Rubber Room Writings

If I hadn’t been arrested on Valentine’s Day in 2014, you wouldn’t be reading this. There’d be no blog because there’d be no author website because there’d be no book.

Not that I want to spoil your reading of my debut novel—I know you’re eager to get your hands on it come November—but that agonizing experience provided me with the time to start scribbling and informed the plot of Exit Tickets.

Not, however, while I was in lock-up at the legendary Fort Apache precinct in the Bronx, the good ole 41st on Longwood. (Btw: Don’t sleep on that gritty 1981 Paul Newman movie, Fort Apache, the Bronx—it captures those pungent old days in the South Bronx.) Cuffed behind my back—really tight; for weeks afterward my left pinky numbly tingled—I was shuffled into and out of various holding pens for eight hours on that Friday in February ’14. My writing ability was, uhm, hampered, to say the least. But I was beginning to play out certain scenarios in my head.

Two cops had come to my school, P.S. 134 in the Morrisania neighborhood of the South Bronx, the day before. They were generous enough to not escort me out of my school in handcuffs—“Nothing to see here, kids, and don’t forget to do your homework over the Winter Break!” They allowed me to show up on my own at the precinct the following morning to be formally arrested, photographed and fingerprinted. I want to dispose of this part as quickly as possible since there was no validity to the charges against me: a mother of one of my students, who wanted to get back at my principal for whatever reason(s), accused me of hurting her son in my classroom. She must’ve had some pull at the precinct or whatever. The case was thrown out moments after the assistant DA finally had time to interview the mother in depth. But that was weeks after my arrest.

Before the dropped charges, I had been allowed out on a no-cash bail thanks to my UFT attorney. I was tenured; if I hadn’t been, and was still probationary, I’d have had to pay $8,000 out-of-pocket for an attorney and I wouldn’t have collected a paycheck while out of my classroom. It took three weeks to get the case dismissed, but I wouldn’t be going back quite yet. The NYC DOE had (and I can only assume still has) a policy that it won’t begin its own internal investigation of potential teacher wrongdoing until after any criminal charges are resolved. So between the three weeks of pending criminal charges and the three-plus months of the DOE’s own investigation (my kids wrote statements; the gym teacher stated that the boy who accused me of seriously injuring his back had participated with gusto in gym class after the purported injury that same day, etc.), I didn’t get back into my classroom until mid-June. Just two weeks before the end of the school year. My kids had a sub for four full months. Not good for my kids, not good for me.

But here’s where the silver lining revealed itself. While cooling my heals in various DOE rubber rooms (first in downtown Manhattan, then in the Bronx, near enough to Arthur Avenue for some tasty Italian lunches now and then), I started writing short stories. Hey, why not? I always liked writing, although I’d never seriously tried my hand at fiction. There was little else to do. So I scribbled away—in those early drafts, mostly vented—for those three months, long enough to discern an outline of something intriguing taking shape. As I calmed down and began looking at things with a clearer eye, I also began exploring the POVs of various characters. Sure, there was a story about a hard-pressed new teacher, but also a story from the perspective of a troubled student, and another that got into the head of a veteran teacher dealing with an uptight assistant principal, and one about the school's principal, and so on. And now, eleven years later, here we are. When I finally arrived back in my classroom that June more than a decade ago now, my students were jubilant—even the ones who gave me headaches. You know, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. And hey, I missed them, too.

I returned the following school year, if only to show the mother that she couldn’t run me out of the Bronx. Believe it or not, she kept her kid at the school. She got the feds involved, claiming that her son wasn’t getting his mandated IEP services. If so, that was on my admin, not me. Investigators from the U.S. Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) swooped in and interviewed me, the boy’s other teachers, various administrators, the school’s social worker, psychologist, speech therapist, et al.

That was my last year. Burnt out, big-time.

Don’t get me wrong—I really liked my kids. I also got a kick out of walking the several blocks from the Freeman Street stop on the 5 train to 134 on Bristow, or from school to train, and hearing shouts of, “Yo, there goes Mr. Chanko!” A real community school, kids and their families living right there in the neighborhood, some just across the street from the school. I taught for nine years at the school, teaching writing enrichment and, when needed, all subjects in various grades. Very different from my first year of teaching…

As my stories took shape in that Bronx rubber room (okay, officially: in the “Temporary Reassignment Center”), I began thinking more about the setting of my stories. Should it be in the South Bronx, in a school like the one I taught in? Sure, that would lend it a certain gritty gravitas; after all, it’s the South Bronx. But I began harkening back to my incredibly turbulent first year of teaching, in ’05/’06, before arriving at 134. It was a District 75 school on the Upper East Side and there were these intriguing layers: a school whose population was all Black and brown kids, having been labeled severely emotionally disturbed, yet the school was on the very white and hoity-toity Upper East Side of Manhattan, on 88th between Park and Lex. And so nearly every year there was a sizable handful of new do-gooder white teachers, all out of their depth. Including me. I was thrown into a situation for which I was totally ill-prepared. I’ll say no more about it here, because in several significant ways, Mr. J’s experiences in Exit Tickets, and how he feels about them, mirrored my own as a first-year teacher working with special-ed teenagers.

So, yeah, getting arrested was certainly no fun. And my Bronx kids that school year suffered, too. Not that I was ever in the running for Teacher Of the Year; but I was more than competent by my ninth year of teaching and had developed a rapport with my kids during those first five months, before being forced from my classroom. I had also started an afterschool chess club, which the school never had before, and as far as I know, has never had since. So my chess-playing kids were also left in the lurch.

That’s how I came to write my book. If nothing else, it touches on that old lemons-into-lemonade axiom, about not knowing at the time how an event you thought was one of the worst in your life turns out to have served up an unlikely but real opportunity. It did for me. I started my novel way back then, after being banished from my classroom. My, ahem, exit ticket. And now my novel, Exit Tickets, is about to be published. Go figure.

TEACHERS’ LOUNGE

This’ll be a recurring kicker-type deal at the end of most blogs of mine. Don’t be fooled by its title; it’s not just for teachers. Those who love teachers, are parents of school-aged kids, have friends who are teachers—that’s gotta be over half my readers right there—will always find something of interest here. Fair warning: It'll also often be movie-adjacent, given that my decades before becoming a New York City public school teacher were spent toiling in the dark in screening rooms across Manhattan as a film critic and a writer on movies in general. (In fact, funny story: When I arrived at my South Bronx school on my first day and got to talking with several veteran teachers about how I had spent my 20s and 30s, telling them I'd made a living watching movies and writing about them, they were, like, "They paid you to watch movies and you quit that job to come here...?" And then, adding, "Ohhh-kay," they slowly backed away from me.)

Teachers have it tough. Okay, that’s not exactly news. But I got a keen sort of jolt from the way three recent screen depictions tackle schoolhouse and classroom realities in intriguingly different ways. Don’t bother looking for a Mr. Chips or a Mr. Holland or any societies of dead poets here. Think much closer to Ryan Gosling’s Dan Dunne and what he goes through in 2006’s Half Nelson. If all you want are chuckles (and not that there's anything wrong with that), new seasons of Abbott Elementary (ABC, Oct 1) and The English Teacher (Hulu, Sep 26) are on tap.

The Netflix limited series from earlier this year, Adolescence, just took home a bevy of Emmys, and deservedly so. If you haven’t streamed it yet, don’t wait any longer. It’s four one-hour episodes. That’s it. But boy, does each hour—shot in real time in continuous takes (no editing/cutting)—pack a wallop. While none of the principal characters are teachers, much of Episode 2 takes place in a school. And especially given that the series is set in England, it should’ve been titled: “Dark Sarcasm in the Classroom.” I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say the two detectives who visit the school as part of their investigation into the death of a middle-school girl have their hands full. At one point, the cops go on a tirade about the sorry state of the school, including its negligent teachers and impudent students.

Steve (in theaters starting Sep 19; streaming Oct. 3 on Netflix) rejiggers Max Porter’s novella, Shy, and the title switch lays it out plain: instead of being in the troubled reform-school teen Shy’s head, which is where we are throughout Porter’s impressionistic, fractured narrative, we are now totally with his teacher and school-leader, Steve, played with a scruffy dread by Cillian Murphy as he tries to hold it all—including himself—together. While Murphy’s Steve doesn’t smoke crack in the boys’ bathroom à la Gosling’s Dan, he does down a vial of liquid something-or-other about halfway through the movie that’s undoubtedly a controlled substance. Hey, ya gotta get through the day somehow, and the single day that this movie focuses on is a real doozy. Not only is the residential reform school being threatened with imminent closure, but a documentary film crew is on site, and the last-chance residents have no hesitation in violently playing to the camera. The insistent and aggressive in-your-face camerawork can sometimes be a bit much, but it serves to capture the high-volume volatility of these boys’ lives.

Bad Teacher

And then there is Weapons, the surprise late-summer horror hit. If I were still teaching in the Bronx, I might’ve gone to see it a second time the day before the start of the school year, just for kicks. Oh, and to reinforce the idea that while the job might be stressful, no way could it be worse than what poor Ms. Gandy is in for.

She arrives one Wednesday at her elementary school in suburban Pennsylvania, like any other day, to teach her class of 18 third-graders. But only one student shows up. We soon learn that Justine’s 17 other students have gone missing. Okay, at least it wasn’t on a field trip and Ms. Gandy lost count. But, more seriously, here's where the movie will hit home for nearly every teacher I know: even though Justine Gandy had nothing to do with the disappearances of these children, she’s still blamed. It’s got to be her fault. She was the teacher of these kids, right? And no other kids from any other teacher’s classroom at the school disappeared, right? So, something malevolent had to have been going on in Ms. Gandy’s classroom, and Ms. Gandy must be held accountable. Even when it’s discovered that the 17 kids went out the front door of their homes in the middle of the night, Justine is still yelled at by the parents during a school meeting and her car is vandalized, the word “WITCH” spelled out in red paint on her car door.

Justine, young and single and played by the talented Julia Garner in blonde curls and glasses, is hardly perfect. But just because she once had a DUI arrest (believe me, she has nothing on Mads Mikkelsen from Another Round, a Danish film about teachers doing their own research on alcohol consumption), and once engaged in ill-advised sexual relations with another teacher at her school, that doesn’t mean she’s kidnapped or otherwise disappeared 17 of her students. Right...?

There are many alarming and horrific scenes and moments in Weapons—it’s an effective, well-crafted horror movie—but the way the filmmaker Zach Cregger taps into the anxieties of parents of school children, and the way in which blaming the teacher always seems to be the knee-jerk reaction in our society, that’s what stuck with me.

Stay strong, y’all. As my book’s dedication reads:

To my fellow New York City public school teachers: your essential work is too often undervalued.

Good luck out there!