As Bad as They Say?: Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx

5. Remarkable Ramika

5 Remarkable Ramika What you noticed first about Ramika was her large, horn-rimmed glasses. You saw the glasses before you saw her sweet, soft-looking face; she had medium brown skin and was of average height and weight. She could have easily melted into a crowd of students, except for those oversized spectacles. They were the kind of frame that, in the movies, an awkward, shy young woman wore until someone (Prince Charming, probably) discovered that, if the glasses were removed, underneath would be found a ‘‘smoldering beauty.’’ Was Ramika smoldering ? I didn’t know. How can I describe Ramika’s life? Not that she confided in me quickly. I would say that it took the first term and well into the second term before she shared some of her troubles with me. She was an average student, which meant at Carter High School and at many city high schools that she passed four or five classes out of six or seven taken each term. It may come as a surprise to you, the reader, to learn that many city teenagers accept the failure of two or three courses per term as the norm. In suburbia, this high failure rate would be a shock as well as a terrible stigma and would warrant a meeting with the student’s counselor and parent. In the city, failing a few courses per term is so common that it hardly even raises an eyebrow on anyone’s part. Ramika’s passing grades ranged from 65 to 80, and I felt that she tried only half-heartedly to pass her classes; as with so many of our students, there was no great incentive to excel. (Sometimes, no one at home cared 57 58 Defying Expectations about their grades, and so that made it harder for students to care.) Ramika had told me that she had failed social studies because she couldn’t understand the teacher or the textbook. I looked over the book and discovered that it was far too advanced for the average student and that it was very out-of-date, typical of many textbooks used in the city schools. However, Ramika felt ‘‘lucky’’ because half of the class had no textbook at all. Outdated books are better than no books, and all academic subject areas suffered from a paucity of books. (Nursing students, preparing for a state exam, would spend hours at our copy machine in the English office—often the only one working in the building—copying pages out of their shared textbooks!) Ramika had failed Spanish I in her first term but was put ahead into Spanish II for her second term because Spanish I wasn’t given in the February term. (By the way, Spanish was the only language offered in a school of nearly two thousand students, half of whom already spoke Spanish.) What were her chances of passing Spanish II when she had failed Spanish I? You can surmise. Again, this programming problem would never be tolerated in most suburban schools, and yet it occurs over and over again in the city schools. (Suburbia would often run a small class, if it were needed even by only a few students; the city, grossly underfunded, couldn’t afford to run small classes.) I told Ramika that the trick to learning a new language was that she had to go home every night and memorize all the new words and idioms she had learned that day or else she would keep falling behind. She gave me a long, long, serious look and told me, slowly, so that it would register —that it was impossible to study at home because she shared a room and one bed with her three younger sisters. Not only was there no peace or quiet at home, but also there was not a free moment. She did all the cooking and shopping and cleaning because her grandmother was ill and couldn’t do it. Over more time, Ramika revealed to me that her maternal grandmother had taken her in, along with her three younger sisters, when her mother ‘‘disappeared.’’ I asked what ‘‘disappeared’’ meant, and she explained, reluctantly and painfully, that she hadn’t seen or heard from her mother in years. She was a crack addict, and one day she left and never came back. Ramika and her sisters had gone to live with her mother’s mother eight years earlier, when she was only eight, and now, at sixteen...