Home About Us Media Kit Subscriptions Links Forum
 
APPEARED IN:

Sep/Oct 2011View All Articles

View Flipbook

Download PDF

FAMOUS INTERVIEWS

Directories:

SCHOLARSHIPS & GRANTS

HELP WANTED

Tutors

Workshops

Events

Sections:

Books

Camps & Sports

Careers

Children’s Corner

Collected Features

Colleges

Cover Stories

Distance Learning

Editorials

Famous Interviews

Homeschooling

Medical Update

Metro Beat

Movies & Theater

Museums

Music, Art & Dance

Special Education

Spotlight On Schools

Teachers of the Month

Technology

Archives:

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

1995-2000


SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

Review of ‘As Bad as They Say? Three Decades of Teaching in The Bronx’

As Bad as They Say? Three Decades of Teaching in The Bronx
By Janet Grossbach Mayer.
Published by Fordham University Press: 2011, 166 pp

By Merri Rosenberg

As the season of graduations, retirements, moving up — and moving on — ceremonies dominate the end-of-year school calendar, it’s worth pausing to consider exactly what it means to devote one’s life to students.

Janet Grossbach Mayer, a Bronx native, who spent her high school teaching career in that beleaguered borough, offers a humanizing, poignant glimpse of some of the 14,000 students who have been part of her life.

“I saw my students as my heroes, who, despite overwhelming obstacles, were not only capable of high achievement but, more important, were also outstanding human beings,” she writes.

She offers profiles of students who’ve made a powerful impression on her through the years, like Omara (all names have been changed by the author to protect the students’ privacy), who becomes pregnant in high school, doesn’t drop out and ultimately attends college at night. Or a young woman like Ramika, who was raised on welfare, without parents, and nonetheless earns admission to SUNY New Paltz, complete with a scholarship from a generous donor. Then there’s Pedro, who had an undiscovered gift for music, and was able to attend the Manhattan School of Music.

Mayer uses these personal stories to illustrate the political. She rages against the inequities of the American educational system, especially the demands imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 that exacts performance standards from schools without providing the financial means to achieve them.  She contrasts the plight of inner city schools, like the ones where she spent her professional career, with wealthy public school districts like Scarsdale or Great Neck—not to begrudge those communities their good schools, but to ask why those successes can’t be duplicated elsewhere.

She’s frustrated that “NCLB was supposed to narrow the achievement gap in America between black and white, Hispanic and white, and the poor and more affluent…” but “ not only are we failing to narrow the achievement gap, but in our obsession with these standardized tests, covering only linguistic and logical-mathematical skills, we are grossly over-looking, neglecting and even abandoning most of the other intelligences.”

I’m sure that many classroom teachers would say a hearty “amen” to that opinion. Mayer’s ultimate message is that students, and their champions, their teachers, persevere despite politicians and policies that would seem to do everything to thwart them. #

COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE

Name:

Email:
Show email
City:
State:

 


 

 

 

Education Update, Inc.
All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2011.