The Miseducation of Kevo: Part I, Introduction
Last year I taught in an American public school for the first time.  Last week, I began my second year as a sixth grade teacher in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.  Through a program called Teach For America I was given a classroom and duped into believing I could change the world.  Somehow I would be able to 'reach' sixty children, teach them all they had missed in seven years of substandard schooling, feel good about myself while doing it, then quit it all after two years and move on to my real professional career doing whatever the hell I truly want to do for the rest of my life.  It was a decision to procrastinate in a meaningful way – to postpone the real decision making, and to save the world by doing it.  Fuck that.  I entered a difficult career that people spend their whole lives developing while being treated like morons.  Teachers (in my school at least) often get treatment that a rat doesn't deserve.  Their opinions – not valued, their expertise – questioned, and their successes – swept under the rug or claimed by superiors.  School becomes a political place where employees vie for status and students are left to be herded from one side of the building to the other and berated by various overworked and over stressed employees.  On my fifth day of my second year as a teacher I don't know what to do.  Everyone in my world is excited, inspired, and fresh after two months away from the place they are supposed to be excited and inspired about.  I keep getting flashbacks to reality. 

 

More inspiring thoughts to come…

 

If you missed this month's earlier guest column, Dave Gray's Aviation Monthly, read it here.  We have another interesting column coming next week.