So, You Get a Phone Call, Revised

Revised Nov. 11, 2009

Last week I received a phone call from J, a former student who was in my 6th grade class in 1973-74. He had just been released from a NY State prison after serving 27 years for murder and was in a shelter (not a good thing) until he finds a place to live. We stayed in touch all these years. I visited him twice in various prisons (he seemed to be in just about every state prison possible). He has been denied parole at least 6 times and he was somewhat shocked when it was granted so suddenly on the 7th try. He was released with just about nothing and with little time to notify people (though it turns out that the weird phone numbers popping up on out caller id were from the prison).

His family was even more shocked. Why was he is in a shelter? At first I thought the family forgot he existed. But it turns out that is a requirement of his release for a few weeks.

I knew lots of people in his family. I taught his brother and his nephew and knew his older sister, who was a political activist associated with a socialist party. In the 1975 teachers strike, she came with a bullhorn to rally community support for us.

A political note: These type of family associations are only possible when a teacher spends many years in one school, something that seems to be out of style with the ed deformers.

J had taken up a hobby in prison of building a miniature farm out of popsicle sticks. He sent me the entire farm, which I still have in my basement. Beautiful work.

He was one of the more difficult kids to deal with and had disrupted many classrooms in the past years (that was before special ed). That class was very difficult, with more than a few kids ending up dead or in prison. I took his behavior issue off the table by buying lizards and some math manipulatives and freeing him from his seat or having to do any formal work in class, though he was free to join us when he wished. He had already been held back twice I think – the maximum possible - see BloomKlein, we didn't have automatic social promotion - but it was enough. You couldn't do it a third time and have a 13-year-old sitting in 6th grade forever.

He dropped out at 14. He studied acting and used to come to my classes in later years and do acting exercises. At times he went on trips with us. Then came drugs. And murder. One time he called me on Thanksgiving from jail and said there were 9 guys from the projects in the same cellblock. He put some of them who knew me on the phone. (One of them is featured in the Yankee parade story below.)

His scores on the test the year I had him were probably not great, as expected (though I maintain that if I tried to force him into a traditional setting he might have done even worse). Obviously, my fault. No merit bonus for me. And maybe even a firing for being such a bad teacher as to not get good results, other than to get a child who had disrupted every class to function effectively in a social setting. How do you measure that?

I can't tell you what he learned in class that year academically (though free to roam, his curiosity took him into many areas of interest). Maybe to trust a teacher enough to stay in touch for 35 years. Obviously, the long-term results were not good. But I can only look at that year and I rate that pretty high. What would I have done if I had been offered more money for getting his score up? Or if threatened with being fired for not?

We've been in touch over the past week. I'm dropping off his "farm" at his sister's place. He has a daughter and once he gets out of the shelter, he has a place to stay. I try to imagine the impact on someone who goes to prison in 1982 at the age of 21 and gets out at 48. How does he see the world today? Cell phones, computers, a world really changed in almost 30 years. "What is the biggest change you see," I asked? "The number of women with big butts," he answered.