The Road Less Traveled

Class 608 explodes into the room with a whirlwind of mumbling, stumbling and wondering that only 12-year-olds can produce.

"I'm looking for scholars in this room!"

At Ms. Webb's announcement, her 28 students slow like a ceiling fan coming to a stop, still whooshing for a minute before it eases to a halt. She counts down from 15, at the end of which she sees nine scholars seated, silent and working on their "Do Now" assignment.

That's nine class points earned. The rest all make their way to a desk, good enough for a nod from Ms. Webb as she peers around Room D206 and turns on one of Gershwin's smoother tunes on a small stereo.

The jazz hasn't even made its way to many of those little ears before Class 608 is gawking at Ms. Webb as she pulls out a heavy stack of lined paper and rips off the shiny new wrapping. It's interrupted for a moment again when the principal's voice comes over the loud speaker next to the clock and congratulates two "good citizens" of Intermediate School 90, one who earned the distinction for returning lost money. By the time Ms. Webb has returned from out in the hallway checking on a nearby ruckus, there's a little too much mumbling in the classroom.

"608: Cease!" Ms. Webb commands. "How much talking should be taking place during your 'Do Now'?"

"Thank you, 608. Commence!"

Now the Gershwin can flow from where Ms. Webb is standing through this spacious room and out the window, down into the mid-December streets of Washington Heights, one of New York City's poorest communities. The jazz fades as you walk away from the dead end the school makes of 168th Street, pacing through the heart of an almost exclusively first- and second-generation Dominican neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan. It's faint as can be down Fort Washington Avenue, past the store called "El Basement Dominicano" and the car accident and the huddles of teenagers and all these damn cops.

Back up 168th, though, the chaos is more orchestrated at The Mirabal Sisters School (I.S. 90), a middle school with enrollment the size of the Duke freshman class stuffed into a big, red fort of a building about the size of Lilly Library. Somewhere in there is Ms. Webb's classroom, bright and filled with her 11:15 literacy class of Dominican sixth graders who track in the top rung of four reading levels for their age group. In other words, these are the smart ones.

But they still have no idea that Ms. Webb, shutting off the Gershwin now as she steps across the room in her blue button-down shirt and pinstriped slacks with clipboard in hand, is 22 years old. They have no idea that she graduated from Duke just over a year ago, and most of them don't even know that her first name is Francie. And they certainly have never heard of Teach For America, the program that brought this blithe, poised and sharp-as-an-arrow white girl uptown on the A train straight out of college instead of down to Wall Street on the No. 2. But enough about what they don't know; Ms. Webb didn't come up here to linger on that.

There's music in the air again as Jocelyn, a mumbler and certainly a wonderer, volunteers to perform her "Do Now," with today's assignment to write down the lyrics of your favorite holiday song. "Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg!" Jocelyn belts to a giggly 608. She is not allowed to continue until her class is respecting her, Ms. Webb tells Jocelyn. Same goes when a few classmates start shouting out in the middle of Arianna's performance of a song from the school's holiday play. Ms. Webb meets this interruption with another, "Cease!" because she holds her scholars to high standards--beyond grade-specific reading levels or district-mandated expectations.

"I want them to know how important their success is to me," says a calmer, balmier Francie as she neatens her desk and wipes the blackboard. "I've gotten a lot of comments lately from kids that I pick on them. 'Why are you always picking on me?'" she impersonates with a faux-whine. "Well it's gotten to a point where I even, if I need to, yell back at them. 'You need to be picked on. You bet I'm picking on you, because you're better than the way you're acting. You're better than that.' I don't want them ever to think that they can settle for less than their very best."

Back in class, Jeffrey is trying to answer Ms. Webb's question about who wrote A Christmas Carol, which 608 read yesterday. Small, especially in comparison with boys who have been held back a year or two or three, he mumbles his response but is drowned out by his classmates' banter, which loses the group a class point and puts them behind the dreaded Class 606--Ms. Webb's other class that sits at the third reading level.

For Francie Webb, the goofy bookworm from Lynchburg, Va., who is so literate she never even uses the words "uh" or "like" at 22, the fact that no one else can remember or cares enough to say "Charles Dickens" is initially shocking. But her next thought, a split-second later, is more practical: "What can we do to catch 'em up?" She sure as hell didn't take her $160,000 education at Duke to Washington Heights just because she felt sorry for any socio-economic futility.

"Of course there are effects based on factors in the home, factors in the school, factors in the neighborhood and environment," she says. "But it never occurs to me to look at my kids in terms of their socio-economic background, their cultural background--that's very important to them and that's very important to me. But it's not something I think about on a day-to-day basis. I just think, 'These are my kids. What do they need from me? What can I give them?'"

Well right now, Ms. Webb can give them a quiz. There were three zeroes on Vocabulary Quiz 9 earlier this morning in 606, and the students of 608 sure know they can do better than that.

This time last year, Francie graduated early from Duke--one of those smart ones. She had been one of those do-ers, the Duke kids who just can't stop helping. Her resumé already had highlights from Campus Council rep to Last Day of Classes co-chair and a couple of part-time jobs--at the downtown YMCA and at the Duke University Medical Center doing anti-smoking research. She fit the template for another graduate of super-competitive Duke, ready for the school to throw her into the gauntlet of job fairs in the Bryan Center, with med school/law school/corporate America somewhere beyond it.

But apparently that wasn't enough for the English major who gave up pre-med and was getting sick of being in the research lab and of the medical profession in general. "I didn't like the monotony of it," Francie says. "Keeping records and data collection just wasn't for me. It was the people part I really liked. Just encouraging people to quit smoking and seeing little tiny baby steps is really rewarding. But I realized I just really wanted to work with people, and I wanted a job that was a lot more challenging."

Right under her nose, then, was Little Miss Make You Jealous' third part-time job, as an on-campus recruiter her junior year for Teach For America. The 13-year-old movement targets the overachievers of American higher education not for their skills on the trading floor or on the LSATs but in their own classrooms, as rookie teachers filling increasingly large gaps in low-income areas across the country and inspiring students out of any socio-economic pratfalls. So, basically saving the world.

"We're taking students who have an initial instinct of making the world a better place and who are committed enough to make that happen," says Jerry Hauser, who taught for TFA after he graduated from Duke and, after getting a taste for law school and public interest issues on the non-profit level, returned to TFA as its national second in command. "What we've seen is that many of them quickly get outraged by these inequities they're seeing first-hand, and so they work incredibly hard throughout their time in the classroom. Just the process of seeing how much can be accomplished is really powerful."

That sounded plenty challenging for Francie, who decided to recruit herself on a whim, knowing that she wanted to get a change of scenery, just not necessarily that she wanted to become Ms. Webb. But when she found out that she was accepted through the highly competitive regional recruiting--the average GPA of the 2003 TFA "corps" was 3.5, and 92 percent of the pack held leadership positions in college--it was a no-brainer. Soon enough she landed herself in New York City, her fourth choice for placement and a town she'd been to only once when she was nine.

Last summer, she didn't end up seeing too many of her friends from school who opted for Wall Street and Columbia instead. She was too busy with the Training Institute, waking up at 5 a.m. every day, teaching and going to class, sitting through workshops and crashing by 10 p.m. But she doesn't really seem to have cared about the hours or the buddies with six figures in their back pockets already. "I do find myself very glad that I'm not in the corporate world," Francie says. "I'm excited about being in the city, but I just enjoy this job a lot better than I would working in any office.... I really think that teaching is the epitome of multi-tasking--all kinds of different jobs rolled into one."

She was nervous starting the year off cold, afraid she was too young and too raw to stand up at the front of the classroom as one of TFA's corps members, whom three-quarters of principals across America rate as more effective than other new teachers. For all the maturity she had to preach to her new students, Francie had some growing up to do herself. She wore her glasses every day to try to look a few years older and wiser; eventually, she would switch to her more comfortable contacts.

"I remember the first few days of school just thinking, 'This is just a joke. How did I get to be the teacher?' I'm just standing in front of them, and they're hanging onto my words," the new Ms. Webb now says of her students, then whispers, "I love that." Louder now, Ms. Webb expounds, "But also, it just felt like a role reversal, and at first I felt like an impostor. Then I realized so much of it is how you present yourself to them. And I feel much more comfortable in my role as a teacher now, and I'm proud to tell anybody I'm a teacher."

And an inspiring one at that, picking up skills from colleagues at I.S. 90 and occasionally using TFA's support services--though it's clear simply from the way she speeds through the halls after just four months that she barely needs them. She's comfortable in the Washington Heights batter's box now, adjusting her stance just a couple subway stops away from Yankee Stadium and constantly improving her approach. She works within the Board of Ed system, which provides a workable workshop formula and enough leeway to fit some Eminem lyrics into a lesson on personal narrative.

It's enough to counteract the imposing New York State Standards sign posted in the room and the "No Child Left Behind" act looming in Washington--not to mention budget cuts stripping away emergency money for AmeriCorps, a financier for TFA. The sign above the middle of her blackboard reads, "WELCOME CLASS OF 2010!" She seems to be the epitome of a program that has been looked upon as a bridge toward a better job or a better graduate school during an economic slump but has become a full-on superhero movement, one step at a time. "It's all kinds of little baby things with this hope that in the end they will find a success that they may never have dreamed of." Francie leans in, smiles and whispers, "Wouldn't that be cool?"

After school, when the corners of her mouth flip up, her voice lowers to a hush or impersonates someone, she can absolutely pass for 22. "I hated middle school! And when they asked what I was going to be, that was my last choice. Puberty? Boys? Girls? They're just stupid! They're immature!" But when she steps back into the once-dreaded classroom, Francie's reluctance has been displaced by Ms. Webb's undeniable self-assurance.

Deny" is the first word for the 608 scholars on Vocabulary Quiz 9, on which Ms. Webb claims she gave her students a break. Strange, then, that her class is in such deep thought, gunning for that 95 so they can get their name on the Wall of Genius and trying not to draw on their desks like the boy under the Wall just did--Ms. Webb promptly planted a spray bottle of Fantastik and a clean roll of paper towels in front of him. When they're finished with the lengthy quiz, the students gently take out their IRs (Independent Readers) and fail to notice the man in a cheap suit who has walked in to drop off a rainbow-colored beanbag chair.

Before they even know it, the kids in 608 have re-taken the lead in class points over 606, and Ms. Webb's 90-minute literacy class is winding down. Plus it's Friday, which means it's time for end-of-the-week shout-outs, where students get to show their respect for something another person in the class has done that week. One of the scholars gives a shout-out to Ms. Webb "because she's so helpful 'cuz she let us be in the play, and she's helpful with everything." This is the first time Ms. Webb has blushed all class, and she's blushing a lot. The next two shout-outs are to Ms. Webb too, for helping two scholars with their work. This is not supposed to be happening, she thinks. She is bright red. Yet it's confirmation that this is working, that the Gershwin will be able to flow whenever it wants, that she can leave the glasses behind now because of, well, what the quiet boy in the corner is about to say: "I'd like to give a shout-out to Ms. Webb for giving us an education."

An admonition by Ms. Webb later, a confirmation that she's beaten the new Duke investment banking crop to the whole changing the world thing: "This is the most challenging thing I've ever done," she urges. "Forget Reynolds Price's third-of-my-grade essay. This is the biggest challenge I've ever had in my life, and I love it. And I also want to teach them to love it."

When the shout-outs are through and the hallway outside is rumbling again, it takes 608 three times to line up correctly by their lockers on the left side of the room, the boys in one single-file line and the girls in another. They split for Ms. Webb, who struts her strut and peers her peer through the middle with a bowl of candy, a hot Friday commodity only available in exchange for Scholar Dollars--like Monopoly money, only with tiny strips of cardboard. Francie smiles as she tells each one to have a good weekend and gently takes back the strips from some of them, knowing that it's the little things that make them love it.

Francie's talking about all the support her principal and TFA have given her over the course of these past few months, even though she admits that though she could, she probably won't stay on as a teacher after her required two years are through. Maybe children's books or educational policy--

But out of nowhere comes the voice of Ivana, a girl from 606 who's been a trouble-maker ever since Ms. Webb took her and a friend ice skating in Central Park on a TFA-sponsored trip a few weeks ago. Today, Ms. Webb sent her to detention, and now she's back.

"You finished? Are you mad at me? Go home, sweetie. Monday morning, I'll see your homework. Okay? Do I need to call you on Sunday?"

"Nope."

"Bye, Ivana!"

And now Ms. Francie Webb, 22 going on 30 going on 22 again, can tell this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence, about when two roads diverged in a wood, and Francie took the one less traveled by.

"Ivana, she's my favorite," she whispers, "and my current biggest challenge."

And that has made all the difference.