Relentless Pursuit Read Free

the kid he had punished and the kid he had not. All the veteran teachers had warned him not to take things in the classroom personally. Well, for him that was impossible. He took things
very
personally.
    What’s happening to me? This is a complete mind blow!
    Three months before, he’d been a party-loving senior at Boston College with a double major and great grades. Now he felt so…sad. Overnight he had gone from being a twenty-one-year-old kid with no responsibilities to a man who woke up before sunrise. The old fun-loving Hrag was gone. In his place was an overworked, stressed-out, lonely guy winging it as a teacher in a dysfunctional inner-city school thousands of miles from his home in New Jersey. More than one person had stopped to ask him what was wrong. He looked terrible. His hair was always a mess, his tie awry, his eyes heavy with fatigue behind his thick glasses. It wasn’t just the hard work and the long hours that bothered him—or the fact that he had no girlfriend at a time when he needed one most. It was the idea that if he failed, it wasn’t just him. His kids failed, too.
I feel like someone has his foot on my head and I’m underwater, and just when I think I have enough air, my head goes under again. Nothing is constant. There is nothing to rely on.
    Hrag hadn’t expected to feel like this. Many of the TFA recruits had had a difficult time over the summer. Not him. For Hrag, the training had been a breeze. He had seen people break down in tears, and he had heard about corps members throwing up because they were so stressed out. He was shocked when his friend and roommate quit the program because he found it too intense. Hrag left the institute on a high. He felt more confident than ever.
    Now here he was, standing in the doorway of his own classroom, dreading period five. As the kids streamed in, Hrag noticed a security guard walking his way with Cale in tow.
    Oh no. He’s back.
    Before Hrag had a chance to work out how he would handle the irascible teenager, the boy slipped the guard’s hold and disappeared into the crowd.
    Another guard approached Hrag and instructed him to keep both his doors open so that the light coming from his windows would help illuminate the hallways. Hrag agreed. Then, as soon as the guard was gone, he shut both doors. There was no way he could allow his kids to witness the craziness outside and expect them to do any work.
    â€œYo!” Hrag boomed as he paced in front of the room. “We have work to do today. Sit down. Let’s go.”
    The kids settled down. They were used to a darkened room; Hrag had been turning the lights off during this period anyway to cool them down after PE and lunch. Twice, administration officials walked into the classroom to tell Hrag to hold the kids in his room for the rest of the day, but not to let the class know. Of course, the kids were aware that there had been a blackout. They figured Locke hadn’t paid the electric bill.
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    Taylor Rifkin and some of the other ninth-grade teachers were in the staff lunchroom finishing up a planning session for the first freshman social when the lights went out. Taylor was pleased that the veterans had invited her to join them. She hadn’t expected them to be so welcoming to a new TFA teacher. The power failure barely registered with her. There had been plenty of little technical glitches these first few days of school; she figured this was just another one. Her fifth-period class was due to start in minutes, so she finished the fried chicken from the fast-food place up the street, clipped up her long brown hair, and made her way back to room A22, one of the makeshift bungalow classrooms on the outer reaches of the campus built years before to relieve overcrowding. Outside, the sunshine was blinding.
    Her ninth-grade English students entered the bungalow joking that since there was no power, there would be no lesson that