(cv1A)September US SUBS Cover Final2
7/25/08
1:30 PM
Page 1
S T E V E F E AT H E R S T O N E I N A F G H A N I S TA N
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008 $6.95
◆
TYRANNY OF THE TEST
One Year as a Kaplan Coach in the Public Schools
By Jeremy Miller
THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR
Searching for Deadly Toys in China’s Pearl River Delta
By Donovan Hohn
WILLOWS VILLAGE
Story by Dagoberto Gilb
Also: Vivian Gornick and Francine Prose
◆
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/25/08
8:06 AM
Page 35
R
E
P
O
R
T
TYRANNY OF THE TEST
One year as a Kaplan coach in the public schools
By Jeremy Miller
A
bell sounds, and students tumble out of
rooms and into the gray corridors of George
Washington High School. Eight A.M.
lethargy has given way to the Brownian
motion of the day’s first passing period.
A tall boy beside me wraps his arms
around a small, pretty girl, backpack
and all, picking her up from behind
and twirling her roughly. The girl tucks
in her feet, tilts back her head, and
shrieks giddily, “Yo, who the fuck is
this? Who the fuck is grabbin’ me?” A
male teacher with a buzz cut and the
build of a wrestler claps sharply.
“Enough. Second period. Move.” The
boy drops the girl, and the two bounce
away, laughing down the hall.
I am here because the High School
for Health Careers and Sciences, one of
several small schools in what was once
a single large high school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, has purchased Kaplan’s SAT
Advantage program, an abbreviated
version of the SAT prep course offered
by the testing company at any of its 150
centers nationwide. (“Higher test scores
guaranteed or your money back.”) As
one of Kaplan’s roving “coaches,” I will
spend the day helping math and English
teachers kick off the test-taking course
by modeling the “Kaplan method” for
their classes. Depending on the number
of students it serves, a Kaplan program
like this can cost a school well into the
tens of thousands of dollars. For my ef-
forts each day, which cannot exceed six hours
of instruction, I will receive a fee of $295. At
this rate, a full school year’s pay would
exceed a starting teacher’s salary by
more than $10,000.
I glance down at the schedule that
Kaplan’s “implementation” team
emailed me a few days before. “8:55,
Semidey. Room 320.” Disorientation is
an unavoidable part of the job. In general, I don’t know the physical layout
of the schools I parachute into. I don’t
know whether Semidey is a Mr. or a Ms.
I don’t know this teacher’s students or
whether he or she already uses some
kind of test-prep curriculum in the classroom. I don’t even know how “Semidey” is pronounced. Although Kaplan’s
assignment sheets include school contact
numbers, coaches are instructed not to
call ahead; if we cannot resist this urge,
we have been told not to expect busy
teachers to talk to us. Rather, Kaplan
coaches are taught to handle the strangeness of each new workplace by falling
back on their highly scripted lessons and
by quickly identifying school faculty as
one of several possible archetypes; e.g.,
whether they are “trailblazers” within
their schools or dreaded “saboteurs.”1
1 Kaplan’s handbook for coaches suggests that
saboteurs be dealt with in a counterintuitive,
Sun Tzu-esque way: by keeping them “on the
inside where they can be watched rather than on
the outside where they can cause trouble without it being detected until their effects are felt.”
Jeremy Miller is a writer and high school science teacher living in Denver.
Yellow #2, a carved pencil by Diem Chau. All are courtesy the artist
(diemchau.com) and Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery, Portland, Oregon
REPORT
35
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/24/08
9:24 AM
Page 36
Inside room 320 a young woman with long
dark hair and olive skin is studying papers
spread across a long science-demonstration
table. Definitely Ms. Semidey. The room looks
just big enough to seat fifteen comfortably but
includes chairs for twenty-five or thirty, with
desks facing one another in configurations of
four or five, filling up almost all the floor space.
I still have a few moments before the bell, so I
walk down the hall to fill my water bottle at
the drinking fountain. No water comes out.
I pause in the hallway at a bulletin board
fringed with red-white-and-blue bunting and
featuring a picture of an exploding ship. The
vessel is the U.S.S. Maine, and tiny crewmembers are being thrown hither and yon by the
blast. Of the several essays stapled around this
image, the top grade has been awarded to a
lier, I was a rookie teacher in a New York City
public school, struggling to manage my classes
while working toward a teaching license. I also
know that many teachers equate the presence of
test-prep coaches like me with the more insidious aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act. Because Health Careers has been able to meet certain testing benchmarks, it hasn’t been required
under the law to purchase test-tutoring services
from outside providers like Kaplan. But nearly 90
percent of its student body falls below the federal
poverty level, and the school’s principal likely decided to use a chunk of Health Careers’ NCLB
low-income-schools funding to pay for our testprep materials.2 (Kaplan’s SAT program is one
of an array of test-prep courses that the company is contracted to “deliver” in schools nationwide. In New York City, Kaplan provides NCLB-
MANY EDUCATORS ARGUE THAT THE GAINS FROM PREP COURSES ARE
NEGLIGIBLE AND THE PROGRAMS THEMSELVES ULTIMATE LY HARMFUL,
SINCE THEY DRAIN PRECIOUS FUNDS AND CLASS TIME
paper inscribed in blunt pencil by a student
named Zeeshan Pervaiz. In what is otherwise a
sober reflection on the Spanish-American War,
one of Zeeshan’s paragraphs, focusing on the
media, strikes a more strident tone. “The practice was called ‘yellow journalism.’ It was called
yellow journalism because the materials used to
make the newspaper were basically garbage and
the odds of it being true were the odds of the
Knicks going to the playoffs: bullshit.” His history teacher has written along the margin in red
ink: “Avoid expletives. Also, the stories had an
element of truth.”
I return to Ms. Semidey’s class, my water bottle empty. Most of the students have filed in but
few have found their seats. The student population of Health Careers is 90 percent Hispanic and
8 percent black, and the twenty-five students
milling about fairly accurately reflect these proportions. “Ms. Seh-MY-dee?” I say softly, trying
to get her attention, sure that I’ve butchered
the name. She looks up from her papers, startled.
She smiles. She is very pretty, in her midtwenties, with large brown eyes and full lips colored in bright red.
“Yes. It’s SEH-meh-DAY.” Introducing myself,
I say that I’m from Kaplan and here to “demo” the
first lesson from the SAT materials. “No,” she
says emphatically. The smile has faded. She explains that she is supposed to be observed by the
assistant principal this period, that the observation
is part of her ongoing certification. I look down stupidly at my schedule.
I understand her anxiety. Just a few years ear-
36
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008
mandated tutoring for the high school Regents
exams and the subject exams administered to
students in the third through eighth grades.)
Many educators argue that the gains from prep
courses are negligible and the programs themselves ultimately harmful, since they drain precious funds and class time. A recent Chicago
Public Schools study examining student performance on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills found
“little difference between tutored students and
those who were eligible but did not receive tutoring.” The price tag for supplemental tutoring
in Chicago, which 60,000 students received in the
2004–2005 school year: $50 million.3 Teachers
also are aware that Kaplan’s presence will continue to be felt long after its coaches have moved
on: completion of the thirty-six-lesson SAT Ad2
And to say there is room for academic improvement at
the school is a vast understatement. Only 58 percent of
its students graduate in four years. Of all graduates, 41
percent leave with a full “Regents diploma,” which is
conferred if a student scores 65 percent or higher on five
subject-proficiency exams. A mere 3 percent of Health
Careers’ students graduate with an “advanced” diploma,
which can be earned if they take three additional Regents
exams and an increased credit load. The state average is
36 percent.
3 When I emailed my Kaplan supervisor, Katy Shannon, to find out if the company had any stats showing
the effectiveness of its test-prep work in schools, she
said that they did have someone working to collect that
data but couldn’t show me anything at that time. “It is
difficult to do,” she wrote, “because we sell the program to a school and it is up to them to maintain fidelity, which doesn’t always happen, therefore that data
tends to be unreliable.”
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/25/08
8:06 AM
Page 37
vantage program, which includes three abbreviated tests and one full-length practice exam, requires a full forty hours of instruction time.
I tell Ms. Semidey I can teach the class tomorrow, since I’m scheduled to be in the school
for two days. A little smile returns to her lips.
“I’ve worked my ass off on this lesson,” she says.
As I turn to leave, I am met by a small, perky
woman. “Are you Jeremy?” she asks. It is the assistant principal, Ms. Campeas. She listens as I explain the conflict and the proposed resolution.
“No,” she says. “This is Kaplan day. We will do the
observation another day.” She calls Ms. Semidey
over and firmly tells her the same.
By the time Ms. Campeas has issued her decree,
class has been in session for five minutes. I quickly distribute Kaplan
workbooks to the students. I toss one
Frisbee-style to a student whose corner desk is so thoroughly barricaded
I cannot reach him. With a little
sideways lurch, I wriggle between the
groups of desks into the small hollow that seems to be the room’s dramatic center point. Students observe
me quizzically (though some must
look over their shoulders or turn
around completely to do so). One
rangy boy slumped heavily in his
chair notices the Kaplan logo on the
book, covers his face with longfingered hands, and announces, “Not
this again. Not Kaplan. I hate this
shit.” Ms. Semidey stands between
the science table and the chalkboard
at the front of the room, a pair of
scissors gripped tightly in her hand.
Her Kaplan teacher’s manual lies
unopened on the table
before her.
O
ver the past nine years, I have
worked on and off for Kaplan in numerous capacities. My first job with
the company came soon after college, when I traveled to the manors
of Westchester County, New York,
and Fairfield County, Connecticut,
offering their university-bound residents tips on ways to boost Board
scores. In 2004, after two years of
teaching biology at an alternative
public high school in Manhattan’s
Chelsea neighborhood, I joined Kaplan again. I was dispatched to several
of New York’s worst-performing and
most dysfunctional high schools—
William Howard Taft, Jane Addams,
Evander Childs. My job, ostensibly,
was to help students pass the New
Standing, by Diem Chau
York State Regents exams. A few days a week,
three or four of the strongest students in each
school would leave their classes, where they
were stabilizing forces, and attend my miniworkshops of packaged prep lessons. Although
they seemed to enjoy the exercises, these kids
were already more than capable of passing
their exams with high scores. At Taft, I was
placed in a room with juvenile offenders and
nineteen-year-old sophomores. “Just keep them
in the classroom,” a science teacher instructed
me. “That is your job.” A police officer was
stationed outside the door, in case things got
rough. Things never did. But Kaplan’s testprep manual offered little that these wayward
youths could use.
I began my current stint last September. I was eager to return to the
classroom, where I felt I might be able
to do something meaningful. But my
wife had been negotiating a job transfer to another state for the better part
of the previous year, and I didn’t want
to commit to a school I quickly would
have to leave. So I settled for the stopgap work as an ancillary. With Kaplan, I knew at least that there would
be none of the duties outside the classroom that comes with being a fulltime teacher: no grading papers, calling parents, ordering supplies, or
attending meetings. I also was curious to find out how the company had
changed in recent years. No Child
Left Behind had opened up new vistas of opportunity for testing companies, and I had heard that Kaplan had
charged forward by radically expanding its services within schools.
Although hailed by its advocates as
a step toward institutional accountability and full student proficiency,
No Child Left Behind is, at its core, a
highly punitive act. Ratified in 2002,
the legislation mandates that states
create a system of tests and other academic indicators that measure whether
students meet “the minimum level of
proficiency.” Schools that repeatedly
fail to meet these benchmarks can be
closed, taken over by private corporations, or restructured. Schools with
high-poverty populations that receive
federal aid (known as Title I funds)
and fail for three straight years to
demonstrate “progress” toward full proficiency are required to spend up to
20 percent of this federal money on tutoring or transportation costs for students who choose to transfer out of
REPORT
37
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/25/08
8:07 AM
Page 38
their current school. In New York City, the transfer option is derided by critics as a hollow provision, since other city schools generally are no better and successful ones are already oversubscribed.4
Thus, failing students become trapped in a
foundering system, and the schools where students land en masse are left to carry out the testheavy requirements of NCLB. For the New York
schools “in need of improvement,” this means
preparing students—many of whom are utterly
lacking in basic academic skills and subject knowledge—to pass a battery of standardized exams.
Toward this end, it also means paying
money to outside entities (often private
companies such as Kaplan, the Princeton Review, and Newton Learning)
up to $2,000 per student for courses
focused not on improving content
knowledge or on intensive educational counseling but on strategies for a
“particular testing task.” (The total
annual government expenditure per
student in New York City is $15,000.)
The failure of schools serving lowincome students has been a windfall for
the testing industry. Title I funds earmarked for test tutoring increased by
45 percent during the first four years of
NCLB, from $1.75 billion in 2001 to
$2.55 billion in 2005. With the ever
growing stream of funding flowing
through the nation’s schools, the number of supplemental-service providers
nationwide has exploded. In New
York City, the number of providers
approved by the state’s department of
education jumped from forty-seven in
2002–2003, the first full school year
of NCLB, to 202 today. To capitalize
on these new revenue opportunities,
Kaplan has acquired Achieva, a
provider of online course materials to
schools, and SpellRead, a national
“reading-intervention” company. In
2003, Kaplan hired former N.Y.C.
Chancellor of Education Harold Levy
as an executive vice president and general counsel, and in 2006 relocated its
headquarters for Kaplan K12, the division of the company that works in
schools, from Midtown Manhattan to
4 New York City’s handful of high-performing
high schools, like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant, require that students
pass rigorous entrance exams and navigate a
complicated enrollment process. Several of the
city’s middle schools with gifted and talented programs also require testing. Not surprisingly,
Kaplan and other testing companies offer prep
courses for all these entrance exams.
38
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008
luxury offices downtown. According to Crain’s, the
company made the move “to be closer to the New
York City Department of Education.”
Not wanting to be limited in its offerings to
schools, Kaplan recently entered the business of
selling content-based lesson plans. Although the
shift from testing strategies to classroom content
is a departure for Kaplan, the company sees little
difference between the two. Earlier this spring, I
designed a genetics class for Kaplan’s “Lesson
Bank,” an online repository of short lessons that,
for a fee, teachers can download in PDF form. As
writers of the curriculum, we were repeatedly told that the materials had
to provide hassle-free prep for teachers.
When I submitted a first draft of a high
school lesson on Mendelian genetics,
the Kaplan staffer overseeing production, Tyler DeWitt, told me it was too
complex. “We’re really trying to almost script lessons,” DeWitt wrote via
email, “so that teachers who may be
new or not the greatest (or smartest)
teachers in the world can follow the
‘script’ and still give a great lesson.”
For $35 an hour, I obliged and watered
down the material, removing all “advanced” content points, such as codominance and pleiotropy (though
these were subjects that I covered in
the basic biology classes I taught a couple of years earlier).
Kaplan’s increased workload has produced some remarkable results, though
not necessarily in the classroom. The
company’s revenues have jumped from
$354 million in 2000 to more than $2
billion today, and it is now the most
profitable subsidiary of its parent, The
Washington Post Company, accounting for almost half of the conglomerate’s income. More telling are the margins: in 2003, Kaplan posted a loss of
$11.7 million; in 2007, the company
reported a $149 million profit. Because
the revenues from Kaplan K12 are folded into the test-prep operations, it is
impossible to say with precision how
much of the company’s income comes
from Title I funds.5 In New York City
schools, Kaplan contracts and purchase
orders (which run to over 300 pages on
the city’s “Vendex” contract database)
have totaled $73 million since 1999,
5
Kaplan’s communications director, Carina
Wong, said the company’s recent growth has
come largely in the area of higher education. “I
can’t provide specific numbers,” she wrote in
an email. “But NCLB has not been the driver
of Kaplan’s rapid expansion.”
American Boy, by Diem Chau
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/24/08
9:24 AM
Page 39
with the overwhelming number of these contracts
awarded to the company after the passage of
NCLB. (Princeton Review, Kaplan’s chief rival,
has taken in $50 million in city contracts since
2005, when its Vendex records begin.)
The K12 division’s fiscal success in public education, a realm long seen as resistant to profitability, has added a sense of swagger to Kaplan’s
corporate culture. The company now considers itself more than a waypoint for the college-bound
and the budding professional. During training,
coaches are often reminded that Kaplan’s mission
transcends the dysfunction and malaise that we’re
told we will find in failing schools. “Good schools
succeed for many reasons, but bad schools fail
for all the same ones” is repeated like a mantra in
these sessions. Shannon Bryant, Kaplan’s academic director, who peppers his speech liberally
But early in the delivery of my P.D. script, I was
cut off after I asked the teachers what the SAT
was designed to do. It was a lame question, I admit, but the vehemence it unleashed surprised
me. “It’s designed to keep people in their
places,” a teacher shouted from the back of the
room. “It serves the status quo.” There were approving snickers. “Are you saying there are
things in the Kaplan prep book we aren’t already doing with our classes?” asked a teacher
who began to rise threateningly from his seat.
(Although I saw other indications of this antagonism at Truman—e.g., in a flyer tacked up in
the main office that announced a meeting with
the headline STUDENTS CORPORATIONS FIRST—
this last teacher’s hostility came from a different
source. He had worked for the Princeton Review. During a short break in my presentation,
BECAUSE OF A FEDERAL POLICY, KAPLAN WAS ABLE TO FUNCTION LIKE SO MANY
PRIVATE CONTRACTORS OPERATING AMID CHAOS AND DISARRAY—BENEFITING
FROM THE CRISIS BUT DOING NOTHING TO CHANGE THE PROBLEM
with SAT words, prefers the prefix “über-” in describing our work. At training pep talks and orientations, he utters phrases like: “When we go
into the school, we’ve got to maintain an image
of übercompetence,” or, “Since many of you are
young and intelligent, many [students] will see you
as übercool. It’s important to remember to keep
a safe distance, to remain überprofessional. . . . Let
them know you could be working toward your
Ph.D. But you’re not. You’re here
teaching them.”
T
he assignments given to Kaplan coaches are
doled out largely based on experience—and responsiveness. In order to get work with some frequency, coaches must stay in constant contact
with Kaplan’s implementation staff and confirm
assignments almost immediately. The work is also
tied to the ebb and flow of the school year. In
the early fall, when the sales team is busy pitching its services to principals and most schools
have yet to decide how to integrate these (often
mandated) materials into daily operations, coaches frequently find themselves leading professionaldevelopment seminars. The “P.D.” meetings are
intended to give teachers a thorough tutorial in
the Kaplan materials, including an overview of lesson structure, key strategies, and, most important,
how the curriculum should be taught.
One of my first P.D. assignments was at Harry S. Truman, a high school beside the sprawling towers of Co-op City, in the Bronx. I was
supposed to talk up the merits of Kaplan’s SAT
Advantage to the school’s math department.
he apologized for seeming upset. “It’s not you,”
he said. “But Kaplan’s materials are weak compared to Princeton’s.”)
I agreed with many of the standard criticisms
leveled against Kaplan and the other for-profit
companies peddling test-prep methods in schools.
Because of an ill-conceived and poorly executed
federal policy, they were able to function like so
many private contractors operating amid chaos and
disarray—benefiting from the crisis but doing
nothing to change the nature of the problem. Yet
as I came under attack at Truman, I found Kaplan’s
training reflexively surging into my chest. We
had been told in practice seminars to diffuse criticism by acknowledging complaints and then responding with an array of talking points intended to play on teachers’ anxiety over metrics and
accountability. As a kind of disclaimer, we were
to emphasize our transient and limited role in
schools: We, Kaplan, could not ultimately be held
accountable for whatever inadequate form of instruction was taking place at the school. Other seasoned presenters I had been required to observe
used more creative and provocative methods to
evade criticism. One Kaplan representative, a
longtime teacher in New York City public schools,
invoked the renegade geneticist and scientific entrepreneur J. Craig Venter as a way to reconcile
the seemingly contradictory ideas of profit and
public service. At the end of his presentation, he
held up Venter’s autobiography, A Life Decoded,
and urged teachers to get their hands on a copy.
“You guys are doing a great job in your classes,” I said calmly to the math teachers assembled
REPORT
39
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/24/08
9:25 AM
Page 40
before me. “But this book will help you translate
the content and help your students bridge that
knowledge-performance gap.” To another teacher
who said he already taught SAT problems in his
class, I asked if he used a “consistent methodology.” Do you teach your kids ways to seek out the
right answer without actually knowing the answer? Do you use the results of diagnostic exams
to customize your lesson plans? Do you have them
practice in real test conditions? Do you track student progress in a uniform way? Is that data centralized and easily accessible to the entire staff?
A solemn, gray-haired teacher said, “with all
due respect,” that the test prepping would surely take away from his already limited teaching
time. Another teacher, a large stack of papers
piled in front of her, cut him short. “I personally don’t see what the big deal is,” she said. “We
can just pick and choose lessons, exercises, and
ter; from the balcony hangs a full-length oil painting of George Washington. The Battle of Fort
Washington, a major defeat suffered by the American Continental Army in 1776, played out not
far from here. The atrium also houses a gallery of
the school’s famous alumni: Alan Greenspan, Jacob Javits, Henry Kissinger, Harry Belafonte, the
baseball great Rod Carew. Alongside the photograph of Kissinger is a typewritten letter in which
the former secretary of state recounts the importance the school held in his early life as a refugee
from Nazi Germany. Although he regrets that he
must decline the invitation to attend his induction on the school’s “wall of fame,” Kissinger does
offer, in absentia, words of encouragement to his
G.W. successors: “In America, everything is possible. It’s up to you.”
A clearer understanding of a school also allows you to make adjustments to your lessons
A STUDENT ASKS WHY THEY AREN’T USING THE NORMAL MATH BOOK.
“WE’RE NOT LEARNING ABOUT MATH TODAY,” MR. PACELLA SAYS, HIS VOICE
OOZING SARCASM. “WE’RE LEARNING ABOUT HOW TO TAKE A TEST.”
questions from the book. We can work it in.”
“We’re not ‘just working it in,’” the head of the
math department, Ms. DeSimone, said with finality. “We’re supposed to be teaching SAT curriculum once a week. We didn’t pay all this money for this program for it not to be done right.”
The math faculty of Truman High School was
no easy mark. A tough sell. But it didn’t
matter. They were already owners.
“C
ustomization” and the educationally in
vogue “differentiation” are two of Kaplan’s professed guiding principles. But Kaplan’s boilerplate
assignment sheets and teaching materials hardly
reflect the particulars of each of its customers. For
Kaplan coaches, entering a New York City public school for the first time is like the first day on
a job. Without data, perspective, or familiarity, you
quickly try to pick up on the culture of the place,
to see beyond the oppressive similarities in the
buildings—the uniform concrete corridors, the
unsynchronized clocks, the scuffed linoleum and
dented steel doors, the relentless echo. Indeed, the
shows of police force and the prisonlike design elements, now nearly ubiquitous in underserved
schools, often hide redeeming aesthetic qualities
and important pieces of a school’s past. Once you
pass through the security checkpoint that dominates George Washington High’s entryway, the architectural grace and history of the school suddenly
come into relief. Two staircases run in torqued
parabolas along the edges of the building’s grand
atrium. Overhead, a balcony encircles the perime-
40
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008
and teaching style. A school’s stairwells, for instance, tell you whether you’ll be spending the day
in a safe or a dangerous place, whether the staff
has ceded the margins to students. When students notice a teacher in these annexed spaces,
their faces sometimes slacken to suggest that a tacitly agreed upon line, an unspoken boundary, has
been crossed. At Wadleigh High School in
Harlem, where I worked in March, I stumbled
onto a group of students tagging the stairway
walls. Lookouts were positioned on the top and
bottom landings. I passed the sentries unnoticed
and saw a young man in a Yankees cap straining
toward the ceiling with a bright-green marker.
“Oh shit,” the boy in the ball cap said, hiding the
cucumber-sized marker behind his back. “Why
didn’t you yell ‘teacher’?” he scolded his friends.
I passed through a door into the lobby, where a
police officer sat reading a newspaper. I told him
what I had seen. He lifted his eyes heavily from
the paper but did not budge from his seat.
Another place to learn about the day-to-day life
of a school is the teachers’ lounge. Kaplan coaches are often sent here during downtime, or as
they wait to “debrief” teachers on the day’s
lessons. These mandated discussions give faculty members more cause to evade test-prep interlopers, but this isolation does bestow on coaches a certain invisibility, and you sometimes find
yourself privy to conversations not meant for
your ears. At Health Careers, for example, I overheard a teacher and an aide discuss a student
who had recently become a “no-show.”
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/25/08
8:08 AM
Page 41
“Enrique has been missing class and sleeping
when he’s here.”
“I’ve so noticed that too.”
“The kids tell me he’s joined a gang. I’ve been
asking around.”
“A gang? He never seemed like the type.”
“I know. But they say he got kicked out because
he missed a chapter meeting. So that’s why he’s
been back in school lately.”
“Gangs have chapter meetings?”
“Well, you know what I mean. I mean he’s
too lazy to even be in a gang.”
Some staff members are welcoming and go out
of their way to present to itinerants like me the
largely hidden idiosyncrasies of a school. As I
waited one day to speak with Health
Careers’ English faculty about “weaving” forty hours of Kaplan SAT instruction into their busy, test-laden,
end-of-year schedules, Zev Shanken, an
English teacher, directed my attention
to the lounge’s large pane window. The
window offered a spectacular view of
the Harlem River, the bare limbs of
Inwood Hill Park, the gray-blue mesa
of the Palisades. He pointed to the
school’s athletic fields, tucked into a
small elbow of land at the edge of the
cliffs. On this very field, Shanken declaimed, Manny Ramirez, the Boston
Red Sox slugger, perfected his oppositefield stroke. The baseball diamond sits
inside a rectangular, high-fenced enclosure that runs into a 90-degree corner at dead center. A ball hit to center would probably have to travel some
500 feet to leave the field, but to right
field the fence appears to be no more
than 250 feet from home plate.
“Kids ask me why Manny isn’t up
on the wall of fame with Greenspan,
Kissinger, and Javits,” Shanken said.
“Some say it’s discrimination. I tell
them no. The reason Manny isn’t up
there is because Manny didn’t graduate. You’ve got to have a
diploma to get on the wall.”
S
ince a day’s coaching brings me
a wage that exceeds that of all but the
most senior teachers, schools do not
want to pay Kaplan’s hefty fees if they
are not going to get an “honest” day’s
teaching out of it. But occasionally
teachers do not feel comfortable turning over their classes to strangers and
say that they’d prefer to teach the test
materials themselves. When this happens, Kaplan coaches watch and take
notes on a teacher’s performance and
American Girl, by Diem Chau
then, later in the day, offer feedback on how the
teacher utilized the Kaplan materials. The company calls this “spotting.”
At Truman High School, in April, I find myself spotting a Mr. Pacella. Mr. Pacella is a veteran of the Truman math department and a man
of imposing stature, with delicate features set on
a meaty swath of face. When I arrive at his classroom, he is using his girth to push two students
out the door, much as a sumo wrestler forces an
opponent off a mat. The two male students, slender as reeds and draped in baggy clothes, are
knocked backward into the hall. They protest
loudly that someone in the room has something
that belongs to them. Mr. Pacella simply holds
his palms flat toward them, closes his
eyes, and silently shakes his head and
hands. I maneuver between the students and introduce myself. Mr. Pacella tells me he has just passed out the
Kaplan workbooks. But when I say I
can demo a lesson, he declines the
offer. “I’m okay on the teaching,” he
says. “Have a seat wherever you’d
like.” Several students huddle around
each of the room’s trapezoidal desks.
Any vacant space is covered by backpacks, soft drinks, piles of ragged textbooks. I take a seat atop the radiator,
beside a window overlooking the New
England Thruway.
By today’s standards in New York,
Truman is massive. With an enrollment hovering around 3,000, it is one
of the city’s few remaining “intact”
high schools. For most of the teachers
I spoke with there, this is a source of
pride. Truman is big and the staff
doesn’t want to see the school shattered into a babel of small academies.
Hassan Laaroussi, a dean there, tells
me that the school’s no-nonsense principal, Sana Nasser, is able to maintain order in such a crowded school
through the use of a new surveillance
network. When a student is caught
breaking a rule, Principal Nasser will
sit the offender in front of the video
machine. “She’ll cue it up right to the
spot,” Laaroussi says. “She can even
zoom in. Then she’ll ask, ‘Is that you?’
There’s no arguing with the tape. If the
kid tries to deny it, it’s over. He’s out.”
From the show of force at the beginning of the period, I expect Mr.
Pacella’s class to be a regimented, disciplined place. But this is not the case.
The room is loud. Students wander
about. One student wearing large headphones stares into a corner, his head
REPORT
41
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/25/08
8:09 AM
Page 42
moving in little roosterlike stabs. At another table,
a girl extracts bright-pink lip gloss from a plastic
cylinder and dabs it repeatedly on her lips. A paper plate pasted over the classroom’s clock displays the scrawled phrase IT IS NOW. Mr. Pacella
paces around the room, aggressively urging students to get going on “Page V, page Roman numeral five, page VEE!” Page V contains a short introductory quiz approximating the structure of the
SAT math section. Despite his entreaties, few students have opened their books.
A female student who seems eager to get to
work asks Mr. Pacella why they are using this
book and not the normal math book. “We’re not
learning about math today,” he says, his voice
oozing sarcasm. “We’re learning about
how to take a test.” Another student
says she has been working with the
Kaplan SAT book in her English class
for the past two months. Mr. Pacella
tells the girl to rephrase her statement
in the form of a question. She pauses
to reflect and then tries again. “So
why are we just getting around to it
now?” “Because it’s just the way things
have worked out,” her teacher says.
After Mr. Pacella instructs his students to begin the introductory quiz,
the class continues to buzz with conversation and nervous energy. A girl
in tight jeans rises to a half-crouch
and pleads with her classmates to be
silent. “Everybody, quiet. Listen up.
We’ve got a visitor!” she says, holding
out an upturned palm toward me. No
one appears to have noticed her seemingly heartfelt plea. A boy in the front
row raises his hand and asks if he can
use a calculator. The boy’s name is
Ryan, and throughout the period a
girl named Antoinette seated directly behind him has been using the thin
handle of a comb to meticulously separate his hair into dozens of neatly
spaced rows. Mr. Pacella replies dryly to Ryan’s question. He says he
doesn’t have any more calculators because Ryan has “stolen” most of them.
“How many of my calculators do you
have at home now, Ryan?” Ryan
smiles. “I don’t know, four or five.”
Mr. Pacella begins to read out the
answers and scripted explanations,
verbatim, from the next page of the
workbook. “Wow, so did you hear
that, class?” he says. “You get a point
for a correct answer, you lose a quarter point for an incorrect answer, and
you don’t lose anything for skipping.”
By this time, Antoinette has nearly
42
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008
finished twisting Ryan’s hair into tight cornrows.
The pair’s relationship appears to be symbiotic and
is quite something to behold (not least for the fact
that it is playing out in the very front of the classroom). As Antoinette fluffs, picks, and sculpts,
Ryan dutifully copies the answers into his, and
Antoinette’s, book.
Twenty minutes into class, and I begin to doubt
whether Mr. Pacella will ever gain control. But
then with the authority that experienced teachers can instantly summon—through a shift in
tone, the light touch of a hand on the shoulder,
a readjustment of posture—he signals to the class
that it is time to pay attention. He ambles calmly to a chalkboard in the corner of the room. He
plucks up a piece of chalk in his hands
and pauses a moment, shaking it like
dice. The class is rapt. I’m sure he’s
working toward something big. Then
I notice what’s already written on the
board behind him: “Reasons Why
Ryan Is Failing.” He begins to form a
list beneath the header:
1. Ryan only cares about his hair.
2. Ryan is a constant distraction
to Antoinette.
The classroom erupts in laughter.
When I catch up with Mr. Pacella
later on in the day, for my required debriefing, he is seated at a small desk in
the hallway, presumably on hall patrol. He is reading a self-help hardcover. I ask how he thinks the lesson
went. “Okay. I’ve worked with Kaplan’s materials before,” he says. I can
tell he wants to get back to his book.
“Yeah,” I say. “The first lesson is always a little rough.”
L
unch can be an especially solitary time for a Kaplan coach. So when
Zev Shanken asks if I’d like to join
him at a place near George Washington called Isabella, I happily agree.
Since arriving at the school, in fact,
I’ve heard teachers speak favorably, almost fawningly, about this Isabella.
“Should we meet over at Isabella?”
“Are we headed to Isabella for lunch?”
I guess that it must be some local
Washington Heights treasure, a lowkey Dominican café or gem of a diner. I’m excited.
We pass through the security
checkpoint and into the gray March
afternoon. But instead of walking
the half block to St. Nicholas Avenue, where there are a host of
Latin eateries, Mr. Shanken makes a
hard left and stops at the building
Present, by Diem Chau
T
C
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/24/08
9:25 AM
Page 43
next door to the school. Isabella is the sixteenstory nursing home that abuts George Washington. We enter and pick up little green clip-on
tags that lie like potpourri in a small basket at
the security desk. We move down the hallway
toward the cafeteria, past a group of wheelchairbound residents huddled beneath a television.
“This place is a nice change of pace,” says
Shanken, smiling at a wisp of a woman shuffling
up the corridor with the help of a walker.
Many of Health Careers’ teachers come here.
Apparently the geriatric balm of Isabella is a
remedy for the adolescent unrest of the school
day. “Mr. Samuels, the math teacher you’ll be
working with tomorrow, said he’d be up here
too. I’ll introduce you.” When we get to the
cafeteria, Samuels and a group of colleagues are
seated around a table eating sandwiches and
iceberg-lettuce salads from Styrofoam bowls.
editor you’ve worked with in the past might say,
‘We need 1,200 words in a couple of days. Something really raunchy on a topic like soft-cock
fucking or gerontophilia.’”
“Gerontophilia?” I ask. He looks around the
room theatrically.
“Love of the elderly.”
I
n mid-May, as the school year neared its
end, I received an assignment I had long sought:
a month-long Regents prep course for “nontraditional” students. I was told that I was
selected for the job—leading the prep for the biology Regents exam—because I ranked among
Kaplan K12’s best teachers. Shortly after I
accepted, however, Lauren Phillips, a Kaplan
coordinator, expressed her relief in an email,
writing that she was “afraid she was going to
have to get on the phone and start begging folks.”
THIS IS THE KIND OF TEACHING I LOATHE: THE TEST FETISHIZING, THE WEASELY
CODE-BREAKING THAT BEGINS WHEN THE HOPE OF LEARNING HAS EVAPORATED.
BUT WHAT ELSE, IN THIS FINAL HOUR, DO I HAVE TO OFFER?
They look down at my Kaplan-stenciled bag
and offer strained smiles. By the time Shanken
and I make it back from the buffet line, they
have gone.
Mr. Shanken is a compelling storyteller and a
great lover of words. He talks excitedly about
vocabulary-building exercises that use etymology, common roots, and associations. He says his
Spanish-speaking students often get tripped up in
these exercises by misleading roots or similar
sounding words with a figurative component that
is lost in translation. One example, he says, is
the word “obscure.” “Oscuro in Spanish means
‘dark.’ But ‘obscure’ means ‘hard to see’ or ‘uncertain,’” says Shanken.
This appreciation of language has also led
Shanken to work as a poet, an editor of a literary
magazine, a freelance writer, and a journalist.
His writing has found its way into various New
York–based publications, including community
newspapers like The Villager and the Westsider
and erotic magazines like Pillow Talk and Variations. “It was great money,” he says of the literary porn. “It’s really no different from any other
kind of writing. Apart from the fact that it’s very
hard to write an original story about sex.”
Although I find it a little surreal to be discussing erotica over lunch at a nursing home, I
press ahead and ask him how assignments come
down. Are there traditional pitches, or do you just
hack something out and send it in? He says once
you have a good working relationship with your
editors, stories are often solicited by theme. “An
Nevertheless, I saw the work as a sort of promotion, a hard-earned graduation back to the world
of real teaching. Unlike my previous assignments, with this one I’d have a class of my own.
I knew the students were in desperate need of
guidance. Many of them had full-time jobs, children of their own, or other adult responsibilities
that kept them from attending school during
the day. And I believed I would now have enough
time to do some actual good. Not only would I
be able to learn my students’ names for the first
time this year but I’d have the chance to gauge
and cater to their individual academic strengths
and weaknesses. Although I would be teaching
Kaplan’s thirty-six-lesson prep course exclusively,
I’d have a measure of control. Since there was no
chance of completing the whole course book in
the time allotted, I would decide what should be
included and what excised. I would also be paid
nearly $1,800 to teach the nine hour-and-a-half
classes, an astonishing $130 for each hour of my
coaching time.
The course was being held after the school day
at John F. Kennedy, a high school located in a
northwestern Bronx neighborhood called Spuyten
Duyvil. Twenty minutes before the first class there,
we are told in a brief orientation that our students are between seventeen and twenty-one years
old. Some need only to pass the Regents exam to
graduate; others have accumulated barely enough
credits to be sophomores and juniors. All of the students assigned to my class have failed—several of
them on multiple occasions—the Living
REPORT
43
(44,45)Miller Final2 rev2
7/29/08
9:09 AM
Page 44
Environment Regents exam, which New York
State’s students typically take in ninth grade. The
challenges pile up once class begins. Of the thirteen students signed up for my biology prep, four
show up. In a class taught by one of my colleagues
that evening, a tutorial for the U.S. History &
Government Regents exam, just one of twenty students is present. So by the first critical measure of
how many students we will potentially be able to
help, we have failed before we have even begun.
As troubling as the absence rate, however, is that
not one of the students who is supposed to be in
my class is fluent in English. This vital piece of
information—that we will be working not with
over-aged and under-credited students but with
over-aged under-credited ESL students—has somehow slipped beneath the notice of the administrative bodies overseeing the program.
The attendance for the second class is better:
six students turn up. All arrive seven minutes
late, strolling in unhurriedly. I suppose I understand: When it has taken five years to accumulate the credit equivalency of a sophomore, what’s
the point of rushing? We begin with an assignment designed to show students that Regents
questions often contain bloated diction, and that
very few of the words in the prompt are necessary
to arrive successfully at an answer. But with the
literacy limitations of the group, I find that getting the students merely to read the questions, let
alone read them aloud, is a nearly impossible
task. No one volunteers, and my attempts to
nominate readers are met with firm resistance. So
I fill the void with my own voice. I read the questions to them, knowing that such coddling will
do them no good on test day.
As we move into the lesson, we encounter a
question about the adaptation of species to
their ecosystems. I ask students what the term
“ecosystem” means. They have become more
comfortable and have begun to talk to one another in Spanish when things get difficult.
Yinette, a student who dresses like she might be
headed to a nightclub after class, utters the
word “ecosistema.” She and the rest of the group
seem to understand. I point out the window at
the trees along the steep hills rising from the
narrow strait, linking the Hudson and the
Harlem rivers, that is the neighborhood’s namesake, the “spitting devil.” I ask what they remember about how these trees looked a few
months ago. A pony-tailed student named Pedro says they didn’t have leaves. “Now think
about tropical plants you have seen in the
Caribbean,” I say. “What do those plants look
like in the middle of winter?” “The ones in the
Dominican Republic still got leaves,” Pedro answers again. “They got flowers, and some even
got fruits hanging down.” This is good, I’m
thinking. The lesson has transcended a simple
44
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008
review of basic ecology. It has become an exercise in the logical progression of thought.
I say that the Regents will probably ask something like: “How are these plants adapted to
their ecosystems?”
“Adapted?” asks a girl named Cynthia.
“Yes, adapted. You know this,” I say, but I can
see that they do not. “What does ‘adaptation’
mean? Adapcion,” I try in an awful Spanish. Nothing. I attempt a different tack. “We said that the
plants in New York drop their leaves and the ones
in the D.R. do not.” Nods. “We said that this is
because it gets cold here and it does not get so cold
there. Right?” More nods. “So what does this tell
us about how these plants are ‘adapted’?”
Cynthia’s eyes widen. As if channeling a biology textbook, she says, “The plants in D.R. are
adapted to the warm weather and the ones here
are adapted to the cold.” Right. And what are the
adaptations? “The leaves,” she says, trying to project a sense of toughness, as if this whole tangled, exhausting effort to spit out a single sentence
were beneath her.
A boy named Jaime lifts the brim of his Cardinals ball cap and looks up from his
paper: “Say that again.”
T
he remainder of the program at Kennedy
moves in similar fits and starts—of tidal wanderings, of ever more apparent gaps in language,
knowledge, and continuity. The average attendance for my class is three students. In the eighth
of nine sessions, the temperature reaches 97 degrees and the humidity is off the charts. Only
one student comes, Yinette, who travels an hour
by subway from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Yinette
is nineteen, and she has told me that she wants
to be a flight attendant. The biology Regents is
the last exam she must pass, she says, to graduate
from high school and get into the community
college where she can begin training for the job.
Yinette sits down and immediately pulls out a
transparent folder filled with copies of past Regents
exams. “Can you help me on these?” she asks eagerly. There is no air-conditioning. In the corner
of the room a large fan on a steel pedestal whirs
like the prop of a Cessna, buoying little flecks of
dust and paper that float through the room on
slow currents. Some of the exams she has scattered
over the desk are in Spanish and some are in English. Her looping handwriting can be seen on
most of the visible pages. I decide to overlook
Kaplan’s policy of never deviating from the teaching script, which, with the slow progress till now,
dictates that I conduct an “accelerated” review of
two of the course book’s units.
We begin with a problem that references a cryptic flow chart of complementary and inverse
processes of photosynthesis and cell respiration.
The questions below the diagram are designed to
(44,45)Miller Final2 rev2
7/29/08
9:10 AM
Page 45
test understanding of the inputs and outputs of
these processes. These core concepts will probably
surface in at least two or three different ways on the
exam, so I’m heartened when Yinette shows that
she knows this material. As she taps into her memory and recalls information gained at some indeterminate time in her past, she seems filled with optimism. “This is fun!” she says at one point.
We come to a problem about the functioning
of insulin in the bloodstream. We work incrementally, reviewing information so that she can
sufficiently answer the written responses.
“What is insulin?” I prod.
“A hormone.”
“How does it work?”
“Like a key, to unlock the cell.”
“Yes. So why does the cell need to be unlocked?”
“To let sugar in.”
“Why does sugar need to be in the cell?”
“To make energy.”
This feels almost like teaching. In
all the other classes, I’ve pressed
ahead in order to cover as much of
the Kaplan material as possible, well
aware that students hadn’t grasped
the concepts presented. During this
session with Yinette, there is real
engagement. But too quickly the
lesson is over. The electronic bell
sounds; Yinette’s cell phone rings
and rattles with new messages.
“Thank you, Mr. Miller,” she says.
We have one class remaining. “I’ll
see you here on Wednesday, right?”
I ask this because she has missed
the previous two classes. Yinette
says into the phone, “Lo siento.
Lo siento. Lo siento.” Apparently I
have already kept her
too long.
A
t the final class, Yinette
again is the only attendee. She
has brought a few more retired
Regents exams, and I do not
protest when she asks if we can
work on these instead of the Kaplan manual. We review the tests
together, but the openness and
energy of the previous class have
faded. Her recall of information
has ceased. Tonight she seems to
be operating in a mental shell, as
if the idea is hardening that she
will soon fail the Regents biology
exam for the fifth time.
I find myself desperate. I can’t accept that I have not reached a single student in the program. Kaplan
Pencil Girl, by Diem Chau
was being paid $1,200 per student (attending or
not) for a job it knew from the outset it couldn’t
complete. The money could have been used for an
ESL or special-education teacher. Instead, I was
receiving an entire day’s wage for each hour I sat
in a nearly deserted classroom. “If you see the
word ‘homeostasis’ in the answer choices,” I say to
Yinette, “pick it. It is most likely the right answer.” Her eyes light up. This is the kind of teaching I loathe: the test fetishizing, the weasely codebreaking that begins when the hope of learning has
evaporated. But what more, in this final hour, do
I have to offer?
“So if I see that word, ‘homeostasis,’ it’s probably right?” asks Yinette.
“Probably,” I say and do not elaborate. As we
move into the final section of the test, Latisha
Hanson, the on-site Kaplan administrator, enters
the room.
“Sorry to bother you,” she says. “But Lauren
wanted me to remind you that we
need to give the students the final
diagnostic exam.” I look at her intensely, in hopes that I will pull her
eyes magnetically down to the classroom empty save for one student,
that she will acknowledge the tragic absurdity of her request. “We
need to do it for record keeping,”
Latisha says. “I’m sorry.” Then she
places a couple of Scantron worksheets on the table. Yinette quietly tucks her practice Regents exams away.
The next forty-five minutes pass
agonizingly. Several times Yinette
asks me directly for information.
What does UV stand for? What are
the building blocks of a protein?
What is a nucleotide? A week earlier, I would have refused to acknowledge such entreaties. But
tonight I am a sieve, leaking weak
encouragements and with them answers. At one point I interject, “I
won’t be there on test day to give
you this help.” Yinette says she
knows, and then proceeds to ask me
what the difference is between a
heterotroph and an autotroph.
The clock reads 7:00, and I tell
Yinette that it is time to stop writing. I say she needs to finish the
question she is working on and hand
in her answer sheet. Doggedly, she
continues. I repeat my request, and
she looks up from her exam. She
stops writing and hands me the
Scantron. “I failed,” she says.
“You don’t know that.”
REPORT
45
(35-46)Miller Final2
7/24/08
9:26 AM
Page 46
“No. I failed,” she says with jarring finality
and rises to leave. She does not bother to
retrieve her Kaplan workbook from
the desk.
N
early two months earlier, after I teamtaught back-to-back SAT math prep classes at
Harlem’s Wadleigh High, I found myself stuck for
lunch and decided to eat downstairs in the school’s
cafeteria. By the stairwell leading to the basement
cafeteria were two stained-glass images of Goethe
and Victor Hugo encased safely behind tough steel
mesh. A tarnished plaque read, FROM THE CLASSES OF 1907. The cafeteria itself was long and oppressively narrow, with small bench seats attached
to foldout tables. The scene there was one of frenetic, centerless activity, of bodies moving and
colliding in an elaborate and aggressive minuet.
Two students were engaged in a sort of joust atop
the bench seats, trying to throw each other off. A
medley of mashed apples and oranges littered the
floor. Students yelled to be heard over the yelling
around them—an ever escalating feedback loop
played out in a drab and unlovingly built echo
chamber. The thump of basketballs from an outdoor court and the thrum of traffic added a sort of
bass line to the tinny cacophony inside.
Jonathan Kozol writes of the “squalid feedings”
that take place in these subterranean mess halls.
He says that such conditions persist because of “a
convenient defect of vision” and “are almost guaranteed to coarsen the mentalities of children and
to manufacture restlessness and discontent.” Yet
no laws mandate that additional funds go to improving these critical spaces. It’s perfectly understandable why rational adults don’t want to eat
down here, and that afternoon I saw only one
teacher, seated at the end of a row of foldout tables. When he saw my bag, he greeted me with a
wordless nod. Apart from this teacher and the
kitchen staff, one other adult, a female aide or
assistant, was stationed at a little wooden table
near the entrance. As if she were a small outcropping in a great river, students flowed around
her. She hunched down over folded hands, her
back to the current.
I stepped up to the lunch line and looked for
something palatable. It was the typical school fare
of processed chicken fingers and limp veggies
steamed relentlessly into a weird gelatin. Behind the counter, a machine churned a pale slurry. I asked what was in the machine. “Smoothies!” the cook announced enthusiastically. In a
small basket behind the counter were the smallest and waxiest apples I’d ever seen.
As I surveyed the grim offerings, a group from
the class I had just taught slid in line next to me.
“How’s it going, Mr. Miller?” It was a young man
with a close-cropped stubble of hair, his dress-code
tie neatly tucked behind a maroon cardigan. I was
46
HARPER’S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2008
surprised that he remembered my name; I certainly didn’t know his or his friends’. During the
previous period, their teacher, a Ms. Geraldino, allowed me to lead the lecture portion of the SAT
prep but interjected occasionally to remind students
of a recent lesson on factoring polynomials and of
the importance of showing their work. At one
moment, she stopped me entirely and separated the
students into small groups so that they could illustrate the steps they had taken to arrive at their
answers. Under the constraints of Kaplan’s routines
of repetition and direct application, I tried to add
pace to the lesson, and Ms. Geraldino and I proceeded to teach in different directions, offering
students conflicting messages. Near the end of
class, I announced to the students, “It’s not about
the work you show. It’s about getting the right
answer.” Ms. Geraldino, whose room was papered
with complex algebraic equations, winced visibly.
The student said his name was Shawnell. He
wondered whether I wanted to order something.
His confident guidance made me feel like I had
run into a Virgil of the Wadleigh High cafeteria.
“What do you suggest?” I asked.
“Honestly? Nothing. It’s all really bad,”
Shawnell said, shaking his head. “But I’d probably get an apple if I was you.” My thoughts exactly,
though judging from the thick paste on the floor,
I suspected that the apples made better projectiles
than snacks. There were no registers, so I asked
where I should go to pay.
“Pay? Nah. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t
need to pay. It’s free.” Then my guide leaned
over the counter. “Miss! Miss!” The lunch woman
turned and smiled. “My teacher here, Mr. Miller,
needs some apples,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Hello, Mr. Miller,” she said with a
vibrancy completely out of line with her surroundings. Then she looked back at the boys.
“So what’s Mr. Miller want?”
“He wants some apples. Not the ones that are
all banged up. Not the mushy ones. Get him the
good ones,” he said. The lunch woman carefully
sifted through the pile, and when she came upon
an acceptable fruit she laid it to the side. Shawnell
and his friends peered over the counter, performing a sort of quality control. “Yeah. Yeah.
That one looks good.”
She handed them to Shawnell, and he carefully
placed them in my hand. Three perfect, tiny apples gleamed in my palm. “So are you going to be
teaching us tomorrow?” he asked. “I like this
SAT stuff.”
“No, I’m here only two days.” I replied. He
nodded in quiet acknowledgment. He and his
friends seemed to understand the arrangement.
They had come across my type before.
“Good luck on the test in June,” I said. Then I
stuffed the apples into my jacket pocket and ascended the stairs back into the world of adults. ■