Last Sunday, The Post featured the book “The Battle for Room 314,” Ed Boland’s account of teaching for a year at the Lower East Side’s Henry Street School of International Studies, where he said he was terrorized by his ninth-grade students. We received a number of letters from New York educators taking exception with his account. Here, a rebuttal from one of them, Thomas Martone, a teacher in Brooklyn.
After reading The Post’s feature on “The Battle for Room 314” several times, one thing became clear to me. The problem was not the students. It was the teacher.
I teach global history at a transfer school in Brooklyn. My classroom is filled with students who are parents, students without parents, students who receive free lunch, students who don’t speak English, students who are in gangs, students who are in legal trouble, students with mental disabilities, students with physical disabilities, students who are overaged, students who are under credited, students who are unable to identify the seven continents, and students on their last strike . . . the list goes on.
The students in my school are the students who have been kicked out of schools like the one Mr. Boland taught in. I teach the most challenging population there is in New York City.
It seemed as if Mr. Boland watched “Dangerous Minds” for the first time and decided to play hero to needy kids with no real classroom-management strategies at his disposal.
Upon the completion of his tenure as a teacher, it seems as if he intended to release this memoir as an obvious money grab, then sit around with his buddies and tell them stories about how he (as Matt Damon so eloquently put it in “Good Will Hunting”) “went slummin’, too, once.”
If Mr. Boland truly wanted to change the lives of his students, why throw in the towel after one year and proceed to write a book about it?
Teaching in New York City schools is definitely not for everyone. The students don’t necessarily come into the classroom before the bell rings and immediately sit at their desks. The only way to deal with students like this is to not only have a plan, but to steer into the skid when the situation seems appropriate to do so.
I have found that administering constant stimulation to the students’ senses through channels such as audio, video, art and even food keeps them engaged in the content of the classroom.
Distribution of candy could be used to help explain the wide gap between the Estates during the French Revolution. Listening to Tupac can help the students remember that Niccolò Machiavelli’s book, “The Prince,” was about how to get power and keep power by any means necessary.
I had a student who would sit in the corner of the classroom and just tear up any piece of paper he was given. Day after day, he was tearing up paper. Rather than demand he assimilate into the classroom norms and threaten “serious consequences” like Mr. Boland, I gave the student activities where he would rip out vocabulary, geographic features and social classes from one piece of paper and label them appropriately on the wall next to him.
My most difficult student started the school year doing absolutely nothing productive in my classroom. It is now January and we have cut a deal where he can listen to music on the computer in return for a packet to be completed. Sure, his work isn’t worthy of an “A,” and he might not pass the Regents, but the bottom line here is progress. Any progress within the walls of my school, or any challenging school for that matter, is valuable.
If you’re currently in college to become a teacher, these strategies I have outlined won’t be in your curriculum. Becoming a teacher isn’t about whether you had a full ride to college, or if you graduated cum laude. Managing a classroom isn’t about buzzwords like “chunking,” “Bloom’s Taxonomy” and “differentiation.” Those things are basic. You have to have the personality to be able to handle a curveball when you’re expecting a fastball and vice versa without getting upset, whining about it, screaming about it and writing negative books so you can score a few extra dollars.
Mr. Boland has done nothing with his book except fuel the negativity surrounding inner-city schools. Listen, I get it, they don’t look like you, act like you, or dress like you. It isn’t easy to accept the fact that the old days are over and some students act the way they do. That’s a deeper discussion to have another day. My job isn’t to judge, it’s to teach.
So on the behalf of all New York City teachers, stop throwing fuel on the fire. We know it’s burning, we feel the heat every day.