Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire My year of terror and abuse teaching at a NYC high school

This shows that the problem with the Ghetto Gangster culture is within it's members. It's not caused by discrimination or poor schools or poverty.

The Battle for Room 314

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-schoolteacher, 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.

The book is certain to be controversial. There’s something dilettante-ish, if not cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a book deal.

What Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.

Names and identifying details have been changed, but the school Boland calls Union Street is, according to clues and public records, the Henry Street School of International Studies on the Lower East Side.

Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.

A teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and ignored.

“Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work — now!” Boland says.

A calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing along. Another girl is immersed in a book called “Thug Life 2.”

Chantay is the one that aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class.

“Chantay,” he says, louder, “sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”

The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, “she laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it . . . She looked me right in the eye and screamed, ‘SUCK MY F–KIN’ D–K, MISTER.’ ”

It was Boland’s first week.

Prob'ly weren't an honors class...

What did he think was gonna happen? If you raise your kids to act like animals they will act like animals. How come jihad crazed goat [bleep] don't blow up places like that? That would be a public service.

I cannot understand why every attempt is made to blame everything but the real problems. Being poor or a minority is irrelevant. Being rude, disrespectful, violent,vulgar and not doing any schoolwork are the problens. Why are we not allowed to say that?

You need to think about this issue for a bit. When I have discussions with liberals they always blame the schools for the failings of Blacks to succeed. The book and article exposes that lie and should be good for the country if enough people read them.

And there in lies the problem. Liberals think that they can change the nature of these thugs whether they are felons in prison or the Ayatollahs in Iran - with kind thoughts and rainbows of happiness.

You put rabid animals down.

WHAT? THE SCHOOLS AREN'T TOTALLY TO BLAME FOR EVERYTHING WRONG IN THIS COUNTRY?

Naw, couldn't be. Schools are totally commie. Book must be bogus.

If one of them gets shot by a white cop or armed white citizen in the act of committing a violent felony against them, the press will report that he or she was indeed an honor student.

Filth.

I wonder how NYC schools have changed in the last 30 years? Wouldn't surprise me if this has been the norm in certain schools for a while.

I haven't been in a high school since I graduated 34 years ago and this Saturday I helped do some judging for a Robotics competition in our local one. The kids were not all high-school they were all 9-14 years old and they trended toward the younger side. We did the robot judging (as opposed to the 2 other judging categories) in the schools shop classes. Yes, classes. they had multiple shops that were in great shape and well equipped. One of the other judges was a teacher there and he said that the school put great emphasis on practical skills and the kids loved it. We also visited the tech lab shop that had a very high-end 3D printer and CAD/CAM computers and printers. I was pretty impressed with the facilities.

I don't have much interaction with kids 9-14 in my life and these kids were equally impressive. All races and ethnicity were represented in teams up to 10 kids and they ranged from school sponsored teams to kids that put a team together in their neighborhoods. There was clearly a wide variety of income levels represented too. There were 30 teams and the kids were enthusiastic and respectful and smart. I was impressed and left with some hope for the future.

t's easy with the news to write off a generation. I'm not ready to do that.

The problem is school administrators that don't want to deal with problem students or especially, their parents.

The girl in the story should have been kicked out and held out until she learned to behave. Let her parents deal with her.

I fixed it for you.

We do have issues with some liberal bs at school but some local business have lent a hand.
Some of these kids will make a difference.

http://www.metalsinmotion.org/robobots.php

Welcome to my World

...and it ain't just Robotics where what you said applies.

And I think you can understand how I can be so totally awed by their parents.

Citizens for Responsible Tazer Use in the Classroom.

This is probably not the average NYC public school.



It seems to be a union laboratory school for mostly non-white students, set up on what looks like, in practical terms, a pass / (almost impossible to) fail system designed to graduate SJWs.

apparently some suffer from gender identity issues as well:

Kudos to Ed Boland, and I hope he makes a fortune on the book.

I'm not really sure I'm interested in reading it, it'd be like reading about work. All teachers everywhere have the exact same stories, only the colors of the faces and the accents change.

Nationwide there has to be a couple of hundred thousand of us who teach in big-city lower-income schools. If you are beyond second-generation poor in America there's prob'ly a reason for that and it ain't due to racism or discrimination. 90% of kids at least reflect how they were raised.

The only thing I would question about Mr Boland's book is those of us who teach every year, including myself, are suspicious of those who put but a single year in and then quit.

Birdwatcher

Exactly. The problem is that the charge of racism would immediately be hurled (and supported by the MSM) against the administrator if he were to expel all students whose behavior was chronically inconsistent with an orderly and disciplined classroom. That's because the majority of blacks would suddenly be gone, while most whites would still be in school. The "social justice warriors" would be all over that as a "clear case of racism," and the administrator would be fired for same.

You have to be mindful that Boland is an example of a liberal do-gooder who THOUGHT he could "make a difference" and got bitchslapped by the reality. Nurses,Cops and a few other fields have a way of doing that to liberal thinking folks. We had a Mex-American Lady Cop who was VERY liberal when she came on the job. THEN the ghetto rats gave her a very sharp primary education and she became their worst nightmare. She was/is still my friend and was/is a Helluva good Cop.