This is a true story about a unconventional teacher who left us too early. R.I.P Mr. Asaad.
Death of a Teacher: Part 3Mr. Asaad’s unconventionality was not limited to parking lot duty; it spilled over into his classroom methods.
In May of 2009 I flew to Charlotte to do a sample lesson and interview for the job at KIPP. On that same day, Mr. Asaad flew to Charlotte from New York City with the same purpose. As part of our interview, we had to observe each other teach, and formally assess one another’s pedagological methods. I sat at the back of the room to observe his Math instruction, and from the minute he started to the minute he ended, he was badass.
He taught a simple lesson on multiplying complex fractions, and he explained the steps so effortlessly and transparently that even the dumbest kid in the class understood how to do it. After his mini-lesson and after working through a couple examples, he said to the class, “Now it’s your turn.”
He wrote a problem on the board, then whipped around facing the kids. He peered across the room, making eye contact with each and every student. He slowly began to meander through the rows of desks, looking for his victim. Finally, he stopped, and stood over to a girl with pigtails. He swiped his open palm over her head like a preacher giving a blessing.
“Stand up.” He told the girl.
He then asked the class, “Ok, I’m looking at this girl – what’s your name girl?”
“Alexus.” She replied.
“I’m looking at Alexus, and you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that Alexus…she got this. What do you all think?” he asked the rest of the class. They nodded their heads in agreement, mesmerized by his pizzazz. He then handed Alexus an Expo marker and asked her to approach the white board and solve the equation, which she did successfully.
He smiled, “That’s good. Very good. In fact, I think that’s,” and here he broke into song, “Redddd hotttt, that girl is redddd hotttt, that girl is R-E-D, red, H-O-T, hot, once she starts she can’t be stopped.” he sang, clapped his hands, and bobbed with the rhythm.
Once he had finished the chant, he stared at the class, and said, “What is this girl?” And he sang his little song again, this time the class chimed in as each student learned the words, “That girl is redddd hotttt, that girl is R-E-D, red, H-O-T, hot, once she starts she can’t be stopped.” By the third time, everyone joined in.
Then the song ended, and he approached the board and wrote another equation.
“Now, who wants to give this one a try?”
All hands in the room shot up like bottle rockets; each student competing for the chance to be redddd hotttt.
Unconventional, but totally talented.
A karate-chop to the gut, then a thumb-twist hurling the victim sideways, followed by a forearm block, and top it off with an elbow strike to the incisors. On more than a dozen occasions, I watched Mr. Asaad inflict this type punishment on KIPP Charlotte students. He was a black belt, and he told me at least fifty times what brand of martial arts he mastered, but I could never remember exactly which type it was. What I do remember, however, is keeping a running tab of his potential lawsuit bill as I saw him assault kid after kid.
Oh, Mr. Asaad just air chopped Jacory? That’s a couple thousand.
A hammer fist to Tyler’s jugular for incorrectly answering a math question? Another thousand and a half.
The roundhouse kick to Keshean’s shoulder? That one did some damage. Maybe three and a quarter?
A four knuckle strike to Langston’s forehead? Langston had that coming; plus, Langston’s Mom, if anything, would thank Mr. Asaad for whipping her boy into shape. He might actually make a buck or two back on that one.
He whacked kids, put them in headlocks, twisted their noses, and everything in between, but he never ever hurt them. It was a ploy, like a puppy play fighting. His physicality added life and toughness to a profession that is overrun with laws and bureaucracy that - although designed with student safety in mind - often stifles the bond between teacher and student.
In addition to all the physical abuse he dispensed, he would verbally insult KIPP students as well: in an endearing sort of way. At the end of our first year at KIPP, the principals threw an end of year banquet at a local Mexican restaurant. As part of the event, each teacher had to randomly draw another teacher’s name out of a hat and make a paper plate award for that teacher. Ms. Myers, my co-teacher, picked my name, and she awarded me the ‘Flava Flave’ award, since she had never seen a teacher use more clocks and timers in a classroom than myself. I, ironically, picked the name of my confidant: Mr. Asaad. I awarded him the ‘most-likely-to-get-arrested-for-saying-something-innappropriate-to-a-student’ award. An award he would never fully live up to, but an award well earned no less. I handed him the award, shook his hand, and snapped a picture to commemorate the event.
When I looked at Mr. Asaad, I saw a dear friend (as well a legal liability to the school); however, when students, particularly the boys, looked at him, they saw someone they deeply admired. Behind Mr. Asaad’s back, during lunchroom conversations, the boys at KIPP Charlotte would mock his timbre, yelling across the table at one another in their best attempts at a Caribbean accent, “What’s your major malfunction?” On the playground, they mimicked his karate moves; yelping and kicking like a kung-fu parody. Nonetheless, the same boys who lampooned him the most were the same boys who would spend hours after school with him on Saturdays, getting free martial arts instruction. Deep down, they worshipped him. Strong black role models were something of a commodity in the neighborhoods most of these kids were raised in, and Mr. Asaad was the archetype of a black role model: strong, domineering, eloquently opinionated (although brash at times), charming, educated, and a physical acme. In short, there was a lot to for the kids to admire.
Mr. Asaad could get through to students who were to me a concrete slab of indifference. If I had a dime for every time I asked Keshawn to stop talking during a mini-lesson and then he would throw his hands up in the air declaring, “It wasn’t me!” I could easily pay a respectable down payment on a Manhattan condo. Yet to Mr. Asaad, Keshawn was a lemming, awaiting his command. On one particularly muggy afternoon following Saturday school, I noticed Keshawn doing an exercise on an outdoor bench in front of the eighth grade building. He thrust his leg up on the bench, fully extended it, achieved balance, and proceeded to kick with the other. He repeated this arduous move over and over again while sweat dribbled down his face and formed a ring around his black Nike T-Shirt.
“Keshawn, what are you doing?” I asked as I passed by him.
Between huffs and puffs he said, “Martial arts training.” his eyes grimacing with exhaustion.
“What for?”
“For Mr. Asaad. He’s teaching me…huff…how to do…puff…Tae Kwon do.”
“For Mr. Asaad. He’s teaching me…huff…how to do…puff…Tae Kwon do.”
“Good deal. Carry on.” I said, as I walked away in veneration, just glad that someone was teaching Keshawn some discipline.
Another student that Mr. Asaad got through to - more so than any other teacher at KIPP – was Jacory. Jacory was a perpetually silly child, with a clownish incriminating disposition, that earned him a three-year rap sheet of tomfoolery at KIPP. When I think of the epitome of a ‘class clown’, I immediately picture Jacory. Not a single word of sincerity ever crossed his lips, unless, of course, you’re counting a sincere attempt at humor; in which case he was sincere to a fault. At KIPP Charlotte we had something called ‘paychecks’, which are more or less behavioral markings teachers give students based on positive or negative behavior in class. The kids start out the week with forty paycheck dollars, and each student moves up or down based on how well he or she follows or disobeys school rules. Jacory, although never having been suspended and never having been in a fight, had the lowest paycheck out of all eighty-four students in the eighth grade. He earned a fourteen-dollar weekly average by years end: solely due to his unbridled silliness. Yet he too was no match for Mr. Asaad.
At the beginning of his Math classes, Mr. Asaad would greet each student with “Good morning” as they entered his room. When it was time for Jacory’s class to rotate to Math, Mr. Asaad would conduct his meet and greet with his right hand, while his left arm was wrapped around Jacory’s neck in a headlock.
There was a space in the back of Mr. Asaad’s room that he called ‘China’. Mr. Asaad had a pre-industrial view of the country and considered it a decrepit state, a place of vagabonds and fascists. I suppose he got this opinion of China from coming of age during the Cold War era. If a student misbehaved in Mr. Asaad’s class, he would yell, “Go to China!” and the student would then get up and move to the corner seat, facing the wall. Jacory spent so much of the year ‘in China’ that one would think he could speak Cantonese.
But for every ounce of army discipline and tough love that Mr. Asaad dished out, he provided an equal amount of paternal nurturing. Towards the end of my first year at KIPP, Mr. Asaad would haul Jacory outside with him for parking lot duty, coach him to use the police hand signals he used to direct traffic in Phoenix, and asked Jacory to direct traffic on his own. Jacory loved it. By May, Jacory was a pro, directing cars into the appropriate lanes of traffic, effortlessly keeping the pick up lane moving. All the while, Mr. Asaad would stand at his side, keeping at watchful eye on him, arms crossed, smiling at his apprentice.
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