Wonder why this book hasn’t been made into a movie?
My year of terror and abuse teaching at a NYC high schoolhttps://nypost.com/2016/01/17/my-year-of-terror-and-abuse-teaching-at-a-nyc-high-school/amp/Boland had taught English in China. This was his favored school — advertised as the last, best hope for kids who had fallen far behind — and he was thrilled to be hired. He went home to his then-boyfriend (now-husband) and celebrated over takeout pad Thai and an expensive bottle of red wine.
Two weeks in and Boland was crying in the bathroom. Kids were tossing $110 textbooks out the window. They overturned desks and stormed out of classrooms. There were seventh-grade girls with tattoos and T-shirts that read, “I’m Not Easy But We Can Negotiate.” Their self-care toggled in the extreme, from girls who gave themselves pedicures in class to kids who went days without showering.
Boland came to actively loathe most of the student body. He resented “their poverty, their ignorance, their arrogance. Everything I was hoping, at first, to change.”
A lifelong liberal, Boland began to feel uncomfortable with his thinking. “We can’t just explain away someone’s horrible behavior because they have had a tough upbringing,” he argued back. “It doesn’t do them — or us — any good.”
Boland didn’t know what to believe anymore. At the end of the school year, he quit.
