School Daze

Last September, Dave Gardetta, Eagle Rock High School class of 1979, returned to his alma mater to teach English. In doing so, he became one of the 5,472 uncredentialed teachers brought in with emergency permits into the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Eagle Rock High School, like the small town of Eagle Rock just north of downtown L.A., has changed in the last 20 years. Once predominantly Anglo, Latinos and Asians now compose a majority of the student population. Overcrowding has resulted in the conversion of shop buildings into classrooms. And veteran teachers worry about the declining academic abilities of students; in national assessment testing, L.A. students rank among the lowest. Yet Eagle Rock enjoys the fifth-highest rate of attendance among high schools in the district, maintains a strong magnet program and, in many ways, has remained the same: Gardetta’s 11th-grade English teacher worked directly across the hall.

When it came to class assignments, Gardetta says he got lucky: He was assigned to teach two 10th-grade honors classes, one 12-grade college prep class and two 11th-grade classes, the latter with only 20 students per period.

This is a diary of his first year.

*

Oct. 2

This is my first day in class. I spent each period calling kids up to my desk, asking: “Do you like English? Do you like writing? Do you like to read?” On the last question, more than 80% of my 140 students answered, “No.” They do not like to read, and don’t--unless forced to by the school. When asked why, the answer is: “It’s boring, it’s not exciting enough, it takes too long.” They would rather watch than read.

In my last two classes, both 11th grade, almost all of the kids said they didn’t read outside school. All except for a small Filipino girl, who told me that she enjoyed reading books about Hitler, and another girl with a hard-bitten look and a nervous laugh who said she liked reading incest stories. She also wants to become a forensic technician, something she realized on a field trip to the morgue. She was fascinated by the sight of the dead bodies that repelled her follow classmates.

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Oct. 6

A dilemma I realized today--if I assign three essays over the next five weeks, each with two rough drafts, I will have to grade 1,260 papers, on top of tests, quizzes and homework. And 30 weeks follow that deluge.

My girlfriend, who teaches in another district, told me the system is set up to help the student fail. As an example of what our jobs should be like, she cited her ex-husband, a college professor who teaches 12 hours a week and has a reader who grades all his papers. I teach 25 hours, to 140 students, with no assistance at all. I have 11th- and 12-grade students who don’t even know how to write a proper sentence.

“How are you going to expect an essay from your 12th graders when they don’t even know how to write a sentence?” a colleague asked me this morning. “You should be assigning them paragraphs, not page-long essays.”

“But I want to teach essays; I want to challenge them,” I answered. “How did I end up with classes of 17- and 18-year-olds who don’t know how to write a sentence?”

“The system just passes them on,” she said.

*

Oct. 9

An English teacher warned the counseling office yesterday that she is going to fail 50% of her kids at mid-term. Nine of my 39 seniors are already failing after only three vocabulary tests, and another dozen are bordering on failure. I don’t know the exact numbers yet, but many of them cannot write an essay, a significant number of students cannot write a paragraph, and there are several kids who cannot write a simple sentence. And these are kids who are supposedly going on to Cal State campuses.

“You should see who they’re letting into the Cal States these days,” a colleague says when I approach her with my dilemma. “That’s why I said that you should be teaching these people how to write a paragraph, not an essay.”

I decide to visit the 12th-grade counselor and tell her that 50% of my college-bound seniors may not be graduating from high school this spring.

*

Oct. 15

A senior I’ll call Ellen turned in her first essay, revealing that she has a very slight grasp of written English. It was F work--no spelling, nonsensical sentences. After reviewing her work as a junior, I was surprised to find that she had received steady Bs in her English class for essays I would consider beneath passing. I talked to an ESL counselor, and we decided Ellen would stay in my class because it is a prerequisite for entering Cal State. The agreement included a promise from Ellen that she would see a tutor three times a week.

I was told to talk to her teacher from last year, to find out what her grading rationale was. I’m still contemplating that discussion. As for my kids, they all seem to like me. My favorite classes at this point are the third-period honors class and my fifth-period juniors.

“You talk to us,” say students in fifth period, an appraisal I hear in other classes. For whatever reasons, these kids don’t think they are taking part in a two-way conversation about their education: They seem to be saying that, for as long as they can remember, they’ve been sitting through a monologue.

It’s not hard to win them. They want to hear that your life shares some coordinates of their own inner lives and pop-culture tastes, which is easy for me, because culturally I feel I have more in common with my students than I do with my colleagues.

But my kids have begun to win me over, too. I am touched by the trust they have handed to me so quickly. One student approached me after class to talk over worries of a possible pregnancy with his girlfriend; another wanted my ideas on counselors and therapy and the problems she was having at home. I do not have children, and it’s a mistake to interact with my students like a father figure. Unfortunately, that cannot be avoided completely. My brief talk yesterday about counselors and therapy brought to mind the psychological term that expresses what is happening between my students and me: transference. Whether I want it or not, I am daily handed the role of parent by these kids; sometimes the good parent, sometimes the bad parent when a student lashes out at me for no reason before the bell has even rung.

No matter how many rules I establish in my room, the unconscious will always play a subversive role. No matter the distance my colleagues warn me to keep from these kids, an unspoken parent-child relationship is always asserting itself. A good teacher knows how to step gingerly around that relationship, and I am trying. Yet I also feel moved, in a small but profound way, to be invited into that relationship.

*

Nov. 3

According to a friend, another teacher, a counselor just approached her and said, “You have to do something about Gardetta. You need to get him to lower his standards.” This has to be related to the grades I turned in yesterday. Twenty of my 39 seniors are failing--grades based on three vocabulary tests, three work sheets and two essays, on one of which I lowered my standards. I didn’t grade it, I just awarded points as long as they handed in a piece of paper with anything on it. And still a fail rate of more than 50%! In my 11th-grade classes, the fail rate hovers around 25%. In my two honors classes, more than half the kids are getting As.

When Ellen asked the inevitable, I said, “Yes, you’re failing.” She was crestfallen. What could I tell her? That she was misled by former teachers, the last of whom awarded Bs for essays that border on incoherent. She has no sense of grammar, no knowledge of sentence structure, let alone what a verb is, and she’s been passed right through the system with steady Bs. I know Ellen is a special case, not the norm. But still, half of my seniors are failing.

Handing out those 20 fails was awful. I was exhausted and sad for the rest of the day.

*

Nov. 7

I met with another English teacher (she failed only nine of her kids on the 10th-week report card). She told me she doesn’t even try to teach novels. She teaches stories now, a story a week. The whole class reads the story out loud, because if they take the work home, they won’t read it. They don’t go faster than a story a week.

I asked her if she thought her students are going to get eaten alive in college. She said, “Probably.”

Passed out “Slaughterhouse Five” today. Students seemed interested, especially in a line drawing of breasts done by author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on page 217.

*

Nov. 14

I asked a teacher today if she thought her kids, like mine, had a hard time discerning nonfiction from fiction. She said, “I think so. It’s like they live in a virtual world. But you have to remember we didn’t grow up with so many reality-based programs like ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’ If you show them one of those shows, they can’t discern which part of it is real and which part a reenactment.”

My question followed first period, where I spent the hour introducing “Heart of Darkness” to seniors by reading from a history that details the exploits of Europeans in the Congo. This is a history book, I said, and then went over selected passages. Afterward, kids came up to me, asking, “Was that stuff you read based on a true story? Did any of that happen?”

“It’s a history book,” I implored, and even then it was a few minutes until we got through the matter.

Last week, while reading my own journalism articles in class, I had 17- and 18-year-olds continually asking, “Did any of this happen? Is this really true? Did you make this up?” I’m amazed, daily, at their inability to parse information. Today I gave my 11th-graders a test after reading Chapter 1 of “Slaughterhouse Five” (and, yes, I realize now I have to read aloud in class or students won’t understand Vonnegut’s simple prose). After explaining the chapter, I gave an open-notes, open-book test. No one in class came up with more than two answers after an hour with open books and notes.

“You may have a real class of dummies,” another teacher said. “If that’s true, you’re going to have to point out exactly what pages they should look to for their answers.” I understand what she is saying, but this is another version of what I feel I fight against every day--lowering standards and inflating grades to fit my students’ lack of academic ability. If I walk my kids through by the hand, and they get As, and another teacher challenges her kids, and her students get Bs, do my students win seats in a crowded college enrollment? I will end up no different than the teacher who passed Ellen with straight Bs for writing illiterate papers.

I don’t want to be a cynic.

*

Nov. 18

Today one of my 17-year-old 11th graders told me she believed the Vietnam War was fought on American soil.

*

Nov. 19

We have now come to an agreement in my 12th-grade class that the students will read five pages of a novel at home, then we will reread the five pages in class, and then discuss the five pages. These are, again, college-bound seniors, but they can’t understand literature any other way. They have difficulties even articulating what problems they’re having with the text.

Today I also heard about an English teacher who spent the entire year teaching one play: “Othello.” That was it, “Othello” for 40 weeks. So it’s not just the kids; parents are also involved here. Didn’t a single student in that class have a parent who wondered why it was May and the kid was still reading about the Moor?

*

Nov. 26

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was very sweet. My classes sang “Happy Birthday” to me, I received cards, flowers, candy, gift certificates and requests from kids who wanted to be in my classroom next year.

Starting this job in the fall, it was very important that I maintain an identity separate from my school life, going out three, four, five nights a week to assert that I was still Dave, not Mr. Gardetta. But a large reason behind the flowers and gift certificates is that my life increasingly revolves around my students. I chaperon dances now, attend football games, show up at music recitals and school plays. Lately, when I ask a friend out, I open with the phrase, “Hey, there’s a really good basketball game at the gym tonight.”

Eagle Rock is a small town, like a village out of the Midwest. Living here, I bump into my students at the theater, the McDonald’s, just driving down the street. Because the demographics of Eagle Rock changed so rapidly and completely during the 1980s, for the longest time I have felt like a stranger in the town I grew up in--and still live in. Everyone I knew moved away. But I now feel reconnected, as if I play an important part in the daily life of this village, and I have my students to thank for that. They may exasperate me every week, but it’s an exasperation one might feel toward a family member, not a stranger.

*

Dec. 7

After struggling with my seniors for two weeks over “Heart of Darkness,” even showing the movie version, we gave up. Students had no idea what was going on in the book. So now we have embarked on “Macbeth,” likely suicide as well, but the play is core curriculum for the 12th grade. After one week of going over the first two scenes, I have kids who think the play is taking place in Spain, who can’t tell me who the king is, or even where in the text they might find the answer.

All along I’ve assumed that if my students were suffering narrative confusion around the printed word, that at least with video they would become competent scientists, grasping the story lines of a medium they were raised on. Not true. Teaching “Slaughterhouse Five,” last week I showed two films on Vietnam, “The Green Berets” and “Coming Home.” They were simple war and domestic dramas, yet students had trouble identifying characters, assessing situations as being pro-war or antiwar. Watching them in the dark, it was easy to spot faces going slack and eyes glazing over whenever dialogue entered a scene. But they were fascinated by movement. Offer them a three-minute shot of a chopper tracing a Southeast Asia tree line, and they draw forward, their eyes locked on.

I try not to get depressed. At parties I say I love my job 25% of the time, hate it 25% of the time, and am just overwhelmed 50% of the time. People nod, and there’s this strange feeling that we’re all despairing about what all this means 10 years down the line. No one at these parties, by the way, has their children in public schools.

*

Christmas Vacation

June 20 is going to be tough, because I almost teared up on the last day before break, thinking about missing my kids. Period five is special, and so are three and four. One and six are tougher to feel connected to, for different reasons.

Still, they have all moved squarely into the center of my life, crept under my skin while I was unaware.

I’ve moved from a person who 10 weeks ago wanted to do anything he could to get out of teaching, to a person who can’t imagine not teaching next year. It feels weirdly important, outside of the class anyway, because in the class it can feel plainly overwhelming.

My seniors have come up from 20 fails on the 10-week card to only eight fails on the 15-week card. On the other hand, my fifth-period juniors declined to a level of almost 50% fails, and these are kids I think I connect with.

*

Jan. 15

Yet another teacher told me at lunch today that one reason the state does not want to give teachers higher salaries is because we only teach a limited number of classes a day, usually five, and salaries are based on classes taught. But a class should be around 15 students if you are to give these kids the attention they deserve, and because classes can be 40 and more, her theory is that we are all teaching three or four classes for each single class acknowledged by the state.

She went on to say that because the job, even after five years, pays almost nothing (a starting teacher makes $31,304), it attracts two kinds of people: those who are really dedicated and struggle with their kids and themselves, and those who could not hack it in other jobs, and find refuge in the classroom. You have almost no oversight out there, and you can do almost anything or nothing that you want to do in those bungalows. Why talk about the quality of teaching, my colleague said, if you maintain a salary structure that’s going to keep the best candidates out of the classrooms?

And don’t think about your job in terms of what we do as an institution, she warned, or you’re going to burn yourself out.

*

Jan. 16

Today the principal and I talked about how I was doing in my classes, and eventually moved on to form a consensus theory explaining the generation of students we have now. It could be that, in a sense, these kids are a lost generation. They grew up in the shadow of Hollywood, with no real connection to reading; it seems there’s no focus on the importance of literacy at home. These kids followed the experience of my generation, a generation that Hollywood never quite discovered. Reading was still an escape 20 years ago because TV and the movies hadn’t yet molded every product to a 13- to 21-year-old audience.

Yet our students likely precede a generation, now perhaps in sixth grade, that will be raised in a new world of literacy inspired by the panoramic use of computers in home and business, making reading, interpretation and writing all the more important as our lives revolve around PCs.

*

Jan. 18

Today I read that the governor announced we need to extend the school year by one week, to improve the education of our kids. By adding just seven days to the school year, seven more days of me sitting in front of 40 seniors who can’t read, the lives of these children will be intellectually enriched?

Cut the school year by four weeks, and at the same time cut my 40 students by half, and I could get 10 times the work done. Seven days is nothing, if you add up all the time I spent this year dealing with roll-taking, absence-card signing and basic administrative assessment of my extra 20 kids. It takes up more than five school periods of time. A day of heavy absences among 40 kids, that shoots the whole period.

*

Jan. 20

I now believe my kids don’t know how to write because they don’t read; it’s fairly impossible to carry out any task well if you don’t see it demonstrated. When these kids sit down to write, they are in unknown territory. It’s a place they rarely if ever visit: the written word.

Grading some of my worst 11th-grade papers written on “Slaughterhouse Five,” the thought hit me that I suppose hits every teacher at some time: What’s the point? These kids are so far behind, writing on what appears to be a seventh-grade level, that I, and the teacher who gets them next year, will make little or no headway. Here I’m writing page-long memorandums to each of them on their essays, and on some level I know they will just not get it.

*

Jan 23

A friend told me yesterday that she can date the year that the academic abilities of her students began to decline. This is a trend that almost every teacher I speak with can do. She said it was 1985. Four years after MTV, I told her. Three years after “E.T.”

What came to mind after our talk was this: If that immeasurable quality of imagination, of wanting to be challenged and willing to challenge the world, keeps declining in our classes, it’s going to mean a crisis in education that politicians calling for the standardization of teachers won’t comprehend.

The half of teachers who are dedicated to learning are going to eventually phase themselves out of the profession, because without children who respond intellectually and with imagination in the classroom, the challenge that makes the job worthwhile will no longer exist. Thinking of my own future in the profession, I struggle with thoughts of this on a weekly basis. If you read a paragraph from “Slaughterhouse Five” to your 11th graders and then ask them what the sentences mean--as I did this week--and they can’t tell you, what is the pull to stay? That other half of the teachers, those who couldn’t make it in other professions and are out there showing movies and scribbling grades on essays, will eventually take over.

*

Jan 31

OK, I made it through the first semester and turned in all my grades. I was caught between two feelings in my grading: that I was too hard (so my kids told me), and that, considering each grade and each child, the A, B or C I handed out really fit each child. I promised I would be fairer in the spring, but will I?

*

Feb 16

The first tests and writing assignments of the second semester are coming in, and as far as my 11th-graders are concerned, there’s really no change in the two classes. My kids still don’t seem to be able to find the time to do something simple like study 10 vocabulary words during the week. It’s the only homework they were assigned besides reading. There’s no progress. My students are not really concerned about, what? Education? The idea that this leads to a future?

These are not a host of troubled teens overwhelmed by gangs and poverty who could be doing A work (or C work) were it not for the exigencies of their lives. No, they are, more or less, lower middle class. They just don’t . . . what? There must be no connection between what they are doing now and how they envision their lives after Eagle Rock High School.

*

Feb 20

Every day I am faced with entire classes that do not recognize or cannot define words or phrases, or names like lumber, communism, night owl or Freud. Entering this job because I wanted to help these kids develop a deeper, more complicated sense of the world around them, I am caught between two mission statements of sorts: Which is more important, describing what communism was or what lumber is? Again, I am regularly amazed at the lack of general information, and the faculty to absorb it, that these kids exhibit.

Why go over the rudimentary basics of Freud when, at the sight of the term night owl in a novel, my students think the narrator has somehow transformed into a predatory bird and flown away? Weeks like this strain my resolve. I find the reasons I entered this place, and what I thought I wanted to do, slowly being leveled by the kids. Why attempt to illustrate a connection between capitalism and dysfunctional families in “Death of a Salesman” when the majority of my kids are having a sore time merely identifying the half-dozen or so characters?

About my 12th graders: My relationship with that class is improving, finally falling into a rhythm of friendship that eluded me longer than all my other classes. But, still, I am confounded by this class, labeled “college bound.” It is a title that signifies little. After a test on Act 4 of “Macbeth,” not only was I amazed by the class’s poor performance on questions, but also their simple inability to follow directions. When asked to locate two soliloquies where themes of chaos are found, only three of 30 kids found one soliloquy. Everyone else listed a line of dialogue, a description, an entire scene. Graded as I should have, these kids would have failed; instead, a majority got Ds. I find myself, my standards, again being pulled down. OK, the thinking goes, they didn’t follow directions, but they wrote something down; that’s a C.

Of course, this is exactly what Ellen’s teachers told her for the last few years: you did something, no matter how illiterate, so here’s a B. “You have to adjust yourself to the kids here,” I was told over and over when I handed out 20 Fs to this class on the 10-week card. Here I am now, adjusting in ways I am very uncomfortable with, pushing these kids right down the line to colleges that, according to a New York Times report this week on grading practices at Princeton, are doing the same thing, making higher grades available to kids as long as they just do the work. As for Ellen, she left my class at the semester break, along with seven other students who transferred to other classes and teachers they knew would offer easier grading. The girl who once smiled sweetly and said “Hi, Mister” whenever I passed her in the halls, now gives me a sullen, distrustful look.

*

March 1

I applied to Occidental College’s master’s program in education this week, and on my application I listed my worries as a teacher: that, basically, although the classrooms of Los Angeles were some of the most interesting places in the country to teach right now because of the collision of cultures, I have a very difficult time figuring out what is relevant to my students, and how to establish relevancy in a cultural landscape that is endlessly shifting.

What I am faced with is students who hail from Asian and Latin cultures, who are divorcing themselves from their families’ own national heritage because they live in a country where those bonds find no grasp, but who also have no experiential connection to the novels and plays I confront them with. Culturally, they are like expatriates without a country of origin, caught up by whatever presents itself loudest. And, of course, that is Hollywood: a sensory mix of “Baywatch,” Wu- Tang Clan, Bruce Willis blowing up things and Jerry Springer that most immediately resonates in my students minds’ as their culture.

Today, within a 10-minute freeway drive from school, my students are faced with 98 theater outlets, where at least two dozen are screening the latest Adam Sandler vehicle. That is an increase of more than 1,800% in theater space from when I attended ERHS and there were just five. And almost all of the films in these 98 theaters have been scripted, directed and marketed with my students’ demographic in mind. No wonder they don’t read.

*

April 4

The 30-week report cards just went out, during the same week that marked my move from attempting to teach essay-writing to my seniors to trying to teach the paragraph. We read “Hiroshima.” Each night I asked them to cover a chapter, which would result in cries of, “But it’s 16 pages long!” Each day students were asked to write a paragraph built around a strong topic sentence. At least half of my college-bound seniors, after 12 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District, did not know what a topic sentence was. Student after student walked up and handed me paragraphs that made little or no sense.

But . . . they did get better. Students who were scoring 2s at the beginning of the week were walking away with 15s by Friday, the highest grade. Which means it took me 30 weeks to drop down to what a colleague warned me about during the first week of school: “You shouldn’t be teaching the essay to your seniors, you should be teaching the paragraph.”

How are the students, as a whole, doing three-quarters of the way through the year? I have noticed that my 10th graders have improved. They are writing stronger, more complicated, deeper essays than they were doing in October. And I like to think it’s because they have responded to my deeper readings of the texts we have covered.

My 11th- and 12th-graders, however, have not responded. My better 11th-grade students have definitely fallen academically in the spring semester, and my 12th-graders are a flat pulse. There is no evidence in the class that they latch onto ideas. Small victories like paragraphs are the most I’ve noticed. Both 11th and 12th graders seem so distant, so removed. They don’t struggle; they jockey back and forth between Ds and Fs and Cs. My juniors and seniors always seem to run around the 30% failure level, and there is really no evidence I can see that these kids are growing intellectually.

Another girl (I’ll call her Katherine) in fifth period keeps failing my class, and she constantly appears before me at five-week intervals moaning, “Why did you fail me?” She has the same problems Ellen did, and also the same reply: “Last year Mrs. X gave me an A.” Today I read that two-thirds of all students entering Cal State Los Angeles are in need of remedial English courses. I know that next year, and the following year, it will be my juniors and seniors like Katherine--some of whom I’ve already watched filling out Cal State applications--who will fall into those classes.

*

May 14

This, for the last five weeks, is what I have been doing every day with my juniors and seniors: paragraphs, paragraphs, paragraphs. It’s unsettling that the only way I could get the kids interested in the book we’re reading, “Hiroshima,” was to promise lots of high-detail gore, much like what they see at the multiplex. They are no longer appalled by the horror of the atom bomb or interested in the terrible moral questions a book like “Hiroshima” raises. No, they are interested only so far as reading about a woman whose skin is falling off her body or a man whose eyes have turned to jelly is cool. They are divorced form the horror; they wallow in it for pleasure.

This week, I received my STULL, an appraisal by the principal of teacher performance. I was assured that I was doing well, that I had a great rapport with the kids, that I didn’t have discipline problems that were known, that I regularly showed up at dances and fund-raisers (team player), and that I challenged my kids. And I was asked to not leave. Interesting, because retention would seem to be a problem in any LAUSD school.

It was pointed out to Dan Lungren by a Times moderator in the first governor’s race debate how low a starting teacher’s salary is. (By the way, there is absolutely no way that I, a single adult without children, could afford to maintain this job without supplementing my income.) How do you propose to bring in qualified teachers, dedicated teachers, with a low salary? Lungren was asked. “Money is important, but it’s not the most important thing,” the candidate replied. “Teachers need to know they’re respected.”

I had no idea what he meant by that, except to think you want your respect from your kids, not the governor’s office. I am 36, and I am by far one of the youngest teachers on the campus. There are not, it would seem after looking at the teachers around me, many young people going into teaching. This is an aging profession, and at our school I would guess the average teacher is more than 45. Yet for $27,000, why should anyone enter a profession where, if you are really dedicated, you are looking at a 50-hour work week that is exhausting in ways far beyond what just the hours imply?

I do, however, love my job.

*

June 5

Well . . . something unexpected has happened. Something 35 weeks of teaching taught me would never happen. I found a book my 11th graders love, love to read, love to talk about, love to read ahead of others in class and then brag about what page they’re on, and then talk about what this person meant or where that plot line is leading. And it’s literature: Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Completely unexpected--like rain at the end of a drought.

This has not, of course, been a problem all year with my two 10th-grade honors courses; they either are connected to what we are reading, or are already programmed by overbearing parents to act connected to anything academic. And 12th grade, well, they have always seemed to occupy an in-between place, their gaze trained just the other side of graduation--as though they were sitting through an unexpectedly long wait in a bus station. They approached classwork like a distracted traveler asked to fill out a questionnaire.

But my two 11th-grade classes were filled with kids still situated comfortably within the school calendar, no immediate open door ahead of them, and yet nothing I threw at them (“Slaughterhouse Five,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Hiroshima”) raised an eyebrow. They suffered; they wheezed and moaned.

And now this: One of my students has defaced her book with ink purposefully so the school will force her to buy it. She did this because she wanted to keep the book, to have it at home in her bedroom to read again. Totally unexpected. They work in groups now on questions, and brag to others when they have sussed out deeper meanings in the text no one else has come upon. (Again, let me note that this is the end of the year, when kids’ attention spans and work habits are supposed to be crumbling, but these kids are increasing in intellectual intensity.) They are crushed when they realize we won’t have time to finish the 300-page book this semester.

What did I do to deserve this? It’s difficult to discern whether my presence in this room helped bring this about or I just happened to buy a good book (“Beloved” was purchased with Advanced Placement funds allotted to me.) There are elements in the book that would hook them: a haunting, sex and love, racial violence. But they don’t crowd around, say, the violence, like they did the ghastly casualties in “Hiroshima,” as if the book were just another Jerry Bruckheimer production. They have changed. Their reaction to the fiction is now balanced and complicated . . . like, well, readers. Which I guess they have become.

*

June 20

I’ve not, however, become a teacher, although I have moved closer to being one. Looking back, I now think that what the first year teaches an instructor is everything they don’t know, everything they are not. I did have some successes during the school year, especially with my two honors classes: I know those students now connect with literature, and even the world around them, on a deeper and more complex level.

But I made colossal mistakes in my other classes. I assumed the kids knew more than they did, even if it was my 12th graders and the skill of sentence writing. I was proud and avoided the advice of others because I thought I knew what teaching was and how my classes should operate. I sequenced the year backward, believing my students could write essays in October, then admitting defeat in May when I finally began teaching the topic sentence. Sometimes I handed my students too much classroom freedom, thinking they could take responsibility for themselves, and often discovering too late that they could not.

Yet it now seems that some of my mistakes were almost impossible to avoid, given the fact that, like thousands of other LAUSD teachers, I had no training when I walked into the classroom the first day. And while I am very thankful to those administrators who trusted in me and stuck by me through the year, I am now a believer that as institutions, schools should not hire teachers who lack training.

There may be other instructors doing a worse job than I did, but thinking honestly, I likely did a third of the job that I could have done if I had been fully credentialed. The year was a learning process for me--of how to run a classroom, of what’s important to teach, of how to relate with my students. But what education I took came at the expense of my students.

My students taught me. I told them that on the last day and thanked them all for the opportunity. Those first few weeks of school in the fall, I was desperate, considering any career move that came to mind. I did not want to stay in the classroom; I was sure I had made a mistake. It was impossible to imagine myself in the classroom 10 years into the future, let alone three (about the time it takes to become credentialed if you’re teaching and going to school part-time).

I’ve changed. The job now feels like the most important thing I’ve ever done, the most profound contribution I’ve ever given. And it feels unfinished.

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Dave Gardetta begins his second year of teaching at Eagle Rock High School Sept. 8.