Radical by Michelle Rhee Read Free Book Online Page B

at me. Once they realized that the aide was gone and I had no classroom-management skills, the kids took over.
    It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I remember walking down the steps to the cafeteria one day when one of the kids tripped and fell. Every kid who passed him kicked him, like it was a natural thing. I ran back up the stairs and said, “What are you people doing? This is crazy! Stop it!”
    As I dropped the students off at lunch in the cafeteria one day, two boys started to fight. One kid had the other in a choke hold. The eyes of the kid being held were bulging out. It looked as if his blood vessels were going to pop. He was about to pass out.
    â€œStop!” I yelled. I tried to jam my hip between them to get some leverage to pull them apart. I couldn’t imagine the level of violence eight-year-old kids were capable of.
    I was helpless: I had zero respect from the kids and zero ability to strike fear into their hearts. How could I win back something I never had? What could I use as a threat? That I would tell on them to their moms? That they would get bad grades? That I would send them to the principal? They feared none of those things.
    My class was infamous at a school that had experienced its share of violence and misbehavior. The kids would walk down the hallways and rap on doors and push around younger kids.
    â€œThat’s Rhee’s class,” the other teachers would say, with palpable distaste.
    I have gone through some difficult and painful times in my life, but nothing compares to my first year as a teacher. It was the hardest time of my life, period.
    Back at our home on East Baltimore Street, my friends and I commiserated and compared notes on the trials of teaching for the first time. Liz, Deepa, and Rose all had been assigned to tough inner-city schools. But Harlem Park was a special case, the worst case. My friends had more supplies, smaller classes, and better support from the administration and parents. It was a pretty well-established fact within TFA that my assignment was extremely difficult. Doubts began to creep into our conversations. We started to voice the dark side of young, idealistic college grads faced with the reality of attempting to engage and teach disadvantaged students for six and a half hours a day.
    â€œThere’s nothing I can do,” I remember saying after one particularly rough day of being screamed at. “I am a well-meaning person. I work my butt off. I care about my students and their futures. But it doesn’t matter.”
    A S HARD AS IT was to take the daily frustrations and feelings of helplessness, the hardest thing was coming to the realization that, in fact, I was the problem. This became abundantly clear to me with the transformation of Tameka Tagg.
    Tameka was a teeny little girl; she was also one of the main rabble-rousers in my class. She interrupted lessons and instigated trouble for the entire class. She drove me crazy. After one particularly difficult morning, I gave up and sent her to another classroom. The teacher was Bertha Haywood, a thirty-year veteran and a great teacher. She also had top-tier students. Whenever I peered into her class and saw all of her children paying rapt attention to her, I assumed it was because she had the highest-performing and best-behaved class. As it turns out, that wasn’t the case.
    When I walked down the hall later in the day to pick up Tameka, I stopped and looked through the little window in the door to Bertha’s classroom. And there was Tameka Tagg, sitting with her hands folded, raising her hand to answer questions, smiling and keeping quiet.
    And it struck me at that point: It’s not her—it’s me. It’s not just about kids who come to school hungry, from families who don’t care about education, through streets with a gauntlet of drug dealers. I was creating the kind of environment where they could act up and be crazy, but if they were in a