are all familiar with the bracing “hero teacher” book or movie. A plucky, young (inevitably white) teacher ends up in a tough inner-city classroom filled with “those kids” – the ones that both school and society have written off as unteachable – and succeeds against all odds, through grit and compassion, embarrassing in the process those who run “the system.” Ed Boland’s “The Battle for Room 314” is the dark opposite. It’s a clear-eyed chronicle of first-year teaching failure at a difficult New York City high school, vividly written and wincingly frank.
Reading the book brought back a flood of memories of my own not dissimilar struggles as a new teacher at a low-performing public school in the South Bronx. Like Boland, I had my share of defiant and difficult students. If I’d been teaching high school, not elementary school, I likely would have made the same decision he did: to abandon ship and return to my previous career after one year, shell-shocked and defeated.
Via Joanne Jacobs.