd angles all over the sidewalks and driveway. Two paddy-wagons were right in front of the school’s front doors, but it was another paddy-wagon that caught my eye.

Some dumb cop, drunk with the awesome power of having the authority to disobey parking laws, had decided to park on the lawn in front of Shitty. I guess he didn’t notice the torrential downpour occurring or the fact that very little grass actually grows in the dirt, now mud, in front of the school.

The van was stuck. All four wheels buried at least a foot and a half in the mud and a thick spray of that same mud spread forth behind onto the sidewalk and the front of the building from where Officer Dumbass had spun out, stomping away on the gas, digging himself deeper and deeper.

The van was still there when I left in the afternoon. They had a tow-truck out and a thick metal chain, but had succeeded so far only in breaking part of a fence separating the lawn from the driveway.

Report Cards, Part 2
This was the second marking period of the semester, and required a little extra thought. The second marking period is the only one that really counts, because it determines whether or not the kids get programmed for the next level. Conceivably if they failed the second marking period then got their act together and passed the third someone could figure things out and get the their new class changed to the correct level, but around Shitty the chances of that not actually happening are pretty close to certain.

There are some tough calls, mostly involving kids who have failed a couple of times already. Stacey for instance is 18. She wears thick black eye-liner – in a Tammy Faye Gothic style - and revealing tank-tops out of which her rather large belly spills and squirts. This is her fourth straight semester in Level 2 and second in my class. She often mispells her own name and misses at least two days a week. When she does attend class she talks a lot but always makes a point to grab my hand, bat her goopy eyelashes at me and say with great earnestness, “Meester, I need pass you class. You see, I working. I working everyday.”

She doesn’t deserve to pass. She has neither done the work nor learned what she needs to learn. I passed her anyway. It’s not as if it’s possible for her to learn any less in Level 3 than she’s learning now. Maybe getting a new textbook will inspire her to actually open it instead of just leaning on it as she gabs away.

Then there’s Ivan. Ivan is good-looking, light-skinned and tall with long black braided ropes of ahir hanging past his shoulders, and highly intelligent. He likes to rib me about football.

“Yo Mista, you saw my Eagles yesterday? They goin’ Superbowl. Your Falcons suck. Vick’s the truth, yo, but the offense sucks. Falcons aren’t shit without Crumpler.”

His analysis is astute. Ivan does very good work when he comes to class, and is more than ready for Level 4, in fact, he could probably handle monolingual classes. Ivan, however, is certified gangster, often found prowling the corner by the train-station, up to who knows what trouble. He cuts class a couple of times a week, and actually has the balls to do things like come say hi to me before he does so, or to slap me five on the street after school immediately after.

Will failing Ivan further his burgeoning criminalization, driving him to drop out completely? Will passing him be considered unfair by other kids who do show up and do the work? Will it send the wrong message to Ivan?

Life’s not fair, and that wrong message can’t be worse than the ones he’s getting elsewhere. Ivan passes too.

Report Cards
Grades were due yesterday, which shouldn’t have been a particularly big deal. The grades don’t take long to fill out, it’s a standard scantron, bubble-sheet. It doesn’t take me to long to calculate the kids’ grades either, since we’re only allowed to mark in five point increments and any failing grade is a “55.” I don’t even use a calculator, just average their test (or essay, or whatever) scores, add or subtract a little based on whether they do their homework, show up, and behave somewhat respectably, and that’s that.

In addition to the number grade, there is also a field for comments. I hope to one day find a use for such codes as “Required Dental Note Missing/Certificado del Dentista Falta” (74), but in the meantime I gain some catharsis by saying mean things about the kids that drive me crazy. As much as I enjoy malevolently bubbling the code that corresponds to “A Distractive Influence in Class/Interrumpe CLase sin Razon,” (57) or “Uses Inappropriate Language” (94) over and over, these codes are often insufficient.

“Melvin is a great kid,” I would like to say. “Inexplicably, as he is a beginning learner of English, he was placed in Level 3, and due to administrative incompetence this error was never rectified. Melvin works as hard as any student I have, is an eager and good-natured participant in classroom discussions and activities, and is one of the funniest and nicest kids I’ve ever met. Unfortunately he does not know nearly enough English to move on to Level 4, and I am forced to fail him. With his sharp mind and continued hard work I trust that he will do great next semester.”

“Shows a great deal of effort.” (12), “Low Grades on Class Exams/Examen es con baja calificacion” (51) I bubble in instead. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, huh?

Racist
I had my Level 2 kids write acrostic poems about the Bronx. They sucked, but after we were done we wrote, with the help of a few leading questions and grammatical clarifications from me, a group poem that I quite enjoy. All the big ideas were the kids’ own, I just prodded them for more details.

Big buildings on the block
Racism between Blacks and Dominicans
On the
Nasty streets
X-men and the Incredibles will save the city

I thought it was funny that every single one of the thirty-something kids in the class used “X-men” as their X word, but it was even more telling that so many of the kids suggested “Racism” (or racismo, for the less English proficient) for R.

“Racism?” I feigned confusion. “What’s that? Who is racist against who?”

“Morenos, Meester, Morenos,” the chorus of voices screamed back at me.

“Fucking Morenos, mista.”

“Black people?”

“I fuckin’ hate the black. Fuck dat shit, nigga,” said Roulo as he flexed and popped his collar. Roulo, a mocha-skinned, kinky-haired young man with a broad, acne-covered nose, gets away with a lot in my class. Roulo cracks me up. We get along well. Often in quieter moments Roulo will show me snapshots of his toddler-age baby nephew.

“I want son, Mista,” he will confide in me.

“You want a son?” I will laugh. “Are you crazy? You’re too young, man. You’re not even responsible enough to do your homework.”

“That’s stupid, Roulo,” I said when he told me how he felt about black folks. I was dead-ass. I never call kids stupid, felt bad, and quickly decided I hadn’t called Roulo stupid, I had called what he said stupid.

“Why do you hate black people, Roulo?”

“’Cause the fuckin’ black hate Dominicanos, nigga.”

The irony of Roulo’s language and dress, not to mention his appearance and biological make-up, was apparently lost on him. And maybe it’s really not that ironic after all, since what he said is true. Most of the serious violence at Shitty is Dominican on black or (rarely, since the Dominicans outnumber everyone else by a wide margin) vice versa, but that still doesn’t mean it makes any sense.

This is what they call a “Teachable Moment,” I knew, but had no idea what to say or do.

“You know, Roulo, a lot of people in the world probably think you’re black…”

“Fuck you, nigga. I not fuckin’ black!”

Ahh. Another “Teachable Moment.” Don’t say “fuck you” to your teacher, dumbass, no matter how casually it might flow off the tongue.

I pretty much let it slide, though. I was done talking to Roulo, but I didn’t write him up or anything. I shut up, sat down, and stared at Roulo long and hard. It wasn’t one of my usual stares. It was not my bemused, slightly annoyed “you’re acting like a fool, please stop” stare, not was it my seething, furious, “I’d kill you right now if I thought there was a chance I wouldn’t get caught.” This was more like “I know you, I know you know you fucked up, and I’m not about to let you forget it.”

Roulo pouted, puffing out his lips and blinking at me, before looking down at his desk.

“Why you look a’me li’ dat?”

I shook my head slightly, weary disappointment.

“Why not?”

“I don’ like it.”

“I don’t like it when you say racist things and disrespect me.”

“I not disre’pect you, Mista.”

I cocked my head a little, “oh, really?” He looked away ashamed.

That was that. Did Roulo learn a lesson? Will he thinks twice next time he and his boys are about to jump some black kid at the corner by the train station? Probably not, but maybe one day if and when he grows up a little and gets a job or something where he gets to know some black people, he’ll remember our conversation, and it will be a little easier for him to let go of his old prejudices. It’s possible.

With Donuts in His Braces
After Tuesday’s orange/humping/wrestle-mania incident, I was in no mood Wednesday to put up with anything from my afternoon class. As the usual suspects straggled in one, two, five minutes after the bell, Stanley came in and perched his desk in the back doorway, propping the door open. I deal with Stanley and the doorway everyday.

“Close the door Stanley.”

“C’mon Mista, why? I’m not talking. I’m not doin’ nothin’,” Stanley will plead in between craning his neck down the hall to scream obscenities at (and somehow garner kisses from) passing girls, and then yelling across the classroom a play-by-play report.

“Yo nigga! Did you see that ass? Omigod, yo, that shit was bangin’.”

“Stanley. The door. Pedro. Sit down. Nicholas you. Siddown!”

“You see,” Stanley addressed his classmates. “I told ya. These teachers don’t care about us for shit. I hate this fuckin’ school, yo.”

That pissed me off so much that I did not feel it even dignified a logical response.

“Now Stanley, I want you to close the door and pay attention because I care about you. I want you to learn and grow and your future and blah, blah, blah…”

Nope. I went with a more direct tactic.

“Get out.”

“Wha’? What you say to me?”

“Get out. Go. You can stay here and sit down and close the door and be quiet, or you can go.”

Stanley went, and by this point I was about as heated as I can get. When I turned around and some of the other kids were in fact sitting in the windowsill and throwing stuff towards the street below, I lost it.

“Pedro. Sit down now, boy!” I came at Pedro with jaw and fists clenched, kicking a desk out of my way and banging it into a locker as I did. Pedro is a big kid, 6’4” and shaped like a giant pear, he’s got at least 80 lbs. on me and could probably break me in half. When I ask him to do something he typically responds, "Ss'ok, Main" in a cartoon Tony Montana voice, then takes his sweet time. He sat down, though.

The kids stared at me wide-eyed for a little while, whispered about me "ODin' on Pedro," but after they settled down we a good old time. Only nine kids were there, all boys. We read Chief Joseph’s surrender speech in honor of Thanksgiving. Then I busted out a dozen donuts that I’d bought for my co-workers and hadn’t gotten eaten. Everyone had one, and then I officiated a spirited Hangman tournament for the three remaining goodies.

At some point Pedro stood up and unbuckled his giant clown jeans, which until that point had been carefully strapped around his hips, just below his fat ass.

“Pedro! What are you doing, man?”

“Wha’s crackin’ Mista? Ss'ok main.”

“Your pants, Pedro. Put your pants on. Why are your pants off?”

“There’s no girls. Ss'ok.”

Apparently he was just rearranging things. It takes quite a bit of work to keep everything in order when your pants are three times too big. In addition to the thumbtacks required in the back of the shoe to keep the cuffs off the ground, frequent adjustment is required.

Everyone was looking at Pedro now, and someone made a crack about him being fat. Pedro sensed an opportunity and seized it. He hiked his pants up as far as they would go, which, due to their enormity, was just below his neck. He strapped the belt and proceeded to waddle around the classroom looking like some sort thugged out cross between Steve Urkel and Tweedle Dum.

I noticed for the first time that big-ass Pedro has braces, just an overgrown kid playing at being hard.

Orange Explosion
Things in my end of the day double period are getting crazier and major. There are a few kids who cut class pretty much everyday during the first marking period who have started showing up. As an educator, I am supposed to be happy about this, but really they’re just a pain in my ass, and I wish they’d go away.

One of them is a kid named Michael, a seemingly intelligent young fellow who constantly talks in a Donald Duck voice, quacking out such comedic gems as, “Fuck you, bitch!” and “Suck my dick!” Say it in the voice. I’m not too proud to admit that it’s funny. It just pisses me off, though.

Another new attendee is the infamous Smokey, who I never saw again for quite some time after the “Pizza Chant” day the first week of school.

Smokey is by far the weirdest kid I’ve ever dealt with. Maybe he’s just really, really high all the time, but I think the kid has some other, deeper issues on top of that.

He didn’t come back to class all at once but via an elaborate and gradual process. He began by poking his head around corners as, per school regulations, I stood in the doorway before class ushering students in.

“Samuel!” I would holler a little half-heartedly. “Come to class.”

His head would quickly disappear.

Then he started strolling into class sometime halfway through the period.

“Samuel! What’s up man? Long time no see. Why doncha sit down and get to work, we’re on page 53.”

“Lemme get the pass to the bathroom. C’mon, Mista. Lemme go.”

Every time, I would, of course, decline this absurd request, and every time he would throw a little fit, call me a “racist nigga,” then pick up and leave. Good riddance.

I even pulled him aside for a man-to-man, told him he seemed like a smart kid, assured him he was on his way to failing 9th grade if he didn't start showing up and doing some work. He fidgeted and avoided eye-contact, grunted and pushed past me back in the room, soon to storm out again for greener pastures.

He finally stuck around for the whole class last Tuesday, to my chagrin. His erratic behavior and trouble-making began innocuously enough. I caught him eating an orange and tossing the peel all over the floor, and managed to snatch the offending fruit out of his unsuspecting hand. This was probably a bad move on my part, turning things into a challenge of quickness and secrecy, instead of just making the little punk throw his orange away.

As soon as I’d stashed the orange in my desk I turned around to see young Smokey with another one. Then another and another. He had at least a dozen stashed in the depths of his over-sized black coat. I confiscated five or six, he probably ate at least two others, and finally the orange supply was exhausted.

Smokey then asked to go the bathroom. This time, though, instead of storming out of the room when I refused him, he winked at me, told me I had “sexy eyes,” and started wandering around the room humping things and people. He then pulled out a wrinkled Newport which he kept going over to the window and pretending to light. This behavior caused quite a stir among his classmates, who had not, before, during the whole orange situation, been behaving exactly like angels.

I completely lost control of the class. At some point Smokey and Michael the foul-mouthed duck began to wrestle amongst the disheveled desks and scattered orange peels, grunting, grappling and contorting into all sorts of homo-erotic positions. This eventually lead to a series of body-slams and culminated in one of their flying bodies breaking the lock on another teacher’s filing cabinet in the back of the room.

Sometime during all this my AP and another teacher came by to borrow a table. Good times. No wonder they hide me in the basement most of the day.

Animal Boy
Wednesday was fun. Not that many kids showed up, and I didn’t even bother planning for my morning class. I gave them a little bit of work to begin with (“What are you thankful for? What are you NOT thankful for?”,) but once the second half of the double period rolled around I just sat down and started chatting with a couple of kids while I let everybody else do whatever. It was all very chill. No one was really abusing their freedom. In fact, it was quieter than most days when I’m actually trying to teach.

At some point I decided to stand up and facilitate a brief discussion of Thanksgiving, just to see if they knew what it was all about.

“Ok guys, what’s tomorrow?”

“No school!”

“Pabo!”

“Day turkey! Turkey day! You eat turkey, Meester?”

“Right, right. Thanksgiving. We eat turkey on Thanksgiving." I poked my spare tire out and rubbed my belly. "Pablo, what sound does a turkey make?”

Pablo Pernil is a funny kid. Skinny, scruffy, and snaggle-toothed, dude has an uncanny ability to imitate just about any sound you can imagine. He’s particularly enamored with bodily functions, but he’s got a real talent for animals as well.

“Wha?” he looked up, startled, as if I’d caught him doing something he shouldn’t have.

“Turkey, Pablo. Pabo. Gobble gobble, let’s hear it.”

The powers of onomatopoeia are insufficient to recreate the brilliance of Pablo’s turkey impression. The ethereal sound – perfectly capturing the chaotic, confused and frightened feeling that is essential to the turkey’s signature utterance- came from somewhere deep within his throat, as if more than one tongue was at work. It was poetry.

The class was impressed as well. I decided to see what Pablo could do.

“Cat! Gato, cat, c’mon!”

“Monkey!”

“Wolf!”

“Tiger!”

“Bird!”

The kid could not be stumped. His Elephant was especially impressive.

On a particularly difficult one, "whale" for instance, he would grow very still and look at me with great seriousness, eyes wide and slightly puzzled. He would look up, searching for inspiration in some mystical place where the gods of mimicry keep hidden their greatest treasures. He would then look back at me and nod slightly, his eyes even wider than before, now filled with the affirmation of a shared profound truth, and a series of supernatural sounding underwater whistles, beeps, and pings would emerge forth from his crooked-toothed maw.

Do they offer college scholarships for things like this? Are they making a "Police Academy" sequel anytime soon? Kid could really go places. I’m already looking into getting him on Amateur Night at the Apollo.

Hawks
There are two big beautiful red-tailed hawks that haunt the skies above Shitty High School. I have seen them twice circling high above Shitty’s scaffolded façade, graceful as the glide arcs across the cold grey Bronx skies. Once I watched one, as the other hunted high above, perched nobly atop a spotlight on a corner of Shitty’s roof. The subway rattled by, a car alarm cycled through its obnoxious chirps, squawks and wails. Some female students walked by. “Chikky chikky boom boom!” one of them inexplicably screamed. “Yo nigga, that bitch bout to get fucked up.” The hawk remained motionless, chest out, head high, one hundred feet and a mere world away from the anarchy on the streets and in the hallways, classrooms and stairwells below. I stood on the corner watching him, looking up, at peace. I could have stood there forever, but the bird eventually took off dropping a few feet and flapping his great wings a couple of times before launching up into the sky and over a roof out of sight, and I walked on into school to teach my afternoon classes.

Imagination
My teaching is at its laziest during my 6th period “Inclusion” class. Inclusion means half the kids are Special Ed, and that there’s a Special Ed. teacher in the room with me to “team teach.” I signed up for this team teaching gig because it sounded like it would be less work than solo teaching, which it is, I guess, but it’s still a pain the ass.

It’s not the kids. Most of the Special Ed. kids are pretty much indistinguishable from everybody else, stuck on the short bus because their handwriting’s a little messy. Some of them are kind of a pain in the ass because they’re smart enough to have learned that no-one expects much out of them, so they don’t see a problem with not even pretending to ever do any work. A few of the kids are genuinely weird, cross-eyed and clingy, and prone to emotional outbursts, but none of them would qualify for Tard Blog or anything. I imagine that if you just flipped everything and put all the Special Ed. kids in Regular classes and vice versa that you'd end up with about the same number of Special Ed kids who should be taking Regular classes and Regular kids who need to be in Special Ed.

My teaching partner is another story though. He’s an older guy from India, and nice enough, but his teaching technique is ridiculously ineffective. He comes in, writes ten or twenty questions on the board, and expects the kids to get to copying. After a few minutes he begins to tell the kids the answers. He never engages discussion. He never explains anything. Nothing. Often, if one of the Special Ed. kids is acting up, he’ll admonish them to shape up or else the “regular kids will think you are stupid.” I end up doing all the extra explaining, encouraging, and whatnot that you needs to be done with learning disabled kids.

Despite my teaching partner’s poor technique and cold-hearted insensitivity, I let him teach about teach about half the time, because that means I don’t have to. Even when I do teach in there we just stick to the book (the one with the “Pizza Chant,” natch) and it’s really boring and way too easy for most of the kids.

Every now and then I’ll get fed up with the book and throw something else in the mix, mostly for my own entertainment. That’s what happened the other day when I got sick of the book’s insipid blatherings about “miscommunication,” and decided to have the kids write poems about a miscommunication for homework.

True to form, most of the kids misunderstood the assignment and wrote poems about Love or the Yankees or something, none of which were particularly compelling. One poem did catch my eye though.

Raymond Arianno is a smart kid. He sits in class looking miserable, completes all his work with near 100% accuracy in about a third of the time it takes anyone else, and never says a word to anybody. He was in my Level 1 class last Spring, so someone was able to skip him to Level 3 this year, which is something, but he’s still a long ways from being pushed towards greatness. His poem was short and simple. It lacked rhyme, arty imagery, witty turns of phrase, and any discernable syllabic structure, but it made an impression none-the-less.

“I Like Food”

When I come home from school
and no food is there and no persons are home
I am very angry
I like food but I hate when I have hungry
Then I go to the store if I have some money

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this as I sat correcting papers at he Greek Diner down the street from Shitty. Was this kid starving? Should I call Social Services? Should I bring him what was left of my cheeseburger? Maybe his parents were just too busy to always buy groceries. I remember days like that. It didn’t seem likely though.

I didn’t know what to do, so I wrote this, “Wow. Great poem Raymond! Very powerful words. Maybe you should talk to someone about how you feel.”

There. If the kid wanted to tell me something he now had a (somewhat ambiguous) invitation, and otherwise I could just keep an eye on him to see if he started dropping weight, feinting in class, or staring at me as if I was a roasted chicken or something.

I returned the papers the next day, and Ray called me over to his desk a few minutes after I had done so.

“Meester,” he said softly. “I use imagination. It’s not true.”

He gave me a look that seemed to say, “What are you, stupid? You think if I was being neglected I’d tell you about it in a half-assed poem I wrote for my ESL class?”

I didn’t buy it.

“Yeah sure, imagination,” I stretched out the last word, mocking his accent as I did so, eee-mag-i-na-sheee-on. “Yeah, and my friend has this problem with erectile dysfunction. Uh huh. Right. So if I waved a Snickers bar in your face right now, you’re telling me you wouldn’t jump for it? Mentiroso.”

No, actually I believed the kid, I think. We’ll see.

Just Stop Doggin' Me Around
I don’t enjoy being observed while I teach. No one does really, even the veterans who’ve got things under control, but it’s worse for me I think, because I’m not just young and inexperienced, I’m a complete fraud.

I try, really I do, but no matter what there’s always some kid banging out a beat on his desk, or standing by the window tying the blinds cords into an elaborate knot, or throwing balled up paper at someone else, or drawing a penis on the chalkboard, or just generally not shutting up.

That stuff is a constant. The only variables are my behavior and how many and the degree to which the kids are wilding out. My reactions depend as much on my mood as what the kids are actually doing. On the rare occasions when I’m feeling mellow I let things slide and help out those students that are actually working. If I happen to be in a really good mood I’ve been known to do things entirely inappropriate for a teacher like throwing things (pencils, paper airplanes) back at the kids, or looking the other way while a spirited game of Yu-gi-oh gets going.

I’ve actually created quite a buzz among the student body by periodically busting out a poorly executed Michael Jackson spin-move. I wait until only a couple of kids are paying attention to me, then rock it by quickly swinging my right lower-leg back and forth in front of my left, placing the right toe as far behind my left foot as I can reach, spinning on it, then leaning forward, knees bent and pressed together, and letting out a little “hoo!” After a particularly well-executed spin it takes all the restraint and willpower I can muster not to grab my crotch.

It happens fast and only a couple of kids actually see the whole thing. A few others catch it out of the corner of their eye, and the buzz begins to rumble.

“Do it again! Do it again!” the girls squeal.

“Meester, you dancing?”

At this point I look around incredulously.

“Who? Me?” I feign confusion. “Dance? Huh? What?”

Because so few actually saw me, and the reports from those that did are by nature hyperbolic and vague, many of the students become convinced that while they weren’t looking I did something spectacular. I figure a few more strategically timed spins and my legend will spread throughout the Shitty campus.

Usually, though, I’m in no mood for dancing. Usually I’m agitated, sometimes mildly, sometimes to the brink of violence. Alternately, you may find me screaming, tapping my foot impatiently, sighing heavily, slamming a book on my desk for dramatic effect, and, at my worst, kicking a desk or a locker when all I can see is red and I’m overwhelmed by the desire to choke the life out of some insolent little punk kid.

At some point, at least a couple of times a week, usually once or more a day, my agitation and frustration reach a point where I look around the room, realize that for the past ten minutes I have been screaming and clapping my hands and whistling and flipping the lights on and off and whatever else I’ve tried in order to get the kids attention, and it hasn’t worked at all. At these moments I come to, awakened from a teacherly/disciplinarian daze, and realize that I’m yelling at 30 people and perhaps two of them are even bothering to look at me sideways.

When this happens I stop talking (or yelling or clapping or whatever) and go sit down. Sometimes I stare with great malice at a particular student who happens to be getting on my nerves the most. Sometimes I just rub my eyes and feel very old and impotent. On a “good” day, a few students will notice that I have given up on jabbering questions or instructions at them and will begin to repeatedly yell very loudly for everyone else to shut up.

I appreciate their concern, but it doesn’t help. It only increases the overall volume of the room, because now everyone else has to yell even louder to be heard over the yells of, “Cono! Caia se boca!” Typically an argument breaks out between the students yelling shut up and those who refuse to do so. Often a bold young man or woman will stand up and approach the front of the room to imitate me.

“Si’down. I say be quiet. Take out you no’book. You want referral?”

This goes over big with the class, and even I’ve been known to thaw a little and chuckle at my own expense. It, or any of the other things that typically go on, does not go over as big with administrators or other teachers, who always seem to be shuffling into my room to put something in a file-cabinet or retrieve a stack of papers.

It’s pretty easy to lose track of reality while locked in a room with 30 wild-ass teenagers. Having another adult walk in the room to witness the various strategies I employ to handle things, and their varying degrees of failure, allows one to look at things through someone else’s eyes, and to realize just how ridiculous I must look.

Cookie Party
My morning double period Level 2 class is my best of the day. They talk, they sing, they eat candy and chew gum, there was once something very close to a sexual act in the front row, but by and large we get something done everyday, and things never descend into total chaos. I judge this as significant progress for me, because there are a few pretty crazy kids in there, and I think that last year they would have run all over me the way my afternoon class does now.

There are a good half dozen kids in there that are real trouble. Maria Maldonado is 18, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, and she behaves like an absolute idiot. She shows up 20 minutes late every day. When she arrives there is usually a smattering of applause and a few spontaneous rhythms beaten out on desks. “Boriqua, Morena, Dominicana…” She sashays over to my desk and sits down right next to it, where I have placed her so she’ll chill out and act right. It works a little. Still, she talks constantly. At least once a day she stands up, leans over, puts her hands together on her desk and gyrates her big round ass like she’s at Magic City and not in the basement of Shitty High School. It is somewhat difficult to maintain the flow of my lesson while this is going on, but it is an improvement over her behavior last year.

Another girl in this class is by far the single most obnoxious person I’ve ever come across. Frankie is loud, shrill, mean-spirited, and absolutely shameless. When she’s not screaming, sneering and cussing in class she can often be found on the corner by the train station – screaming, sneering, cussing and fighting with any girl unlucky enough to cross her path. Frustratingly for me, her English teacher, Frankie Garcia refuses to ever speak English, preferring to jabber Spanish at a ridiculously fast pace and then look astounded when I don’t understand. Apparently she thinks that since I have learned to say “sit down,” “shut up,” and “listen to me now,” I am somehow fluent. She is wrong.

Frankie has developed some sort of rash on her nascent little round beer belly. She may have tried to tell me this, I wouldn’t know, but I couldn’t help but notice when she walked to the front of the room, unbuttoned her jeans, lifted her shirt and exposed an oozing map of Hawaii sprayed across her spare tire. I promptly wrote her a pass to the nurse’s office.

I’m not sure what the nurse did for Frankie and her rash, but ever since then she has brought with her to class a bar of Secret brand antiperspirant (“strong enough for a man…”) with which, at some point during class she will stand up, let loose her stomach, and rub the rash, all the while cackling, brandishing the deodorant over her head and screaming, “Victoria Secret! Victoria Secret!” There is no rational explanation for this.

Maria and Frankie fraternize, through gyrations, gropings, and general flirtation with a couple of gangsterish boys. Baby-faced and light-skinned with a long black pony-tail and dark mischievous eyes, Carlos reminds me a little bit of Bugs Bunny. He’s a sharp kid. He’s Colombian (hence his nickname “Colo” which one can find scrawled all over Shitty’s walls and desks and stairwells – dude gets up) but was born here and speakie de English just fine. He reads ok as well, but the poor kid can’t spell a damn thing. This is his second semester in my Level 2 class, and I am in the process of convincing him to show up to class (and stay awake) often enough to pass. So far so good, mostly. Colo seems to be smitten with Maria (who, thankfully, doesn’t show up that often) and went out of his way the other day to inform me, “Mista, hey Teacha, Maria nipples is hard! Look! Look!”

Colo’s buddy Roulo isn’t quite as handsome (he once spent an entire period with his head buried in his arms hiding a massive zit on his nose) but he’s pretty damn funny. He’s been in New York a year or two and his English isn’t very good, but what he lacks in finish he more than makes up for with enthusiasm, creativity and the hottest street slang. He usually manages to get his ideas across.

“Yo nigga. Whaspoppin'?”

“Are you talking to me Roulo? I’m really not comfortable with that word, especially not when in reference to me.”

“Wha'appen, nigga?”

“Roulo. Don’t call me that.”

“Oh, I sorry, Meester.”

This foursome, Maria, Franki, Carlos, and Roulo, tend to dominate class, but there are a bunch of other talkative little punks and punkettes in there, and all of them are constantly asking me for a bathroom pass, so they can go down the hall and buy some cookies.

Shitty has a “supermarket” in the basement, you see, right by my class room. Here students can purchase such necessities as Tupperware, tampons, bleach, ramen noodles, and the only item they seem to really move; fresh, hot, Otis Spunkmeyer cookies.

The intoxicating aroma of these buttery oven-baked goodies permeates the basement throughout the morning, and the kids (many of whom don’t even have lunch on their schedule) are understandably distracted. I looked the other way at first when they would eat them in class, but the cookies got really out of hand. Money and chocolate chips would fly back and forth across the room, and much more attention was being paid to who was or wasn’t giving who a macadamia nut than whatever it was I was trying to teach. The class would end, and the students would scatter, leaving the room strewn with wax paper wrappers and half-eaten, stomped-upon cookies, so I put the kibosh down and banned cookies.

This has mostly worked, but hasn’t stopped the kids obsession, and they have a new mantra led by the lead little gangster Carlos.

“C’mon Mista, when we gonna have cookie party?”

“Yeah, nigga, cookieparty! Cookieparty today!”

I fended them off for a few weeks and finally acquiesced last Friday, as it was Halloween, and only a half-day anyway.

I bribed them into doing some work, “no Do Now, no cookie party,” and then peeled off a stack of ones and sent a trustworthy little Mexican girl down the hall to buy the cookies.

Everyone had a grand old time. Maria did a pole dance against the radiator. Frankie screamed and stomped and rubbed deodorant on her belly. Carlos and Roulo taught me some gang signs, showed me how to differentiate Latin King beads from Crip beads, and led a spirited Crip-walk dance across the front of the room as Carlos rapped the words to Snoop’s latest, “I keep a blue flag hanging out my backside/ but only on the left side, yeah that's the Crip side.”

On the way out Carlos came up to me and said with great earnest, “Hey Mista, you know wha' we needs, what really set dis cookie party off?”

“What’s that man?” I was almost afraid to ask.

“Some milk, yo. I be like dippin’ 'em in there. Some milk for da cookies.”

My Kid Can Beat Up Your Honor Student
I attended my first Shitty High School sporting event yesterday. That’s terrible, right? Here I am complaining about this and that, and I don’t even bother to show up on Friday nights for the football games. Well, we don’t have a football team, so I’m off the hook there. We do have baseball and soccer and volleyball and basketball, though, and I think most of the teams are pretty decent. I’d imagine they get by more on talent than discipline and strategy, but that’s just a guess.

The thing is, I’d like to check out the games. I love sports, and as much as I bitch about all the little gangster bastards in my classes, I generally enjoy hanging out with and around the kids, especially when I’m not required to make them do things – such as read, or write, or not throw Jolly Ranchers at each other - that they’d rather not do.

Shitty doesn’t make it easy though. We have PA announcements every morning during 4th period. They are delivered by a comically peppy school aide and consist entirely of administrative banalities such as where to pick up Metrocards, or when to get your ID photo taken. This year there has been a huge push to “get those Lunch Applications in!” The Lunch Application is a form where the student’s parents write down how much or little money they make, and if it’s low enough their kid will qualify for free or reduced price lunch. Pretty much all of our kids qualify, but many don’t bother to return the form, because the school lunch (if they even have it scheduled, which, due to yet another scheduling boner, many don’t) sucks.

Shitty administration wants those forms returned though, because the more poor kids they can account for, the more money they get. This has led to what may be the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.

“Get those Lunch Applications in! The deadline has been extended! And remember, all applications will be entered in a drawing where you could win great prizes like an autographed New York Jets football, a free picture phone, or… a trip for two to Hawaii!”

That’s right. The New York City School Board, which can’t manage to graduate even half of its students let alone teach them to read, is giving away an all-expense paid trip for two to Hawaii.

Naturally, all of my students have been instructed that if they win they are required to take one Mr. Babylon with them to Hawaii where they are to serve him Pina Colladas and fetch his towels while he lounges in a beach-side hammock. Their grade is dependent on it.

Anyway, the point is there’s never any mention of any of the sports teams on these announcements. Neither are there pep rallies, or posters, or signs, or a trophy case, or anything really to indicate to anyone that we even have such teams.

I decided to find out what the deal was and went looking for someone to ask. I started with Mr. Dinkins, who holds one of those ambiguous titles like Student Relations Advisor. This title entitles Mr. Dankins to his own office (windowless and a little dank, but an office just the same) and affords him the time to spend all day lounging around in there with a few seniors. He had no idea what was up with any of the teams.

My next stop was the PE department, which I managed to locate somewhere in the depths of the basement. Here I found a number of relaxed, rested, and amiable PE teachers spread out in a vast complex of offices and cubicles easily thirty times the size of that of the ESL/Foreign Language department. No-one knew much down there either. Soccer was in season, as was girl’s volleyball, but the coaches weren’t there right then, and they were the only ones that knew the schedules.

I found the soccer coach that afternoon, and though he wasn't overly enthusastic, he told me what I needed to know; there was a match after-school that very day.

The fields were not exactly World Cup quality. They were pock-marked and half-barren with large puddles in the corners and around both goals. The sidelines were visibly crooked. The day was cold and grey, and save for two squaking, squabbling sea-gulls and me, Shitty had no fans in attendance.

We were playing Bronx Science, and while not many, a few die-hard parents had made it out to cheer their little over-achievers on. This wasn’t Quiz Bowl, though, and it wasn’t meant to be.

Shitty is pretty good at soccer. The team is mostly made up of West African and black Honduran kids, including two of my former students, and they put a ball-control clinic on. Science got the ball over midfield maybe four times while I was there, and when they did it wasn’t for long. Shitty’s players, although they didn’t seem to be coached at all, were just too good. Every time Science got possession a Shitty defender or midfielder would take the ball away with a deft touch – often lobbing the ball softly over the opposing player’s head and then reaching it, making a move or two and just launching the ball into the Science goal box, where a Shitty striker would invariably get there first, do something fancy, and get off a shot on goal.

They couldn’t put one in the net, though, despite the domination.

The Science parents were pretty vocal, running up and down the sidelines following the play and yelling. “Come on Tommy! Control it!” “Alex get it out of there! Oh…” I found them pretty amusing and even wished Shitty had a little parental support, until they started getting bitchy.

“Come on! Ya kiddin’ me? He pushed off!” Blah Blah Blah. I was trying to ignore them when one of my former students, a very cool Honduran kid named Lambert, made a spectacular play. He saved a ball from going out of bounds by doing a full-on flip bicycle kick, got up, was passed the ball back, faked a dude out, and then banana’d the ball screaming down the sideline where it went a good twelve feet out of bounds before curving back in and dropping at the feet of a streaking Shitty striker.

“Oh! No Way! Dangerous play!” screamed a Science parent. “His foot was all the way up here!” he gestured to his chin.

“Yeah, his head was down here too.” I replied, gesturing at the ground. “Your boy got schooled. You’re just jealous.”

Dad kept his distance after that. I think he had assumed I was another Science fan, and didn’t know what to make of me.

When Shitty finally scored it was all I could do to keep from viciously heckling the Science players.

“NERD! NERD! NERD!” I wanted to scream. “Don’t you have some homework you should be doing? College applications to complete? NERD!”

I can’t wait for basketball season.

A Love Poem
Teaching at Shitty is a frustrating endeavor. Dealing with an administration that views teachers as adversaries and is concerned only with numbers and saving their own asses is frustrating. Teaching classes where half the kids are bored to tears and the other half have no clue what’s going on no matter how many different ways you attempt to explain it to them is frustrating.

What’s really frustrating though, is getting punked by some 15 year old little aspiring gangster with a sculpted hairline wearing giant clown pants, a ridiculous pink t-shirt hanging down to his knees and matching pink Nikes on his strangely tiny little punk-ass feet. It happens all the time.

“Anthony, take your hat off, please.”

“Anthony. The hat.”

“Hey! Anthony! Take. The hat. Off.” This stern admonishment is accompanied by my bug-eyed and ultimately impotent “I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass” stare and a herky-jerk hand-gesture wherein, eyes still bugged, I point to my head and then down.

“Hat. Off.”

Anthony, of course, doesn’t want to take his fresh new fitted flat-brim off, and I can’t say that I blame him. The wearing of head-gear and ability to be educated don’t seem to be mutually exclusive. Perhaps, deep down, Anthony senses my ambivalence, and that is why he refuses to do as I ask. Perhaps he just enjoys pissing me off.

Once this power-struggle starts there’s no way it’s going to end well. I try to remain calm and mature, Anthony spouts whatever obnoxious, offensive, disrespectful, smack he can come up with (often en Espanol). If Anthony is an idiot and says something really weak – “Fuck you, Mr.” - for instance, I can come out looking okay.

“Huh? What’s that Anthony? I know you’re not talking to me?” Anthony, being unimaginative, fears he has crossed some sort of line and retreats.

“Nothing, Mr.”

"That’s what I thought,” I say, real tough-like. Often I’ll add on to this with some sort of condescending self-righteous bullshit, once I’m sure Anthony has been beat.

“That’s real smart, Anthony, cussing at me. You think I’m gonna help you out when you talk like that to me. You don’t wanna mess with me. Don’t play with me.”

Yeah boy! Unhhh!

Sometimes though, Anthony is not an idiot, and I get dragged into a little back and forth. This is where I come out looking bad. I can’t win. I’ve already lost the moment I start playing.

There’s a kid named Ignacio in my Level 3 class, the class where all the other kids are native New Yorkers, who speaks no English at all. He’s straight off the boat from the DR, and clearly in the wrong class. This scheduling problem should be resolved sometime around February, so for now I just have to deal with it.

Ignacio is a fucking nightmare. He never shuts up. He never sits down. He wanders around the room jabbering Spanish a mile a minute, smacking people in the head, throwing things across the room, slamming the window blinds, and smirking in my face as if he actually wants me to backhand him.

He was really getting to me on Friday, screwing with the blinds and flipping the lights off, then running away, screaming and giggling when I walked over to stop him. I tried the polite route. He didn’t understand. I tried Spanish.

“No espaneesh, no espaneesh!” he replied with palms up and an exaggerated shrug. The rest of the class thought that was really funny. So he’d pissed me off, and I responded by insulting him in English, sneering, speaking quickly and using big words, a tactic that allowed me to say whatever I wanted, and convey a feeling, if not a meaning.

“I feel sorry for you, really. I pity you. What’s it like to be a smarmy little punk kid who’s too immature and hyper to sit down for five minutes. It’s pathetic. I feel sorry for your mother. You’re not funny. You’re acting like an imbecile, you childish punk brat.”

It wasn’t my finest moment. It didn’t work either, so a few minutes later when Ignacio, who was now sitting in the back of the room singing dirty songs in an exaggerated falsetto, caught my attention again I decided to try a more subtle tactic.

I walked over and sat right next to him, but didn’t say a word. This seemed to freak Ignacio out and shut him up… for about 30 seconds. He then decided it would be a good idea to try out his extremely limited English on me. This is when I realized that Ignacio was not just a pain in the ass little punk kid, but a certifiable fucking genius.

“I love you, baby,” he said to me pleadingly. “I’m sorry, baby.”

As pissed off as I was, that was funny. The class went into hysterics.

“Oh shit! Maricon! Yo, nigga say he love Mr. Babylon!”

Recovering from my own fit of laughter, I kept trying to get Ignaicio - who, flush with success, continued to repeat his two golden phrases of English, "I love you, baby, I'm sorry, baby!" - to shut up.

“That’s good! That’s good!” I told him. “Write it down. Escríbame un poema del amor!”

Ignacio, he’s a genius remember, had a better idea. He began, spontaneously and dramatically, to recite aloud his love poetry to me.

My Spanish wasn’t good enough to know exactly what he was saying. I caught a little. “La luna, mi Corazon, Palpito para usted con el deseo de un llantén que se bombea.” Even without the other students rolling on the floor and howling with laughter, I knew I’d been played.

How do you respond to that? I did my best. I swooned. I recited a few couplets of poetry of my own. Ignacio was not to be derailed though. Dude was inspired, and my consternation was his muse.

I slinked away defeated to the shelter of offering my individual help to a quiet, illiterate girl in the front row.

“No, not when, went. W – E, no E… E, that’s I, good, W – E – N – T.”

Squeal
I wasn’t really scared when I saw Steven brain the kid in the hall. It was like being in a car-wreck, it happened so fast. As soon as I reacted, it was over. I wasn’t even scared when I saw the blood splattered on the floor, still in shock I guess, and I never saw the victim, so I didn’t really know the extent of the damage.

I might not even have reported what I saw, had there not been another fight in the hallway during my next class. Sticking my head out the door, to see what was up. I t wasn’t a big deal, and the school safety officers seemed to have it under control, so I flagged one down.

“Hey, uh, you know that fight that happened right here earlier this morning, before third period?

“Uh, yeah, uh, no… uh, what fight?”

“There was a fight here earlier, someone got jumped, there was blood everywhere… whatever. I saw it. I know the kid who did it. Didja catch anybody?”

“Uh, yeah, uh, no… uh, why don’tcha go upstairs to the security office and tell someone what you seen.”

So I did. I went up there after 5th period and found a cop. He was intrigued by my story, but didn’t know hat to do about it. He wrote down my and Steven’s names, and sent me on my way.

I had pretty much forgotten about all this when my next class was interrupted by a dumpy, balding-yet-mulleted, dean. (All older male teachers are dumpy and balding, this is not an encouraging sign.)

“Bob Babylon? Is Bob Babylon here?”

That’s me, of course. Problem was, my kids have been bugging me for a couple of weeks now trying to figure out my first name.

“Mister,” I would tell them. “First name Mister, last name Babylon.”

This mullet-head jackass just totally blew up my spot. It was rough. You’ve never been so embarrassed as an adult as when you have had thirty 16 year olds clowning on you all at once.

“Bob! Bo-o-o-o-o-ob! Mr. Bob! Bob Babylon! Ha hah ha ha ha hah!”

So I went upstairs again, and stepped into a war-room. The aftermaths of at least half-a-dozen violent incidents had coalesced at once, and the security office was in crisis mode. I was starting to get a little freaked out.

The place teemed with cops and kids. Radios crackled incessantly. Cops interrogated corn-rowed kids in every cubicle corner. Some one had been stabbed in the face, I overheard and then remembered seeing an ambulance out front that morning when I arrived. IA teacher had been assaulted, but she was okay. Two black kids who were either victims of some sort of violence or in some lesser trouble themselves, I couldn’t tell which, sat complaining to a Dean.

“This the worst school in New York. This like Rikers. You need get the Turtles up in here, they be having shit locked down.”

The Turtles, I assume are some kind of hardcore prison guards from Rikers.

“I think they’re busy guys, sorry,” the Dean replied with a sigh.

I was ushered back and forth between cops and Deans and school security, telling my story again and again.

I was shown and asked to identify a weapon, a yellow bandanna with a padlock tied to the end of it. I was asked if I would be willing to testify in court to what I saw.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I know the kid, he’s always been very respectful with me…”

“He’s 17 and a half with zero credits. This is his fourth fight so far this year. He put the kid in the hospital.”

I agreed to do it if necessary, and I wrote up a written statement.

I saw Steven the next morning as I arrived for school. He was waiting in line for scanning looking quite dapper in a baby blue Jordan UNC throwback with matching hat and shoes.

I didn’t look up as I walked by. I don’t think he saw me. I caught sight of him again down in the basement later that day, lounging in a counselor’s office. He poked his head in my classroom a few minutes later, looked at me sideways, and left.

Now I’m scared.

Blood on the Floor
I’ve seen a few fights in my time at Shitty, but nothing that left anyone more seriously injured than a black eye or some bruised ribs. I’ve heard rumor of some pretty ill behavior, broken bottle stabbings, dudes getting jumped six-on-one, and then there was last year’s infamous hallway gang-rape (or gangbang/initiation, to be more accurate, since according to reports the female student involved was a willing participant.) Somehow, though, I’ve managed to avoid witnessing any of the real violence that certainly does occur in the halls and stairwells while I’m busy collecting worksheets and telling kids to take their hats off. Until last Friday.

Friday morning before my first class I was standing in the hallway outside my basement classroom waiting for the bell to the ring. I had gotten there early, as I try to do every day, in order to avoid the crush of students who come down through this particular hallway every morning before third period when they are let out the back of the auditorium.

Why are they in the auditorium, you ask. Perhaps these students are all members of a Shitty theater or chorus club? No, they’re just the 300-odd students who didn’t get through scanning on time for second period. They are told to arrive for school an hour early in order to go through the metal detectors, it’s worse than the airport. For some senseless reason all off these kids are sent down through the basement, through a narrow hallway and an even narrower door, and off to their various classes. This is bad enough but is made worse by the fact that there are classes in this hallway and students and teachers trying to come the other way through the door, causing a massive bottleneck where everyone is screaming and hollering and pushing and shuffling their feet forward inches at a time.

God forbid someone were to step on someone’s Jordans. It’s a fight waiting to happen, and one did. It wasn’t like that, though, spontaneous and heated. This was cold-blooded.

I heard it before I saw it, about 10 feet down the hall as the crowd of kids was filing by, a general commotion and a collective inhale of excitement. I craned my neck over the crowd, a good thirty-something kids packed in the close space between me and the fight, and I saw a former student of mine right there in the fray, leading the pack.

Steven is a tall, skinny, Dominican kid, he’s over 17 and speaks English pretty well, but I had him in a freshman Level 1 class because he’s never to come to class enough to pass. He’s quiet and respectful, and even kind of cute when he bothers to do some work. He’s half-blind but way too cool to wear glasses, so he pulls his desk up right in front of the board and leans forward, squinting hard, then licking his pencil tip and painstakingly copying down the Aim and the Do Now.

I could see Steven, head and shoulders above the crowd. Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam. In rapid-fire, highly professional, precision he swung something yellow at someone’s head, connecting every time.

I had just enough time to yell into a classroom for another teacher to call security before it was over. Steven and his boys scattered and the victim did too, I guess. I never saw him. I checked out the blood splattered on the hallway floor and then went ahead and taught my morning classes.

Soul Rock!
In my coursework at grad school I’m always reading inspiring stories of teachers who unlock the vast creative potential of their students, soliciting hilarious and heartwarming tales and poems from children everyone else has given up on. It doesn’t happen like that for me.

I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to encourage creativity and critical thought. I’m constantly designing lessons involving drawing, poetry, graffiti, record reviews, whatever, it never works. What’s really depressing is, it’s not like the kids are really into the arty stuff - having a ton of fun as they produce a bunch of hackneyed, clichéd, worthless crap – which I would love. No, they’re actually even more bored and apathetic about this stuff than they are about rote grammar worksheets and other useless busy work which they tend to actually concentrate on and even enjoy.

The drawing is particularly bad. Stick legs protrude at odd angles out of vaguely circular, flat, heads. I taught a basic perspective lesson once where all the students had to do was copy what I was demonstrating in very clear, step by step process (vanishing point, horizon line, etc..) and none of them even approached looking like a three dimensional object.

“No, Meester,” they will whine when I hand them a marker. “No se dibujar.”

Their writing is even worse. I’m not talking about their non-existent grammar, or their atrocious spelling, I don’t give a shit about that. I’m talking about ideas, humor, images, emotions. It really is that bleak. I’ve been doing Haikus all week, and tried to get the kids to write about the Bronx, seeing how they all live there and since it’s where, like Fat Joe Crack so eloquently says, shit happens.

First I had my little Terror Squad write down the first 20 things that came into their minds when they thought of the Bronx. This was great. The kids were crazy excited about this and yelling all kinds of inspirational gold at me like there was prize or something.

The Zoo!
Yankee Stadium!
Spanish People!
Garbage!
Projects!
Crotona Park!
Drugs yo!
D train nigga!
Bad Schools!
Naw son, Bronx Science a good school!
Hunts Point!
Oh shit! Ho’s yo! Ho’s!

And on like that, with me making such teacherly interjections as, “So maybe the Bronx has good and bad schools? I’ll put that, ok, Rocio?”

“Ho… uh, prostitution. That’s good. Yes, Hunts Point is known for prostitution, thank you Stanley.”

The whole Haiku concept went over pretty well. Most everyone was familiar with syllables, so I gave them an example to keep things straight.

Haiku is a poem
Of three lines with syllables
Five, seven and five

And we were off.

The results were monumentally disappointing. The following was one of the better poems.

The Bronx Zoo is good
The Yankees Stadium too
I can go by bus

Woo hoo. Great job, Jose. Seriously. My best, most enthusiastic, funniest, sharpest kids were coming up with poems like that.

The best one I got was from a girl named Loida. It has a certain blunt force to it.

The gangs in the Bronx
Bloods hate Crips and Crips hate Bloods
Both hate each other

Word.

Given the usual creative output I get from these kids, I was blown the fuck away when a tiny little African boy who shows up 40 minutes late to class everyday delivered to me some seriously out there fiction. Unsolicited too. He did not, he told me, want to be associated with the inferior story he and some classmates had come up with together during groupwork. He gave me a frizzy-edged page-and-a-half of notebook paper covered in chicken-scratch.

His story was titled, “The Soul Rock,” and I have to admit, he’d pretty much already won me over right there. It was the story of a boy named Popsoul. Popsoul is a regular kid. He likes a girl, but there is a problem. There’s a blood-guzzling vampire named Napster who Popsoul battles and then lures to an all-night party. Napster has so much fun at Popsoul’s party he loses track of time until Popsoul, crafty little Popsoul, opens all the doors and windows to reveal that it is daylight and put an end to Napster.

Then - nope, it’s not over yet - Popsoul bumps into a guy named Heroshark who is winning all kinds of money in a dance contest. This leads to the following climactic passage of unedited, unabridged, completely unaltered, brilliance.

Popsoul put $500 and the other guy put $1000. lets Rock! Who said that? Everything is technology. No just don’t work like that. We have our new chapion. We’ll call him Soulrock. Yessss. Now girl go get a new house because we’re rich.

Back to Normal
Things are getting back to normal at Shitty. I witnessed two fights the past two days and broke up a third between one of my students and some kids in the hall who came by in the chaos after a fire-drill and stood in the doorway pegging him with pennies. (I'm somehow still maintining my exemplary record of no fights in my class.)

My 6th period in the basement was interrupted yesterday by the slapstick sounds of a high-speed foot-chase down the hall.

A kid ran by, hauling ass, a blur of oversized pink t-shirt and pink accessories. Shortly, he was followed by a cop huffing along as he tried to pull his handcuffs out of his belt. The cop took a spill and went sliding down the hall, his handcuffs ricocheting ahead of him.

My students were naturally curious, and I scrambled to keep them in their seats and focused on the task at hand (something about literary elements, plot and character and whatnot) as I tried to get a better look at what was going down.

Another cop came stomping by, hyperventilating, all blue and black and keys and utility belt bouncing wildly up and down, and then another and another and then one more, four in all counting the original who had initiated his pursuit of the perp in a face-first fashion. Then they were gone, and we were back to trying to puzzle out just whether the setting of Titanic (the example the kids had chosen) was in the past or the future, as if nothing unusual had happened, because, really, in the basement of Shitty, that kind of shit isn’t weird at all.

Hazing
I will no longer complain about my schedule. This is not because it has gotten any better, or because I’m embracing positivity, or even for your benefit, dear reader. No, none of that. I won’t be complaining about my schedule any longer because I have learned of one that is infinitely worse, so much so that it renders petty my own woes and mute my bitching and moaning.

There’s a new guy in my department at Shitty, a kid really. He’s a first year Teaching Fellow from Connecticut. Fresh faced, eager, and oh so naïve, Mr. M, is downright adorable in his enthusiasm. He’s been peppering me with questions for weeks.

“How do I go about implementing a unit plan?”

“What sort of mathematical formula do you use for determining final grades, and what weight do you give to homeworks? Do you weigh all the homeworks equally, or is there some sort of scale?”

I tried to help the guy out, giving what advice I could, and trying not to just snicker and say, “Dude, as long as nobody cuts or fucks anybody in your classroom the first couple of months, you’ll be doing just fine. Worry about unit plans once you can keep them in their seats with their clothes on for five minutes at a time.”

I didn’t say anything like that though. I hemmed and hawed about utilizing different intelligences and remaining flexible and establishing routines and all kinds of other crap that made it sound as if I actually know what the hell I’m doing in a classroom.

Let him float on in blissful illusion, I thought. No sense in bursting his bubble now. Maybe he’s a natural. Maybe he’ll actually enjoy this shit.

Well, Mr. M got screwed. He’s spent this entire week with wildly overcrowded classes. Mind you, more than thirty-five kids in a room is illegal, twenty-four if they’re ESL (that’s never enforced though, because there’s no money tied up with it). Mr. M has sixty kids in his class. Sixty. No bullshit. For three periods a day. Someone in administration was kind enough to allow him to conduct his lessons in the grand Shitty auditorium, but no-one has fixed anything. In fact he got ten more students today. That’s seventy, putting him at exactly double the legal limit.

This sucks for Mr. M, a rookie who is having a hard enough time with his two other, regular sized classes of thirty-two kids, and it’s certainly not fair to the children, who clearly don’t stand a chance of learning a damned thing. Not that they mind, I’m sure they’re having a grand time hanging out in the auditorium, yelling and screaming and smacking each other upside the head.

Mr M hasn’t given up though, plugging on with missionary zeal, scribbling notes on a notepad and hollering to the crowd of children about parts of the body and the alphabet and whatever else he feels these struggling English language learners need to know.

I suggested he put on a talent show, or stage some sort of protest where he and his unruly bunch march down to the Principal’s office and just hang out until the press arrives or someone breaks something.

The Pizza Chant
My schedule this year absolutely sucks. I’m on the late-shift again, 9:25 – 4:05, which is good, because I live almost an hour away by Subway, but can get a little rough in the winter when it’s already getting dark by the time I actually leave. It also makes it a bitch to get to my afternoon classes at Grad. School on time, but as the amount of times I’ve even mentioned that place on here may indicate, I don’t really give a shit about that.

I was lucky last year both semesters, because I had my first period in the morning free, allowing me to do all my planning then and only have to take work home when I got way behind on my grading or had to write a test or something. Not anymore. Now I show up and immediately must jump into a double-period of Level 2s.

I was also lucky last year in that three of my five classes were in the same room, and that all of them were decent sized rooms. (No-one at Shitty is afforded the luxury of actually having their own room, in which they could do important things like create some kind of positive learning environment, focusing creative and intellectual energies through décor and furniture arrangement, or at least keep all their stuff). This year is bad, though. Now, three out of five classes are in Shitty’s mildewed, maze-like, basement.

These rooms are half the size of a regular room. My rosters are not, however, half the size of a regular roster. They are the same as last year, so far. Twenty-five plus kids in a class, and growing. I’m not joking about the maze thing, either. The hallways are very narrow and full of twists and turns and doors marked exit which you must enter to move into yet another, narrower, hallway. This causes un-navigable bottle-necks of students who push and shove and bump and grind, and won’t let poor Mr. Babylon through to get to his class on time.

The mildew is real too. You can smell it, and a number of teachers claim to have gotten sick from teaching down there last year.

Being in the basement, though, is only the beginning of my schedule’s problems.
I have another “inclusion” class, which means half Special Ed kids, and a crappy Special Ed teacher to “team teach” with. Then, my last two classes, periods 9 and 10, are two different classes, but with the exact same rosters, rendering them essentially a double-block as well.

The thing is, by law a teacher can only have three different classes to prepare for (or “preps” in the parlance.) Technically my schedule complies. I have one Level 2 class, and two different Level 3 classes. A double period, though, which my L2 class is officially and two of my L3s are by default, is a lot more work to prepare for than a regular class, you can’t dilly-dally away any time the second hour with attendance and settling in, and other such valuable time-wasters. Let’s be conservative and add a “real-life” half-prep for each of those. Then my inclusion class will run at a different pace and do different things than another class of the same level, so that’s an extra prep and blah, blah, blah… do the fucking math, I have way more to prepare for than three classes.

To make things worse, the L3 kids from the afternoon pseudo double-block aren’t really L3s, or even ESL, at all. They’re all native New Yorkers. Yeah they speak Spanish, and yeah they can’t write so well, but they speak English (or a Bronxed-up version thereof, at least) just fine.

Yesterday we were having a discussion about class rules, and I let the class suggest rules of their own. If they could give me a good reason why, I told them, I’d consider using their rules. I got a number of suggestions like, “We ain’t gotta come to school if we don’ wanna, cuz sometimes we be bored an’ ain’t feel like it.”

“Hmm,” I would say, scratching my chin. “I don’t know about that. If you don’t come to school you can’t learn anything, so that won’t work. How about I try to not make class boring, okay?”

No-one seemed particularly convinced that I would somehow manage, unlike every other teacher they’ve ever had, to render class interesting.

Sometime during all this a kid named Gabriel, with eyes bearing a remarkable resemblance to those of a turtle, wandered in late. He came in through the back-door and settled in with a group of wise-cracking guys in the back who were already giving me a hard time. I asked him and one of the other kids to please move to the front, and after considerable consternation they complied. Gabriel moved to the corner by the window, threw a t-shirt over his head and tried to go to sleep. This, of course, is not allowed, and I had to tell him so.

In the middle of this little back-and-forth another kid, one of the guys from the back, raised his hand.

“Mista, hey mista. I got a rule.”

“Yes Stanley, go ahead.”

“Yeah, like, my rule is ‘Don’t be comin’ into class late lookin’ all high an’ shit.’”

In the midst of my spiraling classroom management I hadn’t stopped to consider that tardy young Gabriel, with his swollen eyes covered by an over-sized t-shirt, was clearly blazed out of his skull. My naivety, combined with the slowly forming, glassy look of surprise and anger on Gabriel’s face was too much, and though I knew I shouldn’t do it, I couldn’t stifle a big grin at all this.

Stanley and few others then began to refer to Gabriel by a new nickname, Smokey.

“Okay, who wants to read the first paragraph? Come on guys, let’s have a volunteer.”

“Smokey’ll do it. Hey Smokey, c’mon, you wanna read, right?”

Keep in mind these kids are classified as Level 3. That means the text I am ostensibly required to use with them contains such intellectual English language challenges as this actual, no shit, this is actually in the book, “Food Chant.”

“Okay kids, repeat after me! Everybody now!”

“Pizza, pizza, pizza!”
“Pizza, pizza, pizza!”

“I’m hungry!”
“I’m hungry!”

“Hot dogs are good!”
“Hot dogs are good!”

“I’m hungry!”
“I’m hungry!”

And so on.

Actually, come to think of it, Gabriel probably could go for a pizza right about now.

Year 2, Week 1
The first week (or first 3/5 week, actually, Jewish New Year suckas!) is over, and the reviews are mixed. It’s certainly easier than the first week last year. I know where I’m going, how to deal with the attendance and other various paperwork, and have a somewhat better idea how to keep the kids in check and get a little something done. I also know a number of my students from last year, which helps a lot.

Some are kids I had in Level 1 last fall who have now advanced to Level 3. These kids are for the most part absolutely fucking awesome, at least by Shitty standards. They do enough work to get by, show up mostly, appear to actually want to learn English, have not yet been fully criminalized, and generally behave with a modicum of respect towards me if not their peers. This is because they had me when they first got here, I feel quite confident.

Other students that I know already are ones I failed in the same class last Spring or even last Fall, and while we have mostly (and grudgingly) developed a mutual and inexplicable fondness for one another, these kids are, to a one, big pains in my ass. For some reason these are not the kids who tried to work or listen or behave and just weren’t prepared or mature or confident enough to pass, who just needed a little more time and practice, they are the ones who could give a fuck about learning English, who respond to anything I say (no matter how polite or charming) with a sneer and snarling “Que?” The ones who right after I ask them to be quiet stand up and begin to clap and sing and grind their big round Dominican ass against one of their classmates, the ones who see me in the hall and smile and then cut my class anyway.

I also have a student - a really smart, self-confident and mature kid who is in Special Ed., as far as I can tell, because he has poor penmanship – who passed my Level 4 class last semester and is now, through a quirk of scheduling that ought to be resolved in 6 weeks or so, in one of my Level 3 classes.

So it’s easier, but I still wake up every morning full of woe and the desire to flee. It’s great that I have a little better idea of what I’m doing, but I also know exactly how much everyday sucks and will continue to suck, and bear no illusions of one day figuring it all out and being serenaded “To Sir, With Love.” (I do, however, still fantasize about looking like Sidney Poitier, but that’s a post for my other website, iwishiwasagoodlookingblackdude.blogspot.com). I was thinking the other day how much easier this year was so far, especially just being here from the beginning, and not getting thrown into things the third week of school. Then I thought about the fact that this year would therefore be two weeks longer than last year, and it was if my heart had been ripped out of my chest and shoved down my throat, and I was choking on my own dread.

School Pride
Shitty Bronx High School is now officially known as the Shitty Bronx Campus. This name change reflects the fact that the building now houses, up from two last year, a total of four ”mini-schools” in addition to the regular old high school.

The idea behind these mini-schools is not a bad one. A close-knit, small population of students and teachers focused around a specific interest or talent or need, art or business or bilingualism for example, is probably a very good thing for many people who are lost inhte shuffle of a giant, anonymous schools. Being the educational movement du jour, they have money (courtesy of a hefty Bill Gates grant) and support from the powers that be.

The problem is there is no room in the city to build new schools, so they are creating schools and then housing them within existing, already over-crowded, schools like Shitty.

This is no good for anybody. We at Shitty, especially the veterans, resent having even less of our already insufficient space and resources given to these interlopers, who never seem to lack for a book-room or a teacher’s lounge or a faculty bathroom (we’re going to have to go all Ally Mcbeal unisex this year) or have to teach classes in a converted broom-closet in the basement the way we do. There’s also the fact that regular Shitty students are likely to feel even more like born losers when compared to all these “special” students from “special” schools within their midst.

The mini-schools aren’t happy either. They don’t have their own space, have to deal with all the bureaucratic bullshit that a giant school entails, and have to worry about getting jumped or stabbed by Shitty’s roving student criminals. These poor kids from a music mini-school are going to have a hell of a time coming through the metal detectors every morning with their trumpets and tubas and flutes and flugelhorns.

They’re terrified and pissed and have been raising a big stink in all the papers about being put into such a violent, chaotic environment as Shitty. It’s funny, as much as I agree with their assessment, I think they’re a bunch of whiny little bitches. We deal with this crap every day, and, while not the most wholesome educational environment (unless you consider a minimum security prison to be a wholesome educational environment) I never fear for my safety.

Part of me wants Shitty kids to help all their worst fears come true, to rise up and take Shitty back, to beat down all these uppity band-dorks.

“Welcome to Shitty, nigga! Wha'appen? How you gonna win your choral competition with a clarinet stuffed down your throat? Yuh yuh! You ol’ punk-ass bitch…”

The Coming Distribution Super-storm
Our new principal, Ron Popeil, started off with a flash and a sizzle. He’s certainly more enthusiastic than was the witch. He read, “modeled,” for us a bed-time story, Stone Soup, and even provided a sumptuous breakfast spread of pancakes and eggs and bacon and coffee (sumptuous compared to the stale bagels and war-rations of cream cheese that were such a rare delight last year). He even winked at me, creepy touchy-feely, Christian guy style. Perhaps he’s trying to put one over on us.

By Friday he’d gone from a suit and tie to t-shirt and jeans, and we’d already exhausted all three of his promised limit of dreadful faculty meetings with nary a trace of any more bacon or eggs.

There has been, however, a major snafu. We received our Distribution assignments on Thursday. Mine is G1W. This means that whenever there’ is something to be given to the students - programs, grades, free-lunch applications, Metrocards – we have a special schedule with an extra period, and all the students in a Distribution group report to their assigned Distribution class to get their stuff.

This is a poorly designed system to begin with. It screws up the day by shortening all the other classes, and more importantly, it puts a group of 30-odd kids with a teacher they don’t know at all. Thus chaos ensues with kids dicking around and sitting on desks and walking around the room and leaving as soon they have their stuff (or rioting like Russians in a bread-line to get their precious Metrocards; they aren’t nearly as concerned with their Report Cards). Because what do they care if their Distribution Teacher gets mad at them?

Other schools have certain periods designated as Distribution periods, and on those appointed days, their regular teacher gives out the necessary materials, thus the day proceeds according to regular schedule and you don’t have roomfuls of kids with teachers they don’t know. Other schools also have the radical idea to give students their schedules before the first day of school, so that the first day of school can be used to, you know, begin teaching.

Not Shitty. We received our assignments and a schedule informing us that Monday was to be a special hour-long Distribution. We were also given, in a move rather insulting to our nominal status as professionals and adults, 12-point step-by-step instructions of how to seat the children, take attendance, and distribute the materials.

This is an inconvenient and poorly designed system, but it is a system none-the-less, and the students generally end up receiving the papers they need and having some vague notion of what their schedules are.

This year there was a problem, though. The students were never informed of which Distribution class they are in, so when they show up on Monday no-one will know where they are to go, at which point they will begin to fuck like monkeys and/or rip the flesh from each others bones.

The solution to this problem was to create an entirely new, temporary, set of distribution assignments based upon an alphabetical list of the students’ last names. For some reason this required a three hour meeting to explain.

Pistol P
My buddy P, aka The Pistol, has a very similar gig to mine. He’s a first year High School ESL teacher too, only he’s out in Ozone Park, Queens, old Gambino stomping grounds. The Gambinos and their goombahs are still around, but they’re getting pushed out fast by a wave of South Asians. P has a ton of Bengalis and Indians in his class. I don’t think he has too many Italianos.

P played in the student/teacher basketball game at his school one Friday and you know, despite the nearly two-hour Subway ride from Shitty to the OP, Mr. Babylon had to be there.

P and I shared MVP honors on our 8th grade basketball team. This, along with the time I came really, really, close to dunking, was the highlight of my basketball career. P, however, was just getting started. He grew tall. He honed a killer jumpshot (hence the Pistol,) he developed his handles, and somewhere came up with a deadly quickness that no-one knew he had.

He led our tiny high school to the state championship game, won lots of awards, and went on to play for a couple of different colleges, and even got in a handful of professional games over in Europe where he did quite well.

Now he’s in Ozone Park teaching ESL, and this basketball game offered the perfect opportunity for him to show some of his students that he’s more than the buttoned-down grammarian they’ve come to know every day in English class, or so I hoped.

I rode the A-Train way out deep through the vastness of Brooklyn all the way into the OP. I grabbed a couple of White Castles (jalepeno good, cheese bad,) and made my way around to the back of the gym, where P had told me I was expected. I just needed to mention his name.

I had to yell back and forth with an old deaf coach for a while but was finally allowed inside the gym where things were already bumping, packed to the rafters with rowdy High School students. The OP High School boys’ varsity squad was warming up and putting on quite a dunk show. This one kid, #11, could absolutely fly, which must have had something to do with why the crowd called him “JFK.” The crowd was loving it. Girls were dancing and screaming, and the boys were pushing each other and running back and forth waving their hands like they just got religion.

Then, not to be outdone, the teacher’s squad, which included a short, fat guy who had to use both hands to dribble, came out with du-rags on and started zig-zagging around the court in some sort of imitation of a figure-8 drill. This soon morphed into your standard tap-drill, where the first guy dribbles up to the basket like he’s going for a lay-up, jumps up and bounces it off the backboard to the next guy who runs in, jumps up and bounces it again, continuing until the last guy jumps up and lays it in or, hopefully, dunks it off the carom.

The crowd was already howling with laughter over the sight of all these middle-aged white guys running around with du-rags on, but when the tap-drill started, and quickly went south (some of these guys couldn’t even get off the ground, let alone put the ball back up where the next guy could get it,) they went absolutely ape-shit. P, the only teach not wearing a du-rag, was the final man in the drill and made a valiant attempt to finish, but the guy in front of him whiffed so bad he wasn’t even close.

I was not optimistic about what was fixing to go down.

It started off okay, the teachers starting five wasn’t as bad as I expected. They had a few guys that were clearly YMCA veterans, passing well, setting nasty screens, banging the boards, and knocking down some open jumpers. P missed a couple of open 3s (his specialty,) though, and otherwise was being way too passive, and the students were hitting absolutely everything they threw up. They must have shot 75% in the first half, which they ended up by almost 20.

P owned the 3d quarter, though. First he went up really high and intercepted an alley-oop tossed to #11, who was pissed. While “JFK” was pouting his missed highlight, P took it the other way, crossed somebody over, and had a sweet no-look pass to another teacher for the lay up. The crowd started to murmur. P then went on a little scoring roll, hitting a couple of step-back 12-footers, and driving to the hole for a couple of nice lay-ups. The students’ lead was down to single digits. The crowd was actually cheering for P now.

Then P poked a pass away and headed down the right sideline with a speedy, pesky, little, water-bug guy guarding him tight. P went behind his back to the left, spun back around to the right and jammed it all over the little speedster’s head.

Oh shit.

Half the kids in the stands were stomping up and down and falling out, while the other half began heckling the student team.

JFK blew another alley-oop and P had a couple more buckets and another dunk in transition to wind up the third quarter with the students clinging to a slight lead. Then the inexplicable happened. P went to the bench. The teachers apparently were operating under some sort of Mighty Mights, equal-minutes-no-matter-how-sorry-you-are rule. By the time he got back in the game it was over, and the students won handily.

P and I left after politely declining to hit happy hour in the OP with his teammates. On the way out a couple of lady security guards looked him up and down before slapping him 5 and declaring, “You da man!”

Outside a group of girls were walking ahead of us.

“You the teacher dunked on them boys?” one of them turned and asked.

“Yeah,” he nodded, and we kept walking.

“What your name is?”

“Mr. P,” he said, a little louder this time.

“Mr. P!” all the girls screamed in unison.

“Next time we see you walking down the hall,” the lead girl continued, “we all gonna be like…"

"Mr. P!” they all shrieked again in unison.

P and I just smiled.

Mentor
Iris Goldstein is my mentor at Shitty Bronx High School. It’s official. She gets paid to do it. I didn’t know she was getting paid for quite some time and thought she was just being nice, which I found odd, because she’s not a very nice person.

Goldstein is in her 50s and is old-school Bronx Jewish all-the-way. She actually went to Shitty Bronx High School a million years ago when she was a young (and presumably less bitter) lady. And she is very bitter indeed. She also has a hunchback, which her students, of course, love.

She tried to help me at first, I think. She gave me a bag of little plastic animal toys that she had used when she taught elementary school. She suggested I might use them with my Level 1 kids. These young people are 15 to 19 years old. Most of them are sexually active. Many of them are in gangs. They were not interested in toy giraffes.

Mostly though, her mentoring consists of one-liners delivered from her phlegm-filled throat through her garishly lip-sticked lips.

“No one does any of the work I assign,” I will tell her when she asks me how my classes are going.

“They are not exactly intellectual giants,” she will respond, which is mostly true, but not very helpful.

I shouldn’t have expected much, I guess, because Goldstein is a terrible teacher herself. She writes an assignment on the board, then sits at her desk and reads the Times whiled the kids eat candy and, litter, and simulate sex in the back of the class.

That’s when she’s there. She uses a sick day at least twice a week. She even faked a broken arm that kept her out for almost six weeks. Loud weeping was heard coming from the student bathrooms on the day of her return.

In her ultimate bid to get out of work she accused a student of sexually harassing her by looking down her shirt. This is a 50-something year old woman… with a hunchback. All the students in the class claimed that she was leaning over, her saggy flapjack teats dangling, while everyone did their best to avoid the horrific sight before them.

Coffee Clutch
Chock Full O’ Nuts is terrible coffee really, under any circumstances, and I’m not a coffee snob. I don’t like instant, my parents drink that Folgers Crystals stuff and it sucks, but I’ll drink most anything else. Deli coffee, fine. Cofee-cart coffee, not bad, 2 sugars please. Starbucks too strong, too bitter, too corporate? Tastes great to me.

Chock Full O’ Nuts is crap though, and that’s what we have in the ESL department of Shitty Bronx High School. I don’t know who makes these decisions, but it’s not me. I’d complain, but I’m sure the alternative is worse. I paid $20 (to Mrs. Robinns of course) for the privilege of drinking this coffee daily. They call this arrangement, this co-operative effort, a “Coffee Clutch,” I don’t know why.

There’s no milk or cream, or any refrigerator to put such delicacies in for that matter, so the options are non-dairy creamer or black. I choose black. I also go no sugar. I went with the creamer and the sugar at first, but it still tasted like shit, so I figured black was healthier, or not quite so toxic at least.

So I choke my little Styrofoam cup or two of coffee down - black, weak, soapy - like it’s cough medicine or a shot of Jagermeister, and it gets me through the day. I try going without every now and then if I’m feeling adventurous and reasonably not hung-over. My subsequent low energy level generally rubs off on the kids and we have a relatively mellow day. I’d do it more often if I could.

The worst part about the coffee is the water. I know where it comes from. Sometimes I even go to get it myself. I know what you’re imagining. Most offices have one of those big, blue water cooler things, glug-glug. We don’t. It’s a school though, right? So we’ve got water fountains. Nope, they’re broken and filled with lung-oysters and sometimes even urine.

So when I must play martyr and go fill up the coffee pot with water, I trudge down to the teacher bathroom, unlock it with my key, brace myself for the wall of disinfectant/urine/sewage stench and wade in, nostrils flared. There I must fill up the pot in the sink, the same sink everyone (or everyone who’s not completely disgusting) uses after they’ve taken a dump, approximately six inches away from the pube-garden of the urinal. This is not a quick process either. The faucet is the type you punch down on causing an allotment of water to spurt out. This allotment of water is not enough to wash your hands with or even get them wet. It could make them damp, if you had small hands. So I stand there surrounded by stench, coffee pot wedged into the sink, trying not to touch any tainted porcelain, and punching the faucet over and over until the pot is full. I then emerge - inevitably a student is there and looks from me to the bathroom to the coffee pot with visible disgust - and return to the office to brew up another pot of Chock Full o’ Nuts.

Here's to You
My department at Shitty High School in the Bronx is filled with all sorts of people, diversity at work. A patchwork quilt. A tossed salad. Mixed nuts. My favorite co-worker of all is a lady we’ll call Mrs. Robinns. I’m not sure what her official title is - School Aide, Para-professional, Head Flunky to the AP? – but nothing happens around the office without her touch. She doles out stacks of dog-eared books from the bookroom to which only she has a key. She knows where the coffee filters and cups are kept, a secret place she disappears to without a word as soon as someone whines that our supply has been depleted. She’s the only person who knows how to fix the copy and Rizo (high volume copier) machines.

Pretty much every morning the first thing I do is walk in and ask Mrs. Robinns for something, and pretty much every morning she responds by pausing, smiling genuinely, saying “good morning,” and then doing whatever it is that I need done.

An angel in a pantsuit and tacky red lipstick, Mrs. Robinns makes things happen, and that insistence on polite pleasantry in every interaction is often the only thing keeping me from stalking around all day in a black cloud of rage.

Mrs. Robinns is also the one around the office who’s always nagging for $2 for a card for the retirement of someone I’ve never met (which often makes those storm-clouds rumble,) and she’s always the one organizing end-of-semester dinners, happy hours and the like.

It was at one such Happy Hour where the subject of Mrs. Robinns’s illustrious tennis career came up. Once a week or so she’ll cut out of work early (or, more accurately, not stay late, as is her usual) to play tennis. She seems reasonably fit for her age, mid-fifties. She’s slender, not very strong (she’s often asking for my help lifting boxes) and she never takes the stairs. So I figured she played tennis for fun once or twice a week. Perhaps she used to be good as a younger lady. Turns out she’s a superstar.

She started playing on a whim when she went back to college. The overhand smash came naturally to her, as did a powerful forehand and a ferociously accurate two-handed backhand. Her topspin lobs dropped like bricks, rocking opponents tumbling back on their asses. Fans kept track of her ace’s as if she was Dwight Gooden throwing strikes. She’d never heard of a double fault in her life.

She lost only once her first year, playing against men because there was no women’s team. Every match was a Battle of the Sexes. Every small college tennis complex was the Astrodome. Every cocky, preppy, 20 year old was Bobby Riggs, only Mrs. Robinns didn’t even have Billy Jean’s youth and experience on her side, only her nascent talent. She had never played before in her life. She was 42 years old.

They ended up starting a women’s squad just for her (and likely so she’d stop embarrassing 18 to 22 year old men) and she went undefeated her next three years. Ten plus years later she still regularly wins tournaments playing against men and women half her age.

My hero. She ought to have her own postage stamp.

The nights are hot, and Days is crazy
Hope, Patrick, Roman, Gramma and others are trapped on an island, behind a force-field, in an alternate Salem. Also the guy from the Real World never wears a shirt, and they just up and replaced Belle, Aunt Vivian style. If I was casting it would have been Anna, late of the OC. She's not working right now is she?

Day 2
"Fuck You, Mr. Babylon"

This was written across the chalkboard in two-foot high letters, sans punctuation, when I entered the maelstrom of my L3RE class for the second time ever. Students were running around screaming and laughing and smacking each other upside the head with their little flimsy shoestring-satchel Nike bookbags. They all stopped and stared expectantly when I walked in and saw the board.

“Oh shit,” someone said under her breath.

Someone else blurted out something in rapid-fire Spanish, and everyone laughed, some even falling down and kicking and banging furniture and the lockers, Def Comedy Jam style, for hilarious emphasis.

I put my bag down, sighed heavily, and turned around with my best screw-face. The class paused, inhaled, and began to laugh even harder. I began barking orders at the students to sit down and shut up. They barked back in Spanish, or mocking English, but no-one obeyed.

A student walked in late, Dominican guy, with his curly hair died blonde at the tips and an over-sized pink t-shirt on. I had seen him walking out of the class as I arrived. He surveyed the class from the front of the room. Everyone seemed to hush slightly in anticipation. He looked at the board, which in the chaos, I still hadn’t erased.

“Fuck You, Mr. Babylon!” he read gleefully, and turned to me with a smile.

I screwed my face up even further. “Wh-what’s your name? Who are you?” I stammered, stabbing the air with the still unused eraser.

“What? I just reading the board. I reading the assignment!” He explained with a giggle and a wink towards the class.

“We s’posed to read the board, right?”

Like Sands Through the Hourglass
It's summer vacation. I'm smoking heavily, sleeping past noon, and watching Days of Our Lives, but I also plan on going back and filling a bunch of holes in the story so far, things I didn't have time to write up before, updating often. Consider yourself warned.

First Day, First Hour
I was hired here at this shitty Bronx High School, with remarkably little scrutiny and even less fanfare. It’s just another example of the swamp of disorganization and chaos that is the school system. I spend all summer looking for a job, calling principals, faxing resumes, shaving and getting gussied up in a tie to schlep from table to table at maddening job-fairs, to no avail. Then, two weeks into the year, I walk in, speak for three minutes with Assistant Principal Mrs. S******, a distracted, tiny little old lady with shoulder pads in her jacket and big glasses giving her a tortoise-like appearance, and I’m hired. No interview, no sample lesson, nothing. You’re hired you start tomorrow. You speak Spanish? No? Whatever. Be here by 9:25.

So I showed up the next day, early in fact, sweating nerves and from the fact that my only dress shirt was of the thick blue Oxford type, and it was still in the 90s out, and the school, like the subway stations, has no air conditioning. Also I hadn’t worn a tucked in shirt outside of a funeral or for more than an hour at a time since I started dressing myself, and my khaki pants, purchased hastily at some discount store in Harlem, were just slightly too short, causing me to constantly adjust them by pulling down on my hips, where they wouldn’t stay and, I thought, combined with my billowy, wrinkled, tucked-in shirt, uncomfortably accentuated my general scrawniness in a way my usual hipster attire – which shows off the lean, wiry, hirsute machine that I am – thankfully do not.

I was given a schedule, a Delaney Book (an arcane attendance record device featuring slotted pages and hundreds of cards slightly bigger than 2 postage stamps, corresponding to each student, on which I was to somehow record addresses, phone and identification numbers, and every day of their attendance or lack thereof) and stacks and stacks of paperwork to fill out, and that was it. No curriculum, no instructions, no pep-talk, nothing. I was starting to sense a pattern. I was nervous but not scared. I was, in fact, pretty confidant that these kids would think I was Miles Davis after I came in, as I planned to do, and showed them that writing and reading could be hip and witty and dangerous and relevant. They would write essays about Biggie vs. Tupac, and they would love me. I planned on ignoring every bitter old codger who had told me not to smile until Thanksgiving. I would kill ‘em with kindness. All I had to do was be, you know, real.

I walked into my first class, L3RE (level 3), ready to be a next-millennium Mr. Kotter to my eager Sweathogs. A young woman teacher was already present, standing in the front of the room shuffling papers or writing on the board or doing some such teacherly thing.

I sidled up and informed her that this was my class. She looked confused. I showed her my schedule. She sighed and slammed her Delaney Book closed and hurried out of the room, muttering something about “fucking ridiculous bullshit” as she left. The kids were mine.

Born Again
I, Hombreblanco, am now Mr. Babylon. Why? Because I'm the teacher, and I said so. Now, take out your notebook and copy the "Do-Now."

Come, We Drink
I’ve become quite the weekend-warrior these days. It’s sad I know. Back when I worked in fantasy land I used to hate those workaday slobs, raging against the dieing of their life’s light, taking all the parking spots and making all the bars too crowded to enjoy. I am now one of them, those that I once held in such disdain.

There’s something about the stress of teaching, the early mornings, the hour long subway rides, the little Styrofoam cups of toxic Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee, the yelling, the pleading, the frustration of having 100-odd young people a day not listen to me. It creates in me a strong need to spend my weekends, painfully short as they are, faded, fucked up, and faded some more.

So this past Friday a good friend and I were in Brooklyn sipping on some cheap Canadian whisky, when some drunk girls begin calling incessantly, insisting he come out to Sheepshead Bay, where, apparently, the party was live. My friend has a car and no girlfriend, and we didn’t have shit else to do, so we headed out that way, cheefing off the one-hitter as we cruised the surreally Sci-Fi Beltway deep around Brooklyn, under the neon Vegas set of the Verazano Bridge, past Coney Island and its vast Soviet-style block-housing, and into Sheepshead Bay.

We met the ladies at the spot, a very local looking establishment called ( I shit you not) the Townie Lounge. This place reminded me of some country bars back in Texas, with a crowd of silver foxes drinking heavily and dancing with their spouses. Only these folks were straight out of some kind of Cyrillic Goodfellas. The women - all of whom were pushing 50 - had platinum hair, fake tits and slutty cocktail dresses on. The men, silver-haired gentlemen mostly, wore silk and lots of gold, shiny shirts unbuttoned half-way down their barrel chests, pinky rings flashing as they lit cigars and sipped on big glasses of vodka.

You know how sometimes when you’re watching a mob movie you think to yourself that this shit has to be an exaggeration, that no-one actually dresses like that, no-one actually behaves so crassly and obviously like a gangster? You’re wrong. They do. Organized crime is real and thriving and just as tacky as in the movies, at least among the Russians of Sheepshead Bay it is.

The girls we met were wasted, obnoxious, sarcastic, and ugly, a mixture of dorky Teaching-Fellows and bitter grad-school types; together we soon left, my friend and I wondering aloud why they had neglected to warn us that we would be wandering onto the real-life set of Das Casino.

The next bar was a different scene altogether, yet equally foreign to my experience, and somehow inter-connected with the Townie Lounge. It was a much more pleasant place, with lots of wood and soft-lighting, and a much younger crowd. The Russian girls were smoking hot, irresistible in their simultaneous ability to be exotic and white. They were all with big, young Russian guys in tight rubber shirts, and they were all yelling incessantly at each other in Russian. A cheesy young guy with an acoustic guitar was breezing through Eagles and Beatles tunes (including a version of "Hey Jude" sung as "Hey Jew," which I wasn't sure whether to take as a threat or not) while his leggy percussionist slapped her tambourine and appeared more and more erotically aroused with every note-plucked and blackbird flown.

Just to see if it was possible, I tried to warm-up the bitchiest of the unattractive ice-queens (the one who greeted everything anyone said with a snort and an “ok” hand-sign) we were with by pushing past her bitchy façade and asking about her job. She seemed to warm up for a minute, before quickly freezing back over in a massive eye-roll, snort, “ok,” fit of misdirected sarcasm.

I was outside by myself smoking a cigarette and watching souped-up Nissan Maxima after souped-up Nissan Maxima roll past, when an elderly, drunk Russian man with big, thick, Junior Soprano glasses, approached me.

“I am tdrrunk. I will tdrrive,” he informed me with a sway and a sly grin.

I engaged him in polite conversation, asking if he had far to go, or if he lived in the neighborhood.

“No. I live far, long way,” he told me. “I live there,” he continued, pointing at the building on the corner.

I didn’t press him on his inconsistency. He was old, and very drunk, and his English was pretty halting.

“’Ss OK. I am cop,” he then told me. “No tdrrouble. I am cop.”

He then pulled out a very real looking badge with his picture on it.

“I am cop.” He repeated and chuckled.

This guy was way to old, and spoke way too little English to be a cop, I thought, but what did I know. Maybe out there in Sheeepshead Bay the cops have to speak Russian.

“Are you a cop around here, in the neighborhood?” I asked, hoping to get some stories out of him, but he only grunted in response, appearing not to understand my question.

“How long have you been a cop?” I tried again.

“Long time. Long time.” He assured me. “I am constdrruction,” he added, changing his story. “Cop is hobby. Just hobby,“ he explained. “I am constdrruction. I get in tdrrouble... no tdrrouble. I am cop. Constdrruction.”

I was slightly bugged out by all this, but I was more fascinated than anything, and I continued to smile at my teetering, elderly, possibly very dangerous, new acquaintance.

“Come, come we tdrrink. You are friend, we tdrrink,” he offered, grabbing my arm and leading me back inside the bar.

Once inside he led me to the back, stumbling frequently and grabbing onto me for support. At the end of the bar he found two of his friends, a muscular young Russian guy in a tight black rubber club-shirt and the skuzziest looking Russo-trash dude in the whole place, week’s stubble, greasy black ponytail, eyebrow ring, and a soccer jersey.

My new friend introduced me to these fellows, who weren’t nearly as friendly as he, though they did oblige him and give up their barstools for us. My friend then made the younger guy buy me a drink.

“Wodka, cognac, vhat you vant? You are friend, you are guest. Anything you vant.”

The royal treatment. I chose vodka. This was great. I had apparently met the right guy. I was wondering where the fuck my friend was, as I was pretty much surrounded, trapped there at the end of the bar if something were to go wrong. No big deal, though, and we continued to chat.

“I work in the Bronx. It’s much different than here,” I offered by way of conversation, and I received an appropriately ridiculous reply having something to do with a “meeting tomorrow in Bronx,” with “big developer. Italian. Mafia. I am constdrruction, Bronx. Constdrruction,” and on like that.

My new friend and I were both into our second vodka when he turned to me, laid his hand heavily on my shoulder and said a very surprising thing.

“You are man? You are gay?”

I looked up at this drunk old fake-cop, at his techno linebacker friend, and at his KGB junkie hitman friend, and I was very afraid. I was also good and drunk.

“What? No! What kind of question is that?” I stammered, and he mumbled something incoherent in response, before then whispering something to his tight-shirted friend. No-one said anything. I looked at my drink suspiciously, convinced now that it had been spiked with something, and that I would soon pass out only to awaken under the Brighton Beach boardwalk soaked in urine, burned by cigarettes, mouth stuffed with pickled whitefish, having been buggered forcibly and beaten mercilessly by these psycho Russian gangster perverts.

“Is ok,” he assured me a minute later. “We are Russian. We like fuck women. We like fuck men. We like fuck anything that moves.”

With that I was vanquished, never again to return to Sheepshead bay.

Sexual Yeti
S****, the big, loud, unlikable, survivalist teacher from the fire, has been at it again. He eats lunch the same period as me. He does not however, eat lunch the same way as me, or any other civilized human-being for that matter.

He sits in the cafeteria hunched over his heaping tray, his broad, lumpy, back curled protectively over his chicken patty and string beans with a New York Times in his left hand. Meanwhile his right hand blindly grabs sloppy fistfuls of whatever it can reach, then angrily shoves the food into his big, droopy, face. Salad, potato-salad, macaroni, it doesn’t matter. It’s like watching a starving yeti tear into a rotting elk corpse.

Oh yeah, he also regularly asks out many of the younger female teachers, inviting them on secluded hikes upstate, or to grungy parks in the Bronx, for a “glass of beer.” He has yet to have an invitation accepted.

Finally, rumor has it he’s been sexually harassing a voluptuous young freshman in one of his classes. Whenever she leaves her seat, he sneaks over surreptitiously and discretely places there photographs of big-assed beach-babes in thongs.

Nutjobs Abound

There is an older black woman who teaches in the English department. I don’t know her name but we’ve been friendly since we sat in solidarity next to each other at some kind-of useless “reading RAMP-Up” or other such nonsense this summer. She’s from LA, where she taught for 30-odd years, and she has a quivery Grandma and fried chicken Southern accent with which she speaks through an unfortunately large set of lips that protrude obscenely out of and above an unsightly under-bite. She dresses in that distinctive way older, single women sometimes do that is always referred to as quirky or eccentric. She’s pretty funny, mumbling things like, “This shit is ridiculous,” in her trembly drawl as we pass each other in the halls amidst the whistle-blowing cops, screaming kids and blaring fire-alarm.

I ran into her yesterday in the library and gave her the special smile and “How ya doin?” that I reserve exclusively for older ladies that I think are hip.

“What do you know about landlord law?” she asked, shaking her way towards me.

“Who do I need to call,” she continued, “if there’s a secret passage in my apartment?”

I suddenly realized she had me cornered between the periodicals and her layers of flowey skirts and baggy sweatshirts, and I felt a little trapped.

I grunted a non-committal reply and tried to give her a quizzical look that I hoped casually said, “Please explain,” without screaming, “Holy Shit! You’re fucking looney tunes!”

“I know there’s a secret passage because people have been coming into my apartment when I’m not there, they’ve been using my stuff,” she explained, and I wasn’t about to argue.

“I wrote the landlord a letter, and he just ignored it,” she went on, “so I need to take this to the authorities. They’re coming into my house.”

I decided my best course of action was to act as if what she had just told me was a perfectly sane, normal thing to say.

“Pictures. You gotta take pictures. You ever watch ‘The People’s Court?’ If you’re going after your landlord, you need pictures of the,” I choked a little on this last part, “the secret passage.”

“Well, you can’t see the secret passage. It’s just a wall. All you can see is the wall.”

Yeah, no shit it's just a wall.

“Well then, at least get pictures of the damage the, uh, intruders do,” I actually said before going on to specify that, although I am no expert, it’s my definite opinion that her complaints be delivered to the Housing Authority. I then excused myself and walked away muttering, another day closer to the secret passage myself.

Spring Fever
Spring is bursting out all over NYC. Every tree on every street is exploding with fragrant flowers. Women everywhere seem to have morphed overnight into leggy, brickhouse Goddesses with big designer sunglasses. They also all seem to have taken up exhibitionism. Scanty is the new black.

Not in the Bronx though. Not at my High School. The great, grey, paperbark maples lining the drive lean heavy under day-long rain, stretching towards the park to the north, and still bereft of even the tiniest sprout of new growth. The school’s blonde brick façade remains in mourning, forever draped in the black veil of scaffolding and opaque, black dust netting. Although hammers can sometimes be heard banging in the late afternoon, and dust chokes the windows that must always be kept open to alleviate the stifling heat that pores incessantly off the radiators, it still appears that no progress has been made, nothing has changed beneath the school’s rehabilitative cloak.

Still every 10 minutes the train rattles by, its speeding silver cars emblazoned with a neon-red “8,” taunting with swift passage to the sunshine and flowers of home, of the park, and happy hours, and matinee movies. I’m stuck here in this Bronx High School, and time keeps dragging on.

Mo' Murder
Got back from a very welcome February Break to learn that another student had been killed. Valentin Hernandez was a senior with a baseball scholarship to college. 3:00am after a party he had the shit kicked out of him by a crowd of guys and then was stabbed to death as he lay unconscious on the street. The story is he was on the wrong block (read: not in the right gang,) but it sounds more and more like the beating stemmed from an altercation over a girl at the party.

There weren’t any riots this time. But the walls were covered with tribute posters, many from young ladies who seem to be under the impression that they were Valentin’s one and only. Go Valentin.

Friday after-school in the teacher’s cafeteria at a monthly student open-mic poetry thing - normally a mix of bad, clichéd, cloyingly positive poetry and bad, clichéd, comically violent rap - all the talk was of Valentin.

Lots of cheesy poems were read, a couple of girls glared holes in each others foreheads, and the vibe was pretty heavy. “Legacy,” a mildly talented rapper who takes himself way too seriously and is always at the Open Mic despite the fact that he graduated at least 3 years ago, was even more melodramatic than he usually is. Dude ends nearly every performance on his knees, veins popping on his neck, staring plaintively towards heaven and wiping a mock tear from his eye. It’s pretty silly, but when spitting about his dead friend, to a room full of his dead friend’s friends, it worked.

The real highlight of the Open Mic wasn’t an ode to the dead though, just a good old fashioned celebration of the eternal bump n’ grind. Last performance of the afternoon two guys walked up to the mic, cleared their throats, and unleashed a quiet storm upon the room, busting out an a capella version of Usher’s “Nice and Slow,” a song I’d never given a second thought to before.

From the opening line, “It’s 7 o’ clock/ on the dot/ I’m in my drop-top/ cruisin’ the streets,” it was hypnotic. The guys were smooth. The crowd started swaying, girls were singing along (“...ain’t gotta rush,” “I-I wanna do something freaky to you,”) and the teacher’s cafeteria, with it’s industrial green paint and trashcans full of discarded, half-eaten Salisbury steaks and tater-tots, was transformed into the syrupy center of a monumentally deep groove. When the song ended the sound guy announced he had the beat, and they did it all over again, this time just holding the mics out and letting the crowd carry the jam. It was the kind of genuine, spine-chilling, spontaneous, shared musical experience you never actually have, and a more fitting tribute to Valentin, our slain Cassanova, I can’t imagine.

A few hours before it had been announced that yet another student, Phillip Prince, had been murdered at the train-station 5:30pm the evening before, shot point-blank in the chest with a shotgun for unknown reasons. Peter was Special Ed, always high, and never said a word, that anyone (any adult at least) ever heard. Nobody at school seemed to give much of a shit about his passing, but someone has been canvasing the neighborhood with a can of Rusto silver writing "RIP Phillip" on every available surface.

Beard Report
Three separate students have informed me that my beard makes me look like Osama bin Laden. It’s working!

Honeymoon
So far so good. The new semester is going so much smoother than the last one. I haven’t had more than a minute or two of dead time at the end of class (a major problem for me last semester), and no-one has cussed at me, thrown anything at me, or evenly openly defied me. My stress level is approaching zero. It’s like the fucking Twilight Zone.

Starting from day one has made a difference, as has not having more than 22 kids in any one class (as opposed to over 40 at this time last semester), not to mention my experience from last semester. I think I learned a lot, but it was already too late to get control of classes that I’d already lost, which was pretty much all of them. There also don’t seem to be as many little punk-ass fuckhead bastards on my rolls. That helps.

Better still, I’m like a celebrity in the halls. All my old students greet me enthusiastically with much exchanging of hand-slaps, snaps, and pounds. Even an old nemesis like Melva greeted me fondly.

“How are you? Como estas?” I asked her.

“I am missing you, Mr. Babylon," she replied with genuine affection. What a sweetheart.

We’ll see how long this honeymoon lasts.

Beard
I’ve grown a beard for the new semester. I think it makes me look more authoritative.

Heartbreak Hotel
Regents week just ended. It’s a week full of “high-stakes” standardized testing, and a monumental waste of time. No lesson planning though, which is nice. I had to be there at 8:00 am every morning. That meant leaving the house by 7:00, but it wasn’t so bad, since I was supposed to be getting out early.

I proctored two tests, both for Special Ed kids. Monday was a Math RCT, a test apparently reserved for Special Ed seniors so I had a room full of 19 and 20 year olds, an envelope of test booklets, and a couple of boxes of calculators.

I was given absolutely zero instructions on how to administer this exam. When to start, what to say, what questions to answer, whether to let anyone go the bathroom. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone else though, so I didn’t let it bother me. I guess no-one in administration is too concerned with how these 7th year seniors do on their 2nd tier math exam. Their must not be any money tied up in it.

They were generally a sweet, quiet group of kids. I think the test totally freaked them out. Most of them seemed like your average ******* student, just unfortunately stuck in the dead-end of the sped track. A few were genuinely slow though. One kid kept asking me to read the word problems to him. I obliged him, though I was sure I was violating some kind of testing protocol.

Tuesday I was assigned to administer Day 2 of English Regents. This was apparently a much bigger deal, with all kinds of testing ID numbers, assigned seating, 3 forms of attendance etc… The funny thing was these kids seemed a lot less concerned with the test. Four or five straggled in well after the test had begun, and therefore missed my impassioned and precisely articulated reading of the directions. One kid, Elvis, came in late, went to sleep for an hour, the got up and left.

Hail to the King.

Blotto
Saw an article in the “Blotter” section of the Post today. 6 kids were arrested for a racially motivated assault against a white girl at ******* High School last month. That’s the first I’d heard about that. (not to mention, I don't think I've ever seen a white girl around.) They don’t tell us shit around here.

Fire and amongst the Flames, Freaks
Finals were given (by requirement) last Thursday and Friday, and Regions testing is next week, leaving this week with nothing to for us to do and no motivation for the kids to do it. I signed up for the VCR on Thursday, but neglected to plan on what movie we would actually watch. Last minute, I borrowed a copy of “Amelie” from another teacher, and popped it in for the kids. The fact that this movie is in French and way too subtle and sophisticated for my class full of Spanish-speaking 15 year olds was not to deter me from not teaching jack-shit this week.

The kids didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on in the movie, but neither did they seem to mind much. Some slept, some talked amongst themselves, and some even laughed at bits of Jeunet’s wacky visual humor, this despite the fact that the fire alarm was (as it is want to do) screaming incessantly from the hall.

The alarm went on for a minute or two, and we all ignored it as usual, until AP Motto’s voice crackled over the intercom, instructing us to evacuate the building immediately.

“Let’s go, now. Vamanos, ajora.” I was calm but deadly serious. I don’t know where this voice of authority and steely resolve came from but it worked. The kids were up and heading for the door immediately. I don’t think they’ve ever responded to me with such obedience.

I shut the VCR off, thinking this was probably the last time I would see the thing, seeing as how the classroom door doesn’t lock.

We shuffled into the madding crowds and downstairs and outside into the 20 degree air where I suddenly remembered I had no jacket. There were no signs of fire, but fire engines began rolling up almost immediately as thousands of kids milled about on both sides of the street and frantic deans directed traffic around the crowds.

I stood across the street, a little away from the crowds and watched my kids interact sans supervision. It wasn’t much different than usual. I saw fellow teacher Sexual Yeti walking away towards a parking lot down the street, and wondered if maybe the old codger had finally had enough and was burning off for good. He sidled up to me a few minutes later, now clad in a purple fleece and a downright fruity purple and pink knit cap.

“This is a real wake-up call,” he informed, managing to be loud and overbearing even as he talked under his breath.

“Yeah, sure is… uhh, how’s that?” I asked, thinking he was talking about the danger of all the false fire alarms or something.

“Well, in this time – post 9-11 – of international or domestic terrorism or what have you, you can never be too prepared,” he replied, and I was immediately sorry I had asked.

Apparently he had grabbed the jacket and hat out of his van. He just happened to have them because he’s an avid skier and hiker. This was some sort of providence, and he was now convinced he needed to fill his car with canned food and kerosene (with which, by the way, one can heat a cabin for five years on a couple hundred dollars), for when the shit, inevitably, goes down.

He then told me of finding a hat in the school library. It had been there for a few days, he said, left by a student no doubt, so he grabbed it and wore it home. Then his head started to itch, despite the fact that he had inspected it for lice! The freak then generously offered to get me a hat and jacket out of his van/survivalist machine. I politely declined.

Anyway, after about 45 minutes we were allowed back in the building where my class and I sloppily reconvened to watch some more “Amelie” (the vcr, miraculously, was still there.) The fire alarm immediately began going off again, and, a little nervously, again we ignored it.

Motto kept coming over the intercom every 30 seconds or so pleading, desperation palpable in his voice, for all students to return to their classes, and for all teachers who were available to help herd the kids out of the halls. It soon became apparent why.

A low rumble from down the hall grew louder and louder, until it was a roaring tornado right outside the room. Dozens (hundreds?) of kids then appeared, running, screaming, fighting, and banging on everything in sight, including my classroom door, which, you remember, doesn’t lock. The riotous crowd would move off, down the hall or into the stairwell, and then it would roar back towards us. My kids were pressed up against the windows, watching, but even the crazy ones were too scared to actually open the doors.

Nothing happened, to us anyway. The rioting stopped, and the period eventually ended. It turns out that when everyone re-entered the building some students took advantage of not having to pass through the metal detectors and snuck in knives. Somehow, no-one was stabbed. The fire, by the way, was relatively small. Someone had set a bulletin board on fire. The plastics had made a lot of smoke. They arrested two kids for arson the next day. They were bragging about their mischeivous deed.

Idiots.

Return of the Phantom Pisser
During a particularly unruly 9th period the vague odor of urine began to creep into my classroom.

“Mister, Mister, pee-pee!” (This seems to be becoming a refrain) Melva screamed running towards the windows and clearly delighted with the chaos and genuine excuse to scream scatalogical vulgarities (not that she needs any such excuse.)

“Mister, they pee on the heater!” Robinson stood up and informed me, holding his hand at his crotch, swiveling his hips and pantomiming a peeing motion for clarification. I wasn't sure if he was referring to someone in partucular or a general miscreant behavior with which I should have been familiar.

Luis and Jose had their heads out the windows and were laughing maniacally. Scrunching up my nose and looking at these out-of-control students cock-eyed, I yelled and gestured for them all to sit down, as I made my way to the door to investigate. I opened the door and was blown back by what seemed to be a solid wall of hot, putrid, stench. I closed the door and jumped back, my reaction raising the kids chaos level another notch or two. I walked over by the windows and continued trying to teach as the room slowly filled with the thick nauseous gas of steamed urine.

Animals. They're fucking animals.

Talent Show
The Talent Show was postponed until after Christmas due, I think, to some sort of security concern. No-one tells me these sorts of things. So I sacrificed a Thursday evening and stuck around to see what Shitty had to offer in terms of song and dance. I paid my five bucks (ridiculously apportioned to serve under-funded schools in Honduras or someplace, this despite the fact that Shitty doesn’t have a single computer dedicated to student use…) and was escorted by an overly serious student to my seat, which happened to be partially broken and hanging at a crooked angle.

The show was slow to get started, but got off bangin’ with Shitty’s award winning cheerleaders, coached by the terrifying Ms. Jackson, AP of English. These ladies impressed, disciplined, funky and well-choreographed, rocking a nice-balance of traditional pyramids and tosses with “Set it Off” type dance moves. Then shit got crazy.

The next act began with the salsafied bump of a reggaeton beat and four girls sashaying out on stage wrapped in towels tied above their breasts and hanging only theoretically below their jiggling butts. The bass then dropped on the beat and the girls dropped their towels to reveal lacey, white, tube-tops and little red short-short-shorts (they were really short) with Dominican flags sown on the ample ass. The girls only had two moves – the rapid-fire bent-over booty-shake and the slow-mo booty isolation rotation – both of which were perfected to such degrees that the asses seemed to move independent of the rest of their bodies, which remained largely motionless.

The crowd went absolutely apeshit, screaming, climbing over their chairs, and pouring into the aisles in spontaneous dances of their own. The rest of the evening proceeded accordingly. Between numerous interminable delays and terrible rappers who flubbed their lines, every other act featured copious booty shaking and indiscriminate waving of Dominican flags. These displays of Dominican Pride were greeted, one and all, with straight up pandemonium.

The last act was an actual live Bachata band, which I actually wanted to see. But when the singer took the stage and shouted “Yo soy Domincano!” I thought a genuine riot was going to break out and slipped out the back before I could hear their music or get my head torn off.

Union News, Cont.
Maybe I'm just a pampered, naive, jackass, and will soon become numb to things like the murder of yet another 18 year old drug dealer. At that point I may sneer knowingly with great disdain at the sniveling liberals with their bleeding hearts and tie-dyed wool over their eyes. Until then this shit freaks me out and pisses me off.

Union News
Phatman, our cynically jovial, fat, shine-headed Union Rep. – he looks like a caricature of a hedonistic, inbred, Roman Emperor/Toxic avenger extra - released the latest installment of the “Shitty Advocate.” Pretty dry stuff as usual, aside from a bad pun about “penal dysfunction.”

This issue was all about school safety or the lack thereof, with the general focus being on a lack of meaningful negative consequences for misbehavior, which is valid I guess. Seems like the root of the problem might be a lack of positive consequences for positive behavior, though. One thing that rubbed me the wrong way was Phatman’s rather crass chastisement of the school or administration (not sure which) for “memorializing a dead drug dealer,” as if the fact that Lopez (Boquita) was a criminal somehow negates his humanity, or makes his death any less tragic. I guess Fatman’s point is that “celebrating” this outlaw life and death only legitimizes and romanticizes it, but again, symptom not problem.

Snow
The first snow of the year was a couple of weeks ago. It was a big one. Big floppy flakes upon big floppy flakes, piling up quickly and briefly transforming the Bronx into a winter wonderland. Many of my Level 1 kids had never seen snow before. They ran to the window and watched excitedly as I tried to teach, then nailed me with snowballs on my way to the train after school.

Somebody Got Murdered
A former Shitty Bronx High School student was shot and killed last week. 18 year old Jose Lopez aka Yo-Yay aka Boquita was shot 9 times at point blank range in the lobby of his building. It seems to be pretty widely accepted that Boquita was a drug dealer of at least some importance. Looks like he stepped on some toes. Who'd of thunk it?

Strangely, Mr. Dunn and I had recently taken note of the proliferation of “Yo Yay” tags around the halls. I’d even taken to jokingly accusing Lynn of being “Yo Yay.” As in, "Hey, Yo Yay, why don't you quit tagging up my classroom door with your wack-ass letter styles? You didn't even spell 'Domincano' right."

The kids pretty much lost it, running around crying, tagging everything with “RIP Boquita,” and hanging up posters all over the hall with sentiments like “Let’s get drunk” and “Smoke some weed, B.” Lopez’ brother is a D1 baller at a top 25 school. With “RIP Jose" scrawled on his shoes he hit 23 this weekend as school knocked off the #1 team in the nation. He ended the game with his hands on his knees sobbing.

Hot Streak
After a decent class 10th period, everyone working diligently, Angel being somewhat quiet, Lissette not whining too much, I looked the other way as Edgar and Angel began playing trashcan basketball the last 5 minutes of class. I even started tossing a few myself from my comfortable perch in my big wooden chair.

I noticed the guys had money down and went over to their side of the room. I missed a couple wide right, then had one literally go in and out. Lissette squealed with delight at my near miss.

I can do this, I thought, and anted up (it was only a dollar). I nailed my next 3 shots. Edgar and Angel both missed. I grabbed the pile of ones and strutted across the room to erase the board, dreaming of the Dollar Menu goodies my riches might obtain.

The fire of my prideful joy was quickly diminished when everyone I told of my victory reacted with horror.

"That's awful."

"That's unethical."

"That's illegal."

"You could be fired."

I tried to explain that I had money down as well as the kids, that it was a fair and just contest, and that, besides, it was only $1 each. To no avail.

I gave them their money back the next day. Edgar tried to refuse.

"Nah Mister, you won."

Edgar's allright. I made him take the dollar.

American Way
Had my Level 3s write paragraphs about where they will be in 10 years (use of the future tense). Edgar Garcia spent 10 or 15 minutes clowning around, coloring a necklace with a blue marker, before he got down to writing.

“What do you call the school after high school?” he asked. I waited for him to answer his own question, as he is wont to do.

“College, right?”

I nodded.

“You went to college?” he asked me.

I told him I had, and that I was, in fact, still taking classes.

“So how much do you make an hour if you go to college?”

“Well, it depends…” I start to explain, but Edgar cuts right to the point.

“How much do you make an hour?

I tell him I’m not sure, but would be glad to calculate for him. My $1060 every 2 weeks comes out to about $13/hr, of which I bashfully inform Edgar.

Twenty minutes late he turns in his paragraph:

“In ten years I will be a drug diler. I will sell the drugs more cheaper than everyone else so everyone will by from me.”

Smart kid. He's got this America shit pretty well figured.

The Mystery of the Phantom Pisser
Mrs. Robinns, school aide and office assistant extraordinaire, has been assigned to help me out in the second half of my 4th and 5th period double block. I guess things are somewhat calmer with her around, although she certainly doesn’t do any disciplining. She at least allows me to run around somewhat less like a headless chicken as she helps out her favorite girls and I can get to others.

This day was a day like many others, chaos bubbling up towards riot while every single girl in class asked to go the bathroom at least once. I was flustered and sick of it and began telling them all no. It was so chaotic in there (another failed attempt at groupwork) that I don’t even remember who asked to go to the bathroom when. I was spinning like a figure skater in there deflecting girls left and right with large sweeps of my arms and loud burst of “Sit down, no!”

The bell finally rang and the kids quickly pushed their disorderly way out, all save a small group of girls huddled up at the front of the room.

“Okay guys, lets go, hasta manana,” I urged eager to get out of there and to my lunch. They didn’t budge, though they did giggle awkwardly.

“Mister, Mister, Pee Pee!” Dainy finally managed to tell me, pointing and covering her face in embarrassment. She was pointing to a puddle on the floor.

I looked around. Mrs. Robinns was gone. There was a puddle of piss on the floor. I had no idea what to do. Only one thing was certain; one of my students was a goddamn James Bond caliber genius for managing to piss in the middle of class without either me or Mrs. Robinns noticing.

“Vamanos, vamanos,” I urged the group of girls as I simultaneously panicked and eyed them all suspiciously, looking for some tell-tale stain or guilty gleam to help me identify the pisser.

I closed the door behind me, found a janitor, told him, ahem, “Something was spilled in room #360.” And walked away without looking back.

Still in Excess
Seeing as how I’d been recruited (and spent all summer training) to teach in NYC, and all the papers were talking about school over-crowding, it seemed pretty fucking ridiculous that there were a bunch of teachers (enthusiastic or not) sitting around getting paid not to teach.

It was an inauspicious start.

Excessed
Spent the first week and a half of the school-year as an “un-placed” Fellow, forced, along with about a dozen “excessed” (isn’t that what you do to a boil?) teachers, to report to a middle school in the Bronx where we were stuck in a library most of the day organizing boxes and boxes of books (part of Chancellor Klein’s literacy push), and receiving full-salary and benefits all the while.

My only other duty required me to stand in the sweltering student cafeteria as a sort of lunch sergeant, positioned in a sentry-like position. I was to make sure the kids sat at their assigned tables (separated by grade and gender) and keep them sitting there until their particular table was given clearance to dump their trays and head to the playground. This is a nearly impossible task. I tried to use this time to develop some sort of teacher-style “evil-eye” look – lips pursed, eyes bugged, one eyebrow raised menacingly - but it remained wholly ineffective, even when I could pull it off without giggling.

My filing colleagues, a motley group of under-qualified and/or disagreeable teachers whose Union cards made them nearly impossible to fire, were a disheartening mix of bitter and apathetic, pissed that they were having to scramble for new jobs, but not exactly chomping at the bit to start serving the youth. The most entertaining of the bunch, a big, gay, Hispanic art-teacher who spent the entire time meticulously cutting out bubble letters for various bulletin boards, was also the most literate.

"Oh God, The Catcher of the Rye,” he moaned, lisping and rolling his eyes and his Rs while misreading the title of the classic he had plucked from atop one of the many teetering piles of books cluttering up the table in front of him. “They made us read this at college. This book is boring…”

No-one else had ever heard of it.