Time for the biennial update!

I'm at the beginning of my second year in a wonderful charter school (which is hilarious if you scroll down 3 or 4 posts to my anti-charter screed).  It's been an amazing experience overall, and it has completely flipped my opinion about public vs. charter.  New stance: charters that do it well are the way to go.  Bad charters are just as bad as bad public school, and Lord knows there are lots of bad charters.  But I'm really fortunate to work for a very thoughtful, supportive, well-planned-out school.  It's in the South Bronx, but I'm not exaggerating when I say I would actually send my own child there.

The craziest thing about my school is definitely the kids' home lives.  Last year wasn't quite as intense, but this year most of my kids live in housing projects, and the ones who don't live in pretty terrible apartments and neighborhoods anyway.  I don't think I have a single two-parent family (although lots of moms with boyfriends).  Many of the parents are great, hard-working, and do everything they can to provide the best life possible for their kids.  But then many of them are just hot messes.  We do home visits at the start of the year, and a lot of my kids live in places I couldn't stand to be in for more than a few minutes.  That sounds really snobby, but I swear it's not a project thing.  A few of the kids in projects have lovely families and lovely homes (once you get out of the hallways, yikes!)  It's a chaos thing instead.  Some of the families have a lot of kids, no boundaries, and limited hygiene.  It's intense.  It makes me feel really anxious to be in homes like that, where there are multiple babies crying, and it's dark and dingy and scary.  Home visits are a pain in the ass, but also wonderful because it forces me to develop a degree of empathy and understanding I wouldn't otherwise have.

 I don't mean to be so judgmental.  I think it must be so overwhelming to face the challenges that poverty presents.  There are so many things I take for granted, like having enough money for food and transportation.  It just makes me so sad when things happen like a student has a horrible stomach ache because all she had for breakfast was soda, or one of my students never does her homework and her mom can't support her because she's illiterate.  It's pretty amazing that most of these kids come to school excited about learning.  It actually blows me away.  In a twisted way, maybe this will be an advantage later in life?  If they do make it to college and end up getting white collar jobs, all the adversity they faced as children will make everything feel so cushy later on!