Read Online Radical by Michelle Rhee - Free Book Online Page B

into the profiteers’ propaganda and ploy to try to take over the schools.
    I was a bit shocked. I had seen a fair amount of pushback from some of my colleagues at Harlem Park. But the level of animosity directed at me seemed over-the-top.
    I continued to talk about lesson plans and new tools for teaching.
    â€œWhore!” someone yelled from the audience.
    â€œOkay,” I thought—“that’s a first.” I finished my presentation and sat down. I was uncomfortable. The rudeness and flat-out verbal violence were shocking, but it didn’t seem endemic of the teachers union. I attributed it to rigid bureaucracy—to old-school people who were resistant to change.
    W HEN MY CLASS BEHAVED well for an entire week, I would often reward a group of students with a trip to another Baltimore neighborhood. Some of my students rarely ventured more than ten blocks from their homes, so this was always a treat. We would go to Chuck E. Cheese’s for lunch or spend a Saturday afternoon at National Harbor. Early in my third year, I got the bright idea to take the class on a real trip.
    â€œWho’s been on an airplane?” I asked the class.
    We were reading a book about the Wright brothers and early air travel at the time. Not one hand went up.
    â€œReally?” I asked. “No one in this class has been on an airplane? Okay! Who wants to go on an airplane?”
    There was a buzz in the room. “No way!” some said. “We could fall out of the sky!” “I’m too scared!” said others. “YEEEAAAAAAH!” screamed some of the boys.
    Eventually, every hand shot up.
    Southwest Airlines was just starting up in Baltimore at the time, and they were advertising round-trip flights from Baltimore to Cleveland for forty-nine dollars each way. Cleveland is not far from Toledo. I thought, “Why not raise funds and take the whole class there?”
    Our class held raffles and sponsored carnivals and put on bake sales. I convinced Education Alternatives to front a few thousand dollars for the airline tickets. My father’s doctor friends agreed to sponsor students. We planned a three-day trip for the third grade. We bought plane tickets, rented hotel rooms, and organized ferry rides. The kids were excited out of their minds. And scared.
    Some of the parents were scared, too, at first. “You’re not taking my baby on a plane,” one mom said to me. But most relented, and quite a few said, “I’m coming with you.” So we had plenty of chaperones, but the trip required much coaxing and explaining.
    The kids knew I was from Ohio. “How are we going to talk with the people out there?” one student asked. “We don’t speak Ohio.”
    I laughed. Since I was Korean, they had assumed Ohio was full of Koreans who looked like me and spoke a different language. I set them straight about that. And off we went: about ninety-five students out of a class of 110, and nearly twenty chaperones, mostly parents and a few teachers. We went to the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, ate all we wanted at the Old Country Buffet, went to see a movie, and spent an afternoon at the Children’s Museum of Cleveland. We had a blast. By the last day everyone was exhausted.
    My parents had driven from Toledo to see us in action and come along on some of our adventures. I remember walking into my parents’ motel room Sunday morning. Inza and Shang were asleep—with one of my students dead asleep between them.
    Everlyn Strother, the teacher who swept me into her room my first day at Harlem Park, came along as a chaperone.
    â€œI knew you had the potential to be all right,” she said. “But this—this was something else.”
    B Y THE END OF my time at Harlem Park, my kids who had been with me for the second and third year were soaring. I would have put them up against kids from any private school in Baltimore. One student’s mother was dying of