don't want to do this anymore

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Home : 2004 : January : 15

don't want to do this anymore
By Sharon

I understand what you are feeling. I taught in inner city San Antonio for a year. The only thing that got me through the first few months was secretly planning to quit at Christmastime. But by Christmas I had finally developed
a relationship with my students, and it turned out to be one of the hardest and most rewarding years of my career. What didn't get much better was the administration, which was very dysfunctional. I felt that they were training the students for life in prison, with harsh treatment and authoritarian rules, which probably was fairly realistic, given that a majority of my students had

a close family member in jail already, and were starting drug and gang activity. But they were basically good kids in a very harsh environment, and the school did not in any way address the realities of their lives in a proactive way.
One thing that I did was to do a study of my students' TAAS scores looking at gains rather than overall scores (7th grade reading). This gave me reassurance that they were actually making progress, and also earned me credibility with my administrators.
It took a lot of time and effort to establish a working relationship with my students- I am white and middle class, and my students were Black and Hispanic, from the projects. I was not willing to go to "In your face" authoritarianism which was used at my school, and I don't think it would have worked in my case anyway. But it took awhile for them to learn to hear me, and for me to learn to hear them.