Abandoning poor students

Punishing Teachers

I was stunned by the recent anonymous post at Wesley Yang’s Substack Taught for America about an idealistic Ivy grad who spent a disastrous two years with Teach for America in Baltimore. He is a good liberal. Did watch The Wire. Probably was a fan of The Dead Poet’s Society. Pummeled by the reality of a daily threat of violence and chaos in the classroom, he soon realizes he is a failure of a teacher at a school that is failing its students. If he isn’t beaten up, or if his students don’t attack each other, he has had a successful day. In the midst of all this, he clings to silly pedagogical exercises that are obviously not working in the midst of social breakdown in one of America’s poorest school districts that teaches mostly African American students. Learning takes a back seat to crowd control, often with his body while trying to ignore the sense of panic familiar to every teacher when you’ve lost control. His students are shut down, prone to violent confrontations with each other, their young lives marked by tragedies that place them in a psychic world of abuse and negelct no Upper Middle Class kid like the author ever inhabited.