From 2005 until 2011 I worked as a high school English teacher in what are classified as "disadvantaged neighborhoods" in New York City. I became a teacher through the New York City Teaching Fellowship, an organization that recruited new graduates and career changers in an effort to fill the teacher shortages plaguing parts of the Big Apple that were more colloquially known as "hoods" or "ghettos."
I spent five years at a school in the Bronx and one year at another school in Queens before I moved away from New York City for good. Six years is not a long time, but the average New York City Teaching Fellow lasted a mere year or two before quitting, so my brief tenure is actually fairly respectable, all things considered.
When people discovered I worked as a teacher in New York's inner-city schools, they tended to look at me with a blend of admiration and pity. Many encouraged me to write about my experiences as a teacher. I entertained the idea from time to time, even after I had left New York because I certainly had experienced much during those six years I spent working in "ghetto schools."
For a brief time I toyed with the idea of writing a collection of essays á la Theodore Dalrymple, essays railing against the corrosive forces of social justice, the inefficient (and evil) bureaucratic workings of the Department of Education, the awfulness of progressive education, and so on. On another occasion, I considered composing a collection of short stories focusing on days in the lives of students and teachers.
In the end, I never touched pen to paper for either idea. For reasons I cannot explain, I have never felt inspired to write extensively about my experiences as an inner-city teacher, or my other teaching experiences for that matter, not even in blog posts.
And the more time passes, the less inclined I feel to do so. Though I do keep in touch with a couple of my former students from New York, my inner-city teaching years are buried in the past now. I feel no desire to revisit them creatively, and I probably never will.
In fact, this might be the only focused blog post I will ever write about the subject . . . yet even here I do not feel inspired to say anything else about it all.
Strange.
I spent five years at a school in the Bronx and one year at another school in Queens before I moved away from New York City for good. Six years is not a long time, but the average New York City Teaching Fellow lasted a mere year or two before quitting, so my brief tenure is actually fairly respectable, all things considered.
When people discovered I worked as a teacher in New York's inner-city schools, they tended to look at me with a blend of admiration and pity. Many encouraged me to write about my experiences as a teacher. I entertained the idea from time to time, even after I had left New York because I certainly had experienced much during those six years I spent working in "ghetto schools."
For a brief time I toyed with the idea of writing a collection of essays á la Theodore Dalrymple, essays railing against the corrosive forces of social justice, the inefficient (and evil) bureaucratic workings of the Department of Education, the awfulness of progressive education, and so on. On another occasion, I considered composing a collection of short stories focusing on days in the lives of students and teachers.
In the end, I never touched pen to paper for either idea. For reasons I cannot explain, I have never felt inspired to write extensively about my experiences as an inner-city teacher, or my other teaching experiences for that matter, not even in blog posts.
And the more time passes, the less inclined I feel to do so. Though I do keep in touch with a couple of my former students from New York, my inner-city teaching years are buried in the past now. I feel no desire to revisit them creatively, and I probably never will.
In fact, this might be the only focused blog post I will ever write about the subject . . . yet even here I do not feel inspired to say anything else about it all.
Strange.
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