The subtitle: \u00a0My Year of HOPE and DESPAIR in a NEW YORK CITY HIGH SCHOOL (yes, that\u2019s the capitalization on the front cover).<\/p>\n
A quick synopsis: \u00a0Ed Boland, a professional fundraiser for a nonprofit which aims to send talented inner-city poor kids to top-flight private schools, decides to move to the frontlines of the battle, by getting a teaching degree and teaching ninth-grade history in a high-poverty-neighborhood high school. \u00a0He discovers that, all inspirational movies aside, it\u2019s difficult to impossible to educate kids who don\u2019t want to be educated, and, when at the end of the year he is offered, not just his old job back but a promotion to boot, he skedaddles back to his old world.<\/p>\n
As a piece of writing, there were irritants: \u00a0he is a gay man, and he weaves this into his narrative not just in the appropriate spots, such as the fact that it compounded his difficulties in classroom management, but with what really felt like excessive time telling us about the society\/culture he moved in, and even telling the reader that the stress of teaching affected him, er, in the bedroom. \u00a0And he had an odd, out of place, section on his time as an Ivy League admissions officer, which had the clever turns-of-phrase and descriptions of eager, even desperate, applicants that sounded so familiar that I tried to find that section again just now to see if I could google the text and see if it had perhaps been published elsewhere as a short essay online. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s just that there are so many articles mocking Ivy League applicants that it all just sounded familiar.<\/p>\n
But beyond that \u2014 he spent one year there, and, while he certainly didn\u2019t have an obligation to stay put, that meant that the book largely takes the form of a series of anecdotes, with little connected story of any of the kids. \u00a0I was convinced that he had assembled his blog posts into a book until I read the acknowledgements in which he said he wrote it during a \u201cwriter\u2019s workshop.\u201d \u00a0And the stories he tells are nearly all just awful stories of irredeemable kids, but, at the same time, he had three classes of 30 kids each, but it\u2019s hard to get a big picture from his series of anecdotes.<\/p>\n
How bad, really, is the situation? \u00a0Certainly, as a middle-aged middle-class (and culturally-gay) man with no experience dealing with insolent teenagers, he was at a serious disadvantage (among other things, he recounts being told to simplify his vocabulary), and, beyond his demographic characteristics, he just didn\u2019t seem to have the sort of personal skills needed to succeed with this sort of teaching. \u00a0But he describes the last straw that put him over the edge and sent him back to fund-raising: \u00a0he helped to grade final, \u201cregents\u201d exams for the 10th grade history teacher whom he admired as seemingly experienced and skilled, and even she ended up (with a very generous grading scale for the essay), with a 53% average score.<\/p>\n
And the tales of insolent students, of fights in the hallways or courtyards, of students with shockingly low writing ability, of the fact that, class period after class period, the best-case scenario was absence of disruption, but students sat in their seats without cracking a book or writing a single word (let alone doing homework!)\u2013 that can\u2019t be written down to \u201che was inexperienced.\u201d \u00a0He also recounts parents being called in, excuses being made, due to a poor home life, but little progress made, with the exception of a few star students who were clearly out-of-place \u2014 as well as students on the roster who seldom, if ever, actually walked into the classroom.<\/p>\n
At the end of his narrative, he concludes with a set of prescriptions. \u00a0One is clear: \u00a0\u201cimprove training and support for teachers.\u201d \u00a0He describes the fact that his graduate school education offered nothing in the way of classroom management, and his student teaching stint was woefully insufficient; his professors had little to no connection to actual classrooms \u2014 and this is indeed unacceptable. \u00a0I\u2019m not sure why this never changes, except that professors don\u2019t want to lose their jobs in favor of more apprenticeship-learning time, and schools don\u2019t want to spend more effort on mentoring new teachers. \u00a0But some of his other prescriptions come from his pre-existing progressive politics, rather than his (one) year of experience: \u00a0\u201cintegrate schools\u201d (we tried that \u2014 remember bussing and white flight?), spend more money on poor-performing schools, spend more money on education R&D, \u201cget teachers unions on board\u201d (that is, pay them more to get them to agree to reform), provide all kinds of therapy to troubled\/suspended kids, and, oh, by the way, \u201cend poverty.\u201d \u00a0\u201cEnd poverty,\u201d eh? \u00a0Sure, that\u2019s an easy one (\/sarc).<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no easy answer, and this book paints a woefully-incomplete picture of the problem to begin with. \u00a0Are these kids even \u201cfixable\u201d? \u00a0Is it just a matter of spending enough money, as Boland suggests (whether directly to the schools, or to their families via social welfare spending)? \u00a0At what point do kids have to take responsibility for themselves?<\/p>\n
So let me conclude with a request: \u00a0after reading the recent articles on Saudi Arabia<\/a>, I pulled out the most recent book in the library. \u00a0Who\u2019s got some recommended reading on this subject?<\/p>\n