To Steve, with Love

A particular hell awaited former businessman Steve Mariotti when he became an inner-city schoolteacher. Then, remarkably, he found for both himself and his students a singular way out

A decade ago, when Steve Mariotti began teaching math at Boys & Girls High School, in New York City's Bedford-Stuyvesant slums, entrepreneurship was the furthest thing from his mind. He'd already had a business career as a financial analyst at the Ford Motor Co. and as the operator of his own import-export company. Teaching in one of New York's most notorious schools ("Teacher Beaten and Dragged Down Stairs," noted a headline at the time) seemed to Mariotti to be the best way to overcome his fear of life in a large, potentially dangerous city and to find a job that felt like something more than mere work. He succeeded on both counts, though not in the ways he'd imagined. His wars and discoveries in that first classroom -- described in the following excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Young Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting and Running a Business (Times Books) -- led him eventually to launch the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), which he still heads. They led him also to understand anew why he loved business in the first place, and how the things he loved about it -- the ways it can arouse our passions, uncover our talents, connect us to our community -- can electrify inner-city kids just as they do seasoned businesspeople. His story reminds us why we love business, too. We join Mariotti during his second week in class. . .

I began to lose control of my classroom almost daily. One student actually set fire to the back of another's coat -- the student with the coat was as astonished as I was. In a rage, I ordered the arsonist out of the class, and he was expelled the same day. On another occasion, I was locked out of my eighth-period class. Finally, one of the girls took pity on me and opened the door, just as I was going to admit total defeat and find a security guard. In each of my three remedial classes, there was a group of six or seven kids whose behavior was so disruptive that I had to stop the class every five minutes or so to get them to quiet down. In my third-period class, I once threw all the boys out. Ironically, those young men provided me with the valuable insight that set me on the road to teaching entrepreneurship. I took them out to dinner and asked them why they had acted so badly in class. They said my class was boring, that I had nothing to teach them.

Hadn't anything I'd said in class interested them? I asked. One fellow spoke up: I had caught his attention when I discussed my import-export business. He rattled off various figures I'd mentioned in class, calculated my profit margin, and concluded that my business was doing well. I was dazzled to find such business smarts in a student the public schools had labeled borderline retarded. This was my first inkling that something was wrong not only with my teaching but also with the standard remedial curriculum.

In my eighth-period class, I was too afraid of the boys to throw them out. The most disruptive boys were Mills, Braddock, and Morrow. They would disrupt the class by making animal noises, cursing me viciously, and treating their fellow classmates with great hostility. I would calmly threaten them with failure. I tried not to lose a joking manner, which, it turned out, they saw as a sign of weakness. One day I knew I was off to a particularly bad start when I sat in my seat and felt something stick to the back of my jacket. I got up, looked at my chair, and saw a large wad of gum. The class roared. Then, seeing the hurt and disgust on my face, the group fell silent. A student named Therese came up to me and said, "You all right, Mr. Mariotti, you have gum on your back; let me help you." She pulled off as much of it as possible.

I tried to start a new subject, but asking them to learn something new at this point just made them anxious. A radio suddenly blared from the back of the room. The noise level soared, and Mills and Braddock got out of their seats and began dancing at the front of the room. The rest of the class began to clap in unison. I ran to the back of the room and threatened, "Turn it off, or I'm going to fail you." Mills got up on my desk and continued to dance.

"Turn off the goddamned radio, you twerp!" I yelled. Someone, imitating me, yelled back, "No swearing, Mr. Mariotti!" I grabbed the radio and went to the front of the room. To my relief, Mills got off my desk and sat down in his seat, cursing me as he went. I could feel my face twitching. "Look, Mariotti's having a nervous breakdown!" said another troublemaker. "You can't control this class, Mariotti, because you don't have juice," shouted Mills. "Shut up and sit!" I shouted back. "Continue with the assignment."

All of a sudden, I was hit in the eye with a spitball. I felt another wave of anger. "Who threw that?" I yelled. The class was again in total chaos. I walked out, and as I did so, I was hit in the back with a wad of paper.

I didn't know how to deal with the situation. I wanted to leave the school and call it quits, but I realized that I couldn't do that. As I stepped into the hallway to regain my composure, I thought about that dinner with my third-period students. They had said I was boring -- except when I talked about business, about money. After about three minutes in the hall, I walked back into the classroom and, with no introductory comments, started a mock sales pitch, hypothetically selling the class my own watch. I enumerated the benefits of the watch, explaining why the students should purchase it from me at the low price of only $6. I noticed immediately that as soon as I started to talk about money, and how to make money by selling something, they actually quieted down and became interested. I didn't know it at the time, but that incident, born of desperation, pointed me toward my real vocation -- teaching entrepreneurship to inner-city kids.

When I had their attention, I moved from the sales talk into a conventional arithmetic lesson: if you buy a watch at $3 and sell it for $6, you make $3 of profit, or 100%. Without realizing it, I was touching on the business fundamentals of buying low and selling high, and on the more advanced concept of return on investment.

I realized I would have to start getting tough -- no more Mr. Nice Guy. That evening I practiced my expression in the mirror. I decided I had to come to my classes ready to be instantly angry. I knew I had to stay very alert. I couldn't let a few of these students make me lose my livelihood. Unless I could bring my classes under control, I was of little value to the students who were actually there to learn -- and many of them were. Not only would I be tough, I decided, but I would begin to develop a curriculum around my students' obvious interest in business.