I had the teacher pegged the minute I heard his voice on my answering machine. Tim Schlosser sounded so forthright, so earnest and so impossibly young, he had "Teach for America" written all over him.
He was responding to a message I'd left about Southeast Middle School students, who had e-mailed me with questions as part of an assignment in his journalism class.
"I'm sorry if they clogged up your inbox," his message said. He assumed I'd called to complain -- which speaks volumes about the way teachers get dumped on these days. I called back and offered to visit his class.
So on Tuesday I drove across the railroad tracks that separate Watts from South Gate and rolled up to a collection of bright, yellow, box-shaped buildings that resemble -- in Schlosser's description -- a giant poundcake baking in the sun.
At Southeast, which opened four years ago, all but nine of the 1,367 students are Latino, and more than one-third are still learning English.
In Schlosser's classroom, I was greeted by two dozen students in uniforms and a slight, blond teacher who looked so young that he could swap the tie for a uniform and pass for a student.
Conventional thinking has it that schools like Southeast need experienced teachers to help students weighed down by history and poverty. But veteran teachers often opt for more suburban settings, leaving inner-city campuses to newbies like Schlosser.
He graduated two years ago, at 21, from Seattle University, a Jesuit college. He hadn't planned on a teaching career, but a degree in creative writing doesn't make for a lot of options. So he signed up for a two-year stint with Teach for America, which recruits top college graduates to teach on struggling campuses.
He spent the summer at a "boot camp" learning teaching techniques, taught a session at Samuel Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles and was hired at a job fair by Southeast Principal Walter Flores.
"I wish I could clone him," Flores told me.
It didn't take long, Schlosser said, to understand why the first question in every teacher interview was some version of "How will you keep order in your class?" One unruly student can be like "a drop of red food coloring in a clean glass of water," he explained.
His first year, he felt like an impostor in front of the 200 students he taught. In a blog he kept to stay in touch with his family, he recalled "standing in front of the class pretending to know exactly what I'm doing, while desperately trying to generate some way of filling the next 35 minutes."
