{"id":85706,"date":"2016-01-18T16:35:43","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T00:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=85706"},"modified":"2016-01-18T16:35:43","modified_gmt":"2016-01-19T00:35:43","slug":"my-year-of-terror-and-abuse-teaching-at-a-nyc-high-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=85706","title":{"rendered":"My Year of Terror and Abuse Teaching at a NYC High School"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maureen Callahan, New York Post, January 17, 2016<\/a><\/p>\n

In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city\u2019s neediest children.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School\u201d (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland\u2019s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public school teacher, and it\u2019s riveting.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing dry or academic here. It\u2019s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.<\/p>\n

The book is certain to be controversial. There\u2019s something dilettante-ish, if not cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a book deal.<\/p>\n

What Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.<\/p>\n

Names and identifying details have been changed, but the school Boland calls Union Street is, according to clues and public records, the Henry Street School of International Studies on the Lower East Side. [Editor\u2019s Note: The school is 54 percent Hispanic, 29 percent black, 14 percent Asian, and 2 percent white.]<\/p>\n

Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.<\/p>\n

A teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and ignored.<\/p>\n

\u201cChantay, sit in your seat and get to work\u2013now!\u201d Boland says.<\/p>\n

A calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing along. Another girl is immersed in a book called \u201cThug Life 2.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chantay is the one who aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class.<\/p>\n

\u201cChantay,\u201d he says, louder, \u201csit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, \u201cshe laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it .\u2009.\u2009. She looked me right in the eye and screamed, \u2018SUCK MY F\u2013KIN\u2019 D\u2013K, MISTER.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Boland\u2019s first week.<\/p>\n

At the time, Boland\u2019s new school was considered a bold experiment\u2013not a charter but an \u201cautonomous\u201d one, given freedom in both management and curriculum. It was endowed in part by the Gates Foundation, and the principal hired only teachers who had once lived abroad.<\/p>\n

Boland had taught English in China. This was his favored school\u2013advertised as the last, best hope for kids who had fallen far behind\u2013and he was thrilled to be hired. He went home to his then-boyfriend (now-husband) and celebrated over takeout pad Thai and an expensive bottle of red wine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was ready to change lives as a teacher,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

How wrong he was.<\/p>\n

There were 30 kids in his ninth-grade class, some as old as 17. One student, Jamal, was living in a homeless shelter with his mother; most of the other students lived in public housing. There was one white kid in the whole school.<\/p>\n

{snip}<\/p>\n

Two weeks in and Boland was crying in the bathroom. Kids were tossing $110 textbooks out the window. They overturned desks and stormed out of classrooms. There were seventh-grade girls with tattoos and T-shirts that read, \u201cI\u2019m Not Easy But We Can Negotiate.\u201d {snip}<\/p>\n

{snip}<\/p>\n

Here among the kids who couldn\u2019t name continents or oceans, who scrawled, \u201cMr. Boland is a f*****t\u201d on chalkboards, who listed porn among their hobbies, were a few who had a shot.<\/p>\n

There was Nee-cole, who wore thick glasses and pigtails. She was quiet, smart, much more childlike than her peers, and Boland felt for her. He was also intrigued by a tough girl named Yvette, who showed flashes of insight and intelligence yet did all she could to hide it. \u201cPLEASE DON\u2019T TELL ANYONE I WROTE THIS,\u201d she scrawled on one report.<\/p>\n

{snip}<\/p>\n

Boland came to actively loathe most of the student body. He \u00adresented \u201ctheir poverty, their \u00adignorance, their arrogance. \u00adEverything I was hoping, at first, to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

{snip}<\/p>\n

A lifelong liberal, Boland began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. \u201cWe can\u2019t just explain away someone\u2019s horrible behavior because they have had a tough \u00adupbringing,\u201d he argued back. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t do them\u2013or us\u2013any good.\u201d<\/p>\n

{snip}<\/p>\n

Boland didn\u2019t know what to \u00adbelieve anymore. At the end of the school year, he quit.<\/p>\n

Boland ends his book with familiar suggestions for \u00adreform: Invest more money, recruit better teachers, retool the unions, end poverty. But there\u2019s no public policy for fixing a broken kid from a broken home, or turning fear into resilience, or saving kids who can\u2019t, or won\u2019t, be saved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maureen Callahan, New York Post, January 17, 2016 In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blacks","category-education"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85707,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85706\/revisions\/85707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}