DEDHAM — In a bright box of a classroom at Norfolk County Correctional Center, Adam Frattasio faces his students with the same eagle eyes and lit nerves that made him MVP of his college baseball team. His words split the air like the crack of a bat.
“Some of you guys already know a lot of this,” says the teacher, who at 5 foot 6 and 185 pounds is a block of muscle and strength.
Then he turns, and with a flick of the wrist, draws a circle on the whiteboard behind him.
“What’s the name of a circle in numbers?” he asks in a voice that straddles the line between confident and cocky.
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“Three hundred and sixty degrees,” comes the answer, as disembodied as the scent of sweat that lingers in the air.
In 10 days, six inmates from this class of nine will take the last part of the High School Equivalency Testing exam (HiSET) in math. They’ve already completed reading, science, social studies, and writing. By passing this last test, doors will open: jobs, college, a better life.
But they’re not there yet: Today, they endure yet another round of punishment as Frattasio hammers them with the Pythagorean theorem, quadratic equations, sine, and other mathematical concepts they need to master.
“They want something,” Frattasio says during a phone conversation. “They pay attention. They know if I don’t like the way their hair is parted, they’re out of my class.”
The inmates, dressed in green uniforms that resemble hospital scrubs, slouch over their desks, heads thrust forward.
Anthony DiGregorio is 22 and dropped out in the eleventh grade; he wants a high school diploma and a union job as a demolition worker. Gerald Daughtry, 23, who sports a tattoo on his wrist that says “GED,” has his sights set on college. Daniel Rexford, 26, an eighth-grade dropout, wants to attend the New England Institute of HVAC in Lowell — and set an example for his 5-year-old daughter. There are six others, including a latecomer, dressed in cafeteria white, arriving straight from his job in the kitchen.
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Whether the inmates know it or not, the odds are in their favor. During the 11 years that Frattasio has been teaching the adult education classes at the jail, 603 prisoners have taken the high school equivalency test and 558 of them have passed it — a success rate of 93 percent.
“I love it. I have the best job here,” he says during a phone conversation before the class. “The reason why is I’m Santa Claus. My guys actually get something. They take a test, and it’s like Christmas when I tell them they passed a national test.”
But Frattasio is a Santa who thinks like a cop.
“You cannot work in a place like this and think they are regular people. They’re not. They have a different set of rules,” he says. “You have to put up a wall. I love my job, but I’m not going to be inviting these guys for Thanksgiving dinner.”
Still, the teacher, who grew up in Milton, Hyde Park, and Hanover, the second oldest of nine, identifies with his students. “I come from not having much. I don’t have the king’s English; I didn’t grow up in Wellesley or Duxbury, a rich house,” he says. “In some ways, I grew up a little bit like some of them.”
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He credits a strict father, an abhorrence for the taste of alcohol, and a passion for sports with keeping him on the straight and narrow.
“My idea of a great time on weekend nights during my teens and 20s was lifting weights, playing street hockey or softball, or renting late-night ice to play hockey, then hitting a Chinese food restaurant at midnight,” he says in an e-mail.
Frattasio didn’t set out to become a teacher, although teaching is in his family and his blood: His father, Vincent, taught art at Hyde Park High and Boston Latin Academy for 40 years; his wife, Kathy, teaches high school French and Spanish. Growing up, he was always teaching — or coaching — his younger siblings and their friends. And when his three kids were younger, he coached their teams, too.
The job at the jail was a stroke of serendipity. Frattasio had worked for a friend’s commercial cleaning business, ran a gym, and was a personal trainer, substitute teacher, and sportswriter before going back to school at the age of 39 to become certified as a teacher. He had been teaching in a public school, but unhappily, when an acquaintance working at the jail told him they were looking for a GED teacher.
On his first day on the job, the director of education showed him to his classroom, patted him on the back, and walked away.
“I didn’t even know what the GED consisted of,” Frattasio says in an e-mail, describing how he pored through workbooks and completed the practice tests to figure out the best way to prepare his students to pass the equivalency test — then called GED, now HiSET.
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On this Monday afternoon, ribbons of sunlight stream through the slats of a window blind at the back of the classroom. At the front, the teacher opens a cardboard box and pulls out calculators, tossing them into hands that make perfect catches up and down the rows.
“Look at problem five. How do the areas of the two circles approximately compare?” Frattasio wants to know.
“I hate math,” somebody grumbles while guesses sail like spitballs, and the exasperated teacher declares, “My lovin’ God!”
Then he goes over the formula again, a jackhammer drilling into his students’ brains, filling them with what they need to know.
“Piece of cake, right?” he says.
Footnote: On March 26, six inmates in Frattasio’s class at the Norfolk County Correctional Center took the math test and five passed, earning their high school diplomas. The sixth inmate, Frattasio said, wants to take the test again.
Hattie Bernstein can be reached at hbernstein1@hotmail.com.