Demanding students test their teacher’s resolve

Ricardo Acuna began each class with 15 minutes of silent reading. They were his only moments of peace.

His students selected paperbacks from racks along the wall behind them. As they read, Ricardo played John Coltrane on a little black boombox. Or Mozart.

Or Billie Holiday. Sometimes Buena Vista Social Club.

One day, Gusto Jimenez, 15, announced to the class that he had never read an entire book. “I’ve never done it, and I don’t think I ever will.”

Everybody laughed.

“If you’re in my class,” Ricardo replied, “you’re going to read a book.”

That evening, Ricardo perused his own books, lined up along shelves on his living room wall. He passed up “The Beatles Anthology” and “Native Son” and “Chasing Che: A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend.”

Instead, he settled on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” The next day, he handed it to Gusto.

Gusto rejected it. He said he’d rather read about Latinos.

So Ricardo went to the school library and checked out a book about Cesar Chavez. A month later, Gusto had read two chapters. He gave a halfhearted presentation, but it included a poster about what he had learned. The poster showed a Latino couple dancing and an American flag that said: “Free.”

Ricardo counted it a victory. Gusto deserved a C at most, but Ricardo gave him a B-minus to encourage him. He got something out of it, Ricardo would recall thinking. The realization strengthened him for the ordeal to come.

*

Ricardo Lira Acuna, 34, had switched vocations. He had been a fledgling writer, and creative writing was still important to him. But now, as an intern in a Los Angeles Unified School District program for career changers and college graduates without training in education, he was a teacher.

His five English classes at Marshall High School in Los Feliz were a challenge beyond anything he had encountered. Three of his students were especially demanding of his time, his patience, his energy and, most of all, his idealism. In different ways, each was like he had been: None were rich, two were Latino and one was very bright.

They and other students, particularly the lethargic, the recalcitrant and the unruly, were wearing him out. Bureaucracy, paperwork and his internship classes at night and on weekends were frustrating him. His most trusted and available mentor was his wife, also a teacher, but his difficulties were affecting their relationship.

Writing still beckoned. But so did his students. Ricardo Acuna was torn.

*

DISCIPLINING THE CLASS CLOWN

Gusto avoided work. He was a clown, with energy to spare. He disrupted class with jokes and smart remarks.

On Oct. 16, 2003, Ricardo was trying to explain possessive nouns. Gusto sat restlessly in a corner, wearing baggy pants, white Nike shoes and an oversized Ecko Unlimited T-shirt. When Ricardo asked for an example of a noun, any noun, Gusto blurted, “Gangster.”

A possessive noun?

“This is Gusto’s class.” Then Gusto turned to a nearby student. Repeat after him, he said: “This is Jose’s territory.”

By now, class concentration was in disarray.

Gusto’s antics were significant. On his information card for Ricardo’s files, he had written in tag, the jagged letters used for street graffiti. When he chose to do assignments, he wrote some of them in tag, as well.

He did it so often that Ricardo learned how to read tag.

By mid-October, however, Gusto’s interruptions had become a serious interference. Others simply could not concentrate.

When class ended one day, Ricardo asked him to stay. Afterward, they said their conversation had gone this way:

Gusto spoke first.

“C’mon, Acuna, I’m gonna miss my bus.”

“Look, it’s only going to be a few minutes,” Ricardo replied, “and we need to talk.”

Gusto paced near the door. Damn, man, he recalled thinking. I gotta go home and eat.... I will just stay five minutes, and then I will jam.

Ricardo looked at him. “If you have a question or you need to talk about something, raise your hand. When you start talking to somebody when we’re supposed to be reading, you’re disrupting them.”

Gusto gave a here-we-go-again look. “Why don’t you loosen up? Why do you wear a tie all the time? Why are you so uptight?”

“I want to be a good role model for you guys. I don’t think it would be cool if I showed up in baggy pants or an athletic jersey.”

Gusto said he couldn’t see anything wrong with wearing either one.

“What do you want to do when you grow up?” Ricardo asked.

“I’m not leaving my ‘hood.”

The ‘hood was all that Gusto knew.

Gradually, he began to relax. He inched away from the door, then sat on top of a desk, facing Ricardo.

Under other circumstances, Ricardo would have told him to sit in the desk correctly, but he did not want to interrupt.

Slowly, Gusto began telling him about his brother. He was 23. On Aug. 11, two weeks before school started and one day after Gusto’s birthday, someone knocked on the door and shot his brother six times.

Two shots hit him in the neck, one creased his head, one struck him in the stomach, one ripped into his left leg, and one shattered his right hand.

His brother survived.

But it was a reminder, Gusto said, that there was no easy way out of the ‘hood.

It was in Echo Park, in a tough neighborhood he called “Home School.” He said he could not use certain streets or hang out at the park because he might be shot himself.

“When you are here,” Ricardo replied, “it shows you a way to get out of there.”

“You don’t understand, you can’t get out of there. I’m made.”

Made?

Ricardo thought of “The Sopranos,” where thugs were inducted as Mafiosi.

No, Gusto said, he was not a member of a gang. But he was in a crew. Gangs meant killing. Crews meant baggy pants, Nikes, tagging and fighting. He lived by the rule of the streets, he said. Ruthlessness.

Ricardo felt a dash of fear, for Gusto, even himself.

“I may not have grown up in your neighborhood, or gone through what you’ve gone through,” he said, “but we started the same. I grew up poor. I grew up like you did, and the only thing I ever thought about was figuring a way to get out of that. I was told education was a way out of that.”

The conversation lasted an hour. But Gusto had the last word. “Look, you don’t know where I’m coming from. We’re from different worlds.”

Afterward, Gusto wondered why he had opened up. I never really talked to a teacher like I talked to that fool.

Ricardo left the classroom and drove a half a mile before taking off his tie. “I needed to breathe,” he would recall. Usually, he turned on KPFK-FM. This time, he drove in silence.

He agonized. I didn’t get through to him. I didn’t understand. He was right, in a sense. I was coming from a different world. Ricardo felt like a bourgeois idealist. He wanted to go home and burn his Banana Republic pants.

At home in Eagle Rock, where his furniture was trendy and he was a regular at an Internet cafe down the street, Ricardo never worried about gangs. He leaned against the kitchen counter and watched as Marvilla, his wife, cooked picadillo.

“I don’t care about Gusto anymore,” he told her. “If he doesn’t care about his life, I don’t either.”

She knew better. He was always talking about Gusto. He even dreamed about him.

*

LEARNING TO ADAPT

As a first-time teacher, I am grateful that Mayra was forthcoming about her condition and that she is a conscientious student who constantly reminds me about the needed modifications and adaptations. I also find it admirable that she is able to mainstream with the rest of the class and even surpass most of her classmates.

-- Ricardo’s journal

*

Because she was legally blind, Mayra Ramirez, 14, needed as much help as Gusto. But she was fiercely independent and full of hope.

On Halloween, she came to class dressed as a veterinarian: beige pants and a shirt covered with white, brown and black puppies. Two boys made fun of her, asking, “Hey, Mayra, what’s up with the dog shirt?”

Ricardo was about to intervene when she handled it herself. “I like dogs,” she said, matter-of-factly.

At age 9, Mayra was diagnosed with Stargardt’s disease, a degenerative eye disorder. A doctor told her parents that she could go totally blind.

Too often, her teachers ignored or forgot her special needs. Her sixth-grade social studies teacher was the exception. She was a gentle woman who enlarged Mayra’s workbook assignments on a photocopier, taught her to type and let her lie down sometimes to rest her eyes.

One day, that teacher announced to the class that she was leaving. She didn’t say why. Mayra cried.

But now here was Ricardo. When other students did not pair up with her on assignments, he offered to be her partner. She was shy and soft-spoken, but not embarrassed. She had clear aspirations, and she seemed confident, even driven. She wanted to go to a four-year college.

She told him that she drew strength from a cousin who had died of cancer four months earlier. Mayra said she lived to please him “up there” and added, “I don’t want to feel like just because I have a disability, I won’t make it.”

Ricardo admired her strength. He noticed a picture of Eminem on her binder, and he was impressed that she liked such an outspoken rapper. An extraordinary student, he would remember thinking. Wow, this is what I am here for.

Each day, he stopped by the photocopier in the main office to enlarge her assignments. He read to her and explained everything she could not see. During a mythology unit, he magnified the characters: Hades, god of the underworld ... Poseidon, god of the sea....

One day, he brought Mayra a book: “A Little Princess,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was about an orphaned girl who survived hardship by finding strength in her heart and in her imagination.

“Thank you,” she said. She was glad that he thought of her, and she read parts of it every day.

Otherwise, he treated her like everyone else.

“I consider myself normal.... That’s what Mr. Acuna has taught me,” she said one day to a classroom visitor. “He gives me the same work as everyone else. He has taught me to be the same person, and just because I have a disability, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to be able to do the work.”

Ricardo asked everyone to keep a journal. It meant at least one writing assignment every day.

Mayra wrote poems about friends, family and love. She wrote about her fondness for cupcakes: They are “as sweet as your future husband.” She wrote about her annoying little brother, her best friends, her close-knit family. One day, she wrote a poem about her cousin:

We all have an guadian angel

Someone to love us

But I have 2 angels

My guadian angel and

My loving angel.

My loving angel the

One who died but guarding

me from above.

The one I loved

I saw him die

and I also saw him

come back.

I can feel him but I

don’t see him.

I have my loving angel face

recorded in my head.

I have his voice recorded deeply

in my heart.

all our conversations we

had recorded on the tip

of my heart.

I want my angel to come

back.

Plese come back to me.

Ricardo told Mayra that she was talented, and though he could not ignore her spelling errors, he did not want to discourage her. So instead of marking the pages of her journal with his red pen, he made a deal with her.

He would help her with spelling and grammar, and in one year, by October 2004, she would spell 80% to 90% of her words right and use complete sentences.

“Yeah, my spelling is not too good,” she said.

“Don’t worry. You can do it.”

*

TRYING TO ENGAGE AN INTELLECT

Here was a student who really talked about authors and caught on to the idea of the author names taped to the chairs. I thought he [too] was the reason I was teaching high school. This is the time students form ideas, and they need to be guided. This is going to be a great class, and Jeremy is going to be a great student.

-- Ricardo interview

*

Jeremy Sentance, 17, the shaggy blond kid with the Che Guevara T-shirt, was merciless with his questions.

But he would not do homework, despite Ricardo’s efforts to encourage him. Often, he simply goofed off.

One day, during silent reading, Ricardo noticed that he had brought in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson.

Ricardo was surprised and pleased. “That’s a college-level book,” he said.

Jeremy bragged to his parents about the remark.

A few days later, he came to Ricardo and read aloud passages from “Marabou Stork Nightmares,” a novel by Irvine Welsh, about someone who hallucinates in a coma.

“He’s having an out-of-body experience into this heavenly world,” Jeremy said. “I wish I could get into a part of my head where that can happen.”

Then he brought “Trainspotting,” another Welsh book, this one about a clique of hopeless junkies.

“When they’re high,” Jeremy said, “they get into that zone where most people want to get.”

Ricardo told him: “You can get to that point when you’re sober.”

As the weeks went by, Ricardo brought in other books he thought Jeremy might like. “The Motorcycle Diaries” by Che Guevara. “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. “The Revolt of the Cockroach People” by Oscar Zeta Acosta.

During silent reading, he let Jeremy play Bob Marley.

Jeremy read a chapter of “The Revolt of the Cockroach People.” Interesting, he said, but when he came back to school the next day, someone else had borrowed the book, and Jeremy did not get another one.

Ricardo wanted to find out what would challenge him and keep him working. Maybe he was too advanced for his lessons. He might be bored. Finally, Ricardo asked Jeremy to meet with him after school.

He and Jeremy recalled their session this way:

“You’re a smart kid,” Ricardo said at the outset. “I know you can do well in this class.” Did he want to go to college?

“Nah,” Jeremy replied.

“You would love college,” Ricardo replied.

Jeremy said he had heard plenty of pro-college lectures. He said he wanted to be a musician and a photographer and work at a skateboard shop.

“What if you get tired of that?” Ricardo said. He could do all of those things and go to college, too.

“I’ll never get tired of it.”

Why would such a bright young man reject college? Ricardo wondered.

The talk did little good.

Jeremy went weeks without turning in his daily journal assignments.

“I don’t do journals,” he told a visitor. “I don’t like to write about the day. I would like to keep it in my memory instead. A day, to one person, is a personal thing.”

On parent-conference night, Ricardo told Jeremy’s mother her son was getting a D “purely because he won’t do the work.”

She said she was not surprised: He was an untamed spirit.

“We’ve tried everything,” she would tell the visitor afterward. Jeremy’s father added: “If he said he didn’t want to do [homework] anymore, there was no persuading him.”

A few days later, Ricardo caught Jeremy passing a note to a girl.

The note, Ricardo would recall afterward, asked if she wanted to “go out with a white boy.”

“No,” the girl replied. “I like Latinos.”

Ricardo photocopied the note, marked out Jeremy’s name and the girl’s name and put the note on an overhead projector for each of his classes to read. He made an English lesson out of it. He corrected its punctuation and spelling. He changed white to Caucasian and black to African American.

“Hey,” Gusto said. “I know who that white boy is.” Soon everyone had figured it out.

The girl blushed, and Jeremy tried to make light of it. “Caucasian?” he said. “Who writes like that?”

“I was making a point,” Ricardo said, “not to pass notes in class.”

Jeremy had already begun skipping school, and now he did it more often. He would say later that he cut because he had found a good pizza place and that he had better things to do: drumming in a rock band.

But Ricardo feared that what he had done with the note had driven him off.

When he told Marvilla about Jeremy, she encouraged him. “This is exactly the kind of student you can help.”

*

BOTTLING UP HIS EMOTIONS

I feel confused, frustrated, unsure. I go ... day by day, week by week.

-- Ricardo’s journal

*

One day in November, Ricardo walked around his classroom picking up wrappers and other papers. His students were violating his rules, including: “Leave your workspace and the area around it cleaner than the way you found it.”

For that and other violations, he had listed 17 students for detention. It did little good, though. Not only were they cutting class, but some were skipping detention, too.

His four hours of intern training every Monday night weighed him down. To keep up, he had to read books and write memos, besides preparing for the classes he was teaching and grading his students’ papers. He was not writing anything creative -- no screenplays, no short stories, no poems. He had neither the time nor the energy.

His intern training struck him as nothing but theory. He could not get practical answers to his questions.

Some of his students were not improving. “Boring,” they said. “Who cares about gods?”

“Too much words.”

“Too many words,” Ricardo corrected.

A fellow intern who was a friend complained about her unruly students.

He urged her to stick it out, at least until Christmas.

Then she was gone. She “left screaming and yelling,” said Kristin Szilagyi, the English department chairwoman.

The school principal urged teachers to raise Academic Performance Index test scores.

What does this mean? Ricardo recalled thinking. I can’t get these kids to read a book. How am I going to get their scores up?

In the past, he could have gone to a mentor for answers. The year before, Marshall had five veteran teachers who each got paid extra to help up to four interns like Ricardo.

But mentoring had been eliminated because of district budget cuts. Some schools did without. Marshall found money to pay two experienced teachers over the summer to work with interns and other new teachers, but Ricardo and three others arrived too late.

That left the counseling of interns up to four teaching coaches. But they were already burdened with assisting the school’s other 197 teachers. Moreover, one of them helped math teachers only. Two of the other three visited Ricardo’s classes, but just occasionally.

Being new could be confusing, so Szilagyi made herself available to Ricardo anytime for advice. She gave him her home number and urged him to call day or night.

He would have been too embarrassed. Even as a new teacher, he would later say, he should have known how to solve his problems.

Besides, he did not want to be a whiner, a complainer.

Instead, he turned to Marvilla.

His work was already straining their relationship. Again and again, she had asked him to take her to a movie, or go with her to visit her mother, or walk in the park with her and Ringo, their dog.

“No, I have work,” he said. “I have work. I have work.”

If it wasn’t work, it was money. L.A. Unified had written to say that just three of the 40 courses he had taken at Columbia would count in determining his pay. That meant his ranking on the salary scale would drop. Already he was making barely $35,000 a year.

Why did I go to these schools? Why am I paying all of this debt? Why did I study literature and screenwriting if all I am writing are memos?

At night, he jolted awake and stared at the bedroom walls. He shook Marvilla. “I’m dreaming about work.”

“Just a nightmare,” she said.

He fell back into the same dream. Jeremy’s face glided toward him, smirking. It disappeared. Then Gusto’s face. Then Mayra’s....

“I’m getting resentful,” Marvilla told a visitor. “This is never ending. He’s not as talkative. He’s not the same free-spirited personality, which is why I married him.”

One night, the tension erupted.

Ricardo came home from his intern classes and said an instructor had told him that he was flunking because he had not completed enough of the homework.

“I went to the best schools. How can I be flunking out?” he said. I have become my own worst student.

“This is not worth it.”

Marvilla urged him to stick it out. “Let me help you,” she said. She offered to do his homework for him.

“What is the point if I don’t do it myself?” he said.

She felt helpless. “Well, maybe you should just quit.” It was a challenge. She thought it might turn him around. “You can’t handle it.”

*

CONFRONTING THE PROBLEM

Part of the reason I became a teacher is because I wanted to connect with students, to find them something to get them interested and excited. With Jeremy, over time, I have just wanted to give up on him.

-- Ricardo interview

*

Jeremy, who had been cutting class regularly, showed up one day with a root beer.

“No drinks,” Ricardo said and took it away. As he turned to put the bottle down, he heard laughter.

Jeremy would later say he had felt hot and thirsty. He had opened another bottle of root beer and was gulping it.

“You’re not taking my drink,” he said defiantly.

Ricardo would not forget the words. His tie felt tight. His cheeks grew hot. He squinted and crimped his brow. He blurted: “You’re f---ing it up for everyone.”

He surprised himself. He said it again. “You’re f---ing it up for everyone.”

He glared at Jeremy, then at Gusto. It was always either of them, he would remember thinking. Either Jeremy or Gusto.

“Just leave,” he told Jeremy, loudly. “Just get out.”

Jeremy grabbed his backpack and his skateboard. He strolled out, taking his root beer with him.

Ricardo’s nostrils flared. He clenched his teeth. With his eyes, he followed Jeremy out the door, staring him down.

*

Gusto’s disruptions became more frequent. He chatted. He joked. He, too, stopped doing his homework. He would not sit still. He squirmed and walked around during class.

Ricardo pulled Gusto’s desk up to his own.

Each day, Gusto sat facing Ricardo with his back to his classmates. But it did not work. He turned and whispered until he had someone’s attention. Then he joked some more.

He refused to read.

Ricardo told him he would flunk.

Gusto said he didn’t care.

I’m going to fail anyway, he thought. Why even try?

“He doesn’t like me no more,” Gusto told a visitor afterward. “I’ve been bugging him a lot. I get in trouble. It’s too boring.

“I can tell he doesn’t really know how to run his class. He’s, like, too professional, with his tie, or whatever.”

*

Mayra was Ricardo’s bright spot. She struggled with her vision, her spelling and her grammar, but, when he helped her, she responded.

Somehow, despite her blurred vision, she was able to recognize him among the students and teachers who crowded the hallways, and she always said, “Hi, mister.”

Every night in her prayers, she asked God to bless him.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

About This Series

Erika Hayasaki observed Ricardo Acuna’s classes for more than 40 hours. She interviewed him repeatedly and visited his home. Her story also is drawn from observations as well as home visits and interviews with his wife, Marvilla Bonilla, and students Gusto Jimenez, Mayra Ramirez and Jeremy Sentance. Their actions, words, thoughts and emotions were either witnessed by Hayasaki or described directly by them.

Hayasaki visited and conducted interviews five times at the Los Angeles Unified School District intern summer training program. She also interviewed David and Carla Sentance, Jeremy’s parents; Milagro Ramirez, Mayra’s mother; Bob Grakal, a teaching coach at Marshall High School; Kathleen O’Connell, an assistant principal at Marshall High School; Kristin Szilagyi, chairwoman of Marshall High School’s English department; Beth Irizarry, an intern at Marshall; Erin Winter, an intern at Wilson High School; Mary H. Lewis, the director of the L.A. Unified intern program; Susan Stealey and Nancy Bell, program instructors; Arnie Weiner, a program director; Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Alternative Certification; and Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education at Stanford University.

Acuna provided screenplays, poetry, journal entries, lesson plans and intern assignments reflecting his thoughts, concerns and workload. Some students, including Ramirez, also provided journal entries, poetry and class assignments.

Coming tomorrow

As his first semester drew to a close, Ricardo Acuna agonized over whether he was truly helping his students and whether his inexperience was doing more harm than good. Was his presence in the classroom pointless? He wondered if there was a better way to make a difference.