A to B: Why I Got into Education - A Way In

Like my father and his father, I am a teacher, but teaching was never something I imagined I would end up doing. While it was an esteemed profession for my grandfather and an acceptable one for my father, for me, teaching was never the important work that dreams were made of. I began my time as a Teach For America (TFA) corps member in New Orleans thinking I could do this work for two years while I decided what I really wanted to do with my life. Teaching was good service. It would look good on the resume. But it was not the stuff of dreams.

Yet no words or pictures could have prepared me for the extreme racial segregation of the schools and the poverty and hopelessness I found in New Orleans. It was determined by the TFA staff that I would become a teacher in one of the poorest performing schools in the poorest performing district in a state consistently at the bottom of any ranking of state educational quality in the United States. And I, a newly minted bachelor of science in environmental studies and biology, would teach high school English. But this arrangement was temporary, so, with little time to think, I jumped in.

One afternoon that first December, a grandmother of one of my 10th-graders stopped by at the end of the day to talk about her granddaughter's absences. We sat together on the school steps and talked about make-up work. Mid-sentence, she stopped. When she spoke again, her words came louder and faster. She started going on about how great it was that a white girl like me would come down South to try to put some sense in the heads of these poor ignorant black kids. Surprised, I tripped over my explanations: That's not what I was doing. ... That's not who these kids are. ... education ... it's ... I had no good answer for her, and she wouldn't have my stuttering. No, she insisted, clinging to her characterization of me and of my students, I was doing good work, and I would show these kids how what they knew was not going to get them anywhere. I didn't understand what she was saying. I certainly had no response.

But as I walked up the crumbling concrete steps back into the school after our conversation, stepping over crushed milk cartons and candy wrappers, some understanding of her words started to take hold. Months after coming into a school with broken windows patched by cardboard and too few desks for too many students, I understood that my student's grandmother saw this place as a way out, and she saw me holding some portion of her granddaughter's future in my hands. In all my stumbling as a new teacher, I was not the only one chasing dreams.

My father came to teaching to pay the bills. He clung to his graduate school texts and animal traps as if they contained his dream of becoming a wildlife biologist who studied coyotes in the Adirondacks and wolves in Montana. Instead, he left graduate school and took a position, temporarily, as a teacher after my older brother was born, and has stayed now for 39 years. The profession, for him, cannot be separated from a narrative of unrealized dreams. While he is a capable and well-loved teacher, he has never spoken of teaching with anything approaching the passion with which he speaks about shifting coyote populations and global climate change. He understood my decision to join TFA as something temporary, as he understood his own decision to teach. It was a job.

My father's books and traps filled an entire room of our western New York farmhouse. And my mother, who would have, somehow, changed the American food system, had dreams likewise subverted. The boxes of pamphlets and the Rolodexes of contacts filled corners, the props of her many failed attempts at self-employment. Our family of seven moved together through their possessions and memories.

The weight of their unrealized dreams could have taught me hopelessness. Instead, I had a way out from under that weight: I went to school. The calm routines soothed me. School became a refuge where I learned that the world was mine and that I could dream my own dreams. The ideals of my parents' lives became less relevant as I was shown that life decisions rest on a process of careful decisionmaking. You make a chart, even: The good that will come from a decision on one side, the bad on the other. You balance the two carefully and you decide, assured that the choice you make is the right one because you have the evidence of your chart to support it.

Which is why the hopelessness of New Orleans shocked me. I do not mean that I had never heard of inequality or that I was unschooled in the Teach For America rhetoric of closing the achievement gap. I knew it so well that I could recite it in my sleep -- which was likely part of the problem. I learned the talking points and the statistics, but I saw them as something else to discuss, to write about. Never something that I understood.

Only very slowly did I begin to see what my students were really up against. I thought I knew what it meant to have less. But their school was not the refuge from hopelessness that my own school had been. While this immersion into the harsh realities of inequality was little more than a stopover for me, it was life for this grandmother, for her grandchild, for so many people that were not born white and middle class, born with the questionable luxury of being ignorant of the structural inequalities that are reality for so many people in our country. This grandmother saw education as a way out and I, as both a teacher and an unwitting representative of the dominant culture, was to provide that way out.

So I left New Orleans eight years ago like I left other difficult situations before it and after it: I panicked. I panicked at my lack of preparation, at the hopelessness of the situation I found myself in. I opened the next doors: I went to graduate school. I worked for a government agency. I traveled. But my conversation sitting on those steps that day in New Orleans altered my understanding of the world in ways that were slow to take root. Like my father, I can no longer separate the teaching profession from the narrative of unrealized dreams. Indeed, I cannot separate schools themselves from that narrative. I have come to understand that the very function of schools is dreaming, but I know now that it is not just my dreams on the line. As my students prepare for unknown futures, I participate in countless narratives of unrealized dreams.

My greatest hope now is that I will become a competent and, someday, excellent teacher of English, and that my students will leave my classroom better equipped for the world than when they came in. I want them to be better readers, stronger writers, critical thinkers. Really, though, I want them to see life as full of opportunity. This is the important work that I have been waiting for. Maybe dreams don't have to be realized to be right. Maybe there isn't, exactly, a way out. Whatever the case, I think that teaching is my way in.

– While she was at the Ed School Roanne Bosch, Ed.M.'08, worked in an urban school in Boston that was similar to the one in New Orleans: The paint was peeling and the textbooks had seen better days. Today she teaches freshman English at Lexington High School, just outside of Boston.

Illustration: Jeff Hopkins, Ed.M.'05