Emergency Teacher by Christina Asquith Page B

the older teachers manage? By 11:30 AM, I had already punished Ronny with lunch detention and Rodolfo with after-school detention. When was lunch?
    Relinquishing the drug debate, I pulled out my copy of Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul, an idea borrowed from another teacher. Hoping to calm them, I opened to a story about a boy whose mother was addicted to heroin. The morose tone of the story and the sadness that welled up in my students’ expressions reminded me how tough their lives were. Leaning on the desk, tears came as I read, mostly from nerves. I coughed to cover up my choking voice.
    At lunch, I dismissed the rows one at a time, specifically instructing Ronny to stay put. Big Bird approached my desk. Behind him were Vanessa and some girls.
    â€œMiss?” Big Bird said, with raised eyebrows.
    â€œNot today, okay?”
    He loped out the door with his head down. They wanted to stay and have lunch together. Eating lunch in the classroom with the teacher was, for some reason, a big treat for sixth-graders. But I had no time for the well-behaved kids on this day. I had to discipline Ronny, who was leaning back in a desk wondering aloud why Rodolfo didn’t have to stay, too. This was one of the many small ways in which the needs of the well-behaved students were brushed aside for those of the troublesome students. Ronny sat in silence for a few minutes.
    Ronny was thirteen and lanky, with long arms, milk-chocolate skin, and a fluid motion. He had grown up in the Dominican Republic and had moved to North Philadelphia only a few years earlier. His father ran a popular rice-andbeans eatery a mile north of the school, and a grocery store where Ronny worked after school each day. Ronny always wore stylish, expensive-looking gold chains. One day I was collecting $2 from everyone for a field trip, and Ronny pulled a wad of twenties from his back pocket and asked me for change, which I didn’t have. While Rodolfo burst into anger unpredictably, Ronny was gentle and shy, but mischievous, nonetheless. They’d fight all morning, and then I’d see them joking around at lunch. This must have been their torture-theteacher routine.
    â€œLook Ronny, I know this isn’t the best class right now. And that Vistas story was boring. But, you know you can’t act this way in our class. What kind of class would that be? You have to be on the team.”
    His face softened.
    â€œYou can do it, you’re bright.”
    Pete’s advice had been: Don’t take student misbehavior personally.
    I suggested we read the story together. But once the book was open and Ronny stuttered through the first line, I realized the deeper problem. In the next few weeks, I saw that Ronny could read neither English nor Spanish. Ronny had already failed sixth grade once. Each lunch, he crossed the cafeteria to join his seventh-grade friends. When the bell rang, they went on to their seventh-grade classes, and Ronny returned to the same Room 216 as he had the prior year, with, in his eyes, a bunch of little kids. The prior year he had had the emergency certified teacher whom Mr. Marr called Jaime Escalante. How many emergency certified teachers had Ronny been subjected to?
    â€œMiss, I don’t want to end up in the store like my dad.”
    He told me one night a bunch of guys had broken in and held a gun to his head, and he saw his dad with a gun to his head. Sometimes he had nightmares about it.
    â€œWhat do you want to do?” I asked.
    â€œI wanna be a baseball player. Or draw.”
    â€œOh, Ronny,” I said. “No matter what you do, you have to be able to read.”
    He nodded. This was not a motivational issue, I realized. Ronny wanted to know how to read. No one was teaching him.
    When we finished reading the story, Ronny had a giant grin on his face. He seemed thrilled that a teacher was finally going to help him. I sent him off to lunch and watched him race down the hall. Watching him go, I