Be Careful What You Wish For

by Lloyd B. Abrams

The end of Rhonda Pearl’s first year of teaching was finally approaching. She was sitting in a stifling third floor classroom marking Algebra I Regents exams.

After more than 400 answer sheets had been alphabetized, each teacher had taken a pile, blithely ignoring the edict against scoring their own students. Rhonda was marking Lisa Brown’s. She had struggled all term – even staying for extra help despite her baby-sitting duties after school. Rhonda liked Lisa, who was a respectful, even friendly student, unlike the surly losers who gave her a hard time and cut class for days on end.

She looked around at the discouraged, worried looks on her coworkers’ faces. The scores on several of her students’ answer sheets were equally as dismal. She wondered if any more than one-fourth of her students would pass.

“You can’t keep on blaming yourself” was the mantra of Bertram Silverman, her beleaguered department head, when she’d come to whine and complain to him on yet another occasion during her one free period. Rhonda assumed that by now he was sick of dealing with her when she accosted him but he inevitably countered with his mantra, “You might think it’s your fault, but the kids are coming to us ill-prepared, semi-literate, and, frankly, not ready for high school algebra. Many junior high teachers aren’t even licensed, and they just pass the kids on. The same goes for summer school. Even some teachers here don’t give a damn and just pass the kids. And once they pass, you can’t take back it back. The students will then keep on failing and failing and eventually they’ll drop out.”

His hoped-for pep talk-turned-diatribe rarely made her feel any better. It seemed that everything she did – from giving up her lunch period to spend time with her students to staying after school to give them extra help – didn’t make a difference. Often, after fighting late afternoon traffic she’d return to her studio sublet, toss her file folder-stuffed Lands’ End bag on the floor, and crash onto the convertible couch until well into the evening. Worse, the quality of her social life began to match what she began thinking of as her “pathetic professional existence.”

Miriam Rothenberg, a retired teacher who often came in to substitute, tottered up the row and stood beside her. “It looks so bleak, doesn’t it?” Rhonda nodded as Miriam sat down next to her, pulled her chair close and lowered her voice. “Despite what hifalutin principle Bert might claim, about turning our kids into well-educated, productive citizens, it’s our overriding responsibility to get our kids promoted and to graduate on time.”

“Gotta keep those statistics up.” Rhonda said. “You can’t disappoint the bean counters. Yup … it’s always the bottom line.”

“Right. And you know it also has to do with performance bonuses and teacher ratings …” Miriam paused. “… not to mention the reputation of our school and its so-called report card.”

Rhonda winced. She was sick of all the edu-babble terms like rubrics and alternative methodologies and learning objectives and, the worst, data-driven, as if that was the raison d’être for everything. Her main reason for going into teaching – to make a difference – seemed like some ephemeral ideal from a far distant past.

And, too, there was the department policy, drilled into them at the meeting last month, that if a student passed the Regents exam, then he would automatically pass the class. Unless, of course, there were extenuating circumstances, like a student being a chronic truant or a miserable pain in the ass. Even then the teacher was forced to justify a failing grade.

“And look right here,” Miriam continued, pulling Rhonda out of her brooding, while pointing to a 1 on Lisa’s answer sheet that Rhonda was about to red-line through. “The correct answer is 4. You might consider, uh … letting it stand, or perhaps, you know, do whatever you think is best.”

“What? Like change it to a 4?”

“Well, you know, it’s your decision.”

“What if somebody found out?”

“I’ll let you in on a secret. Everybody’s doing it. They look out for their own. Why do you think we have the students answer in pencil?”

“But what about …” Rhonda gestured with her thumb.

“Bert? He’s in his office. Listening to sports-radio and typing up reports. He doesn’t want to be in here. He doesn’t want to know.”

Rhonda glanced around. Each of her colleagues was working on a stack of answer sheets. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one of them erasing and then flipping the pencil around in one smooth motion.

What the hell Rhonda thought. Four more right answers could turn Lisa’s 57 into a 65 – a level 2 into a level 3. She certainly deserves to pass. She intersected the 1 with an L and it became a 4. A couple of sloppy 2's became 3's. A blank space, despite Rhonda’s insistence that they answer every multiple choice question, got filled in with the correct answer. After what Lisa’s been through, it’s the right thing to do.

She pulled Darren’s paper out of her stack, then Jessica’s. Changing the incorrect answers became easier, even justifiable. Rodney ended up passing. So did Jasmine and her friend Chantal. LaToya and Pauline and Julius, too. And on and on. She didn’t bother with the losers and made it a point to not alter Anthony’s answer sheet because he had been a problem all year.

Later that afternoon, when marking and collating the exams was finished and Bert tabulated the results on the board cross-referenced by class and teacher, Rhonda saw that her passing percentages topped some of the veteran teachers – not by much, but enough to be noticed.

“Good job, Rhonda,” Bert smiled her way. “I could see that all that extra attention you gave your students evidently paid off.” She thought she heard snickering from the back.

Rhonda shrugged but tried to shrink into herself. She had never craved extra attention. And she felt neither particularly proud nor thrilled about what she had done.

But I did it for my kids, she thought. If not for me, who would look out for them?

The next morning, Bert sat down with the program coordinator to finalize the classes to be offered the following term. Because of an unexpected bump in the number of students being promoted to Algebra II/Trigonometry and the concomitant need for extra classes, Bert decided to assign the more demanding additional classes to Rhonda even though she was an unseasoned teacher. The coordinator assured Bert that whenever possible, Rhonda would be assigned her current students.

On the last day of the term, tentative class lists were printed and distributed. Rhonda’s heart swelled when she saw that she would be again having so many of her own students. She thought about the fifty or sixty students she helped get by. I hope they can make it in Algebra II, she thought … even though it’ll be a lot harder. She resolved to do her best for them when she returned in September.

But Bert’s cautionary words about students being ill-prepared and teachers just passing them on were already starting to nag at her.

Rev 4 / October 16, 2014

-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 33, November 2014

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October 2014 … Copyright © 2014 Lloyd B. Abrams