COACHING THE CORPS
A VIEW FROM THE FIELD: ON LOCATION
I secured a “visitor” spot in the faculty parking area of the Jacobson
School in South Phoenix’s Randolph District. My destination, on that
mild January morning, was the classroom of Laurie Brooks, located at the
far end of the campus near the junior playground. Dr. Williams, the principal,
spotted me walking and, with his voice magnified by a portable
sound system, he commanded, “Barbara, get inside! Now!”
“What’s going on?” I wondered. With my heart racing, I quickened my
pace to a jog, even in high-heeled pumps and a business suit. Wide-eyed,
I surveyed the unexpected scene ahead: yellow-and-black police tape
crisscrossed the school grounds and law enforcement officers surrounded
the playground area.
Just minutes earlier, a gun-wielding suspect in a liquor store robbery
had jumped the barbed-wire fence encasing the school’s perimeter, seeking
refuge in the vicinity of the primary playground area. Uninformed of
the danger, I served as the perpetrator’s lone target by walking into
harm’s way during a midday lockdown at an inner-city elementary school.
Laurie, my graduate student and first-year Teach For America teacher,
was visibly concerned and anxious when I arrived in her classroom. “Are
you okay?” she questioned, empathetically. “We all know the code that
came through, ‘Mr. Locker is in the building.’ So, this isn’t a drill, right?”
she asked rhetorically. “When I signed up for TFA [Teach For America], I
never expected this. But, hey, now you’re here going through it with the
rest of us.”
She shook her head, let out a sigh, and comforted a teary-eyed second
grader.
THE RESEARCHER’S JOURNEY: SEEING MYSELF IN MY STUDENTS
The principal escorted me to my classroom, handed me a roster with the
names of my second graders in the Northeast Bronx, and left me to survey
my surroundings, alone. Forty desks were shoved against the radiator.
A wall of textbooks rested on the windowsill. I did not yet know the range
of challenges that would face me as an untrained “teacher”––I was hired
in late August, shortly before school began. I left a banking job on Wall
Street a week earlier because I wanted to teach.
I knew that I lacked student teaching experience, as well as pedagogy
and education coursework, yet, I took the job anyway, believing that my
degree and desire would suffice. My only experience in an elementary
classroom had been during my own years as a student and time spent
“playing school” with my five younger siblings. I held onto the teacher
guidebooks for dear life, assigning workbook pages as both an assessment
of students and self––a sort of barometer to assure that the required material
was taught.
