Back to school for Summer

Hurrying through Charlestown High School, hunched under a full backpack, Lauralee Summer looks almost young enough to pass for a student.

Summer is the ''homeless to Harvard" girl whose story -- of drifting with her mother, finding her niche in an alternative program at Quincy High School and as the school's only female wrestler, then going to Harvard -- attracted national attention. She wrote the 2003 memoir ''Learning Joy From Dogs Without Collars." But here, in this brick behemoth of an urban high school where almost three-quarters of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, Summer is one of 16 first-year teachers. She's another newcomer trying to establish herself in a difficult profession.

She teaches remedial English, English as a second language, and freshman writing. She's been buffeted by the unruly behavior that plagues many novice teachers, but things have improved enough that she hasn't gone home and cried since winter. In a school where headmaster Michael Fung guarantees new teachers a job for two years before deciding whether to retain them, Summer, 28, will teach seniors next year and, she hopes, help start a wrestling team. Her idealism bruised but intact, she dreams of making a difference to students, as Charles MacLaughlin, her mentor at Quincy High, did for her.

''It gets better toward the end of the year. You know the kids so well that you feel more relaxed. You know the ways they're going to test you," Summer says. ''You still have to be constantly aware, but it's more like being with a family, a big family that you always have to watch out for."

Fung calls her a ''typical" new teacher. ''She has maybe a bit more problem," he says. ''By no means is she the worst first-year teacher. Not even close."

''Her life is not very different from ours, but sometimes we make her feel like an outcast," says freshman Shaquandra Johnson.

''She's gotten more strict. Even though I got an A, in the beginning my behavior was unacceptable. I started getting detention. She never gave detention before," she adds. ''Sometimes first-year teachers have teenagers of their own. They know how to give that look. That motherly look. We sense it. The attitude we have is not mean, but about the way teenagers are crazy."

''Dear Students . . ."

So starts the letter Summer distributed in September. She tells them she went to Harvard even though she was poor. ''We were always on welfare," she writes. ''Sometimes we lived in homeless shelters and welfare motels, and once I was in a foster home. I did not meet my father, or even see a picture of him, until I was nineteen years old." She's wanted to teach since kindergarten. ''I admired the good teachers I had and wanted to be like them," she writes. ''Whenever I had a bad teacher who was mean or who didn't listen to me, I wanted to be a teacher even more."

Johnson, who confesses to having cursed and used her cellphone in class, nevertheless came home last fall chattering about the teacher who'd been homeless, like her family a decade ago, and who, like her, loves writing. ''It was Mrs. Summer this, Mrs. Summer that," says her mother, Laugena Joyner, a hospital billing coordinator.

Summer surprised Johnson. ''I was like, for real?" she recalls. ''How did you come out so nice? Usually when people come from that background, their attitude is very different from how she carries herself."

Summer is unsure how her story resonates. ''A lot of the students identify with some things," she says. ''It's also very different to be white and poor and black and poor. A lot of people just see me as white."

Summer's day begins easily enough, with a remedial class of four upperclassmen parsing short stories, preparing to write their own.

''Today," Summer begins, ''we're going to talk about the secrets characters have and how that builds the tension." Already they've read ''Scribbles," by Pedro Juan Soto, in which a man secretly paints a mural for his wife, only to have her erase it.

On an overhead projector that rattles until Summer shakes it is a quote from ''Mrs. Warren's Profession," by George Bernard Shaw: ''There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everyone guesses." What, Summer asks, might Mrs. Warren's profession be? How can you tell if someone's keeping a secret?

Summer is short and slender, with a pierced nose and cropped hair dyed black with red highlights -- a much tamer look than she sported as a skateboarding teenager with hair colored blue or orange. Her stature, girlish voice, and round green eyes render her almost waiflike. Yet the sleeveless red shell she wears reveals muscular arms, evidence that she uses the weight bench in her Dorchester apartment and that, as her past suggests, she's not as vulnerable as she seems.

She is also disarmingly candid, which shouldn't surprise, given that she's published a memoir. But that's a tale of triumph that ends with her going to Harvard on scholarship and finding her father, a judge in Oregon. Now she's midchapter.

Summer's two most challenging classes belong to a freshman class Fung calls ''the toughest I've had in eight years." Student teaching in Oakland, while a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, was easier, Summer says. ''In this school, a kid will all of a sudden start swearing at you or knock a table over, and nothing you could possibly do could justify that," Summer says. ''It's so resistant. They feel like they have no choices and they never had any choices." Experience has helped, as did Fung's removal of the most troublesome pupils from her classes.

''With my personality, being an authority figure is very hard. The way my mother raised me -- very reasoning with you, letting you find your own consequences -- you cannot really do in a public school," Summer says. ''It's not like the school of life or anything. I've gotten better about saying, 'No, no, no, no, no,' but being nice about it."

She also battles another barrier. ''No matter what, especially being homeless," she says, ''I was always trying not to bother anyone."

Summer is an experienced consumer of public education, having attended nine schools, including a month in a school in a California shelter and four years at Quincy. She's ricocheted between classes for gifted students and such disenchantment that she stopped attending school. She was the top student her freshman year at Quincy but fizzled as a sophomore. Then she joined MacLaughlin's Heritage program, which let her take courses at Quincy College and Harvard Extension School. An extension-school professor urged her to apply to Harvard.

''Heritage was very centered on students' dreams and helping them achieve it," Summer says. ''More schools should have something like that because every school I'd gone to, you would get thrown into these classes. You'd feel angry and resistant. It felt like teachers don't really listen to you. You're not learning; you don't have anyone who's on your side. Heritage was my first experience -- I'd had a few good teachers -- of a really cool place.

''Things like that inspired me, and going to so many different schools when I was homeless and in a foster home and everything and seeing the difference between them really shocked me," she says. ''It made me feel passionate that this is a good career. You should try to make a difference and to equalize things."

She keeps in touch with MacLaughlin, the ''Mr. Mac" in her book's dedication. He retired from Quincy in 2001, after 36 years, and now, at 62, teaches seventh and eighth grades at St . Peter's School in Dorchester. He still gets excited when a student makes a connection between George Eliot's ''Silas Marner" and Rudyard Kipling's ''Captains Courageous."

''If she gets some breaks," MacLaughlin says, ''gets a couple of good years under her belt, she'll be fine."

How do you know if someone has a secret?" Summer asks her freshmen the same question she asked her remedial class.

''Their eyes start to shake," replies one girl. Another says, ''They shiver when they're around you."

Summer talks above the undercurrent of conversation, trying without luck to cajole with vague threats of detention. The next period, she simply stops talking and stands silent and quickly captures students' attention.

''Learning persistence against hard situations helps you," Summer says later. ''That's why I worry with a lot of the kids. They're young. They haven't learned that persistence or resilience or sticking with something that's difficult."

In her book, Summer likens poverty to gravity, unmoved by hard work alone but possibly yielding, she writes, to ''a tremendous miracle, a hundred thundering wonderful interventions, and an astonishing pinprick hole in the oh-so-rationally constructed scientific fact of gravity."

Sitting at her desk is freshman Ava Mooltrey, who's started wandering into Summer's room between classes, wondering if Ms. Summer needs any help.

''When she was younger she had to live in a shelter and her mother couldn't get a job. I felt like I could be friendly with her because something like that happened to me," Mooltrey says. ''I want to be like her. I want to teach, too. She's somebody I can look up to. If she can do it, I know I can."

''Ava," Summer says, ''is really quiet."

Did she ever mention that she'd been homeless, too?

''She never did."