Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Kirn Lanier is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Miami University in Hamilton, Ohio. She is the author of The Story You Tell Yourself.

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TEACHING IN THE TERRORDOME

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................IXAUTHOR'S NOTE................................................XIONE—THE SCHOOL BESIDE THE CEMETERY.....................3TWO—TEACHER BOOT CAMP..................................14THREE—FIRST DAY........................................35FOUR—THE PLOT OF MARIGOLDS.............................44FIVE—WHEN THE STATE WALKS IN...........................67SIX—BARELY PASSING.....................................80SEVEN—HAPPY HOUR.......................................99EIGHT—DO OVER..........................................109NINE—DISARMING THE ALARM...............................127TEN—THE REVOLVING PRINCIPALS...........................147ELEVEN—KILLING THE KITTEN..............................159TWELVE—READING POWHITETRASH............................171THIRTEEN—NORTHERN EXPOSURE.............................188FOURTEEN—ELISABETH SHUE LOVES US.......................205FIFTEEN—ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY..........................217EPILOGUE.....................................................230

Chapter One

"Never drive west of MLK," a friend advised before I learned I'd teach every day in a school two miles west of Martin Luther King Boulevard. "I drove west of MLK last night," said another friend, a future teacher, "and a cop stopped me at a light, told me to turn around. Go back, he told us. He said a white person's car got set on fire west of MLK. He said they were just sitting there, at a light—the white people—and someone set their car on fire." I imagined cars west of MLK spontaneously bursting into flames.

But so far, I've never seen any. I'm heading west again today, as I did yesterday and as, should I survive another seven hours of teaching, I'll do tomorrow. After passing through Charles Village, the neighborhood of Johns Hopkins and brightly painted, Victorian row homes, and after passing through Mount Vernon, Baltimore's upscale, urban-hipster scene of posh bars, galleries, bead stores, and transvestite prostitutes, I turn right onto West Franklin. White flower boxes sit perched on the sills of tall, arch-shaped windows. Park benches and potted plants line one building. I am not yet west of MLK.

But West Franklin becomes a freeway, and it's here, on a slab of concrete hovering twenty feet or so over MLK Boulevard, that I do what those voices warn me never to do. The elevation of the freeway lowers until it dips below street level. I now speed below the short Baltimore blocks that my students freely, almost cheerfully call "ghetto." I pass under the names of streets they live on, the ones that make the news for the latest shooting or drug arrest: Calhoun, Gilmor, Monroe. If I were to head south on the last, I'd hit West Fayette. North Monroe and West Fayette: a drug intersection made famous by an HBO series.

I merge from West Franklin onto Route 40, and with each passing meter the road rises to street-level, the walls diminish, and it's like emerging from a concrete tunnel, like being birthed from a concrete mother into a depressed world of more concrete that's now just trash-riddled and broken. In a mile, the city has transformed. Trees and shrubs aren't sculpted around banks and homes. Instead, dead vines and branches wrap around phone lines and chain-link fencing. Row homes line the streets. The homes are no wider than a window and a door. They look conjoined and sad, their varying brick façades stuck together like dulled Lego bricks. Several are boarded up, the doors and windows covered by plywood. Homes should have entries, openings, ways in and ways out. The boarded-up homes look like faces with sealed eyes and mouths. Occasionally, when I spot a real home—a home with glass, a working door—it's almost inviting. Except its rarity seems foreboding.

At a traffic light at North Warwick, an old black man crosses in front of me. With his back bent forward, he makes shaky, pained steps across the road. I smile when I read his stretched out, threadbare T-shirt. Walk to Win, it says. In another year, Mayor O'Malley will plaster Baltimore's billboards with his simple marketing scheme: Baltimore Believe. The white capital letters will stand starkly against a black background, and no image or border will clutter the signs. Right now, the billboards advertise mattresses and McDonalds and the importance of keeping one's virginity. Right now, the city's slogan is "Baltimore: The City that Reads." City workers stenciled the phrase long ago onto bus stop benches. Baltimore's reading test scores are a national embarrassment, so locals like to mock the motto. Even the kids know it's a lie. A friend of mine asked his students to re-create the city's ad campaign. "Baltimore," they said. "The City that Bleeds." They haven't been the first to say it.

I turn left and pass a gas station, which I've stopped patronizing. While my car idled at this intersection on the way home one day, I watched a man fill his tank, turn away, head to pay. Another man hopped into the driver's seat and sped off. The tires screeched as the car veered right onto Route 40. "My car!" the owner shouted and ran after. No, I don't use that gas station. I use the ones downtown.

North Warwick is a small backstreet squeezing between parking lots of trucks, a towing service, used tire places, more row homes, and a ton of ambiguous brick buildings. The exteriors of the commercial spaces rarely reveal what's inside: they look like brick cubes planted on overgrown grass, and if they have signs, some of the letters have peeled away. "INTER STA E UE" reads one. Its windows are barred. Overgrown trees and shrubs fill the right side of one block. The greenery might be refreshing if it weren't so unruly. "Sit under a tree this weekend and write your poem," I once told a class for homework.

"Under a tree?" a girl scowled.

"Yeah," I said, and nodded, "A tree."

"What, Ms. Kirn," said another, the brightest in the class. "Right next to the hypodermic needle?"

I tilted my head to the side and reconsidered.

After passing four black teenagers, some smoking, all cutting me eyes with dark almond suspicion—what am I, the white, short-haired, glasses-wearing woman, doing around their way?—and after passing a skinny white woman wearing a stained T-shirt for a dress, wavering down the sidewalk in a zig-zag, her knees and elbows jutting out from her shirt like ashy knobs, I reach Font Hill, the driveway of Southwestern High School. It's a long, steady hill that Ms. Patterson says is the reason we never meet anyone at Parent-Teacher night. "It's too hard for them [the parents] to walk up that hill," she says. "After a long day, who wants to walk up that hill in the dark?"

Noelani and I first navigated west Baltimore for our interviews, that tale of the flaming car firmly in the backs of our minds. Once we got here to Font Hill we saw, between the brambles and dead vines raveling around still more fencing, a few tombstones. When we reached the top of Font Hill, two jaw-dropping forces competed for our attention: the high school—a tan, five-story mega-complex—and the seemingly endless acres of graves that spanned south and west. Perched on top of dead grass, Southwestern High School stood like a mammoth, intimidating god of the dead.

"Woah," Noelani said. "My high school was small."

I was more preoccupied with the graves. Mount Olivet Cemetery covered a square half-mile of ground. Our eyes were gazing across 34,000 tombstones. Don't go west of MLK, they'd said, and here we were, south and west, and even south and west of Southwestern were none other than a lot of dead people, like the further south and west in Charm City you went, the bleaker the outlook.

Like a prison, the Baltimore Sun often says of the school, and the newspaper isn't speaking of (or only of) the emotional atmosphere inside. Prisonesque is always the first observation anyone makes of the exterior. The school is a drab beige color, and when you approach it from its only accessible road, Font Hill, there's no clear entryway. There's no grand sign, no front door. Very little landscaping, including a charred tree that might have been picturesque before lightning evidently split it. Two rows of tiny windows span the length of the biggest building. A few tiny rectangular windows puncture the side. As I round it, I'm sandwiched between gravesites and a fortress.

"We got you an interview at Southwestern High School," Jeremy Beard, the Program Director of Teach For America-Baltimore, told a handful of us only two weeks before the city's first school day. We'd promised two years of our lives to Teach For America's mission (One day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education), and though the organization was responsible for procuring us positions in the district, sometimes jobs came through at the last minute.

Someone asked Jeremy what the school was like. To this, Jeremy clapped one fist into his palm and gave a diplomatic Teach For America response. "It's definitely a school in need." Another fist-to-palm clap. "It's definitely got challenges." Challenges, I'd learned, was the preferred TFA parlance for obstacles, difficulties, things that would make the job grueling. But challenges implied surmountable possibilities. And a school in need meant Southwestern needed us.

What were the challenges? I asked.

Again, Jeremy paused. "Every Baltimore high school has issues. There's almost like a checklist ..." He held both hands together and then stretched them apart like he was unfurling an imaginary scroll. "... Like a laundry list of problems common to the high schools. Low attendance. Low test scores." He started tapping his fingers on one hand with each count. "High incidents of violence. Poor special ed services...." He stopped, dropped his hand. He could go on, but I got the point. "Southwestern has," he paused, nodded, "a good many of the problems on that list."

Southwestern has every problem on that list, I took him to mean, which was accurate. I must have looked hesitant.

"Just go in there and talk yourself up," he said. "Know you can handle it."

Know I can handle it, I thought. I, an introverted white woman from the suburbs, a student of Virginia Woolf's prose and Gwendolyn Brook's spontaneous metric verse—I can handle teaching in an inner-city school without ever having taught. Ever. But this is the very premise of Teach For America: that overachieving recent college graduates can in fact become change-agents in the most economically depressed of American corners. If the others he gathered that day harbored doubts, they didn't show it. Noelani, tall and half Hawaiian with silky straight black hair, exuded a calm presence. Amy and Brooke, both blond, were fast-talking and intense. Ellen, brown-haired and the shortest of us at 5'2", seemed to hang back a bit but still voiced no concern about heading west of MLK (as Jeremy had instructed) or handling the "laundry list" of challenges.

As the five of us were making plans to carpool, Noelani's roommate piped in. "Southwestern ... That sounds familiar." She racked her brain but failed to recall how she'd heard the name.

The next day, when I got into Noelani's car for the interview, she relayed the news. Her roommate had paged through The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, by David Simon and Edward Burns, the same guys who would later go on to make HBO's hit show, The Wire. The nonfiction account follows a family entangled in the drug culture of west Baltimore—a son dealing, a mom and pop addicted. Noelani's roommate swore she'd seen Southwestern's name somewhere in there. And in one line of the nearly 600-page book, Southwestern High School is referred to as The Terrordome.

"We're about to interview," I said, "at the Terrordome?"

I've driven here every workday since. I park in the back. It's 7:45 A.M., and from the looks of the cars, about a dozen administrators and teachers are here. Among them are the four other Teach For America teachers—Amy, Ellen, Noelani, and Brooke—along with Ms. Davis, the science department head. She arrives faithfully each morning at seven, puts in twelve hours of work. But school won't start until 8:45, and about half of the faculty will roll up that hill in a sudden line of traffic. They'll crowd the parking lot only a few minutes before the first bell, fight for the closest spaces, and rush to the front office so they can sign their names and prove they're on time. Some of these teachers will be the first to bolt from their classrooms when the final bell rings at 3:25.

A year from now, Amy will confess to me that for the first few months of school she feels as I do now: like she's going to puke. I'll be surprised to hear this, in part because, by default, I tend to believe everyone besides me has their shit together. Yet Amy is also amazing at feigning confidence, as are the other early risers, Ellen and Brooke. Other than Noelani, who from day one has echoed my concerns, I think I'm the only one who worries about walking through the single unchained side door of "The Terrordome" and doing what Teach For America has charged me with: bridging the achievement gap. Playing a role in providing my students with educations on par with their middle-class counterparts.

Just as TFA has armed us with alarming statistics on low-income students ("only one in ten will graduate college"; "by the time they reach fourth grade, low-income kids are two to three grades behind their high-income peers"), the organization has also armed us with optimistic evidence of our successes, or at least of the successes of those who've gone before us. Ninety percent of all principals who've hired TFA teachers in their schools say that they'd hire another if given the chance. And the anecdotal evidence of our effectiveness is inspiring. According to TFA, former teachers have raised their classrooms of elementary school kids two and three grade-levels in nine months; they've transformed resistant kids into engaged students by linking subject matter to fun things like football; they've founded movements of nationally recognized charter schools. We've heard the stories. We know we're meant to achieve similar results.

The stories once led me to believe that the faculty here would receive us with open arms, but we were quickly warned otherwise. "Don't. Trust. Anyone," said the first TFA teacher to be placed in Southwestern, a woman from the very first TFA corps back in 1990. Noelani and I had met up with her prior to the school year. "You might think you're making friends," the veteran said, "but they'll stab you right in the back when you're not looking." She lasted two years at The Terrordome and then escaped to Mervo, a technical high school with admissions standards, strict attendance policies, and a smoother-functioning administration.

At first, I thought of chalking her advice up to paranoia, but when the five of us first met Ms. Davis, the science department head, she delivered a similar message.

"Come give Ms. Davis a hug," she said when she found us in a hallway. A pear-shaped woman with wide, plastic-framed glasses stretched her arms out. "You are all my babies!" She hobbled in between embraces. We smiled and returned her hearty bear-hugs. "I adopt all you Teach For America people. Mm-hmm, I do. Just ask some of my former teachers. They'll tell you. Mm-hmm, yes, I still keep in contact with Teach For America teachers. Teachers from 1990." She looked at Noelani and nodded, "That's right." Then she grew quiet. "Now, I want to tell you something. This information is between you and me."

She beckoned us closer, and the five of us huddled around her. I prepared to learn a secret.

"I don't go around telling people how I feel about Teach For America. You know how people are," she said. I realized then that Ms. Davis's secret was her support of us. Her opened arms were a gift we should keep private. "And if I were you, I wouldn't tell anyone you're a part of Teach For America. No. Uh-uh. They don't need to know that. You can just keep that information to yourselves."

It was impossible, though, to keep it a secret. To the faculty, we were obvious outsiders—dubious, energetic white people straight out of college. None of us knew Baltimore, none of us spoke with a B-more accent. Before the school year started, I didn't have enough desks, and my own department head, Ms. Wallace, said she had no extras, so I had to scavenge some vandalized ones from Ms. Davis. "FUCK YOU" one read in Sharpie marker. On another, an erect, life-size penis, also in Sharpie pen, was about to enter a girl's open mouth. Other desks had the names of housing projects tagged all across the tops. Noelani was helping me carry these—the last desks to be had in Southwestern—downstairs to my classroom, but we were stopped by a tall woman in clacking red kitten heels. "Can I help you?" she called from down the hall. I knew she was a science teacher.

"No, we're fine," I said, thinking she meant, literally, Can I help you?

"What're you all doing up here?" She wore tight red Capri pants to match her heels.

"My room doesn't have enough desks," I shouted back, and side-nodded toward the one I'd heaved into my arms. Half a hallway still separated us. I sensed that I'd crossed an unwritten "No Trespass" sign, the ones that hang on the wire fences of ramshackle homes nobody actually wants to enter. "I teach downstairs," I said, certain this would put her at ease. I know I don't look like I teach her, but for real, I teach right down there.

Her neck slumped forward and she put her hand on her hip. She wore a semi-disgusted, semi-bored sneer. She turned to a stout teacher behind her. "What do all these teachers think they're doing, coming up on our floor?" I went to respond, but they both turned away, mumbling to each other. "These are our desks," the tall woman shouted over the clack of her kitten heels. "People shouldn't be taking things that aren't theirs." I heard the other teacher huff and mhmm as they rounded the corner and walked out of sight.

Noelani and I were baffled. You can make a difference, we'd been told by TFA. You can level the playing field. America's schools need you. Ninety percent of all principals request more of you. Why wouldn't our colleagues appreciate our presence? Back then, I thought TFA teachers were seen as some kind of youthful, revolutionizing commodity. Now, just a couple of months later, I look back at my assumptions and cringe. How could a person so naïve survive even a few weeks in this place? "People have bets on whether or not you'll make it," a teacher had told us before the first day of school.

So far, though, we've survived. And now I see us from our colleagues' perspectives: they're experienced teachers of a tough inner-city school system where they've worked for five, ten, twenty years on lower pay than their county colleagues. In some cases they've lived among their students all their lives. And suddenly a bunch of eager, mostly white, twenty-something kids storm in under the banner of a white-founded organization and believe, or have been taught to believe, that they can make the experienced teachers' same students perform two and three times better? And without having ever taught? Yep, our presence can appear insulting. The teachers think we believe we can do their jobs better than they can.

Which is, depending on how you look at it, what Teach For America has taught us to believe. This again might sound insulting, but not if you take a hard look at our faculty. There are some solid, hard-working veterans here, but there's also Mr. Johnson, the math teacher, who openly derides his female students and makes derogatory, sexual remarks. There's Ms. Jones, the reading teacher, who only shows up the first few weeks of any semester and then calls out sick, using her racked-up sick-days and leaving her kids with a permanent substitute who shows movies. And there's Mr. Sypher, a thirtysomething, white history teacher who, when we first met him, told us how we should best handle our future kids. "You just have to fuck with them," he said, and when Brooke scoffed and my brow furrowed, he rephrased. "Never let them know what to expect."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from TEACHING IN THE TERRORDOMEby HEATHER KIRN LANIER Copyright © 2012 by The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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