Seven Days of Possibilities:
One Teacher, 24 Kids, and the
Music That Changed Their Lives Forever: A book by Anemona Hartocollis
Reviewd by Joan Baum, Ph.D.
A compelling book, despite its extravagant subtitle and ambiguous
point of view, Seven Days of Possibilities tells the uplifting story of Johanna Grussner, a music
teacher at P.S. 86 (The Kingsbridge Heights School) in the
Northeast Bronx, who drifted into teaching as a way of paying
her way to be a jazz singer, shortly after she arrived in this
country from Aland Island in Finland, population 25,000, “an
archipelago of 6,500 rocks and islets,” situated between
Finland and Sweden. Not just another tale about Making a Difference
with an underprivileged youngster from mostly dysfunctional
families, the book moves creatively and persistently against
an education bureaucracy with art and heart. It also provides
a sobering history of the political intrigue that defined New
York City's public schools in the '80s and '90s.
Blond-haired, blue-eyed,
Johanna, the middle child of a close upper-middle class family
in Aland, left her rural home to find adventure, musical
opportunity, and herself. Fresh from graduate study at the
Berklee College of Music in Boston, she lands a part-time
job at a minority school run by feared, admired and shrewd
principal, Shelly Benardo, “a [45-year old]
creature of a certain era in the history of New York City schools.” It
was a critical time for the schools under Guiliani, as he was
pressing for higher standardized test scores and not a time
for the arts. Against the odds and driven by an inner incentive,
Johanna forms a school chorus, rouses intractable kids (90
percent met the poverty standard for free lunch) written off
by their teachers, families, and society, and transforms some
of them, at least for a short while. Excited by her success
Johanna organizes a week's trip for the chorus to her hometown
to perform gospel songs. For most Alanders the Bronx was only
Fort Apache.
Interspersed with Johanna's story are vignettes of her family,
friends, colleagues, students and other secondary players whose
stories go on too long, and therein lies part of the problem
of Seven Days. Despite
its accessible style and laudatory goal to be inspirational
and “instructive for public education in general,” there
is also a problem of the author's reconstruction of inner thoughts
and conversations. Without the benefit of quotation marks,
a novelistic device that becomes dubious in sections that would
explain why Eve is finally expelled from Paradise. Anemona
Hartocollis, who for years has been a reporter and columnist
for The New York Times seems
to straddle a line between sympathy and dispassion. She visited
Johanna and her family in Aland more than once and acknowledges
their generosity, but she stops short at exploring fully the
demons that affected Johanna, especially the young teacher's
acknowledgment of the increasing evidence of muscular dystrophy
which she and her two sisters inherited through recessive genes,
a horror that somehow must have accounted for the odd interview
(critical by any standard) she gave after the successful trip
and that caused the permanent rift in her relationship with
her former principal.
Blessed with praise
from, among others, Jonathan Kozol, Randi Weingarten, James
Gleick, and Samuel Freedman, and filled with memorable portraits
of some of the youngsters, Seven Days
of Possibilities, for all
its moving, inspirational drama, seems at times to be a reworking
of education articles grafted onto a story of personal courage,
or the other way around. Still, the book is worth reading.#
