Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is not merely a holiday in Tony Danza’s year at Northeast High School; it is the point at which his new professional identity collides most sharply with his obligations as a husband and father. What begins as an anticipated pause in the school year becomes a choice between returning to his family in Los Angeles and remaining with students whose competitions, performances, and emotional needs have made the school feel increasingly like a second home.

A Planned Return Home

Thanksgiving initially appears to offer Tony a simple, natural break. He loves the holiday because it requires no gifts, only food, family, and friends, and he expects to fly home to be with his wife and daughters. When he made that plan in September, the trip seemed automatic: leave Philadelphia after school on Wednesday, spend three days in California, and return early Sunday morning before school resumed. The distance, however, makes the holiday less restorative than it sounds. The journey requires a six-hour flight in each direction, followed by a four-o’clock wake-up on Monday that will not accommodate three hours of jet lag.

The practical difficulty is intensified by the condition of Tony’s family life. After his television show was canceled, he and his wife separated following twenty years of marriage, and only their youngest child still lived at home in Los Angeles. Tony therefore approaches Thanksgiving with a mixture of longing and uncertainty. He misses his daughters and his wife, but he also worries that he has already been absent from too much of his elder daughter’s life. When he calls her in early November and admits that he has not bought his ticket because he is unsure when he can get home, her easy acceptance unsettles him. He cannot tell whether she is reassuring him, quietly accustomed to his absence, or recognizing that his work with students matters. His inability to interpret her brief response becomes an intimate counterpoint to his effort to teach students to read: he can help them interpret texts, yet cannot read his own daughter anymore.

The School Claims the Holiday

As November approaches, school responsibilities begin to overtake the calendar. Northeast’s football team is scheduled to play Central High on Thanksgiving Day in what Tony describes as the oldest public high school rivalry in the country. Three boys from his class are playing, and he feels that he should be present for them and for the team as a whole. The same weekend brings another obligation: if the marching band continues winning, it will compete in the state championships, and Nakiya has made Tony promise to attend.

These commitments are not presented as formal duties imposed from above. They arise from relationships Tony has accumulated during his first year. His students have begun to expect his presence, and he has begun to understand attendance at their games and performances as part of teaching rather than as an optional extracurricular gesture. The school’s scale reinforces the contrast between his original plan and his new reality. Northeast is Philadelphia’s largest high school, with multiple stories, trailers, sports fields, its own football stadium, a large cafeteria, cavernous gyms, and even a Philadelphia police station. Within that enormous institution, Thanksgiving concentrates Tony’s attention on particular students whose individual claims make the holiday impossible to treat as an empty space in the schedule.

The holiday also exposes the emotional labor built into his new profession. Teachers at Northeast have explained that their work includes counseling, comforting, advising, and serving as surrogate parents, especially when poverty, housing insecurity, violence, abuse, or weak parental involvement leave gaps in students’ lives. Tony has acquired unofficial advisory students who visit his classroom, accept half sandwiches at lunch, and seek him out whenever they can obtain a hall pass. Thanksgiving makes visible the consequence of that closeness: once students become people to whom he has made promises, leaving them for a short family visit no longer feels uncomplicated.

The Decision to Stay

Tony and his family eventually agree that flying to Los Angeles for only a few days does not make sense. He tells his wife about Gwen, a good student whose work has recently declined and whose difficult home circumstances have begun to improve. The conversation about Gwen helps confirm how deeply Tony’s attention has shifted toward the lives unfolding at school, though he dislikes how readily his wife accepts the decision. Her easy agreement leaves him feeling that the family may have grown used to receiving less of him.

Missing Thanksgiving does not make Tony feel heroic. He admits to feeling sorry for himself and needing a change of pace, but the alternative he finds is not home in California. Instead, he considers taking the students to New York City, a place he regards as a kind of home and as a major field-trip destination. The impulse shows the substitution taking place in his life: when he cannot return to his family, he tries to create a shared occasion with the young people now claiming his time.

On Thanksgiving Day, Tony spends almost the entire day on the football field. Northeast defeats Central decisively, and he is not truly sorry to have missed the flight home. He then spends most of the weekend on a bus with Nakiya and the marching band traveling to and from their state competition. The band places third, and Tony is glad that he did not have to fight jet lag when he signs in at school on Monday. The immediate results—an important victory, a third-place finish, and a rested return—make his decision feel justified, even though the family cost remains unresolved.

A New Measure of Belonging

Tony’s presence over Thanksgiving changes how the school reads him. When he returns on Monday, Assistant Principal Byron Ryan tells him that Ms. DeNaples has suggested him as a chaperone for the Winter Formal. Tony hears the words as a compliment because they indicate that he is being entrusted with an ordinary but demanding responsibility of school life. The invitation follows his commitment to the football team and marching band, suggesting that belonging at Northeast is earned through repeated acts of presence rather than through celebrity or intention.

The holiday also gives a sharper form to the question of whether Tony will remain a teacher. By the end of the year, he recognizes that caring for students requires more than classroom instruction. Teachers describe having to be mothers, fathers, siblings, social workers, counselors, friends, and whatever else their students need. Tony’s unofficial advisory role follows the same pattern: students come to his room for food, shelter from the pressures of the school day, advice, and attention, while he writes notes explaining their late return to class. Thanksgiving becomes one episode in this larger transformation from entertainer and visiting celebrity into an adult whose availability students have learned to trust.

Yet the decision to stay also foreshadows the limits of that transformation. Tony later tells Lynn Dixon that, at his age, he is unsure whether he wants to care so much about anything. Dixon’s response—that such depth of care is precisely what the work requires—captures the burden revealed by Thanksgiving. A teacher cannot simply attend the game and leave the emotional consequences behind. The demands follow him home, compete with marriage and parenthood, and consume the personal reserves that sustain him.

The Cost of Caring

The Thanksgiving choice is therefore neither a simple triumph for school commitment nor a simple failure of family responsibility. It dramatizes the central contradiction of Tony’s teaching year. He wants to help students who face hunger, homelessness, gang violence, imprisonment, foster care, and unstable homes, but the more seriously he responds to those conditions, the less easily he can preserve boundaries around his own life. A teacher Tony meets at the gym describes having 150 students in five classes, many of whom need extraordinary attention, while weekly quizzes and paperwork absorb the hours that might otherwise be spent giving it. Tony identifies the same dilemma in his own relationships with Alex, Phil, Gwen, Paige, and Brittiny: how far should a caring teacher become involved, and what is best for the child when intervention can also cause harm?

Tony’s decision to remain in Philadelphia thus anticipates the conclusion he reaches about the profession. More than one hundred new teachers who attended his August orientation quit before Christmas, and veteran teachers warn that without boundaries students can take everything out of a teacher. Tony understands the warning but does not yet possess the emotional distance to follow it. When Joe Connelly later asks whether he is coming back the next year, Tony says he does not know, even though he already knows that he needs to return home and work on being a husband and father. He also admits that teaching is extraordinarily hard work.

In the book’s larger argument, Thanksgiving exposes why the educational system cannot be repaired through the blame game. Teachers are expected to teach, counsel, comfort, coach, inspire, document, evaluate, and respond to changing mandates while serving roughly 150 students a day, often for less compensation than other skilled professions. Tony’s holiday absence makes that invisible workload personal. His presence helps students win, compete, and feel accompanied, but it also demonstrates how a system increasingly depends on individual sacrifice. Thanksgiving is consequently a measure of belonging and a warning about its price: Tony has begun to belong at Northeast precisely because he is willing to give the school time that his family also needs.