I'd Like to Apologize to Every Teacher I Ever Had (26 page)

How right I am. By the end of the week, my young boxing pal Matt gets into a wrestling match with a school guard and winds up in handcuffs. And spring fever seems to be kicking the romance between Ileana and Eric Lopez into overdrive. They’re always together now, hand in hand, and cannot take their eyes off each other. The whole class starts mimicking their passionate sighs, and they don’t even notice, much less care. Every once in a while, when the romance flares in class, Nakiya, who proudly wears her own abstinence ring, will lead us in a loud chorus of “
Abstinence!
” I move the young lovers to opposite ends of the room, but even if he can’t see Ileana, Eric still spends the whole class writing notes to her. The good news is that they tend to be poems—even sonnets. A sample:

This would all be pretty sweet except that Eric has unwittingly gotten in the middle of a spat between Ileana and her former best friend Stephanie. The girls’ feud erupts in class when Ileana refuses to read from the same handout as Stephanie. Not realizing what a hornets’ nest I’m stirring up, I give my mini-lecture about our class being like a family and needing to share. Eric pipes up from the back of the class and tries to give his copy to Ileana so the girls won’t have to work together. I tell him to mind his own business, and the next thing I know, Stephanie is in tears.

After class I sit her down and ask what’s going on. These two girls have been best friends for three years. Now Stephanie says, “I hate her. She used to be all colors and always happy and always got along with everybody. Now she’s all dark and mean.”

I have to admit that Ileana is challenging. Some days, just getting her to pick her head up off her desk is a struggle. It’s difficult for me to imagine her wearing bright colors because, this year, black pretty much defines her. She lines her eyes with heavy black makeup and arranges her black hair into extreme styles—cornrows, or a massive Afro, or straightened flat over her eyes. She has a piercing in her lip, and she’s been known to go into moods so dark they threaten to take the whole class down. Ileana’s tough exterior flies in the face of Stephanie, who’s soft and pale and never wears any makeup.

“Let me ask you something,” I say to Stephanie. “Do you think it’s wise to let Ileana control
your
emotions?”

Stephanie tugs on the end of her sandy brown ponytail. “I didn’t do anything to her. If you ask me for help and I give it to you, you don’t start cursing me for no reason and calling me names.”

Her anger borders on irrational, but I remind myself that these things are life and death to sixteen-year-olds. “Okay, right,” I tell her. “You’ve got to be able to count on your friends. So what are you going to do? Right now, I’m just concerned with Stephanie. I want Stephanie to take care of Stephanie. I want Stephanie to be okay and
get her work done and make it happen for Stephanie. Forget about everybody else.”

After ten minutes she’s calmed down enough to go to her next class, but we haven’t solved anything. The next day after lunch she shows up sobbing. “Ileana just spit on me. That’s the highest level of disrespect. I swear to God if I see her, I’m going to kill her.”

I give her a cup of water and tissues and try again. “You can’t be this upset. It’s not good for you!” True, but not helpful. She ignores me. So I try the let’s-think-this-through approach. “What do you think is the best solution here?”

“She’s dead.”

I take a deep breath. “All right, let’s set that aside for one second. Let’s put
dead
over here.” I motion to the left and struggle to keep a straight face. Clueless though I may be, even I know that smiling while a teenage girl is crying will not get us anywhere good. “Okay,” I say after a pause. “What else?”

“I’m gonna leave school.”

“Oh, we’re not going to do that, cause I can’t let you go. I’m sorry, but I’m not giving you up.” I keep my voice calm and cheerful, as if we’re solving a math problem together. “So
dead
and
getting out of school
, over here. What else?”

She shrugs at the chalkboard. “I can’t think of anything else. I can’t forget that she just spit in my face for no reason.”

“Who said you have to forget about it?”

“You want me to ignore her!”

“No, I do not.”

“It doesn’t matter what I do. I talk to her, she gets mad at me. I don’t talk to her, she gets mad at me. She don’t care about anybody but herself.”

“Then why do you care, Stephanie?”

“We were best friends, like family. You don’t do that to your friends.”

I have an idea. “I think you’re judging her the same way you judge yourself, Steph, and you can’t do that. You know why not? Because she’s not like you.”

She takes that onboard, and once again, she calms down enough to go to class, but a few minutes later Eric pays me a call, solo. He’s worried about Ileana. It seems that Ileana also feels betrayed, and maybe this betrayal has roots that stretch back before he even entered the picture. At the beginning of the year, he tells me, Stephanie became friends with another girl in our class, Crystal, and that made Ileana feel left out. By this time my head is spinning. Round and round we go, I think. It’s not easy for me to take any of this seriously, but it’s deadly serious to the kids, and anything that gets in the way of their education is something I have to try to handle.

Poor innocent Eric. I thank him for clueing me in and warn him not to get sucked into the drama. He made the honor roll last marking period, and I want to encourage him. “You’re an honor student now,” I remind him. “You’ve got to take care of yourself.”

There’s only one solution. We’ve got to get the two girls together to talk this out. But for that, I need some professional help, so I arrange for us all to meet in a school counselor’s office. Ms. Morton lays out the ground rules. One girl talks at a time, and the other person listens. Everybody will have her say.

Ileana opens it up. “You said that I spit on you yesterday. I never spit on you. I didn’t even have any water—”

“So water just flew into my face,” Stephanie interrupts her, “and you just happened to be right next to me.”

I stop them. “This is a momentary misunderstanding. Why can’t we move past it?”

That pushes Stephanie to the real issue. “I just want to know why she said in class she won’t talk to me and we’re not friends.”

“All right,” I say. “Ileana?”

“Ever since you been friends with Crystal you’ve been acting
different. You always been dissin’ me. You always act different when you’re around other people.”

“What do I do that’s different?”

Ileana rolls her eyes and starts to sputter until Ms. Morton tells her to stop and breathe.

“How ’bout this?” I turn to Ileana. “How about if you say, ‘I’m sorry you thought I did this when you walked by.’ ” I turn to Stephanie. “And how about you say, ‘I’m sorry you took it that way.’ And then we can move on. Because otherwise it’s like beating our heads against the wall, girls. We’re not getting anywhere.”

In the middle of this Rob Caroselli, the dean of students, has joined us. Rob’s a young guy, good looking and a natural peacemaker. “No one’s going to force you girls to be friends,” he tells them now. “You don’t want to be friends, that’s fine. But you are going to coexist, within the school and within your classrooms.”

“But I want to be her friend,” Stephanie says.

“All right.” I jump in before the cycle can start again. “How about we try to focus on the positive, the things you know about each other that you like, the reasons you were friends in the first place. Think of all the things that are great about each other and all the fun you’ve had together. Put aside the things that are bothering you, and give yourselves a cooling-off period. You both say ‘I’m sorry,’ and we see how it works out, okay?”

The girls glance at the counselor and Mr. Caroselli, who both nod. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we can manage today. “You know,” I tell them, “I’m always around if you need to talk.”

For the first time all week the girls exchange a look. Yeah, they seem to be saying, we know about Mr. Danza and talk.

It’s something. It may be at my expense, but if it brings peace to the classroom, I’m always ready to take the fall.

A
S IF THE STUDENTS
aren’t giving me enough to worry about, the next day the TV show comes back snapping its jaws. Because the network has not yet scheduled an airdate for
Teach
, we’ve been prohibited from talking about the project to anyone in the press. The network’s fear is that the media might lose interest in our story if we get too much coverage too early, and this would undermine their efforts to launch the show when they finally decide to broadcast it. But the policy has backfired. A small local newspaper, the
Northeast Times
, is writing stories that paint our silence as some sort of sinister conspiracy. One in a series of headlines asked,
WHY WON’T TONY DANZA TALK?
Not surprisingly, this has prompted the network to rethink its position. To punish the upstart paper, the network and production company have invited the city’s big gun,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, to send their education reporter to interview me and observe my class.

When Leslie Grief calls with this news, I feel whipsawed. We’re switching overnight from a total blackout to full-on classroom invasion? Unfortunately, Les reminds me, if I resist, the newspaper will conclude I have something to hide. So when the
Inquirer
reporter arrives the next day with her photographer in tow, I’m all smiles.

As luck would have it, a big PowerPoint project is due this morning. I wanted to deepen my students’ understanding of the history behind
To Kill a Mockingbird
and give them practice doing research on the Internet, so I divided them into groups and assigned each group one of seven topics: (1) The Jim Crow Laws, (2) Harper Lee, (3) A Trial in the U.S. Legal System, (4) The Great Depression in Alabama, (5) The Effect of the Depression on the Black Community, (6) Capital Punishment, or (7) The Scottsboro Boys. The kids were to visit preassigned websites for information and then create PowerPoint presentations. Of course, since you can’t assume that public school kids have access to computers, I had to bring in a COW—computers on wheels. This cart of thirty Apple laptops shuttles around the
school, which makes the process cumbersome and progress on projects slow, so I expect one or two presentations to come in late, but since there are seven groups and this creative stuff is what the kids love, I’m not worried. In fact, I’m almost looking forward to showing off to this reporter their talent and my classroom management skills.

As we wait for the students, I hook up my computer to the projector. The presentations were to be emailed to me before class, and of course, my in-box was empty last night, but the kids always wait until the last possible second. I fiddle with the cables and ask this not unattractive young woman what section of the paper she usually writes for. She reminds me that she’s the education reporter—as requested by my network. Extracting my foot from my mouth, I mutter something brilliant like “How nice of you to be here” and direct her and her photographer to seats at the side of the room opposite David Cohn.

The kids have been told about our guests and file in on their best behavior. I open my email, and as they settle down, I tell them we’re skipping today’s do-now exercise so we can get right down to their presentations. The class grows eerily quiet, and a second later I understand why.

Exactly one project has been submitted. One!

I lose focus for a second, and when I look up, the excuses start to fly. More than Carter has pills, as my father used to say, but I put my hand up to silence them. The reporter is having a fine old time scribbling all of this on her pad. I know I must not panic, but I have no backup plan. Zip. As an actor, I’d call this “dead air.” As a teacher I call it “death.”

Stalling for time and scrambling for ideas, I happen to look down at my desk. There in my physical in-box lies a printout my daughter Emily sent for my birthday a few days ago. It’s a short story with an accompanying lesson plan that she found online. Unrelated to
anything I’ve been teaching, “Frank Sinatra’s Gum” is a story about a high school girl in 1945 who poses as a reporter for her school paper so she could interview Frank Sinatra, who at the time was the biggest star in the world. The kicker is that somehow she winds up with Sinatra’s chewed gum in her mouth—without kissing him. My daughter grew up listening to my own Frank Sinatra stories—about the time he yelled at me on national TV for trying to take his arm when I thought he might fall, or the time I introduced him to my former bobby-soxer mother, who used to say after I’d been on TV for a few years, “Big shot, when you introduce me to Sinatra,
then
you’re a star” (Frank Sinatra treated her like a queen). I was lucky in Hollywood to become part of a social circle that included Sinatra and other maestros such as Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Gregory Peck (yes, I actually knew Atticus), and the great director Billy Wilder. My daughter hasn’t met many of them, but she knows her father. “Happy Birthday Dad,” she wrote on the printout. “You’ll like this.”