The Great Expectations School Read Online Free PDF

NYU thesis film after an ill-planned Alaska-bound road trip fell through at the last minute.
    Every summer since high school graduation, I had set a week aside with my buddies Greg and McKenzie to drive the byways of America. We had diamond-mined in Arkansas, danced on the Las Vegas Boulevard median at dawn, performed “Stand by Me” a capella in Virgin Records's Nashville office lobby, romped around Robot World in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, and tramped across every state (except North Dakota) on the mainland. The cancellation of Road Trip V meant everything was changing.
    Like many twenty-two-year-olds, I interpreted occurrences around me as cryptic signposts pointed toward my approaching moment of importance. All roads had led me to this strange adventure. I took the August 14, 2003, blackout as an omen, a silent message with a significant meaning that I couldn't grasp. Three months earlier, I was a college student directing and acting in my first 35mm film. Two months ago, a Los Angeles beach bum on a last-gasp vacation. Last month, a clueless young professional in the company of children named Phaedra and Cochise. Now I surveyed the dark city from my Lower East Side rooftop and sipped orange Vitamin Water, contentfor the moment to observe the crisis from above, with no idea of what was coming for me at eye level.
    New Teacher Week opened with a near-melee inside Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. The auditorium probably held about a thousand people, but it looked to me like more than double that number wanted in for the morning session of “Identification and Reporting of Child Abuse and Maltreatment.” People started pushing and one new teacher screamed, “I need to get into ‘Abuse’
now
!” I caught the afternoon session.
    The speaker, a bearded administrative veteran, launched into a speech about keeping our distance. “Our job, our responsibility as teachers, is to
refer.
As teachers, we
do not
treat the heartbreaking situations that can and will walk into our classrooms. We refer! There are trained professionals, contracted by the Department of Education, for counseling, physical therapy, and social work. We are not them. We are not their psychologists, social workers, nurses, parents, or friends. We are trained professionals in teaching and teaching only!”
    Opened in 1931, formidable, brick Public School 85: The Great Expectations School rests on a steep concrete slope in the square between Marion and Webster avenues. One long, broad corridor built up six stories from the bottom of the hill, its length spans three blocks from 184th to 187th streets. The school stands in the center of the Fordham neighborhood in New York's 16th congressional district, which the 2000 Census reported to have a median household income of $19,311, ranking 436th out of 436 districts in the fifty states. And P.S. 85’s district was deep in last place. Residents of the districts in 434th and 435th place respectively earn on average over $6,300 (32.6 percent more) and $2,600 (13.4 percent more) over the average 16th district resident. Also, those two districts are in West Virginia and Kentucky, where the cost of living is lower than in NewYork City. The P.S. 85 community lives in the very bottom of the economic barrel in America.
    The main entrance is on the first of four floors of classrooms, although the stairwell descends to a basement that houses special ed classes as well as the cafeteria. Below lies the subbasement that leads to the blacktop schoolyard, which serves primarily as the faculty parking lot. Exterior metal grates adorn all windows. The Great Expectations School looks like a prison.
    At an opening faculty assembly, each of the eleven new teachers (all Fellows) stood when introduced. I saw Allie Bowers and Elizabeth Camaraza, my two lunch buddies from summer school. Allie, just a year out of Bard College, was kindergarten-bound, and I thought she would be a perfect fit with the