“You tryin’ to change us?”

A few seconds into my first class ever, a student asked a question that had no answer. Then, he walked out. It was a fitting introduction to City High, inner-city education, and what would soon become the most challenging experience of my entire life. I was a 24-year-old white kid from the Midwest thrown into a Philadelphia school that had performed so poorly it was surrendered to state control. My next two years at City High were hectic, heartbreaking, and at times, hilarious. I met students whose own lives seemed more dramatic than anything you might find in the movies. There was Manny, an oversized class clown with Ivy League dreams, a city kid who liked NASCAR and got kicked out of Catholic school for carrying nun-chucks. There was Romeo, a kid who got arrested for making his own adult films, and Randy, a kid whose father was serving life in prison for shooting a police officer. And there were others too, every one of them struggling to survive in a city that would witness more than 400 homicides in a single year. I taught them all. I taught through the chaos of overworked teachers, underfunded classrooms, and educational policies that often seemed more puzzling than practical. I taught the kids who seemed to provoke every emotion possible, laughter, love, and rage, often all of them in a single period. I almost got fired. And yet, I lasted long enough to maybe – just maybe – make a slight bit of difference. My story is different than all those feel-good Freedom Writer-type films that appear in movie theaters every few years. More than anything else, it is real. For real, for real.

Nathan Frederick is a former sports reporter with more than 1,000 published bylines. His writing has won awards from the Keystone Press Association, the Pennsylvania Society of Professional Journalists, and the Associated Press Sports Editors. He currently lives and teaches in Pennsylvania. Reach him via his blog e-mail, whodeyfans.com@gmail.com