CHAPTER ONE: SEPTEMBER

Tuesday, September 7, 1987

September 7, the day after Labor Day, was the first day of school in my fifth year as the principal at the Hunter College Elementary School, which is a tuition-free, publicly-supported laboratory/demonstration school for intellectually gifted children located at 94th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan, New York City.  The building is a former armory and looks somewhat like a fort. 

I drove my brown stick-shift 1986 Mustang on the Gowanus Parkway to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, paying the $1.50 toll. Some days I “took the bridge,”  driving on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway below the Heights and crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, which had no toll,  up the East Side Highway to 96th Street, taking 96th to Lexington, turning left on Park Street, circling the block, and parking on the playground near one of the turrets on 94th. Off-street parking was a valuable perk of the job, so I didn’t mind the kids who perched on my car during lunch, eating their sandwiches. A car is just a car. Free parking is everything in Manhattan.

The building holds both schools, the Elementary School and the High School. The Elementary School was on the first floor. Right next to the entrance were a guard desk and a mini-gym. Staircases led to the second floor, where the High School resided, and down to the basement, where the lunch room, the gym, and a few classrooms for special teachers (art and science) were. My office was the first on the left on the right-hand corridor as you entered the school through the locked doors. It was across from one kindergarten, next to another, and next to the office of the Director. I had my own bathroom and the Xerox room also resided in my office complex, near the staff mailboxes. My secretary sat in an office near the corridor and I entered my office through her office.

I was up early, energetic, in my five-room upstairs apartment on Ridge Boulevard in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (with balcony, for $800 a month) near the Verrazano Bridge, water boiling on the stove, freshly ground coffee in the filter.

The first day of school is always like New Year’s Day, especially for school people, or for those who have children in school.

New shoes, new school clothes, new tablets, pencils, erasers, and color crayons bought. I’ve read that September has many weddings and new beginnings, even more than January or June. Perhaps it’s the beginning of the new season–fall–and the crisp feel that begins to creep into the air, after the sweat and lethargy of August, even though the actual date of the Equinox is later on in the month.

My other four beginnings here all had their emotional overlays: my first September, 1983, I felt apprehension and fear because I didn’t know what I was getting into. I had been living in Bowling Green, Ohio, and working just over the northern border of the state, in Monroe, Michigan, as a consultant for gifted education programs at the Intermediate School District. I had applied for a job as principal of the Hunter College Elementary School that I saw in the New York Times, back in March, and to my surprise, they called me for an interview in July after all their attempts and other interviews had not yielded them a proper candidate. 

I walked into the interview in a hat and suit and changed my shoes from tennis shoes to high heels at a bench inside the door, in front of the committee. One of the search committee members told me later that that was when she knew I was the one.

I have been an educator since 1964, and have taught and worked in the Midwest, from South Dakota to Ohio to Michigan. I was an unusual choice for such staunch New Yorkers. I was brought in after a battle and a year of an interim principal, but I didn’t know that. I saw this as an opportunity and when the call arrived offering me the job two days after I returned home to Ohio, I accepted, and began to dismantle my four-bedroom home, to have the rummage sale, to put the house up for rent, and to task my 19-year-old son to collect the rent, make necessary repairs, be a landlord.

He was at college at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), in art school. I had my Ph.D. in educational administration from BGSU;  our family had moved to Bowling Green in 1974 when I got a graduate fellowship. This year, 1983, my daughter was to spend her freshman year in high school in her dad’s town, Port Clinton, Ohio, and so I felt free to accept their offer.

I stepped into a swamp of sucking mud.

During my first year, 1983-1984, a majority of the teachers had signed a petition for the removal of my boss, the director, Dr. Karen McCarthy. The schools were in an uproar and I became the administrator in the middle, torn between my new boss and my new staff.  The intrigue, rumors, and explosions of feeling and innuendo set the tone for the work. After she left the Campus Schools, Dr. McCarthy went on to become a successful superintendent up north in Westchester County, at a much higher salary. She died too young.

The second year, 1984-1985, I would be working very closely with the new Hunter High School principal, Lester Hughes, like myself, a transplant from the hinterlands. He had worked in the south, in New Orleans as the principal of a magnet high school. He had moved his five children and had rented a house in Westchester County. His wife was looking for a job, and she landed a good one, at a Seven Sisters college. Lester and I had both ripped ourselves from our homes and traditions to take charge of two of the most politically visible schools in New York City.

In my third year, 1985-1986, we began working under a new director, whom I shall call Dr. Susan Partridge. All three of us were to be co-equals, according to the Dean down at Hunter College. Lester and I were to run our respective schools and Susan Partridge was to be in charge of the physical plant, admissions, outreach, and fund-raising. She had been hired at the last minute in the summer, as I had been, two years before. The Dean had hand-picked the candidates; there was no advertisement for the position.

Susan Partridge appeared on the first day of school in 1986, having resigned her job as the principal of a large high school in Queens, majority African- American students. That school’s population was definitely not the population of this school in Manhattan.  The Hunter College Elementary School and the Hunter College High School drew mostly students of European heritage, many of them Jewish, though the Elementary School had as a guideline a tacit charge to replicate the ethnic makeup of Manhattan, from where all the students had to be resident (except for those who lied), and we strove for 20% African-American, 10% Asian, 10% Latino, 60% European heritage.

The Asians were easy to find, and the African-Americans were also willing to travel to our location from their neighborhoods, but we had difficulty finding and enrolling Latinos, whose parents didn’t want to send them away from their neighborhood schools.  Routinely, over 1,000 young 4- and 5-year -olds qualified by the first screen, an IQ test, from which we selected about 50.

During admission season, I spent my spring late nights counting minorities, as my daughter reminded me when she lived with me while attending La Guardia High School for the Arts. “Are you still counting minorities? Go to bed.”

The High School had begun as a school for intellectually gifted girls from all five Boroughs, as Hunter College had in its infancy.  In those days, City College in the Bronx was the default college for bright young men, and Hunter College the default college or bright young women.

The Hunter College High School only became co-ed after protests in the late 1970s by Manhattan parents of boys who had attended the Elementary School but who couldn’t attend the High School.  In fact, the head of the search committee when I was hired, told me the reason they picked out my resume from the pile of applicants was because my dissertation focused on women’s studies.

When my fourth year began, 1986-1987, the Dean had changed the duties of the Director, and the three of us were not co-equals anymore. The chain of command led from me to Susan Partridge to the Dean. Likewise for Lester.  We were not to contact anyone at Hunter College without Susan Partridge’s  approval. We together vowed to be loyal and professional, though we were a little scared.

This year, 1987, the feeling in the schools was not good. Of course, the Hunter College Campus Schools have been in turmoil almost constantly since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and perhaps before that, because they were tuition-free and excellent, and parents in New York City are desperate to get their tax dollars’-worth in their children’s education. Since the elementary school was founded, in 1941, multi-cultural access to the Campus Schools has been an issue.  Leadership of the Campus Schools has been an issue. The role the Schools should play as models of what excellent, free, multi-cultural gifted education should be has been an issue. 

Admission policies have bent and bulged, but the basis for admission to both schools has been testing–IQ testing for the Elementary School, and achievement /ability testing for the High School.  Children from all five boroughs are admitted to the Hunter College High School

The Hunter College Elementary School admits only students who reside in Manhattan and the High School is open to children from all five boroughs, children who excel on the infamous Hunter Test, which research has found, closely resembles statistically, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).

In July, at a meeting, The Dean casually dropped the remark after one of the rare meetings that included Lester and me, that “80th Street” (code for the head offices of the City University of New York system) had said that principals are tenurable. We had been led to believe that principals could not receive tenure. Tenure is a situation in which one cannot be fired except for moral turpitude or insubordination. In fact, in the City University by-laws, one section said principals are tenurable, and another section said we were not. It was news to us.  Bad news?

♦

First Meeting of the Year

The teachers came for the first faculty meeting today. Here is the agenda of the meeting.

• Welcome Back
• Introduction of New Staff: We have several new assistant teachers but no new head teachers. Turnover is low because it is such a good place to teach.
• Schedules. I have spent the past few days making out the schedules for the teachers. Last year we had a scheduling committee which tried to help iron out scheduling problems. The committee asked each teacher for his/her ideal schedule. I tried to follow the teachers’ ideal schedules as much as possible, but there is bound to be moaning and groaning when they get them today. The schedule is one of the most difficult challenges we have; we have a very short school day, which I’ve tried to lengthen by ten or fifteen minutes per year, a few minutes in the morning and a few minutes in the afternoon, but the bus company that serves us won’t schedule their buses to conform to our schedule; we must conform to theirs.

This year, the fifteen minutes I added to starting time in the morning will affect several other schools in Manhattan, I was told, since our buses pick up children at other schools as well. I asked the bus company why our school couldn’t be the last school to be picked up, but they said that would be a major disruption. The union is also a concern. To lengthen the school day affects the “working conditions” of the teachers, who are unionized, and the union is vigilant. So the schedule must contain all our wonderful activities, special subjects, and academics in a shortened day that begins at 9 a.m. and ends at 2:20 p.m.

•  Testing results for 1986-87. I will hand out the summary of test results for the post-testing in May last year, with students’ achievements in reading, math, and language arts, so that the teachers can get an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the kids they will be teaching this year. Mean scores are in the 95th percentiles.
• Challenges in Achievement. I will do an analysis of which areas we need to work on, areas to emphasize, as a school. A few years ago, it was math computation, as gifted children generally speaking do things very fast, but in doing so, they often compute sloppily.

I began speaking a simple phrase, “Pay Attention,” in order to have the kids slow down a little.

Our math computation scores rose. This year, as last year, we have to concentrate on spelling and language mechanics (they are lower for the same reason–doing things too fast). I will tell the teachers that these are the same areas we are challenged with this year as well.

• Consultant Day. We have many consultants who visit the school to do workshops. For example, we use the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, which sends us practicing poets, playwrights, novelists, to work with the children. The scheduling committee survey showed that the teachers wanted all consultants to come on the same day. I am going to poll the teachers, now that they see their new schedules, as to which day of the week Consultant Day should be this year.
• Staff Development. I will mention that staff development is of two kinds: (1) Personal–that is, going to a conference that will be interesting and challenging academically, and I will say that I want to sponsor each teacher to go to such a conference; (2) Staff-wide, on site. We will schedule an outside speaker for each staff meeting, in such areas as learning disabilities, family relationships, and other areas of interest and current cachet. We have scheduled a mathematics consultant to do an inservice on manipulatives–Cuisenaire rods, blocks, and other materials, so that the students can have hands-on practice.

Two of the teachers have written a mathematics curriculum that needs field-testing. It features a lot of work with manipulatives. Gifted children are brainy children, and they often resist working with hands-on materials, finding the manipulation too slow. The teachers feel that work with manipulatives will help them get the mathematics into their bodies as well as their brains. I will ask for suggestions of speakers and for volunteers to serve on a staff development committee. Three staff-development days have been added to the calendar.

• Long-Range Planning. We are engaged in a long-range planning process and the meeting dates have to be set. People have to sign up for committees. More committees.
• Middle States Evaluation. We are scheduled to do the self-study for the Middle State Evaluation. The Elementary School must be accredited along with the High School. I’m quite surprised that this will be the first time that the Elementary School has participated in a Middle States Evaluation process. The staff is resistant because of the work the process will entail.
• Standing Committees Meet. I will be scheduling meetings of the standing committees–the Multicultural Committee, the Curriculum Committee, and the Computer Committee.
• Changes in Meeting Times. We will meet on the first Wednesday of each month, so that both schools have staff meetings at the same time. This was at the request of the head of the High School teachers’ union.
• Lunch on Wednesdays. The High School will dismiss early every other Wednesday, so that the High School faculty can have staff development, do committee work, and have department meetings. This means that we have to switch lunch periods every other Wednesday, because the High School will have the lunch room during our lunch period. I’m a little bemused because this switch was presented to me as a fait accompli, with no consultation, another example of the High School’s often-fraught sense of entitlement.
• Assembly on Friday morning. As last year, the assemblies will all be scheduled on Friday mornings, to provide the least disruption of academics. Of course, something always comes up and we have to have assemblies at other times. But this is a guideline, anyway.
• Coordinator for After-School Programs. We need a new coordinator. Last year’s coordinator doesn’t want to do it anymore. Pay is equivalent to teaching one after-school class.
• Collaborative Efforts to Continue. We have begun a collaboration with District 22 in Brooklyn, helping them with their gifted program, especially in a junior high modeling ours, with similar admissions. We see this as part of our mission as a laboratory/experimental school. Several of our teachers are buddied with their teachers. There will be visitation back and forth. We are also talking with District 4, District 2, and other districts about doing the same thing.
• What I Did Last Summer. This is my favorite part of the first faculty meeting of the year. I instituted it as a way of getting us psychically back together, and of rekindling good feelings for one another. I am always amazed at the international travel these New York City teachers do, compared to the teachers in the Midwest. Teachers at Hunter rarely take a trip to a national park or visit the Rockies, or drive across Canada. Some of the Hunter teachers barely know that Indiana borders Lake Michigan.

Last summer one of the younger teachers backpacked in Italy all by herself. New York provincialism truly ignores that there is a vast and interesting countryside between the Hudson River and Los Angeles. People in the center of the country tend to feel that the world is not really their canvas.  This time of sharing what we did in the summer, corny though it may be, makes us feel closer, in contact with one another again, and gives us a personal and positive feeling of regard for teach other as we begin the new year’s journey.

• P & B Meeting. The Personnel and Budget Committee is made up of three selected tenured members of the faculty, a representative from the Hunter College faculty, and me. I chair the Committee. We do the interviewing, hiring, personnel evaluation and observations. This model is unusual in a K-12 school, but I feel very comfortable working with this structure because of my experience in the English department as a faculty member at Northern Michigan University. This structure empowers teachers in ways that most schools won’t permit.  I like a collaborative setting, and not a top-down setting. This is collaborative in a real way; teachers vote on appointments and reappointments, though they have little budgetary influence. They have voting power and not just advisory power. We will meet in a week or so to set out our year.

Thursday, September 10

Yesterday was the first day of school for the children. I love standing inside the door and greeting them. They have all grown so much during the summer! I exchanged air kisses and handshakes with their parents. It was an “up” morning. The children go to school for only a half day the first week of school.

A black parent came in to talk with me about having her daughter moved from one class to another. She wants her daughter to have a black teacher. She has counted the numbers of minority children in each of the grades and noted that the black teacher at that grade level has the most black children. We place children by “minority,” and not “black,” and so this had escaped our attention in our determining class placements last spring. I declined to move the child.

I stopped on the way home at a former science teacher’s apartment in the East Village. He’s now an art agent, representing a German photographer. He’s been on unpaid leave of absence for two years. He had to sign his resignation letter so we could clear up the contract of the science teacher replacing him. He was a very popular teacher, and he had tenure, but he had enough of Hunter and its highly political atmosphere, he said.

When I got home I walked for an hour along the Verrazano Narrows and through the streets of Bay Ridge, a pleasant walk on a warm evening along Ridge Street with all those big houses. Many people enjoyed the evening also, playing ball, jogging, bicycling.

Tuesday, September 15

Today was the second day the buses have been running. On Monday four buses did not show up and the parents and children were waiting on corners all over Manhattan.  They then had to get their children to school by some means or another, and this is not a neighborhood school, so it involves much finagling, by taxi, public transportation–bus or subway–or getting their own private car out of the garage. Urban anxiety. We don’t let the kindergartners, or other first-time bus riders take the bus until the routes have settled down, about ten days.

A private bus arrived, and I wasn’t there to escort the children into the building, in all the confusion of trying to find out where the other buses were.  Parents called, concerned about their young children entering the school alone. Usually I buddy a young child with an older child on the bus and the older child escorts the young child in.

Parents’ fears at the beginning of a new school year are real, and parents experience separation anxiety that is very strong. Soon the children are running and tumbling into the building on their own, rushing to their classrooms as fast as their feet will carry them. We have the children go into the mini-gym, which is right opposite the door, until 8:20, so that teachers can have private prep time in their classrooms.  Children are not to enter the classrooms until 8:20 and teachers share supervision of the mini-gym each morning.

The excitement continued throughout the day with a custody incident. A former student in the Elementary School, now in ninth grade, was picked up by his mother and step-father but he didn’t want to go; he wanted to stay in New York City rather than move to Connecticut with them. There was no court order and so we would not release him to the mother and step-father. Fights and scuffles ensued. Police, detectives, counselors, Lester, all involved.

Custody incidents and court orders are becoming more common. Last year, two children in the after-school day care were approached by a man who said they were classmates of his son. The man is banned by court order from the premises. He must not approach his son nor anyone else at the school. He was supposed to be arrested on sight and to serve 15 days in jail for contempt of court. His son was afraid of him. The children described him as wearing faded jeans, torn sneakers, with a blond Hare Krishna braid on his bald head, wearing a painter’s cap.

I copied the boy’s file (again) for the security people and the man was sighted in a few days when he scrambled out from a nearby doorway where he was lurking, and ran and put the painter’s cap on his son’s head. The police and our security guards devised a plan. They wore plain clothes and waited for him to come. I saw him across the yard and told the guards. They told me not to approach him. He left, and the police pursued him for a few blocks where he ducked into a building. He was not seen at the school again.

Wednesday, September 16

The mother who wants her child moved so she can have a black teacher, came again to plead her case. She said that her other daughter, who’s now in the High School, and who also went to the Elementary School, has no black teachers in the High School, and that role models are very important for black children. I agree.

But I explained to her that moving one child is difficult, because then another child has to be moved, or one teacher will have more students than her grade-level counterpart, that the assignments for teachers had been made last spring and the teachers had been planning for their students all summer.

I spoke to Susan Partridge about the situation. She is black and might have some insight as to what to do. Do we want to break the rules for this black family? I’ve spoken to the teachers involved, so we’ll see.

♦

The After-School Program is in jeopardy again. The salaries for After-School teachers are being lowered again, and the teachers have indicated to me in very strong terms that it’s not worth their time to teach there. If we don’t have an after- school program on site, the parents, the kids, and, I believe, the whole school will suffer.  The core of the program has been our own teachers teaching hobby classes such as cooking, newspaper, and music. After suggesting that we hire outside teachers, we were told that the teachers also have an issue with strangers teaching in their classrooms after school. They don’t like people messing with their spaces.

♦

Our chess coach told me he hasn’t been paid the $3,000.00 he was to be paid for his work last spring. That was to come out of a budget Susan controls. I’ll check on that and mention it to her, so she will remember to pay him. I will check with the Bursar first, so I don’t have to bother her if the funds are indeed coming out soon.

♦

The ninth-grade boy’s parents came back with a court order and a battle ensued. He left with them under much duress.

Thursday, September 17

One of our parents who was employed by another of our parents, who got the job when I referred her, has been forging checks.

I helped this parent (let’s call her Martha) get a job as a secretary for a parent who’s an architect (let’s call her Farah) and the architect, in exile from Iran because she is Baha’i, came back from a Baha’i Institute in Europe and found that she had no financial records/account books in her office. Martha had left a note for Farah telling her that she was working on them at home. Farah looked at some recently returned checks and found that her name had been forged on a couple of them.

Farah doesn’t have idiomatic mastery of the English language and had been looking for a highly literate secretary. I knew Martha needed a job, because the school had helped her and her husband (let’s call him Johnny) out a few years ago when I found out the family was homeless and living in the Roberto Clemente Shelter, a huge gymnasium with beds in rows up in the Bronx.

I had called them in and asked how we could help them. We had called up parents who know something about the social welfare system, including one of the major officials who exposed the lead paint dangers for children, who wrote a book about the corruption in New York City. He had put me in touch with a prominent City Council member, who happened to have a daughter in the High School She began to investigate their case.

I had gone down to the Lower East Side with the family to the Human Resources Council office and we sat there all day waiting to see a social worker, so I could testify that the child would be emotionally damaged if he stayed in the shelter any longer. When we finally saw the social worker, he said, “It’s not often that the doctor comes with the family.”  I didn’t disabuse him of the belief that I was an M.D. instead of just a Ph.D.  The day was an education in what poor people, homeless people, troubled people in the public assistance system have to go through.

One of the people who waited with us was a woman with a teen-aged son who had to wait for two hours for tokens for the subway, so they could go to the Bronx homeless shelter they were assigned to.  They were from Brooklyn. The parent-Councilwoman was in meetings at the City Council but kept leaving messages for the head of the Human Resources Council.

Finally, at the end of the day, we got news that there would be room in the Hotel Martinique soon. The Martinique is a hotel for homeless people. At least they’d have a room and not have to be out in the open on their three beds in the middle of a gymnasium.

The President of Hunter College, Donna Shalala, had found the father a job at Hunter College. The Daily News had published a human-interest story about them because it was near Thanksgiving and the father was with the family, a rarity with the homeless, it seems.

The New York Times had sent photographer Dith Pran, whose story was told in the movie The Killing Fields (1984)[1] to wait for the father to pick up the child from the after-school program. I had waited with him for two hours until 6 p.m., the last minute for parents to pick up their children. I had a chance to talk at length with this remarkable man. He has brought his whole family to the United States, and now owned a home in Brooklyn.

The Times didn’t do an article because the Daily News did it. The family moved out of the shelter and into the Martinique Hotel. I had talked with them on the phone on Thanksgiving Day, and they said they had just watched the Macy’s Parade from the window of their room.

The Hotel Martinique is a pit, and we began trying to find them housing. The availability of city-owned and renovated apartments for homeless people is almost nil. The family searched for weeks among the available apartments.

After looking at one place where they were sent, Martha, who is Caucasian, had said she didn’t feel comfortable, or safe, up in Harlem, on a bombed-out block, four blocks to the nearest subway. I had offered them my place in Brooklyn over the Christmas holidays, and they moved in for a couple of weeks.

After Christmas, they had located an apartment in East Harlem. This was through an ad in the paper and not through the city. I had used my discretionary fund, the Principal’s Fund, to help them with the deposit and surety and two months’ rent–$1600.00 donated by their fellow parents at the Elementary School.

Susan Partridge was very supportive also and rode up there to see the apartment with them, paying with cash out of her personal account because the landlord wanted only cash. She was later reimbursed when the check came out of the Principal’s Fund. We all worked together on this that year.

I had told them to keep their jobs and not to lose the apartment. However, soon Johnny lost his job at Hunter College and when I saw him off and on over the next couple of years, he had other possibilities and had entered various training programs. Martha took the job with Farah and stayed there; it seemed she was the strong one, the one able to hold a job.

And now it is two years later, and she is probably a forger.

Today, two years later, I was standing out on the corner talking to Farah when Johnny saw us from a block away. He shooed his child to go in by himself and turned and left. Farah ran down the block after him, asking him to stop. Johnny stopped and leaned against a car and they talked. Farah said she asked him where Martha was. He said he didn’t know, but that he was going to see Martha later on in the day, as she was living with a friend. He said he would tell Martha to call Farah. Farah said, “He lies with such charm. I’ll not hear from Martha.” I told Farah to call the police.

We had a long meeting–the head of the After-School center where Johnny, Jr. spends his days from 2:30 to 6 p.m., Susan Partridge, the counselor, the child’s teacher, and I.

What is our responsibility in a case like this? Our responsibility is to report suspected child neglect and child abuse. Has a child been neglected and abused?

Johnny, Jr. comes to school clean and seems well-rested. He is sometimes hungry, but he has a charge account for free breakfast. His parents love him dearly; that is obvious to all. Is being the child of an alleged felon an instance of child neglect?

We suspect drug addiction is a reason for the thefts and evictions and firings. Is being the child of a drug addict a reason for neglect and abuse? We’ve helped them to pay their rent, to find an apartment, to find jobs, to get out of the welfare system. They continue to mess up.

Johnny, Jr.’s teacher thinks it’s Crack. Johnny, Jr.  told her a story about an empty vial of Crack under the kitchen stove, about the cat finding it and playing with it, and his mother saying to him that it had probably been left by the people who used to live there before, that he should put it back under the stove.

I called a friend of the school, a psychiatrist at the Jewish Child Care Association, and he said we should let the authorities know we’re concerned for the child. The consensus of the group at this meeting was that we should force the parents–escort them–to an agency, for mandatory family counseling and a battery of educational and psychological tests, so we can deal better with Johnny, Jr.’s school-related problems.

I don’t mind that we do that, but I don’t think that counseling will be very helpful after all this. Time is short. (One of the most common panaceas in contemporary society, especially in New York City, is to tell people to get counseling. In most conversations between two people in New York, there is an invisible person–“What does your analyst/counselor say?”)

Time is important here.  Martha seems to have disappeared. Johnny looks to be in bad shape. Johnny, Jr. is coming to school clean and rested. If we can waylay Martha and Johnny, who daily pick Johnny, Jr. up at a corner a block from the school, what will we do? What should we do? In the meantime, who will pay the rent? Who will buy the food? Johnny, Jr. is not doing well in school, but who would, given this? Susan Partridge and I are going to meet with the psychiatrist for advice.

Meanwhile, the other victim, Farah, has no financial records and doesn’t know how much money her company has. I told her to request the bank statement immediately. I told her I doubt that Martha has stolen all her money, because the two of them had become such good friends. Farah had offered Martha her own apartment also, because Martha and Johnny were having marital difficulties and Johnny, Jr. had been sent to Montana to visit his godparents.

And still we, the school, equivocate. We delay. We move with utter slowness.

My instinct is to get the child away from them until they straighten themselves out. But who will keep him? The foster care system is a mess. Should one of us–me? –take him? Susan says no, don’t even think of it. She says I have too tender a heart. She says she “got” Johnny the second time he borrowed twenty dollars from her and didn’t pay it back. I said he’s never asked me for money. She said he probably would be too ashamed. So we’re in limbo here.

♦

On another, more personal note, I continue to try to write both scholarly and literary work. I went to the Hunter College Library to search down the book I read about that was about the juvenilia of literary figures for a study of writing prodigy I am doing with my little principal’s writing group for a paper I am presenting at the state gifted conference in New Jersey next month and at the National Association for Gifted Children meeting in New Orleans next fall.[2]

I reeled and reeled that microfiche machine, squinting through my bifocals, getting a sore neck, and I couldn’t locate it. Perhaps I’m mistaken and there is no such book.  I am also working on a personal essay about my mother’s and my search for her grandmother in Finland last summer, called “The Search for Anna Karna.”

Friday, September 18

Today, Madame Doi from Japan, who is the Opposition Party leader, is coming to visit the school at 8 a.m. with an entourage of reporters and politicians.  One of our first graders invited her when she was in Japan with her parents, who are active with the Asian American Society. This student told Madame Doi that they would be studying Japan in first grade, as her teacher had just done a Fulbright in Japan. She invited Madame Doi to visit.

Madame Doi saw the President of Hunter College, Donna Shalala, at a dinner and she asked Shalala whether the invitation was formal, and Shalala said, “Of course.” So we’ve been meeting with Shalala’s people and planning the event. We will meet Madame Doi on the corner and escort her in, where she will conduct a press conference with the Hunter College High School newspaper staff. Then we will go to the classroom and she will talk with the kids.

♦

In the evening I went to a literary reading at the Endicott Bookstore with Lucia Nevai and Nahid Rachlin. Lucia recently won the Iowa Short Fiction Award.  I feel a little maternal about this because I was the one who told her to submit to contests, citing my own winning the Carpenter Press First Novel contest in 1984, and receiving publication of my novel, The Three-Week Trance Diet, as a prize[4]. She did, and she won! I met Lucia when she was a writer working in in the school through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

I told Lucia and Nahid about my intention to take this journey with a journal, and Lucia said not to forget to include the story of the first-grade boy whose mother called the school last year, frantic, when he didn’t get off the bus at his bus stop. The bus driver called from the end of the line in Battery Park City to say the child was all right. It turns out that the child was closing his eyes in order not to look at the eclipse of the sun that was happening at 3 p.m. just as they were going past his stop. And so he missed it.  Teachers had discussed the eclipse and told the students not to look at the sun. Headline: Gifted Child Takes Science Warning Seriously, Misses Stop.

♦

Martha called the school and left a message for Johnny, Jr.’s teacher to lend him $1.50 for lunch, and she would pay her back. Johnny, Jr. said that she had brought him to school, but we didn’t see her.  Where was she calling from?

♦

One of our parents, who’s got a Ph.D. in sociology, with work on intrinsic motivation, came in to my office to ask whether I’d be interested in having the school do a cable television show. I referred her to Susan Partridge.

Saturday, September 19

Madame Doi’s visit was pleasant, very ceremonial. The kids asked such penetrating questions I’m sure she was taken aback. The Hunter College High School journalists asked about the Japanese-American trade deficit and its effect on employment in the United States. One of the girls in the first grade asked about how Madame Doi got to be so high up, with Japanese society being so hard for women to rise to be bosses. Madame Doi missed a beat, and then asked the girl, “Isn’t being a mother an important job?” The girl (age 6) said, “That’s not what I was asking.”  We exchanged flowers and gifts. I got some Japanese cologne in a beautiful smoky bottle.

These kids give me such pleasure. The depth of their knowledge is always shocking to visitors, who expect them to be like other children, and to not have the knowledge they often show. I chortled when the High School kids asked their questions, and when our first-grader felt she was talked down-to.

Later in the day I went into the science room, giving a tour to a visitor from McGill University in Montreal, and the second grade was in there. The science teacher was doing a demonstration on Base and Acid. Every time he got going with the lesson, as soon as he mentioned the chemical he was going to be using with ammonia and hydrochloric acid, one of the boys (age 7) said, “Oh, I know. B.B.C. It will show which produces Base, and which produces Acid, and the solutions will change colors!”

The science teacher praised him for his insight. Other teachers would feel frustrated and would resent the bright child who knows the answer, destroying the suspense of the lesson and the miraculous change of color.

The teacher of gifted children must always be prepared to have the trajectory of their lessons “jumped” by the knowledge of the kids and must take such precocity in stride.

Humility is a necessary quality for the teacher of the gifted.

Major behavior problems are rare at our school. Talking back, talking out, talking too much are the types of behavior problems we have. 

♦

We have had some incidents at the lower end of our Second Avenue bus run, where some of our children were bullied and hit by children from P.S. 40, who get on the bus there. These are children from the homeless hotels, who have been brutalized themselves, and who, when they see vulnerability in other children, exploit it, as they have been exploited.

Our children have reported hair pulling, punching, socking. The bus driver told me he couldn’t do anything, that he needs a matron on the bus to handle behavior. He has enough trouble driving in traffic. The bus company dispatcher said he couldn’t do anything either, and that the Board of Education wouldn’t put matrons on the bus; that matrons are only for handicapped children. The district superintendent’s office said they couldn’t do anything. I left a message for the principal of P.S. 40 and she called back and said she has suspended the 9-year-old girl who had done the punching, from the bus for a week, but since the girl had only been in school one day this first week, what good did it do?

I said that I was going to ask the bus company to deliver our kids first, and then come back to pick up her kids. She said that might solve our problem, but the problem was city-wide and there was a great need for matrons on buses. The Chancellor’s Office of the NYC Board of Education had not put a matron’s clause in the contract, and that was where the problem was. The District Superintendent’s office couldn’t even solve it. 

I called a parent in our school, who is the State Assemblyman for the East Side. He had been on the corner delivering his child to school when the kids told me about the bus brutality problem. Telling him that the problem was city-wide, on many buses, led him to be more interested, and he said he’d put his education person on it. He said he would call the Superintendent of District 2, if that would help. I told him it’s a damn shame that adults can’t stop brutality of children by other children because of the lack of a clause in a union contract. This “I can’t do anything about it” attitude gets me mad. But I find myself throwing up my hands, also, and using that as an excuse not to do anything. I must watch that.

♦

Susan Partridge and I did not get to go to the psychiatrist’s office about Johnny, but I talked to the doctor on the phone, and he said Monday would be all right. In the meantime, Johnny, Jr. has been coming to school. Where is his mother? What are they living on? Keeping Johnny, Jr. in the school seems to be very important to them and may be the only hook in getting them help. Do we help and help and help again? Of course. If they’ll take the help.

♦

I put out a memo that the special teachers will take over the regular classroom teachers’ classes during the two days of math inservice at the end of the month. There was some grumbling. For example, the counselor and I have gone around and around about my assigning her lunch duty. She says that she works with students during lunch time and that’s one of the only times she can see them. I want her to take a weekly lunch duty because I think seeing the kids at play and in the lunch room is important.

Lunch duty is also a good time to talk to the teachers, as you all stand up and wolf down sandwiches while watching the kids. Also, putting on an orange day-glo parka and coming out to do this duty with the teachers is good, comradely behavior. Good public relations. The counselor has concerns about seeing the kids during lunch hour, so I didn’t insist, but I told her to pick up a parka and do it voluntarily once in a while when she doesn’t have kids she’s talking to. She said she would.

Now, when I sent the memo about taking over classes, the counselor was reluctant to take a class, because she is putting together the tests for the fall testing. She said the secretaries would have to put the tests together, so she could take a class or two. I guess I’ll release her from some of the duty during the math thing, though I told the specials in my memo, that this would be a time to do things with the kids in their own classrooms, lessons and activities that they don’t have a chance to do normally. I told the counselor to try some group counseling activities with them, and she seemed to like the idea.

♦

We still haven’t come up with an answer re. moving the black child to be with a black teacher. Susan hesitates to do it also, although she realizes that we are subjecting ourselves to accusations of racism.

♦

Some kids missed their bus, so I sat with them in the mini-gym and watched them play tag while they waited for their parents to come and pick them up. I had forgotten the rule that you can “freeze” someone in tag. While watching them, I had a long talk with a fourth-grade boy about his birthday tomorrow. He is going to a driving range with his dad. He’s a golf nut, just like his dad. I said it is probably pretty hard to find a driving range in Manhattan. The range he likes best is in Albany, but he thought they were going to go to Brooklyn.  He was surprised to learn that I live in Brooklyn.

Several of our kids who are now in the High School were in the mini-gym as well: One of our alums, who is now in the ninth grade, told me about how, when watching the Constitution celebration on TV, with all the IBM commercials, he got a hint of what fractal geometry is, so he went to the library and began to study up on it. He said his geometry class is very boring, and even though he took Computer Programming 2 last summer at the Talent Search program through Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth at Franklin and Marshall College, he is not permitted to take any extra or more challenging math in the High School.

He spends his math periods silently working on fractal geometry and he needs questions answered, but his class even in this school for gifted children is doing “two points on a line, two points on a line.”

He did ask his teacher a question at the end of the period and the teacher spent five minutes with him.

The teacher said his question would take a week of explanation in a senior math class and was surprised that this boy could grasp geometry so quickly. The boy said he wishes the math teacher he had at the Elementary School could be his High School math teacher.  We have substituted Problem Solving for Advanced Math, as the former math, now problem-solving teacher had two new books out and more on the way, and since this is supposed to be a research school, I thought he should continue his research on problem-solving and not teach straight math.

I then asked the sixth-grade math specialist to go back to the classroom as a fifth-sixth grade math teacher. It was a tough call, and there are still some feelings of rancor.

Another kid came by and chatted. He is a brilliant violinist, who began his career as a violinist when our music teacher started him when she had an after-school class downstairs before she was hired as the music teacher. I asked him to invite me to a recital. It’ll be a thrill to hear him play.

A parent who is a journalist was outside when Madame Doi visited, and I got a chance to tell her how I liked her recent article in the Daily News. I also saw a parent who is a TV producer, who had recently produced a show on ABC about the Pope’s visit to Miami last week. I feel proud when I see our parents’ work about town.

♦

My home answering machine had a call from Farah. She said that as of now, over $17,000 in checks has been forged by Martha. She says she knows it’s Martha because of the handwriting on the checks, though Johnny is also involved. Farah went down to the police station to talk to a detective. The detective, she said, is “dumb, with red pointed fingernails.” The detective told Farah to chalk it up to experience. Farah’s lawyer says it’s the bank’s problem, and the bank must return the money since they approved the checks. Banks go only thirty months back in their records of checks. Martha has been forging for over three years.

I said I feel terrible that I had recommended that Farah hire Martha. I should have known. Farah is stunned, angry, and feeling betrayed. She loved Martha, Martha was her friend, and I shouldn’t feel bad about recommending Martha. Lesson learned.

I too have learned a lesson. As the Director of the Day Care Center had advised me, don’t recommend anybody for employment.

Farah also told me that the police are not returning her calls. She filed the case on September 13, and in the meantime, she’s trying to write letters to the banks in her limited written English.

Farah has her son, who is in the sixth grade, helping her write the letters. A salary of $20,000 wasn’t enough for Martha. Martha was smart; she caught on to the architecture business right away. Farah thought that Martha was a little too hippie-like in dress, and she often came late, but mostly she worked out well. Farah now wonders whether Martha doesn’t have a past record, also. Maybe her first husband wasn’t burned to death after all. Yes. Burned to death.  That was a new one for me!

Farah thinks that if Martha knows the school knows about the case, she will leave the city, even though she’s in “the best school in the city.” Farah is weeping at odd times. She gets up in the middle of the night and thinks she’ll place an ad in the newspaper to tell people not to hire Martha. What’s amazing is that the system doesn’t think that stealing $17,000 is a serious-enough crime. That the police told Farah that she’s gotten a good lesson. That the bank is liable, so nobody has to care.

How “clever” Martha was, Farah says. “And to think I felt so bad when I saw her baggage stored in the office that I hadn’t been more insistent in offering her my apartment to stay in when we went abroad.” (Farah’s apartment is stunning. I went there to a cocktail party once and met many handsome and beautiful Iranian–they prefer “Persian”–immigrants, all professionals, speaking about persecution and hoping for the return of religious freedom in Iran.)

Wednesday, September 23

Last night was Open School night for the parents. The auditorium was filled with our supportive parents. I always tell them that their interest and involvement with their children is the main reason that their children are such achievers. I showed my annual slide show and this time, I spoke to them as a professor, giving a brief presentation on giftedness, a summary of the workshops I gave when I went overseas last year to consult for the U.S. State Department for six weeks in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, and Greece.

Then I put on the tape of last spring’s graduation, with the kids singing their reprise of Fiddler on the Roof, last year’s musical for the fifth and sixth grades, while I silently flipped slides of the 1986-87 school year, with shots of kids, teachers, parents, smiling, learning, socializing; shots of bulletin boards and field day; shots of the trip to the environmental education camp and the New York City Public Library, where Mayor Koch read the kids a story. I tried to have each child portrayed in at least one photo–all 400.

I ended with a few shots of my trip, with me in front of the Taj Mahal, the Sphinx, on a camel in Karachi, walking in the Himalayas. People seemed to like seeing my academic side. One of the dads told me that he had been afraid I was going to read another poem and was glad to see that I could mix it up. Last year I read a poem called “I Am a New Yorker Now.” I laughed and told him I can do other things equally well.

Then the new president of the Parents Association spoke, and the fund-raising chairman spoke, contrasting the costs of going to Hunter with the costs of Dalton, Trinity, and other private schools, at tuitions of $9,000 and above. She said that parents should be willing to donate, or do fund raising; that Stuyvesant, which is a public high school, raised $350,000 a couple of years ago.

We’ll see whether her talk does any good. When I came to the school, I was reluctant to ask for any donations at all, having been a parent and educator in public schools for 18 years. Now, I’m not reluctant–if people are willing and can afford it–even if we are public, in the sense of tuition-free. The school does pretty well as it is.

The Principal’s Discretionary Fund supplements the Other Than Personnel Services (OTPS) allocation for books and supplies, etc., and we also get an allocation from the New York State Textbook Fund. When I hear about the Board of Education schools in the city routinely running out of paper and pencils, and using crummy old textbooks, I wonder how the money is allocated, since we residents pay the highest taxes in the country here in New York City, and our kids get such minimal supplies that the teachers often buy their own.

In Michigan, which has high rates of school taxes, and in Ohio and in South Dakota, which are on the low end as far as taxes, there were more supplies and books than the New York City Board of Education seems to be able to supply.  Corruption rules, I suspect.

♦

On Monday night, we had the New Parents’ Night at the Roosevelt House on 65th Street. The Roosevelt House is Hunter College’s party and conference facility. It is Sara Delano Roosevelt’s old home, donated to the College. It is very lovely, Victorian, filled with antiques. I always imagined what it would be like to have lived there–as I am sure everyone else who enters there does, also.

About 35 new parents showed up to have wine and cheese. We admit about 50 new preschoolers and kindergartners each year, replacing the 50 sixth graders who graduated and went on to Hunter College High School (up the stairs on the second floor). I gave them a little talk about getting involved in their children’s education.

One of the new parents works in the District Attorney’s office as an Assistant DA, and I mentioned the Farah situation to him. He said to have her call him. Afterwards, the former presidents of the Parents’ Association took me out for an Italian dinner at a restaurant called Il Vagabond, where there is a bocce court right inside the restaurant. On a Monday night there was a 45-minute wait. They have no menus. The waiter tells you what’s on tonight. We had a good talk. These parents are now on the way to being my friends.

♦

Yesterday, a newly retired teacher came to the school to visit; we went out to lunch. He’s enjoying his freedom after over 20 years at the school.

♦

Susan Partridge and I went to the Jewish Child Care Association to consult with the psychiatrist about Johnny, Jr. His recommendation was to get him in for educational and psychological testing as soon as possible; then, if the testing shows that the child is emotionally affected, we have some ammunition.

Our hands are tied on the criminal charges pending for Martha. So I wrote a strong letter, sending it home with Johnny, Jr., saying it is “imperative” that they take him down for testing at the Jewish Child Care Association, that there is a sliding scale for paying for the testing. We can’t test the child without their permission, and so I hope they give it.

♦

Even though I feel I’m effective as a principal, since we found out in July that the union considers us to be eligible for tenure, I’m afraid that the Dean of Education at Hunter College doesn’t want principals to have tenure. He’s a former urban superintendent from Detroit, and he is used to the usual system in schools–that principals serve at the pleasure of the school board.

It’s hard to believe that something will happen, since all my annual evaluations have been sterling. And I don’t even believe in tenure; I argued against it in my Ph.D. orals. I said it makes people lazy, and that Civil Rights laws now protect the idea of academic freedom, by which the notion of tenure was made the prevailing practice in academe. I’m willing to work on a year-to-year contract and to let my effectiveness be the judge.

Saturday, September 24

Today is a beautiful 65-degree day.  Rosh Hashanah has given us two days off next week and I’ve four blessed days stretching in front of me. I will work on the Finland essay and on the writing prodigy paper.

♦

As soon as I got to the school yesterday, the day after the Open School Night, I received compliments from the staff about my speech; one teacher said, “If they didn’t know what we were about after that, then we might as well hang up.” Some teachers thought they had to stay too late and that the parents hung around too long after the meetings in the students’ classrooms.

I love walking the halls during these meetings after the big meeting, seeing parents crouched behind child chairs and child tables in the classrooms, listening to the teachers discuss their curricula. I walked around at 9:30, saying “Time’s Up,” and the parents left soon thereafter, so I don’t know why the teachers are complaining.

I think, “Come on! It’s your duty to come to Open House. It only happens once a year.”

♦

The new bus driver for the Soho run arrived at 7:55 with 2 kids on the bus. He was early, and we didn’t have anyone to receive the kids as we don’t have supervision until 8:00. He said he started at 7 a.m. and was amenable to starting later. I called Frank, his dispatcher, who was angry at our parents and was insisting that he’d get the kids there by 8 and that we had to be there to receive them. I said we were; that we receive them after 8, until 8:25.

He said that it’s 7 1/2 miles down there, he measured it, and therefore, he doesn’t have to pick those kids up. I said it’s on the route printout, so that’s irrelevant, isn’t it?

I said, “Let’s calm down, Frank, we’re all under pressure.” So he relaxed a little and said he’d work on it. He also said he’d think about changing the route so the kids could be dropped off before they dropped the kids off at P.S. 11 at LaGuardia and Third.

Then another parent on the run called, upset about it–had I called the dispatcher as I promised? I said yes, and told him what we’ve heard. He was upset, but then I said that the driver is amenable, so let’s just see how it goes, that we shouldn’t put the bus company’s backs up against the wall so that they will hate us and try to get back at us. He agreed. So we’ll see.

♦

We had a meeting of the Forum Committee in Associate Dean Susan Partridge’s office: The Vice-President of External Affairs, six parents appointed by last year’s Parents’ Association presidents, Susan, and I. We’re having a forum on early identification and early admissions on October 31.

This grew out of a parents’ group who were asking about the school’s admissions policies with several purposes in mind: (1) the sibling policy (admitting siblings of already-admitted students); (2) the increased number of “less qualified” students–meaning students with IQs in the 135 range, the lower end of the 99th percentile, and not in the 150 range. We don’t rank IQs anymore, we told them. (3) the computer sort for demographic features that picks the students who will enter the second round of testing.

Of course, we suspect the hidden agenda these parents have is that they fear that the school will serve more disadvantaged children, and the children of the affluent will not be getting a fair shake. They had many meetings in the spring and summer, and The Associate Dean was asked to produce the model for the demographic sorting. She didn’t mind, she said, but City University of New York (CUNY) lawyers told her she could not do so.

There was a lot of acrimony, and by the time I was invited to the meetings, in July, they were sort of ready for a new approach. Someone suggested that there be an Open Forum on admissions, and that the President of Hunter College would speak.

I said that the issue of discovering and identifying young gifted children was a national issue and a problem among states and localities.

This led to talk of having a forum where the issues would be addressed in a broader context, that the problem of identification was not just Hunter Campus School’s problem. The sibling issue is a serious one, for if siblings of admitted students get preference, there are fewer slots for admitting those who qualify by testing.

The Forum Committee got reluctant permission from the Dean and enthusiastic permission from Donna Shalala, the President of Hunter College, and now we are meeting and planning for the conference.

♦

Also at yesterday’s meeting was Elizabeth Stone, who is doing a New Yorker profile on the schools, and who has asked to be a fly on the wall in our meetings this year. This was the first meeting I’ve been to where she has been, and since I only met her briefly last spring, I had trouble figuring out who she was as I arrived late to the meeting after seeing the buses off. Everyone’s a little apprehensive about her presence, as if we have some big secrets or something.

Nothing is a secret at the Hunter College Campus Schools, so why not a New Yorker profile? We’ll probably learn a lot from her dispassionate outside observation. However, she does have a child of admissions age, who tested, she says, in the 99th percentile range, so her neutrality might be suspect, but she decided to enroll her child in a neighborhood private school and did not apply to Hunter. Hmmm.

Her curiosity about the Campus Schools was piqued when she heard the park-bench mothers talk about Hunter. She asked people in her building who are parents of children in our school, and she put in a proposal to the New Yorker, and she will be with us all year.

We’re always leery when someone approaches the school with some kind of scheme, because there are many people trying to get their children, grandchildren, and other friends and relatives into the school because the school is tuition-free and has a great reputation. Parents are desperate for good public education in New York City, and we are that.

The stories about the lengths to which people will go to be admitted to this school are legend.

One of the former directors was offered sexual favors by a Swedish model; a famous TV weatherman about town simulated a whole story about the school that was never aired, though they filmed and interviewed people for days–but then his granddaughter did not get in and all stopped; a Japanese tycoon offered much money as a donation and offered his private limousine to drive another former director to work in the mornings.

We’re glad Elizabeth Stone’s daughter is already in another school. One of the parents at the meeting spoke at length, more than usual, for Elizabeth Stone’s benefit, so I’m sure that the strategy of “fly on the wall” will be more a fly buzzing about the table and landing on the food while everyone tries to brush it away. Her presence at meetings and events will change them in the way film makers’ presence change documentaries.

Another parent came up with a surprising turnabout. He wanted to openly discuss sibling admissions rather than couch it in a discussion of family/community involvement. He wanted a whole hour at the forum on the issue. He’s under pressure from a whole group of parents which has been meeting separately. He has two children in the school and a new baby, so we can understand his agenda. Three children in this tuition-free school would save a heck of a lot of money.

I walked with one of the parents to look at the AV equipment and we talked to the new AV coordinator who has a sad tale; his wife was run over when they were in New Orleans on vacation; he is struggling to raise two little girls, ages 6 and 4, by himself. You can find all the dramas you can imagine in the stories of a school and its people.

On that subject, it turns out that the ninth grader whose mother arrived with the custody order a few weeks ago has had him institutionalized. Everyone still talks about her and how she cursed at everyone, how she shouted and lost her temper, and we sympathize with the boy and wish he could indeed remain in New York City and continue in our school. But the courts have decided.

♦

The black parent who wants her child moved called me at the end of the day, ending my day with controversy and its concomitant knots in my stomach. She says her daughter comes home every day wondering when she’s going to be changed to another class with a black teacher. I told the mother that in my daily observations of her daughter, I see a very happy girl whose best friend is white.

I asked her, isn’t that the purpose of an integrated school, to foster friendship among the races?

The said she had felt very uncomfortable herself on Open School Night, as a black parent, and she’s sure her child feels so also. I pointed out that she said that no black child should be placed in a class without other black children and now she wants to leave the other black child in that class.

My feeling is still that we shouldn’t move the child, especially on her own request, but we’re going to talk with people on Monday and I told her to talk with me on Monday afternoon. This interchange bummed me out so that I was depressed all the way home.

♦

It was a beautiful evening though, and though my instinct was to sit and brood, I put on my sweat suit and joggers and went for a walk along the Narrows and felt a whole lot better. I rented a couple of movies and watched one of them–Crimes of the Heart, with Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard, Michael Keaton, and Sissy Spacek. The most memorable scene was Lange dancing on Sam Shepard’s toes out by the lake in the moonlight. 

Monday, September 28

The four-day weekend is over now, and it’s time to go back to work. We have inservice meetings today on using math manipulatives. Special teachers are covering the teachers’ classes because I want the assistant teachers to receive the training also. The Associate Dean called me yesterday to say she’s hired an assistant; she doesn’t want me to be surprised.  I’m very surprised.

♦

Saturday, Rena Subotnik, a professor of gifted education at Hunter College, and I went to New Jersey to speak at the Gifted Child Society meeting. My session on verbally talented writers went very well, and I must start on the article right away, so it’ll be ready for the National Association for Gifted Children annual meeting in New Orleans

We met David Elkind, who wrote the book The Hurried Child, and we had a good chat with him over lunch. His premise is anti-precocity; however, I believe that precocious children aren’t “hurried,” they’re just faster by nature. We had lunch with James Alvino also. He’s the editor of The Gifted Child Monthly and has been a professional friend for years. He wrote an article on gifted boys that quotes me extensively. I’m flattered.

Tuesday, September 29

I’m still working on buses. The bus from Prince Street arrived at 7:50; it’s a violation to arrive more than a half hour before school starts; Amboy officials want to fudge the time because they don’t like coming all the way up here with that bus line. Going home, the bus driver refused to drop off the kids at 63rd and West End Avenue. We couldn’t reach the dispatcher.

Who thought one of the major duties I would have would be administering bus lines to drop off and pick up small children from all over Manhattan?

♦

The phone was ringing all day with admissions inquiries. We refer them to 860-XXXX, the number of the psychologist who gives the admissions test. I can say the number in my sleep.

Arranging the subs for the teachers took a while but the math inservice on manipulatives seems to have gone well. The kids were settled down, the special teachers kept them occupied and learning with special lessons. Today, the teachers of grades 3-6 will have inservice.

♦

The Dean of Education came to campus and we had a meeting with Susan, her new assistant, and Lester, the High School Principal. The Dean did most of the talking, as usual. When you get to be a Dean at a University, I guess you don’t have to listen much; at least that has been my experience with Dean and Provost. I wonder if Donna Shalala, the President of Hunter College, talks or listens?

♦

Everyone was at the Operations meeting. By the time I got there after the buses, Susan’s new assistant had been introduced. He seems very nice. The issues brought up were the same as always: keys, High School kids in the building before and after hours, moving stuff from the towers. The Associate Dean asked the head of maintenance about what is the proper role of maintenance: does maintenance have to paint? We have union concerns.  Who is supposed to do which job?

♦

I walked out of my office to go to lunch duty and both parents of the black child whom they want to move to a black teacher, were there. They said their child was afraid to meet me alone. Boy, does she have them going!

The Associate Dean has thought about it and she told me to move the girl to the other class, and so I made arrangements. The teacher will tell the kids that there was a mistake last spring in placing students. It’s a lie, but what can I say? The parents are very pleased. It was a no-win situation.

“Move her so we don’t get accused of racism,” Susan said. But now there is only one black student in the other class, and eight in the class she is joining. Hmm. I can’t help but wonder whether we’d do so for a white parent who wanted her child to be moved from a black teacher’s class to a white teacher’s class.

Thus went another day at Hunter College Elementary School where every issue is a big issue. Racism, discrimination against siblings, failed buses, suspect computer demographic sorts.

The red tape is omnipresent; Lester said that his new secretary had to wait three weeks to get properly set up to begin working; she had to hand deliver two $13.00 money orders to the main campus on Lexington and 68th Street–for some unknown reason. Getting a parking sticker for the street nearby is a nightmare also. We must also now see original birth certificates or green cards, so we don’t hire illegal immigrants.

♦

Our chess coach stopped in: he had met with Susan Partridge to explain why he wants to teach an After-School class for the chess team. He explained how he runs his co-curricular chess classes and why he gets a coaching fee for the national tournaments. He said she seemed to understand why he charges fees and was more warm to him than ever before. Chess club parents are a powerful subgroup in our school.

♦

I went to dinner with the chair of the Educational Foundations Department at Hunter College who was instrumental in getting a full-time professor/researcher in gifted education at Hunter–she was head of the committee who hired Rena Subotnik. We had a pleasant time and did not gossip at all, and that’s good, because it’s just dangerous to say anything about anybody around here. We talked about our own children and about life and I enjoyed it very much.

Wednesday, September 30

 Jacques Derrida, that famous French deconstructionist, spoke to the Hunter College High School students.

I was passing by the guard’s desk and saw a handsome, dapper, \ Continental-looking man looking confused and the guard also looked confused as no one had told the guard Derrida was coming. He had a leather shoulder bag and his hair was combed back in grayish wings. He was medium height, and thin. He wore corduroy pants and had a soft leather jacket.

I introduced myself and took him upstairs to Lester’s office.  The students chose Derrida as their fall speaker. He told me he was afraid; he’d never given a talk to high school students before. I told him that the students would be polite. Derrida used the time to parse one sentence. He spoke on the idea of nationalism in the works of Spinoza and presented a few words connected with the idea of nationalism: “revenge,” “election.”

Then he went on to discuss German Jews between the two World Wars and said that the founding of the nation of Israel was based on a Germanic idea of nationhood because the founders were Jewish intellectuals. He spoke softly and was difficult to understand, much less to follow.

The first few rows of the auditorium were filled with English major Ph.D. graduate students from the CUNY Graduate Center down on 42nd Street across from the New York City Public Library. They came so early the students didn’t have a chance to sit in front. Several of the students asked him questions and he seemed surprised at their erudition. Then when he left, six of them followed him out, gesturing and speaking, as worshipful as if he were a rock star.

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I left the Derrida lecture to go down to the play yard and blow the whistle so that the kids would line up.

Being The Principal. I was shocked that I seem to intimidating that a third grader doesn’t want to talk with me alone. I don’t view myself that way at all. I see myself as just Jane, but Lucia said that I do have a presence and a manner that other people see as powerful. So maybe that’s why I have no guy.

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I received more memos from Associate Dean Partridge: 1. Send in a staff report every day on who’s absent. 2. Name the substitutes we have hired to cover the in-service. The memos were short and curt. We seldom see her, which is a change from two years ago, when we met with the school head at the end of every day. Every boss has a different style.

The Personnel and Budget Committee met and voted unanimously to grant tenure to three teachers. All three are good people. I wonder whether anyone will meet go consider tenure for me? Do I have to put in a portfolio? This is my fifth year also, and no action has been taken. I wrote a letter to the President of Hunter College marked “personal,” and I asked her for a reference.

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One of our parents was featured in an article in the New York Times. He is a scientist/professor and was accused of not having two observers in an experiment. This is not how to get your name in the paper. I feel sorry for him and his wife; they are fine people. I will write them a little note.

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Last spring, I put in a proposal for the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) meeting in November in New Orleans and it was accepted. It is for a whole day on the Campus Schools, to be led by Associate Dean Partridge, who will be the moderator. We’re going to take two teachers from each school. We will focus on “products,” “critical and creative thinking,” and “focused research.”

New Orleans here we come! I feel it is part of my job to spread the word about our school among the community of educators who are focused on the needs of gifted and talented children.  I’m somewhat surprised that the Campus Schools have not sent representatives to the National Association for Gifted Children meetings before.

I have been attending since I got into the field, making my first presentation in Houston in 1978, a study I did on Ohio Poets in the Schools, and I’ve attended the conference every year since. I also am active in the New York Association for the Gifted and Talented, as I was in the Ohio and Michigan associations. One needs a professional organization to belong to and to find nurture.

I met one of my mentors, Dr. Mary Meeker, who’s on the Board of Directors of NAGC, at a regional conference in Columbus, Ohio, and that led to me becoming an advanced trainer for the Structure of Intellect Learning Abilities Test. I went to California to take the training, and she sent me to give workshops when she couldn’t do them. I’ve traveled the country giving workshops on this assessment system, all because I became active in my professional associations.  

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NOTES

[1]  Putnam, D. (Producer), Jaffe, J. (Director), & Robinson, B. (Writer). (1984). The Killing Fields. London, UK: Golfcrest Films International.

[2]  I got decent mileage out of this study. See Piirto, J. (1989a). Does Writing Prodigy Exist? Creativity Research Journal, 2, 134-35.

See Piirto, J. (1989b, May/June). Linguistic Prodigy: Does It Exist? Gifted Children Monthly, pp. 1-2.

See Piirto, J. (1992). The Existence of Writing Prodigy: Children with Extraordinary Writing Talent. In N. Colangelo, S. Assouline, & D. Ambroson (Eds.). Talent Development, I (pp. 387-389). Unionville, NY: Trillium.

See Piirto, J. (1992). Understanding those who create. Columbus, OH: Ohio Psychology Press. Chapter on writing prodigies. I published the writing prodigy material in a chapter in this book, and I often read the children’s material during public talks. One of the children in the study has won multiple Oscars, Tony’s and Emmys for his writing. Revised for 1998 edition and also included in Piirto, J. (2004) Understanding Creativity. Tempe, AZ: Great Potential Press.

[3] Published in the essay section of Piirto, J. (1995). A location in the Upper Peninsula. Minneapolis, MN: Sampo Publishers.

[4] Piirto, J. (1985). The three-week trance diet. Pomeroy, OH: Carpenter Press.