I Was a Naive Urban Teacher

This essay appears in The Atlantic.

“My parents emigrated from Russia with a mere hundred dollars between them. Some days my dad couldn’t afford the bus, so he trudged 20 miles to and from his job scrubbing toilets at NYU, his calluses oozing,” I told my wide-eyed high school freshmen — mostly Dominican, all low-income — on my first day as a New York City Teaching Fellow in Washington Heights. “But the hard work paid off. My dad became a businessman and my mom became a doctor. They bought a house on Long Island and sent me to Columbia University.”

I aspired to be like the inspirational movie teachers — lyrical Robin Williams inDead Poets Society, standing on his desk and encouraging students to seize the day; tough army captain Michelle Pfeiffer pronouncing, in Dangerous Minds, “There are no victims in this classroom!”; bleeding-heart Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers, wisely telling a student, “To get respect, you have to give it.”

“You’re going to graduate from high school and go to college — a great college — and become whatever you want to be!” I told my new students. And then, surveying the rapt faces, I added, “What you’re not going to do is drop out, sell drugs, or get pregnant.”

The temperature in the room dropped. Countenances fell. Whispers rose.

Beside me stood a girl I’ll call Milagros — 14 years old and chubby-cheeked — her belly swollen with the weight of a pregnancy in its sixth month. (All names of teachers, students, and administrators have been changed for this story.) Shuffling her feet, she whispered, “Miss, can I go to the bathroom?”

I nodded, incapable for the moment of uttering another word.

Read the rest at The Atlantic.