Count Down

      A 34 year career of teaching English—31 spent in some of New York City’s most disrespected schools—is comprised of…what?  What picture pops into your mind when you think of spending a score of years walking into classrooms at Evander Childs H.S. in the Bronx (named one of the 12 most violent public schools in New York) or a decade in JHS 117 in notorious district 9 during the burned out years?  What do you imagine it was like for a skinny, 23 year old, Italian-American product of Catholic schools to walk into Haaren H.S. in 1972 down in Hell's Kitchen (a school that was so bad it would be closed before the 80s arrived)?

      If you picture a long, slow, grinding torture with surly kids, cynical teachers, incompetent administrators, disinterested parents and hostile communities, you’d be right—about 1/34^th of the time.  I estimate that approximately 180 of my teaching days were the stuff of nightmare, about 150 students were hard-down bad’ns, 20 teachers were burned-out and/or cruel, and six administrators were stupid and/or vicious.

     Early in my career, I spent a lot of quality time thinking about leaving the profession.  I savored the thought of taking one insult too many from a kid or supervisor, giving a little shrug, turning on my heel and sauntering out of the building with never a glance back.  After all, I was a smart guy.  I knew people in advertising.  I could probably sell wart remover with the best of them!  It was a soothing fantasy; it was warm milk before bed; it was an afternoon at the beach; it was a smile from a pretty girl.

     Then something strange happened; gradually, just as my experience began to grow, the kids got better!  At least enough of them did to keep me in the business.  Oddly enough, at the same time, my older colleagues were spending a lot of time complaining about how much worse these same kids were than the intelligent, hard-working, respectful students of yore.  As I happened to have been a student back in those days and knew for a fact what rotters we all were, this confused me.  Although this nostalgia for the old days and the old students was a constant of teacher room conversation throughout my career, I had just the opposite experience.  On the whole, the students continued to improve in how they acted in my class and the kind and amount of work they were able to do right through to my last year of secondary school teaching.

     By the end, there were 6,000 days when it was a joy to enter the classroom.  I enjoyed at least 30,000 classes, working and learning with young people who wanted the same things all young people want—to have fun, experiment, discover themselves, push their boundaries, escape the embarrassment of ignorance, be respected, challenged, disciplined and loved.

     It’s been a career of adventure, with all that the word implies: uncertainty, discovery, sudden threat, startling beauty, unexpected twists and the possibility that there won’t be a happy ending.  It also implies that the adventurer will need to learn from more experienced guides, will have to innovate on the fly, and, every single day, will be made very aware of being alive.

     Of course, I was the guide on this adventure, not the client.  I expected my talent, knowledge and ability would be respected and valued and I expected to be paid for my time.  That this attitude was not universally shared was brought home to me in a thousand ways, perhaps best illustrated by the time I was walking from the subway to City Hall to participate in a rally for a long overdue contract.  As I passed a slow-moving white-haired woman, who was obviously bothered by the crowd, she clutched my arm and asked where everybody was going.  When I told her, she grunted, “More money!  With the kind of crap you people are putting out on the street, they should be paying you less money.” 

     That’s New York.  Everybody’s got an opinion and, whether you’ve asked for it or not, you’re going to hear it.  

     For this blog, the point of view is one that is conspicuously missing from the public debate on education; that of a life-long teacher—one of the people who has had to make it happen in the classroom—one of the people who knows that we teach the students who walk in the door, no matter what their backgrounds, attitudes, readiness, social skills, quickness of mind, stability of home or pleasantness of personality.

     Education policies are predicated on hypothetical children; I taught the real ones.  They had names and bodies, lives and experiences.  Here’s a glimpse of the last 90 days of my career and those who peopled them.