My year of terror and abuse teaching at a NYC high school (Liberal Mugged by Reality)

NY Post ^ | January 17, 2016 | Maureen Callahan

[C19fan]

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 school teacher, and it’s riveting.

There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.

[C19fan]

Perfect example of why I will not call myself a libertarian. In order to live in a free society takes self-discipline, integrity, yes those old fashioned Victorian values. The concept of a moral free for all libertarians envision, for example, no problem with people's sexual decisions, is suicide for a free society. The end result is what this teacher experienced, the complete breakdown of social order and the foundation for a free society. It is stuff like this why I do not want poor people from broken homes living in my area going to my kids schools. Yes I am 100% a socioeconomic segregationist. It just takes a few of these feral kids to destroy the opportunity for the rest of us.

[miss marmelstein]

Who would give up boozing at the Yale Club for teaching some inner city thugs? I lost my rabbi there so now have to slink down to the National Arts.

[sparklite2]

” the principal hired only teachers who had once lived abroad.”

That’s nuts. This sounds like a TV show, a cross between Welcome Back Kotter and Strangers With Candy.

[oh8eleven]

My year of terror and abuse teaching at a NYC high school
Well, that sure ain't news ...

[miss marmelstein]

Very odd, indeed. Maybe he wanted people who hadn’t realized what had happened to the public school system over the last 50 years.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Who would give up boozing at the Yale Club for teaching some inner city thugs?

Someone who wanted to sell a lot of books he would write about the experience.

[umgud]

Did the school make clear the teacher was only hired to babysit? Shirley he wasn’t expected to achieve result?

[DungeonMaster]

Makes "To Sir With Love" look like the pure pap that it is. I actually thought this was a similar but different article from another teacher who tried to teach in Chicago. Both are terrible.

What's the common denominator of the kids problems? I think it's the breakdown of the family as God intended the family to be. People are just breeding stock to liberals collecting votes in that situation.

[Mouton]

Coming to a school near you and for which you are forced to pay property tax and they will not even be able to speak english.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Liberals have destroyed the black family like the KKK never could.

[miss marmelstein]

Now there’s a good reason!

[NYAmerican]

It should be quite clear to everyone that this teacher is a racist. C’mon....rich white male finally enters an inner city multi culti school of color, and immediately slams the culture of these poor disadvantaged little angels? A filthy racist.

[EinNYC]

Boland's tales are simply another iteration of those of thousands of other NYC teachers, including myself. I am daily regaled with "Suck my d___", "Shut up or I git you fired", "F___ you", and duck stuff thrown at me, shoving at times, attempts at locking me out of a classroom, etc. In one class in a high school for Hispanic immigrants in the country less than 4 years (read: illegals), one over-age senior, who already had a child, asked for the bathroom pass. I told him he'd have to wait until the current user of the pass had returned. Whereupon this guy went over to the wastebasket and very thoroughly pantomimed peeing in it, including shaking himself afterward. Then he grabbed a very willing chica slut in the room and the two of them simulated vertical sex in the middle of the classroom, the chica making sure I saw how she squeezed his buttocks like melons. Then they disengaged, having ignored my request for them to cut it out. He then went over to the chair where she sat and straddled her, pumping up and down. When done with this, he found or wrenched off a table leg and swung it around my head.

I made sure he got suspended, but I'm sure he just laughed it off.

And Mayor DeDumDum wants to remove metal detectors from schools. Has now allowed the bane of classrooms, the cell phone, to be brought into schools, so that students can spend entire class periods texting, even openly phoning people, taking pictures or recording the teacher without permission, photographing tests to text them to buddies across the room, etc. You spend more time telling students to put their phones away than teaching. DeDumDum has now also decreed that suspensions of students be virtually eliminated, so stuff like I described above can be done with IMPUNITY.

At least Boland is making money off his travails with his book. Most NYC teachers are just suffering without the fanfare, completely unassisted by a union thoroughly in cahoots with the city.

[donaldo]

This confirms the late Albert Jay Nock’s observation that some are simply not educable, trainable perhaps, but not educable.

[PROCON]

Money quote:

But there's no public policy for fixing a broken kid from a broken home, or turning fear into resilience, or saving kids who can't, or won't, be saved.

I feel blessed I grew up in a kinder, more sane era.

OMG, I sound like a liberal!

[sparklite2]

The principal would also not allow anyone to be expelled for any reason. And to add nuance to an already overloaded sideshow, Bolan is gay.

[sparklite2]

I’ll probably get it if it’s on Kindle, just for the laughs.

[Hulka]

These kids need a strong authoritarian father-figure, a male presence. . .yet we have a homosexual teaching them and further screwing up their minds.

[samtheman]

Boland ends his book with familiar suggestions ... Invest more money, recruit better teachers, retool the unions, end poverty.

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In other words, Boland proved he is as stupid as his students who cant name the continents.

Keep advocating the exact same War on Poverty programs that creates these mental mutations. And at a cost of $3 Trillion and growing.

[uncbob]

Teachers unions deserve a lot f the blame

They have supported the left wing for decades and also put up with violence in the schools as long as they got their raises