Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America

13. Northern Exposure

188 “Karrren!” Wallace beckoned me with a holler that carried out of her office, past the doorways that separated us, and into my classroom. I had second period off. I popped my head in. She sat at her desk, hands holding a sandwich together. “Let me see your writing folders.” It was an impromptu test. Was I doing my job? Had my students been writing, or had I pulled punches similar to a recent twenty-something hire, who whined about a back injury, sat behind her desk, and screened an Eddie Murphy flick with her students? I walked back to my classroom, mentally cataloguing the work my students had done lately. They’d created personal timelines, family trees, and self-portraits with descriptive adjectives floating around their drawn heads, all in preparation for their autobiographies, which they’d also written . “I’m sixteen years old and there are fourteen people in my house!!” “I was thirteen years old and I seen a boy get killed. But I told the police I didn’t see anything.” “The events of my life show that I had good and bad times in my life like a normal person.” They’d imagined and illustrated fictional characters and they’d plopped these characters into short stories, for which they’d written plots with rising action and dénouements. They’d improvised alliteration. They’d drunk green tea from Styrofoam cups and studied Basho to inspire their haiku, and then they’d counted the syllables of their three-line poems and posted them all over the room. The Beautiful Me African-American King of my own land. Get out of my face Your breath smells like raw onions Go get a breath mint. Chapter 13 Northern Exposure northern exposure 189 Girls are hating on me and boys say that I’m a dime but does it matter. And despite my tendency to ignore requirements I deemed lame, my students had even responded to some Maryland Writing Test prompts, though I discerned which prompts to give and which to bury. I eliminated, for instance, the prompt that read: “Think of a time in your life when you were chased or when you chased someone or something.” It seemed cruel of Maryland to set up a prompt for which its city kids could think of cops and for which its suburban kids might think of Labradors . Or bunnies. Or maybe I was stereotyping the suburban kids. Maybe they just as often rushed into their teachers’ classrooms to report the most recent cop-chase story, which often involved the cop wrongfully accusing the kid in a mix-up of “grab the closest black boy in the Timberlands and hoodie.” I chose other, less asinine prompts, and my kids responded to them, and they filed their essays into their new writing folders, recently mandated by the state. Or the city. Someone up there, sitting on high at the right hand of a bureaucratic Baltimore God. I returned to Ms. Wallace’s office with a random sampling of the legalsized manila envelopes, each with a students’ name and a state-designed spreadsheet glued onto the front. She set her sandwich down on the aluminum, wiped her hands on a napkin, and fingered the covers. “What is this?” She shook her head. “Ms. Kirn, why haven’t you had your students do any writing?” “They have.” She didn’t open the folders to see. “There’s nothing listed.” She pointed to the spreadsheet and then looked up with a damning expression—eyes wide enough to show the full circles of her irises, head tilted so far back she used the bridge of her nose as an arrow to point at me. She gestured to the folders’ white covers, which listed types of writing—business letter, personal letter, expository essay—and provided plenty of blanks for titles and dates. Because I hadn’t been very good at making my students record each sample of writing they shoved into their folders, a lot of the spaces were blank. “Your students haven’t listed any writing.” “But they’ve been doing writing.” When Wallace opened a folder, a few pages fell out. Their randomness hardly captured the extent of my students’ projects. The pages needed the accompanying list to glorify their worth. “How do you think this looks for your evaluation?” 190 Teaching in the Terrordome “Really, we’ve been doing writing. We...