The Myth of the Hero Teacher
Ed Boland outside the Henry Street School for International Studies, where he taught ninth-grade history. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times
Maybe you have had the fantasy: Chuck your day job to teach in a public school in a blighted neighborhood. The money is lousy, of course, but that’s part of the fantasy — no one wants to turn around the lives of poor children just for a paycheck. Then you decide that maybe today is not the day, and go back to your life. Sound familiar?
Ed Boland went a step further. An executive at Prep for Prep, a nonprofit organization that places minority children in elite private schools, he quit to teach ninth-grade history at a low-performing public school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had seen movies like “Dangerous Minds” and “Stand and Deliver,” in which heroic teachers reach into the lives of at-risk adolescents and make a difference. Mr. Boland believed he could be one of them.
“I thought, I can do this,” he said the other day, at a coffee shop near theHenry Street School for International Studies, where he arrived as a first-year teacher in fall 2006. “I thought, I want to work on the front lines. I want to be one of those teachers that kids really like and listen to and learn from, and you can turn a kid around.”
On his fifth day, as he describes it in his new memoir, “The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School,” his students schooled him in just how wrong he was.
“On the other side of the room, someone had hurled a calculator at the blackboard,” he writes. “A group of boys were shoving one another near a new laptop. Two girls swayed in sweet unison and mouthed lyrics while sharing the earphones of a strictly forbidden iPod. Another girl was splayed over her desk, lazily reading ‘Thug Luv 2’ as if she were on a cruise.”
When he turned to the girl who had started the disruption, he found her now standing on top of her desk, “towering above me like a pro wrestler on the ropes about to pounce.” She moved her hand in an obscene gesture, then told him to perform an act that was anatomically impossible.
The class erupted in laughter.
“Man,” came the verdict that would follow Mr. Boland until year’s end, “he can’t even control the girls.”
“The Battle for Room 314” arrives in a charged atmosphere, where public education has somehow become a contentious topic. “Teachers are definitely talking about it,” said Christopher Emdin, 37, who teaches science education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the author of a forthcoming book, “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education.”
For Dr. Emdin, Mr. Boland’s book wrongly blames students for what is really a failure to train teachers, especially those working with students from backgrounds that are different from their own.
“Teaching in an urban school is a specialty, like surgery,” said Dr. Emdin, who urges teachers to see beyond the thuggish behavior of difficult students, which might be a performance that itself involves great strategy and talent.
Teaching minority students, especially from poor backgrounds, requires “a particular skill set that you can develop,” Dr. Emdin said, emphasizing that those skills take time to emerge. “But I would not have my internist performing heart surgery. And I would not have Ed Boland teach in an urban school. He’s not trained for it.”
Mr. Boland agreed with at least part of that assessment. “Of all the hours I was at graduate school, I don’t think there was all together an hour devoted to classroom management,” he said. “We were developing beautifully crafted lesson plans that no one could use. I was learning esoteric phrases about test design. I spent two semesters doing a research project. I just The Myth of the Hero Teacher - The New York Times: