The Great Expectations School by Dan Brown

on yourself, just write out what you want and have them copy it over in their own handwriting. That's how a
lot
of teachers do it. The bulletin boards are just to show Dilla Zane that things are under control. You have to do them, but don't let them kill you. There are too many other things trying to kill you.” Then he offered to teach my class a sample math lesson and build my math center.
    On Thursday, I stayed late to mount the magnificent birthday bar graphs against fadeless teal paper. I typed our procedure in flashy fonts, and used magic markers on sentence strips to delineate the New York State standards employed in this lesson. (M4a: Collect and organize data to answer a question. M4c: Make statements and draw simple conclusions from data. M6g: Read, create, and represent data.) The Birthday Bar Graphs were the main attraction, but I also made a smaller literacy display with some “Writing About Me: Autobiography Introductions” from the previous week.
    When I got home, I opened a personal e-mail from Liesl Nolan, the program manager of the Mercy College New Teacher Residency Program. She had paid a random visit to 4-217 the previous day,checking out the bulletin boards and asking me how everything was going. Liesl had typed, “Dear Daniel, I wanted to thank you for welcoming me into your classroom last Wednesday. Your room looks great! I can only assure you that it will get better. You have great support with Barbara and your Mercy instructor, Charles. Utilize them. I truly admire your passion for doing this work! Thank you!”
    On Friday, September 26, I received a surprise. Ten minutes before lineup, Ms. Guiterrez rolled into my classroom. “Mr. Brown, I have to talk to you about your bulletin board. Immediately.” She walked back into the hall. This was her first time in my classroom since her summer complaint about my mom's border paper, not counting the pencil-sharpening incident on the first day of SFA.
    I flashed paranoid. But wait a minute, my bulletin board looked sharp. Maybe this was Guiterrez's way of telling me I had a damn good-looking first bulletin board and to congratulate me for surviving my first month in the inner city.
    Guiterrez did not look at me when I followed her into the hall. “What is wrong with this, Mr. Brown?”
    My bulletin board was a replica of everyone else's on the second floor. “I don't know,” I said, my brief hope that this was some kind of weird compliment dashed.
    â€œAre you sure everything is spelled right?” she asked in the same even, accusatory tone.
    I was supremely positive that every word on my board was spelled correctly. A second-place finish in the township bee back in ’93 (“tyrannous” did me in) was a major event in my youth, and ever after, spelling was one area in which I excelled.
    â€œWhat do you think is misspelled?”
    â€œ
That
word.” She pointed at the word “announced.” I had written it in magic marker as part of the Activity Procedure. The line read, “Students raise their hand if their birthday falls in the month that the teacher has just announced. The data is then recorded in the data table.”
    â€œ
That
word is spelled incorrectly,” she deadpanned.
    I squinted and stared at the word. A-N-N-O-U-N-C-E-D. Announced.
    â€œIs it the word ‘announced’?”
    â€œYes, Mr. Brown.”
    I moved my face close to the board. A tiny piece, less than a centimeter, of the end of the “o” did graze against its neighbor, “u.” Did that make the “o” resemble an “a”? Annaunced? No. It still looked like “announced.” I squinted at her in befuddlement. What kind of conversation was this?
    â€œI see no writing on this bulletin board,” Ms. Guiterrez said icily, changing gears.
    I did not know how to respond without insulting her intelligence, although I felt certain that my own intelligence had just been