![]() ![]() Couldn’t I teach them the way she did? “And look at her blusa. One day, Yolanda, one of my “good girls,” took me aside, “ Missy, quizás debe ir al salon de Ms. Students mooed loudly at Maritza, a large girl from a mountain village in Puerto Rico. Gerardo ran a gambling ring during 8th-grade math, taking bets and using all his math skills for something other than the problems I was teaching. Scuffles would then erupt that usually ended up with someone being sent to the office. A very tall 7th grader, Damaris, tore up every math worksheet and broke pencils and threw them across the room hoping to hit a classmate. When Carmen realized that I only lived a few blocks away from her in Jamaica Plain, she quickly said, “I’ll pick you up at 6:30 a.m.” And that began our friendship. “I just want to finish cleaning these last shelves,” I told her. You could go with me.” I loved that idea! “But, hey, it’s getting really late in the day. La Nueva Canción.” Carmen grinned at my poster. Later that afternoon, Carmen stopped by my room while I was wiping down shelves, arranging books, and hanging posters that I had brought back from Puerto Rico, where I’d previously taught. I followed Carmen up the stairs, watching her dark black hair sway elegantly, as we headed to the bilingual wing in search of my aide. He knows the curriculum well.” She smiled a broad warm smile, and I could feel my confidence emerging. But she seemed to intuit my fear before I said anything. I didn’t want to tell her that only two days ago, I was a high school science teacher, not a middle school math teacher. “They think if they just tell us things it’ll happen. Not a lot of purpose.” I smiled and liked her immediately. She mentioned that she’d seen me at the faculty meeting and quipped: “Rough first day. She was about my age and had joined the school as a bilingual science teacher the previous year. ![]() “Sometimes there’s toast.” Carmen was from Brooklyn, and her family was from Puerto Rico. “You have to get here early, or the coffee runs out,” she told me. Not in line, but “on-line” as she said, her New York accent in stark contrast to the many Boston accents in the school. I smelled the coffee before I noticed a long line of teachers. The next day, Wednesday, I parked in the large lot and entered the school through the cafeteria, as we had been instructed. (I hadn’t yet noticed that most of the shades were broken.) Thirty desks with chairs were arranged in three straight rows. The wooden floors had been waxed to a sparkling sheen and rays of sunlight danced on the floorboards. But when I finally found my classroom, I was delighted. Make sure your bulletin board has something about reading. DiMato has the key to the book room, but she’s out sick. Tuesday was a blur of people talking at the faculty: Do this. But it certainly wasn’t what I’d prepared for, even though it was closer to what I wanted. “I thought I was teaching science at Madison Park.” “I’m the principal of the E Middle School and I’m pleased you’ll be joining us as the newest math teacher in our Spanish bilingual program.” ![]() “Yes, this is Linda,” I said, careful not to imitate his heavy Boston accent. “Is Linder there please? This is Jim Bruno calling from the Boston Public Schools.” I picked it up and heard an accent that would become familiar in years to come. The phone rang just as I finished sharing with my parents my ideas for teaching cell division. Although I’d taken no science in college and only studied Portuguese for a semester, I knew how difficult it was to land a job in BPS, so all summer I prepared, poring over children’s science books and an old general science high school textbook. As a recently certified bilingual teacher in elementary education and social studies, I had hoped to land a job in a Spanish bilingual program, but the district’s human resources department apparently assumed I could teach in Portuguese as well as in Spanish, so they had hired me to teach high school science in a Cape Verdean bilingual program, taught in Portuguese. I was at my parents’ house, sharing lesson plans and ideas for my first day as a bilingual teacher in the Boston Public Schools (BPS). ![]()
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