(This article, reprinted with permission, featuring Ric Klass, class of 1964, appeared in The Columbus Dispatch on August 24, 2006)  8/30/06

In first job, teacher thrown to wolves

Thursday, August 24, 2006
JOE BLUNDO

After leaving Bexley in 1964, Ric Klass worked as an aerospace engineer, a market researcher, an investment banker, a consultant, an entrepreneur and a filmmaker.

Then he became a high-school teacher. It might be the hardest work he has ever done.

Klass, 60, tells the story in Man Overboard: Confessions of a Novice Math Teacher in the Bronx (Seven Locks, $17.95).

As another school year begins in central Ohio, let’s be glad that people such as Klass are willing to take on the challenge of teaching. And let’s hope that none of our schools is as dysfunctional as the one he describes.

By the end of his first day at Central Bronx High School in New York — Sept. 8, 2003 — Klass had already threatened to call the police on one disruptive class.

"This is a bluff," he writes. "I know there’s no help. I don’t have the key yet to the emergency telephone and my cell-phone battery is dead. I’m truly frightened that these kids will get so out of control, they’ll hurt each other and very likely me. But I am very angry besides being very scared."

Klass has a lot to be angry about: The school is mired in bureaucracy. Just taking attendance requires him to fill out four forms per student. There’s a fiveyear waiting list for a parking space on the staff lot. Even going to the bathroom is hard: It takes bureaucrats three days to provide Klass with a key to the teachers’ restroom.

But the biggest challenges are students. They’re like teenagers everywhere else but with the added disadvantage of having little or no parental guidance.

"It’s not that they’re bad people," he writes. "What they are is a combination of all the usual tribulations of adolescence plus an immaturity that places them at kindergarten behavior."

Klass breaks up a fight (in violation of school rules against intervening), learns how to parry "white boy" remarks from his mostly black and Latino students, and quickly masters the skill of writing on the blackboard without turning his back.

"Almost all the freshmen are unprepared for high school in any subject area. . . . Their math skills are incredibly weak. In each of my classes more than a few of the children can’t tell you how much six times seven is. Really."

What led Klass to this scene in the first place? He has always been one to try new things.

Klass — whose father, Lou, owned Hilltop Jewelers and Bexley Office Machines — graduated from Bexley High School in 1964, then obtained degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California and Harvard Business School.

From there, he followed his interests, which took him from aerospace engineering to economic consulting and filmmaking, among other pursuits. (He wrote, directed and produced the comedy Elliot Fauman, Ph.D, a 1990 movie that had a limited release.)

His success tutoring an immigrant child in math inspired him to try teaching high schoolers. And so he found himself in a job that paid $43,786 a year and made demands that he ultimately couldn’t meet.

Klass left the school after a year, frustrated with the system and himself. He came to realize, he said, that teaching Bronx freshmen is 80 percent social work and 20 percent math.

"I wanted the percentages to be reversed," he said. "I’m sorry that I was not the right guy." He now teaches at a private school in Manhattan, still determined to master this new career. "I haven’t been teaching long enough to be bored yet. I’m still trying to be a good teacher." Joe Blundo is a Dispatch columnist.

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