Consider Yourself Educated

The rites (and wrongs) of passage at an alternative city high school

by Larry Mayer

Friday's memo reads: "All senior grades must be in on Monday, June 5, by 8 a.m. -- no exceptions." The day's first bug comes at 8:15: Naida's aunt calls to report that her niece has given birth two months early -- of all times, last night! -- and wants to make up her final exams so she can graduate with the rest of her classmates.

Naida is the serious young lady who ingested one novel after another in my English class -- Zora Neale Hurston, Julia Alvarez, Rita Mae Brown-- and for the fourth quarter, she earned an A in math and an A-plus in biology. I'm baffled and disappointed. Naida's life had begun to blossom. What, the baby couldn't wait another week?

Tuesday, June 6, is D-day -- the day when students find out whether or not they've been awarded a certificate of completion. The seniors dribble in to the one-floor schoolhouse, one per hour. Those who take the elevator to the fifth-floor office are sent back down. "Take the stairs," they are told, "Go back down and use the staircase." Up to the last month of the school year, students had been allowed to ride up and down freely, until the minor vandalism -- key-scratched graffiti, torn wallpaper, profanities -- exceeded the director's emotional limits. Although no one actually graduates from this school -- it's an alternative high school for kids who've been kicked out, or who've dropped out, of regular public school -- there is a scheduled exit meeting with the director, after which the students return to their home schools for their official commencement ceremonies.

Andre, who has made a regular habit of showing up one hour late to school -- as has at least half the student body -- comes for his 10 a.m. appointment at 2 p.m. "Yo, I set my alarm to eight, but I just couldn't get up." He shrugs. He knows what he can get away with, and in a strange way it's a healthy adaptation. A brilliant self-taught cartoonist who has decorated my room with caricatures and comic renderings of students, staff, literary characters, Tupac Shakur, and me, Andre has managed to earn two full English credits for the year. His drawings of Gregor Samsa, Franz Kafka's hapless insect protagonist, are so precise and true to the story that I find it hard to argue over a couple of nouns, verbs, and topic sentences.

I've been teaching language arts to "at-risk" urban students for the past eight years, and though I want my students to write beautifully and wonderfully -- though I want each one to discover the joys of literature, "how reading soothes like nothing else" -- I know that teaching is a lot harder than diagramming sentences. Education, after all, remains a hope rather than a certainty. And graduation, if and when it happens, is often just the moment when two players -- student and school -- both agree they've exhausted each other's resources.

AS A schoolteacher in Jonathan Kozol's South Bronx, Toni Morrison's Lorain County, Ohio, and now Boston, I've met the same disenfranchised kids in each place. Yet while the pattern of student problems remains constant, the quality of alternative-school programs varies. Many are poorly managed and poorly funded, some are well funded but poorly managed, and a rare handful enjoy the luxury of both money and leadership.

As part of a larger coalition of educational programs, the Alternative School (I've changed the name of the school, as well as the names of the students, to protect their identities) fits yet another frustrating but common profile: intelligent on-site leadership and limited funding. As I read over my employee handbook, I discover that the aim of the Alternative School is to improve education "through inter-district and inter-agency collaboration," and to provide "high quality education and related services to students at risk." This explains, perhaps, why the school's indefatigable director -- who has been with the program since Jimmy Carter's presidency -- is constantly working the phone lines and probing new sources.

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Larry Mayer is a writer and teacher living in Cambridge. His first book, Who Will Say Kaddish? A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland (Syracuse University), is scheduled for publication in spring 2001. He can be reached at LMayer27@hotmail.com.