My Classroom From Hell

The Wall Street Journal ^ | Friday, January 24, 2003 | JOSHUA KAPLOWITZ

[TroutStalker]

It was May 2000 and, during my senior year at Yale, I turned down a job with an Al Gore pollster to teach in an inner-city school.

Five weeks later, I found myself visiting Emery Elementary in Washington, the school where I was going to teach. As the interim principal showed me around, he cautioned: "The one thing you need to do above all else is to have your children under control." Easier said than done, as I was to discover in a spectacular way.

[Verginius Rufus]

A totally fraudulent accusation nets Andre's mother $90,000, or two to three years' pay for many American schoolteachers. Just following Jesse's shining example...

[KC_for_Freedom]

White teachers that teach in mostly black schools are there because it is their first job or they have medorice teaching skills.

I have a white teacher friend who taught in an all black school because she was very liberal and felt she was needed there. She had situations like the one described and after spending her entire teaching career there (in east oakland), she told me a story about one of her kids.

He was gunned down by the police while he tried to fix a jammed gun. She said, "If I had taught him better, perhaps he would have been able to fix that gun and shoot someone." At this point she married and left the teaching profession, (and Oakland Ca) to raise her family in a bassically all whithe area. She was an outstanding teacher and the principal wanted her to stay when she tried to quit in frustration. But it was not a good experience.