Fledgling Teacher Gets Tough Lessons, Unexpected Rewards

He dropped 20 pounds in the first semester, not to mention what the experience did to his savings account. By October, he was fairly certain that he had made a grave mistake from which he could be rescued only by the grace of God.

His colleagues told him to calm down, that all rookie teachers felt this way in their second month. But that argument is a hard sell when you are pitching it to a guy who, in a fit of idealistic insanity, has chucked a six-figure salary to teach high school.

Perhaps you remember Bill Crowfoot, the Pasadena councilman who gave up his law career in September to join the faculty of his local secondary school. His midlife job switch made some headlines, inspired some admirers and annoyed more than a few members of the Blair High School faculty.

At the time, Crowfoot said he simply wanted to work in a job that felt more meaningful than corporate law. His new colleagues at Blair privately wondered how long he would last; Blair High is where the Pasadena kids who are not rich go to school, a campus where about half the student body is on welfare and the bilingual education program soaks up one student in five.

It was to this program that Crowfoot, with his fluency in Spanish, was deployed on an emergency teaching credential nine months ago.

And it was to this program that--against all odds and good sense--Crowfoot decided this week that he will return when school starts again in the fall.

*

“It’s been an extraordinary year,” he said Friday, leaning against a table at the back of his classroom as the morning of the last day of school ticked away. “It’s pretty clear in my mind that I do, at some point, want to go back to practicing law. . . . But I like this too, and for now, I find myself thinking that it’s almost treasonable to do anything else.

“I mean look at these kids!”

He gestured toward a group of teenagers who had gathered in his classroom to meet a woman he had summoned from a city program to help them line up summer jobs. Earnestly, the students--from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico--were carefully penning the particulars of their young lives on job application forms. Their heads were bowed. Their life stories were amazing, and Crowfoot alone had heard every one.

“What other business can beat these kinds of customers?” he asked. “What else can be so immediate and intense? I think that wherever I go, this year will have been among the most golden years of my life.”

Teachers in the movies make the job look like a cinch. They walk into a raucous classroom, touch the heart of a delinquent or two and by the end of the school year, they have ghetto kids begging for just one last algebra drill.

*

Real teachers know that the drama is nowhere near that straightforward or one-dimensional. Nobody sings “To Sir, With Love” at the end of the year.

“The novelty wore off quickly,” laughed Blair Principal John J. Herrera, recalling the Bill Crowfoot he knew at the beginning of the year. “He came in on a big white horse, and he had to tone down his approach a lot.”

Crowfoot agrees that the first months were grueling for him. Raised in Puerto Rico, the son of an American sugar company executive and his Yugoslavian wife, Crowfoot was able to speak impeccable Spanish to the students in his classes, but common cultural ground was in short supply.

“He was very weird, you know?” said Jorge Omana, the 16-year-old son of a cleaning woman and her husband, a cook, whose family emigrated from Mexico three years ago. “He was white, but he spoke Spanish very good.”

Behind his back, the students nicknamed him El Chupacabras, for the pop-culture vampire of Latin American lore--a creature who, like Crowfoot, had purportedly spent its formative years in Puerto Rico, and who, like Crowfoot, they didn’t know whether to mock or respect.

Troublemakers abounded. One kid derived maniacal pleasure from setting off the fire alarm outside Crowfoot’s classroom, and was such a pest that school authorities ended up shipping him off to continuation school.

The heat didn’t help. Day after sweltering, San Gabriel Valley-hot day, he stood before an air-condition-less room full of sweating teenagers and wondered what he was doing here.

Then, in that mysterious slow-motion way things unfurl in real life, something, somehow, changed.

*

He struck up a conversation with a chunky kid in the front row and found himself listening to the dreams of a Salvadoran boy who hoped someday to become a cop. He complimented the artwork of the student who couldn’t seem to shut up in class and found himself the confidant of a frustrated adolescent whose Guatemalan mother so feared the lure of gangs that she wouldn’t let him out of the house.

Someone stuck a wad of chewing gum into the hair of a tattooed class bully and, as he leaned forward to help remove it, he found himself unexpectedly moved by the gleam of hot tears welling in the boy’s eyes. Then one day, he overheard the students in his fourth-period class talking soccer and ended up inviting them to a Galaxy game.

That was how it started.

And how it ended this week was with a moment that took him by surprise, when he was unexpectedly called away on the final day of that fourth-period class. He was writing a note to the substitute, instructions of the usual sort, and then he added a postscript: Tell them I’m going to miss them.

Without warning, he felt his throat constrict and his eyes begin to burn.

And the lawyer--no, make that the teacher--cried.