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Thursday, February 2, 2012

An Urban Teacher's Education: The Struggles of a Small School

An Urban Teacher's Education: The Struggles of a Small School:

The Struggles of a Small School

The following is part of a series I'm working on about my time teaching in New York City. This post is an edited version of two posts I wrote while in New York: "Could You Make My Job More Difficult" and "If Only We Had Fewer Resources." You can follow the series by clicking on the label "Teaching in New York" at the bottom of this post.

"I work in a small school." It's what I told myself every time I found myself stealing staples from office staplers or drawing Venn diagrams on twenty papers before class because all of the copiers were broken at my small school in the Bronx. It was sort of like, "This is why I moved to New York," which is what I said every time I talked education with a bunch of progressive educators, got tickets to see Diane Ravitch speak, visited authors' apartments for book clubs, or watched people live their lives in the Manhattan skyline at two in the morning. But one was positive, and the other often proved a hassle.

In the past few decades, much has been made of the benefits of small schools. However, new schools that need