The rush of relief gives me the courage to look at the principal. His eyes are boring into my skull.Fuck youandyour suit, dick!“Thank you so much for the opportunity,” I croon.
His frown grows even deeper.
“Amazing,” Lina says. She cuts her eyes to Mr. Flores another time. “We’re,” she says, “thinking we start with a school tour. Then you can meet with the third-grade team of teachers, and after that, we’ll have you meet the class you’re interviewing for and do a little activity with them. What do you think?”
The tone she takes with him is interesting. It’s the tone of someone who is used to working as a unit, as a Team with a capital T, and not as a beleaguered workhorse assistant. Comfortable, open, a little sarcastic with warm undertones. Is Mr. Flores a dick or not?
Regardless, I celebrate internally about this news.You are prepared. You are competent.“That sounds great. I prepared a demo lesson, so that works. Thanks again for inviting me in, Ms. Sanchez.”
“Call me Lina, please. Only the real old-heads here go byTitle and Surname all the time. The rest of the staff call each other by our first?—”
She is interrupted by a beep from the walkie on her hip. “Ms. Sanchez, you’re needed immediately in the gym. Student in crisis.”
Lina and Mr. Flores look at one another.
“Go,” he says.
“How about Georgia?”
“I think I can handle an interview. Go.”
Lina looks at me. “Sorry, Georgia, I’ll catch up with you both later.” She looks at Mr. Flores. “Behave,” she tells him, before rushing out of the office.
Fuck. I finally look at him. His face and body project cool and calm, but his eyes are on fire. A muscle tics in his temple. “Welcome to PS 2, Georgia,” he says, in a voice like gravel, the words feeling more like a challenge than a welcome.
And this is how the irrationally grumpy, initially antagonistic, and now mostly disengaged Very Attractive Man who thought (still thinks?) I was participating in some high dumpster diving ends up taking me on a tour of PS 2. It’s a massive school, three floors, diverse, with several surprising features.
To be honest, everything about it is perfect, and I want, nay need, to find a way to reel Mr. Flores back in.
“Wow, a New York City public school with a Hydroponics Lab and a STEM Lab? I can’t say I’ve ever seen that before,” I tell him, somewhere on the second floor.
He grunts, somehow making it sound hot. “The Hydroponics Lab is actually thanks to some of our fifth graders from a few years back. They wrote to our City Council Member, inviting her into our building and giving her an entire presentation about the importance of having a Hydroponics lab in acity school. Those kids wrote a proposal, drafted the budget, made lists of the materials needed, reached out to companies, all of it. She was impressed, and put it on her Participatory Budgeting for the year. The entire district voted it in.”
“So, is that what the PS 2 website means when it says ‘project-based learning’?” I ask.
He nods once, curt. “Yes. I know that could mean anything, but that’s a great example of it happening in our school.”
I am dancing internally, marveling at my luck. To find a school with similar values, ideals of teaching and learning that align with my own? Rare, a unicorn in a sea of almost two thousand New York City public schools.
“You look… alarmingly happy.”
“Yes!” I exclaim. “I want to leave my current school because I just don’t agree with some of their values. There’s a huge focus on test scores. I feel like a drill sergeant, or a prison guard, not a teacher.” I notice I look a bit unhinged, bouncing on my toes. Mr. Flores is frowning his frowny face at me. I wonder if he has another face. I force myself to relax. “I love that your fifth graders did that. It’s in alignment with how I view education,” I say.
I imagine the ways in which I can finally have students conduct research, apply their learning to real-world problems, instead of stuffing facts and multiple-choice questions down their throats.
Mr. Flores remains wildly unimpressed. “Well, there are certainly merits to both sides of that argument,” he says, in that snotty, vaguely diplomatic tone I assume administrators learn in Administrator School.
Uh oh, I think. I remember some advice Eloise gave me last night, something about not talking shit about your previous bosses during an interview.It’s unprofessional, she said.Your new supervisors don’t want to hear about how you didn’t getalong with your last supervisors. I clear my throat. “It just isn’t a good fit,” I clarify. “My test scores are great, but I want to find a fresh path. PS 2 seems like it’s a better fit.”
Somehow, the nod he gives me can only be described as ‘condescending as hell.’
“It doesn’t seem like PS 2 is a ‘test prep’ school,” I say to him, while gesturing at a busy group of students laying on their stomachs in the middle of the hallway. As we step through their legs, I overhear them engaging in a heated discussion about the merits of…socialism?
“Good morning, Mr. Flores,” the group chants chorally. Some of them smile at me, while others have the “I’m-too-cool-to-care-but-also-I’m-still-a-curious-baby” side-eye that is common amongst the fifth grade set.
Mr. Flores grins at them, which promptly causes me to trip over my feet. It’s a shocking thing, transforming his entire face so abruptly, as if the sun has just come out during the rain. It feels physical, visceral, like it’s just smacked me in the face. I’m pretty sure I’m gaping at him when he realizes and shifts his face back into its stormy demeanor.
“We’ve found a balance,” he responds to my previous comment. “I put several non-negotiables in place regarding the curriculum and instruction here. Whicheveryonemust follow,” he says pointedly, as if he thinks I’m on so many drugs that I won’t be able to. “We turned our scores around in a few years, bumped our enrollment numbers up, received a bunch of funding, and now we have air conditioning in all our offices and classrooms, in the auditorium and gym,” he continues. “We’re still working on the lobby and hallways though.”
