How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million [View all]

[XemaSab]

Five weeks later, I found myself steering my parents’ old Volvo off R Street and into a one-block cul-de-sac. There it was: Emery Elementary School, a 1950s-ugly building tucked behind a dead-end street—an apt metaphor, I thought, for the lives of many of the children in this almost all-black neighborhood a mile north of the U.S. Capitol in Washington. I had seen signs of inner-city blight all over the neighborhood, from the grown men who skulked in the afternoon streets to the bulletproof glass that sealed off the cashier at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. This was the “other half” of Washington, the part of the city I had missed during my grade-school field trips to the Smithsonian and my two summers as a Capitol Hill intern.

I parked the car and bounded into the main office to say hi to Mr. Bledsoe, the interim principal who had hired me a few weeks before. As he showed me around the clean but bare halls, my head filled with visions of my students happily painting imaginative murals under my artistic direction. I peered through windows into classrooms, where students were bent over their desks, quietly filling out worksheets. I smiled to myself as I imagined the creative lessons I would give to these children, who had never had a dynamic young teacher to get them excited about scholarship the way I knew I could. Their minds were like kindling, I reflected; all they needed was a spark to ignite a love of learning that would lift them above the drugs, violence, and poverty. The spark, I hoped, would be me.

As the tour ended and I was about to leave, Mr. Bledsoe pulled me aside. “The one thing you need to do above all else is to have your children under control. Once you have done that, you’ll be fine.”

Fine. But as I learned to my great cost, that was easier said than done.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_1_how_i_joined.html