Introductions

At the ripe old age of twenty-two and three quarters, I finally have something to blog about. As a newly minted New York City Teaching Fellow (ever after, “Fellow” for short,) I’m about to be thrown into what the city of cities euphemistically dubs a “high-need” school. I’ll be expected to wrestle my way to higher test scores for my students and an incrementally smaller achievement gap for what I can only assume will be a grateful nation.

The education department at the University from which I graduated only weeks ago compares this kind of guerilla education (which will be both mine and my students’) to sending Biology majors to become doctors in small, needy towns. “You’re better than what they’ve got, but that doesn’t make you qualified,” they told me, and advised a slow and steady Master’s degree and a hefty dose of student teaching. After a single class in this department, I decided that their idea of Education - coloring posters, mostly - wasn’t my style, and stuck with my English major. And what does one do with a B.A. in English? Why, one begins a blog about one’s first year as a teacher in Brooklyn.

So stay tuned for real-life drama as No Child is Left Behind and my personal capacity for optimism and hope either expands like a delicate flower or is finally beaten out of me. (Perhaps both in the same day!)

For obvious legal reasons and in the interest of thwarting future google-happy students, my name, the name of my school, and my students’ names will not be included here or will be replaced with pseudonyms. If you know any of the above, please don’t tell. The rest, I assure you, will be better than fiction.