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's neediest children. "The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School" (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland's memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public-schoolteacher, and it's riveting. Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class. 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. "Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work - now!" Boland says. 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 "Thug Life 2." Chantay is the one that aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class. "Chantay," he says, louder, "sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences." The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, "she 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 .?.?. She looked me right in the eye and screamed, 'SUCK MY FUCKIN' DICK, MISTER.'?" It was Boland's first week. "I was ready to change lives as a teacher," he writes. How wrong he was. 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. "It was as if Brown v. Board of Education or desegregation had never occurred," Boland writes. 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, "I'm Not Easy But We Can Negotiate." Their self-care toggled in the extreme, from girls who gave themselves pedicures in class to kids who went days without showering. Oh, they getting real tough around here now," one student said. "Three hundred strikes, you out." Here among the kids who couldn't name continents or oceans, who scrawled, "Mr. Boland is a faggot" on chalkboards, who listed porn among their hobbies, were a few who had a shot. He asked his fellow teachers about the enigma that was Yvette. "One day in class, I intercepted a note," said a colleague, Tasneen. "It said, 'Yvette b-s old guys for a dollar under the Manhattan Bridge.' We punished the girl who wrote it for spreading lies." Soon after, the school heard from Child Protective Services. The prostitution rumor was true. Yvette was removed from her home. "She's not doing it anymore," Tasneen said, "but she'll never outrun that story "Nee-cole's mother is a HOBO," the other kids would say. "Did you get a look at her? Mama look like a homeless clown." Boland came to actively loathe most of the student body. He -resented "their poverty, their -ignorance, their arrogance. -Everything I was hoping, at first, to change." His colleagues gave him pep talks, reminded him to contextualize this behavior: These kids had no parents, or abusive, neglectful ones. Most lived in extreme poverty. School was all they had, and it was their only hope. A lifelong liberal, Boland began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. "We can't just explain away someone's horrible behavior because they have had a tough -upbringing," he argued back. "It doesn't do them - or us - any good." Then there was Jes'us Alvarez, boyfriend of Chantay and, as Boland writes, "a perfect s-?-t." Jes'us would stroll by Boland's classroom and shout, "Bolan', who you ballin'? It ain't no chick." Next, he turned his attention to Valentina, a transfer student who joined his class in February. She wore tight jeans over what Boland calls "an epic derriere," and as she walked to her seat, the kids oinked and mooed. "Step down, all y'all n-?-?-as, or I'll stab you in your neck," Valentina said. "Don't get me tight, bitches." Boland soon learned Valentina was what the Department of Education calls "a safety transfer" - meaning she was such a threat to her fellow students that she was pulled out of school. Now here she was, Boland's newest charge. He was quickly impressed with her observational skills - a bar he had set extremely low, now the victim of some inner-city form of Stockholm syndrome. Asked to write about an ancient sculpture of two royals, Valentina wrote, "Well, isn't it obvious that they are a couple? His hand is on her t-y .?.?. The way they sit is -regal." It was the use of the word -"regal" that blew Boland away. He pulled her aside after class. "You can't fool me," he told her. "I can tell from just that one sheet of paper that you have a very fine mind." For that, he received an official complaint of sexual harassment, filed by one Valentina. She claimed Boland said, "You are mighty fine, you turn me on, and I can tell you like fooling around." The entire administration knew Boland was gay, yet they still had to follow procedure. He was never to be alone with Valentina again. By the time he invited a highly decorated Iraq War veteran to speak to class and Valentina greeted him with, "Hey, mister, give me a dollar," Boland thoroughly despised her. Nor could he escape the kids outside of school. One winter day, Bolan was mounting his bicycle, on his way home, when he saw a gang fight break out in a parking lot. He saw Jes'us in the crowd, and an older man egging the kids on. "That's it, Nelson, show that punk-ass bitch who's boss. Whale his ass." It was Jes'us' father. Angry and humiliated, Boland relayed this latest heartbreak to a veteran teacher. "As crazy as sounds," the teacher said, "that -father may be trying to teach his son how to survive in a hostile -environment the only way he knows how." Boland didn't know what to -believe anymore. At the end of the school year, he quit. Link

from Liveleak.com Rss Feed - Search results for 'fail' http://ift.tt/1Rv7nfz
v

NYC rich liberal becomes 9th grade teacher and he learns to despise every single student

Uploaded by: jironde

Views:

Category: Liveleak.com Rss Feed - Search results for 'fail'

Share

Tweet