Being prepared, and being spontaneous

A.N. Pritzker School is named for the businessman, philanthropist and alum of what had been Wicker Park School. He also was the grandfather of Illinois’ incoming governor, J.B. Pritzker.

In CPS vernacular, the building is “a neighborhood magnet cluster school and regional gifted center,” meaning it’s a hybrid of a selective enrollment and neighborhood school. Students come from around the corner and around the city. One of White’s students travels from Hyde Park.

The school, which includes prekindergarten to eighth grade, is known for its gifted program and for integrating the arts into its curriculum. Its student body is 34 percent Hispanic, 29 percent white and 27 percent black — mirroring Chicago as a whole. Forty-one percent of the school’s students come from low-income families.

It’s situated in gentrifying Wicker Park. Two Chicago Housing Authority towers for subsidized senior housing stand directly across the street. Across the alley is an elaborately restored Victorian mansion on the market for $6.5 million.

Shortly after he graduated from U. of C., White walked into Pritzker School and found Principal Joenile Albert-Reese in her office.

He had been a long-term substitute teacher there a few years earlier and was highly regarded. Albert-Reese made him an informal offer on the spot to take the full-time position of a teacher who was leaving, for a salary of about $57,000. He is contending with “a mountain” of student loan debt.

White started clearing, cleaning and organizing Room 203 in late August.

After the first week of class, he said he learned the importance of preparation but also of being spontaneous when something wasn’t working. He said his biggest challenge was getting his school email activated, coordinating payroll and benefits paperwork and discerning the different personalities in his room.

A few days in, administrators swapped several students from his room to that of his sixth-grade teaching partner, to more evenly distribute some of the rowdier kids.

“This group is a very talkative group,” White said. “They like to be social, and so I’m trying to find ways to provide them opportunities to be collaborative and at the same time remain focused on the task.”

His goal, he said, was to improve his management of the classroom, “giving them a space to move through a process of learning.”

He was very tired. And he was getting pushback, particularly from some of the 11 black male students in his class, he said. “That’s natural for this age,” White said. “They’re testing their boundaries.” Some also may be expressing resentment for absent fathers, he said, although he believes that black males are stigmatized unfairly with that perception.

“But there is a degree of trauma there, and I will sometimes experience that head-on,” White said. “It depends on the student I’m getting.”

By the time he distributed report cards in October, the class was entering the room and working with remarkable calm and quiet. One day the students wrote about what’s most important in being a good friend. Later, they wrote about what it means to be strong.

To deal with one particularly rambunctious student, White moved the boy’s desk right up against his own, calling it his “I believe in you” desk. White also attended the boy’s Saturday football game.

“I feel like students, especially black and brown students, need to know you’re all-in for them,” White said, “’cause they can smell the B.S. A lot of them have been mishandled by adults for a long time, and they’ve developed a very cynical perspective on authority and life in general.”

His “induction coach,” which University of Chicago provides its urban teaching graduates for three years after they complete the program, visited and told him he needed to step up his pace and figure out ways to close out lessons.

She also said White “was doing really well”; that he had clear structure for students and was building healthy relationships with them, that his intuition for teaching was more like that of a veteran than a rookie.

“I call him a warm demander,” coach Margret Pilat-Chiyeni said later. She told him he was “demanding, but you’re not mean. You’re not disrespectful. You’re not trying to destroy students’ self-esteem. ‘It’s not going to be a free-for-all, but, hey, I still like you. I still love you. I see you. I respect you. We’re in it together.’ ”

The class was reading “Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key,” by Jack Gantos, a novel about one boy’s struggle to deal with hyperactivity, to understand figurative language. The students were writing about what they thought was the most important part of the story.

Now weeks into the new school year, White’s voice had deepened, grown hoarse. He was supposed to attend a meeting to design an education plan for a student, but his substitute didn’t show up and he missed the meeting.

He made his class wait to be released for being unruly a day earlier. “You took time from me yesterday,” he told them. “Today, I’m taking time from you.”

After they left, White called over the last remaining student, a boy who’d received a detention from White for disrupting class.

“You’re going to be 13 years old,” he told the student. “You can’t act this way anymore. I’m not going to let you act like this anymore.”

The boy protested mildly. White was firm.

“Whoever’s the loudest person in the room, that’s who I’m going to target,” White said. “That’s how it works.”

He waited a moment.

“You good?” White asked. “You need another minute?”

“I’m good,” the boy said. White held the boy’s gaze. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll be successful. You may go.”

In November, White received his formal evaluation from Assistant Principal Barbara AbdullahSmith, who gave him “proficient” and “distinguished” grades — essentially B’s and A’s — in all categories.

On his birthday that month, Chalkbeat, the nonprofit news outlet that covers schools, reported that the number of black teachers in Chicago Public Schools declined to 21 percent, while the number of students of color grew to 84 percent, including 37 percent African-American and 47 percent Hispanic.

Statewide, the proportion of students of color is now at 52 percent, up from 46 in 2008, according to the report.

Another intriguing nugget: The number of African-Americans statewide graduating with degrees in education was 1,724 in 2009. In 2016, that number was 802.

About the same time, Papageorge, the Johns Hopkins researcher, and co-author Seth Gershenson, of American University, reported in the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper that black students who had just one black teacher by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college and those who had two were 32 percent more likely.

Grueling parentteacher night

In mid-November, White managed parent-teacher conferences for his students and those of another sixth-grade teacher who’d taken an early maternity leave.

It was rigorous. He met with the parents of nearly 50 students in a little more than five hours.

He dealt with one who spoke of his breakup with his child’s mother; another who said a boy is distraught over the death of his grandfather. A dad wanted to make sure his daughter was being challenged and is participating. A mom asked White how he liked her son’s essay on slime.

He apologized to one boy’s parents for calling him a skinny toothpick. “I’m just saying I’m human and I’m tired,” White said. “You’re going to get on my nerves sometimes, but we adults can model what it’s like to take ownership of our mistakes.” Parents were pleased.

“I think he’s a pretty good teacher,” said Marie Smith, whose daughter Jah’Elle is in White’s homeroom.

Talia Clay, mother of Juliana, said she appreciated White’s organizational skills and the twopage introduction he distributed to parents in September.

Theresa McBeth, mother of student Malik Newsom, said the year was going well. “I was getting calls all the time last year,” she said. Now, “I’m not getting calls like I did.” She said White and Malik challenge each other and that White’s “personality and approach” have yielded respect from her son. “I think him being a male teacher makes all the difference,” McBeth said. “Malik can talk with Mr. White and does talk with Mr. White.”

Sharing his humanity

White had spoken before of grieving the loss of his father. When Thanksgiving drew close, he walked through the room and asked the students what they were looking forward to.

“I’m not really looking forward to Thanksgiving,” he told them, “because it’s going to be really hard without my father.”

The kids responded. One talked about mourning his grandfather; another about losing a favorite uncle.

“It was a good week to share,” White said later.

At his own family’s Thanksgiving dinners, the tradition was for his father to lead a discussion of what everyone had accomplished and what they were thankful for.

This year, White stepped into a modified version of that role.

“I didn’t say that much,” White recalled. “I just said the last time we were gathered together, it was my folks’ party and I just felt like this was a great opportunity to reflect on where we were.”

“Lots of tears” were shed and anger was expressed by the 15 or so relatives, White recalled.

“We’re all still grieving,” he added. “We’re all at different places in that grieving process.”

‘Teaching was that thing’

Four days before winter break, students Malik and Juliana said they still thought White was strict. And, they said he sometimes doesn’t acknowledge when they raise their hands.

They also said White is fun. Malik has taken to Social Fridays, when students can watch a movie or play cards or chess at the end of the day.

Juliana likes to hear White’s personal stories from his childhood. Two of her favorites involved him accidentally swallowing a ball bearing while tossing it in the air, and flipping his bicycle during an unfortunate launch from a makeshift ramp.

Jah’Elle called White “a good teacher because he’s supportive.” Malik said he thinks that White wants his students to do their best and that “he always helps us.” Juliana said, “Overall, I think he’s a pretty cool teacher.”

When White reflected on the first 16 weeks of his new career, he said he was mentally exhausted but that he discovered he could handle the unpredictability of the job better than he had expected. Teaching has to be “one of the most interrupted professions on the planet,” which he said probably was the most difficult element of the new job.

He learned that he is impatient with students but that they are very thoughtful and insightful. He said it was too early to say exactly how his presence would influence the male black students in his class; that the important objective is to be consistent and build strong relationships with all students.

He said the work “requires all of you,” will break your heart and make you feel like you’re not achieving what you set out to do. He said prospective teachers of all races need to understand those pitfalls and remind themselves, perhaps every day, why they are here, that it’s a noble profession, a calling, a mission.

He also said he’s found his lifetime career, finally. He may leave the classroom and move into administration, he said, but wants to stay in education.

“Even though I switched careers, I knew that I was in the wrong profession,” he said. “I knew that I was supposed to be doing something more meaningful, and teaching was that thing. And so I answered the call.”

Which might be what his father was trying to tell him all along.