Bad Teacher
17th May 2016
I just read “The Battle For Room 314”, Ed Boland’s account of a year teaching at a NYC high school. Boland had been an admissions officer, done fundraising for nonprofits – but wanted to DO GOOD, and of course go broke in the process.
Such people are why ‘educators’ aren’t paid very well, despite all of the Great and Good telling us they’re the Most Important People Ever — because it doesn’t take much to be a teacher, and the market doesn’t pay a lot of what there’s an overabundance of.
The dean of the Harvard graduate school of education praises it, as does the former head of the Ford Foundation. So you know it’s a bad book. Sheesh, Boland only taught for a year, and he wasn’t particularly successful. He didn’t have great personal force, couldn’t control the kids, didn’t realize when they were lying to him. Came to hate them. But I didn’t expect to learn anything about educating kids- I wanted to see what page the educrats are on lately, just I have a green chili cheeseburger every ten years or so just to see if they’re still nasty.
I know that feeling.