Augie should’ve been a principal. Hell, he should be superintendent. He’s smart and tough and sensitive and organized and has tons of street smarts. But when he got his administrative certification, he’d apparently missed class the day they gave instruction in ass-kissing, so he’d never learned how.
A few weeks later, I had my first opportunity to observe Mr. DeNunzio in action, and what I saw impressed me. New teachers usually get the least-desirable schedules, and my situation was certainly no exception. In addition to five sections of 9th grade English, I was assigned to a study hall that met last period every day. Tuesdays and Thursdays weren’t bad, because I had only about fifteen students in the room those days. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, however, were another matter altogether. Those were the days when I picked up the other thirty-five kids, the ones who had their science labs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Putting fifty teenagers in the same room with a new teacher, even one as lovable as me, is a recipe for disaster. Making matters worse was the fact that about half the kids in the class were seniors. They’d known each other forever, while I was clearly the new kid on the block. The other half of the group was a mixture of 9th, 10th and 11th graders, which presented another problem. Each of the school’s four vice principals handled one grade by himself or herself, so in terms of administrative assistance, I was dealing with four different people, three of whom, I quickly learned, weren’t much help at all. Any referrals I sent to those folks came back with “Call the home” or Assign detention” scrawled on them, even when I indicated on the referral that those steps had already been taken, to no avail.
Augie was the only vice principal who actually helped, but he was in charge of the 9th graders, and they weren’t the ones causing most of the trouble. The other kids were the ones who came late all the time and then talked to each other all period. Nothing I tried worked. On one hand, I was bigger than most of the kids and stronger than all of them, but that didn’t matter. What was I going to do, put a half nelson on one of the one-hundred-pound junior girls who insisted on using the period to redo her makeup while she discussed her social life with the kid sitting next to her? Later in my career, with more experience, I learned how to better deal with such situations, but that first year, I was in need of help.
When I tried talking to the principal about the problem one day, he told me that student misbehavior was a “classroom management” problem and that I should “employ the knowledge gained” in the seminars I’d taken in college. I told him I had tried all the techniques my professors had taught me, with zero success. I also mentioned, with perhaps just a touch of sarcasm, that since the kids didn’t seem to fully grasp their roles in the whole scenario, maybe they should be the ones to attend the seminars on classroom management. That was when he suddenly remembered an important meeting and walked away from me.
About a month into the school year, after I’d gotten to know Augie better, I told him about my last period and what the principal had said. When I got to the part about classroom management, Augie smiled and shook his head. Then he said he might stop by later that day.
About ten minutes into last period, Augie walked into my room. It was a Wednesday, and there were forty-five students there, a few working quietly, a couple sleeping, and most of the rest talking to each other. They all got quiet when Mr. DeNunzio came in. He stood in front of the class for a minute before speaking. Then he said, “Good afternoon, everyone. I just stopped by to ask for your help with something. When I checked my master schedule a little while ago, it indicated that this is a study period, not a talk-to-your-friends period or a do-your-makeup period or a let’s-jerk-the-new-teacher-around period. I’m sure the problem here is that no one explained all that to you, so you naturally assumed that you could do anything you wanted to in here. Now you know better.”
Augie paused for a minute and then continued.
“Look, I can’t make you study and, truth be told, I can’t really make you be quiet, but I can make you disappear, and that’s what I’ll do, three days at a time for the rest of the year, if I have to.”
Then Augie turned and walked over to the door, where he stopped and said, “Oh, yeah, one more thing. As of this moment, no matter what grade you’re in, as far as this study hall is concerned, I’m your vice principal. If Mr. Barnes has to send you to me for any reason whatsoever, stop at your locker on the way to my office and pick up your coat.”
I’d be lying if I said that the class was wonderful after that, but there was a marked improvement. Most of the kids weren’t really bad. They just needed a reason to behave. They knew Mr. DeNunzio wasn’t fooling around, especially when he stopped by again the following Friday and scooped up seven people applying makeup or shouting out as he walked in. They were out of the building ten minutes later. Mostly, Augie gave the kids and me a chance to get to know each other.
I thought about all that as I pulled into the parking lot at Franklin. Despite the heavy
