“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.
