What I think about while my city is thinking about firing teachers

The first time I heard the tenor Carlo Bergonzi was 1978. I was ten years old, and like now, thought I had the right to express a respected opinion about everything. Unlike now, when I know what a schmuck I am for thinking that (and how bad it is that this knowledge doesn't stop me), I had absolutely no idea how dumb I could really be.

In the honest part of me, which is in my silence and in my writing, I always knew that there's no reason at all to have any kind of judgemental opinion about a performance because any interpretation could be valid. Of course, I wasn't paying for the opera tickets that night. My mother was and she was furious and seeing death. Carlo Bergonzi was way past his prime and in the latter part of his career. Anyone could see and hear that, even people as new to opera as we were then. He had obviously been a great star because he got applause when he came on stage and because, no matter how forced he sounded, there was a steady stream of respectful applause. But, I knew that the train ride home was going to be murder. My mother was going to have absolutely nothing good to say, everything was going to be painted in bones and maggots and the number of hours it took her to earn the money for those tickets was going to be emblazoned on my forehead. Meanwhile, what did the two of us really know about the performance we were so condemning? We'd listened to a recording of the opera a couple of times and were in our first year of attending live performances.

In many respects, my mother was absolutely right. Carlo Bergonzi was not the best tenor in the world ever, and that The Metropolitan Opera was serving him up in a lead role for top dollar seemed shameful. Inasmuch as one believes that just being able to pay for the price of the ticket and cramming some listening in before the show made either of us an expert on what great or very good singing was, she was very right. If that were true and she was right then The Metropolitan Opera House and the Department of Education should let anyone with bus fare and a certificate from a three hour course decide how they do their business.

But, as I know now, she was absolutely wrong. And I knew it then, too. Without the pressure of my mother's sense of injustice to the American blue collar worker and her feeling that every attack was personal (and increasingly, that there was a team specifically assigned to torment her) --left to just breathe, I actually enjoyed hearing him. He still had a beautiful sound to his voice and he was artful. That he was a tremendously artful tenor is much clearer to me now and I have also heard recordings of him from 1960. But, really: who is to say that his performance was not world class and that it was not, worth far more than bringing out a younger, more robust but ordinary tenor. Listening to what I can remember of it now, and later recordings of his that I have also heard, there is a great deal of passion, art -- the latter of world class quality. And I can say that I heard Carlo Bergonzi live. The way I can say that I saw Lauren Bacall in "Waiting in the Wings." Yes, she missed lines and it was a boring play. She still had terrific charisma, a fabulous face and to see her and Rosemary Harris go at it was still wonderfully charming and sexy. I got the tickets to that one, so no, my mother didn't bleed iron. She scoured my skin in several repetitions of that half-Yiddish/half English "Ech..." which translates in my late grandmother's words into "I was not enthused." All I could think of was, "Why the F-- are you complaining? I got the tickets and you got to see, in at least Rosemary Harris, one of the best actresses to ever grace the stage and a pop culture icon in Lauren Bacall. And those women had incredible stage presences before they even opened their mouths."

Deep, deep down, my mother knows all this. In later performances at the Met, when we found ourselves without a choice but to see Bergonzi once again, my mother pointed out several moments of beauty. And, given the baritones of the period, we had already found ourselves indulging in the decent acting, half-baked imitation of Leonard Warren that was Sherrill Milnes. For those of you who don't know opera, think Robert Goulet. Or think Usher. He was handsome, he was a pretty decent actor with a lovely sounding voice and the brains to steal brilliant choices from the greater singers who came before him. To show just what I knew about opera then, I was a big fan of his. I still have umbilical chord ties to his recordings and keep a few arias of his on my Mp3 player. No, he's not magnificent as a button I have of him pronounces. He was smarter than he was good and he put together strong performances until 1981 when he became ill and probably should have retired. And yes, I was part of the respectful applause in the years that followed. Listening to Milnes had lead me to Leonard Warren -- think someone on the level of Domingo in baritones or Barbara Streisand or Celia Cruz or Sarah Vaughn, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Jay-Z or Nas. He was excellent enough to have taught me how to listen for more excellence. I had seen and heard all of Warren's phrasings before (because Milnes was, by his own admission in interviews, an excellent thief), so what might have been the initially jarring woody darkness of his voice, was easy for me to attend to, take in and enjoy beyond words. It was like having having seen the movie before reading the book. I could visualize and had a context for something otherwise difficult and alien to me which was better than anything I had ever seen.

I imagine that you heard the "bell" in that last sentence. You recognized the moment where the moral of the story is about to come in. It had the tone of your parents, which they stole from their parents or someone else's parents, or, in my case, a friend whose didactic skills and instincts are impeccable.

No one is impeccable. My friend is as close to the platonic form of the word as a human can be.

If I hadn't tried to imagine what it would be to be "impeccable" I wouldn't be able to recognize it in my friend. If I hadn't had so many friends and teachers who also aimed to be beyond reproach, I'd've never been able to see it in his every motion and to recognize how far above he is everyone else I've ever known.

So, this is what I think about as my city looks to fire teachers who have either been accused of everything from being late to being lecherous but have been convicted for nothing at all or who had the double misfortune, like I've had, of being at a school that is being closed and being 40 or over and making a salary that most principals find prohibitive -- they can get two young teachers for the price of me. And that given the angst that comes with not having enough money in your budget to hire all the teachers and guidance counselors you need, and the general feeling that you don't know what economy you're bringing your students into, I can almost see how my commanding the salary I do, which, by the way is much LESS than that of a close friend who sells phone services, seems daunting. Even if I am AS GOOD as Leonard Warren or Jay-Z, why is it necessary to have someone so good? Does a school necessarily need a fantastic teacher when it can have two serviceable ones? That's a real question, actually, and I'd also bet that thought is very much a part of the climate in which principals make their decisions. After all, they are coming to schools and finding their budgets continually slashed. The atmosphere is not one which encourages one to think about giving the best to your students. It's one where you think about being able to give, at all. In other words, if the Mayor and Governor and everyone involved in the Department of Education's budget doesn't want to fight hard enough to get public school kids in this city MORE THAN THE MINIMUM, what's a principal to do? In the principals' minds, anyway, even if they think about spending their pennies in my direction they'll pause thinking I'm more likely to be like Carlo Bergonzi in 1978 -- not in my prime, though very much a great artist. Or, I might be Sherrill Milnes -- a take-off of other great artists who was very durable, but then broke down.

First of all, anyone who has been in a NYC classroom knows that students do not supply the respectful applause of an opera audience. After 14 years, I had to be at least as good as a durable Sherrill Milnes. I had to be able to command students' attention and get decent test results. Or they would do worse than throw tomatoes at me. Plus, I have mostly good reviews, and most of my fellow colleagues who have lasted as long, have even better ones. Those who have some bad reviews also have excellent ones. Do you know how many sorely bad performances Luciano Pavarotti gave? Besides the times he was caught lip synching? I sat through, at least, five of them. Five out of thousands which were excellent, ten of which I heard. What is the balance of the careers of all of us ATR's -- Assigned Teacher Reserves? That's the important statistic? We have actual track records you can point to -- what are they? Do those teachers who have two U ratings have them in succession and are they both from the same principal -- and were there none from any other? And again, is it two U's against 13 S's. And are there letters of praise in the file?

We are in this position because we are teachers unlucky enough to be made full-time substitutes instantly when our schools closed or because their positions were cut, or because, perhaps, we had the misfortune of having a student accuse them of something they didn't do? Most, if not all of the teachers in the Rubber Rooms who are either NOT FOUND GUILTY or who were found to have done something worth punishing with something as small as a letter in their files, will return to work as ATR's. This is even true of individuals who have had their charges dismissed. It's just easier to pull the person out of their position rather than return him or her to a place where he or she was unwanted enough for someone to have told a lie about them or for them to have been a mild misunderstanding --say, a teacher thought he/she was doing something the principal agreed with and actually the principal NOW SAYS he/she did not.

So, the vast majority of ATR's are in that position through no fault of their own. I didn't say that ALL of them were. But, I'd take a bet that the percentage would be 80 or 90 percent, if only because so many are teachers whose schools just happened to close. The schools' closing does not indicate anything about their abilities. In the corporate world, if a project fails, you don't fire the individuals who carried it out -- or not just them. You fire the director or vice president who was in charge. Many principals have been fired for other reasons, but a great many of the principals of schools which are closing will go on to lead other schools. That doesn't trouble me because I know that you cannot place the blame for an entire school's failure on the back of any one person. I also know that many excellent performances in the arts and in schools have gone unappreciated. My school wasn't closed for poor results. We had especially poor attendance after we were moved to a dangerous neighborhood. Some years, we had poor attendance because the students who were coming to us had a history of poor attendance. They got better. That didn't count. When they graduated, we had to start again, sometimes with similarly bad attending groups. And they got better and it also didn't count.

In 1978, most of the audience applauded for Carlo Bergonzi. He gave a world class performance that showed artistry, knowledge of tradition and an ability to use his resources to their best use. It was far better than the early performances of the young, and later to be very interesting, Neil Shicoff. I learned a lot from it, and I always learn something when I listen to his recordings wherever they are in his career.

On that night, however, I sat enraged the way many people do now when they think about teachers making more money than they think they should, for whatever reason. I learned fairly quickly to think with my whole brain, not just the part of it that was responding to immediate anxieties, and to listen much more carefully. In my platonic ideal of a classroom, my students learn to listen, read and write as carefully as possible with all the knowledge which is required for them to take on the hardest and best literature in the deepest way.

Maybe that's not worth the price of admission to the vast majority in this city. Maybe they would rather my students met minimum competencies very well. Certainly, it is easier to count smaller accomplishments than larger ones.

So, now I know why so many of my students do poorly at math. They live in a city where a large percentage of people are counting in very small, digestible quantities.

I hope that most of them have better taste in music.