Giving Blood

This is not what I signed up for! I realized this when I heard the screaming in my classroom for the first time. I was 20 years old and teaching at a junior high school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Most of the students were bigger than me and some looked as old as I did.

“He’s going to kill her!”

A large boy was chasing a girl around the room, somehow avoiding the desks with other seated students as he ran. Unbelievably he had a window pole in his hands. (A window pole is a large wooden implement with a brass hook at the end of it. It was used in those days to open the tall heavy glass windows we had in most classrooms.)

“Call the principal!” One of the students screamed.

I picked up the phone that was on the wall above my desk. “Hello, hello.” No reply. What should I do, I thought, as the two of them rounded my desk for the third time. I looked at the tall heavy wooden classroom door that was just behind me. “Open it,” I thought as they made the next round.

That’s just what I did. I opened the door wide as the wild boy passed me with the pole just after the girl passed me. I pushed him out of the door and closed it quickly. The girl was sitting on the floor next to me crying. ‘Great! Ms. Goodwin” the students screamed.

‘’What happened?” I asked the girl who was now sitting next to me at the desk.

“He grabbed me and tried to kiss me! I refused and he said he was going to kill me! When I started running away from him, he grabbed the pole and started chasing me.”

“Don’t worry about that now, I sent for the principal.”

A few minutes later the principal arrived at my door and told me he had the boy in this office. He said they were going to hold him there until the police arrived.

That wasn’t my first day of teaching, but it turned out to be one of the last ones at Gayner Junior High School.

It turned out I hadn’t really done my research about that neighborhood since I didn’t actually live there. Williamsburg, Brooklyn was a working class, ethnically diverse, economically strained neighborhood in the 1960’s. I knew that from working with the kids in my classroom and from the short walk I took from the subway station stop to the school.

One thing I knew, I had to find another job in a better public school in a new neighborhood.

I was lucky enough to inherit an apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan in the middle of the school year. I inquired if there were any jobs available in that neighborhood. It turned out that one of my friends from college was working as an assistant principal at a junior high school in the neighborhood. He hired me to teach English there in January. I quit my job in Williamsburg and began a new life as a teacher!

It was twenty years later and I was watching a karate class where my son was learning self-defense techniques.

“The main purpose of learning martial arts is to provide defense for yourself in a life-threatening situation. You should be able to recognize the dangers and react by using evasion and protection,” the teacher explained.

Now that I was teaching in a high school in the Bronx, I needed that advice.

My students lived in the neighborhood where I taught and had emigrated from all over the world. Some were Latin American, some African, some Asian, but they all had the same goal: to learn English well enough to get by in New York and maybe end up going to college so they could get a better job than their parents.

There were more female students than males and I worried how they protected themselves in school from more aggressive students, mainly boys and those who were stronger than them.

“We are going on a trip tomorrow to a museum in Manhattan. Are you all ready for it? We’ll be taking the subway from here to 86th Street.”

“ Should we bring any weapons with us?” one of the boys laughingly asked.

“Don’t be a jerk!” one of the girls responded.

It was the next day, around 12 noon. We were on a local train on the way to the museum. All of a sudden I heard loud cursing from some of the students.

“Get away from me.” one of the girls warned

There were two boys, who were not from our group, threatening the girls. “Come on, don’t be like that, we just want to kiss you!”

I recognized a dangerous situation from my son’s karate training, but I was the only adult accompanying the students on the trip. What could I do?

Suddenly I noticed we were near the next stop. The boys were standing with their backs leaning against the door. When we got to the next stop, the doors automatically opened briefly to discharge passengers.

I moved to where the boys were standing. As soon as the door opened, I lunged against them and pushed them out the door. The door closed before they could back in. I heard them cursing me as the train moved on.

“Great!” the students cheered. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“I’ll tell you when you get back to class tomorrow.”

+++++

The next day the questioning began before I could start class.

“You’re just an English teacher, and you’re a woman and small; weren’t you afraid.”

“ My son takes karate and I’ve been observing his class.”

“But you pushed them out the door!”

“The most important thing you learn in martial arts is how to protect yourself. You have to be aware of dangerous situations and be quick to act.”

“Do you feel you have to learn martial arts to teach in a high school?”

“Remember what Hamlet said :To be or not to be, that is the question.”

“Is that the way you feel about this high school?”

“Well, the first day I came here, ten years ago, there was a notice over the time clock when I checked in. It said "Blood Drive today, would you like to donate blood? Is that what I’m going to have to do to teach here?” I thought.

“Is that what you were thinking yesterday,” the girl who was threatened asked.

“I wasn’t thinking, I was just reacting.”

“Well I guess we learned something from reading Hamlet!”

I guess that’s when I learned that teaching high school English was like “giving blood.”