For those of you who don't know (which is probably most of you, considering there are something like eighty bazillion people on this site), I'm a high school English teacher in south Florida. I've only been teaching for six years, and for all the stress and headaches, I enjoy the hell out of it. There is absolutely nothing in this world like watching the light bulb go off as a struggling student finally gets it, or when a comment or observation by a student makes you see something in a way you'd never thought of before.
But now, at this stage of my teaching career, I find myself faced with a particularly difficult decision.
For the first five years of my teaching career, I worked in a semi-suburban, semi-rural school in a small town attached to a military base. My students were extremely diverse, from a wide variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. I taught them, they taught each other, and they taught me. Probably one-third of my students were from military families and had lived all over the world; probably another third had never been more than a hundred miles from where they were born. It was an immensely gratifying experience to work with such a wide variety of kids.
Last year, my wife and I moved to a new city. When I was hired by the school district, I asked to be assigned to a diverse school, meaning that I wanted the kind of broad cross-section of students I'd had previously. (Some of you can see where this is headed.) The school district took my desire for a "diverse" school to mean a "minority-dominated" school, and assigned me to a school that was monolithic, not diverse. Fully ninety-six percent of my students were African-American; the remaining four percent were a smattering of Latino, Asian, and Caucasian kids.
And you know what? I enjoyed the hell out of teaching these kids, too. They were the forgotten, the discarded; they had gaps in their learning you could drive a mack truck through. I spent months teaching them basic grammar rather than the literature I was supposed to be focusing on. But they were focused and intelligent, and I like to think I taught them as much as they taught me.
But even though I loved teaching the kids, I hated teaching at the school. As one of the few white teachers, I was consistently subjected to subtle and not-so-subtle racism from my fellow teachers and my administrators. Parents could be even worse, screaming obscenities and racial epithets at me when their children did not pass my course. Because of the low performance of the school, I was forced to discard most of the creativity in my classroom in order to prepare the students for the FCAT -- a standardized test all Florida students have to pass in order to graduate. I would come home form work exhausted and embittered, and would often have to steel myself in the mornings in order to drag myself to work.
As the school year drew towards a close, we were told that the school would have to surplus fifteen teachers. I began looking for another job because, as the new kid, I would be the first to go. It ended up that enough teachers volunteered to transfer or go back to school, so I was offered a contract for next school year.
Here's the problem: in my search for another job, I interviewed at several different schools. And now, one has offered me a job. It's a private school, considered one of the best schools in the state. Students must be accepted into a four-year university, or they can't receive their diplomas. The seniors I'd be teaching would already be operating on a level equal to or above that of a college sophomore. The kids are highly intelligent, clever, and well-educated. Many of them come from families whose wealth and power run south Florida.
On the one hand, I know I'm making an impact in the lives of the students I know teach. However, the horrifically negative work environment makes me dread going back. On the other hand, the students I would be teaching at the private school are a teacher's dream: intelligent, well-read, respectful, and focused. However, many of them are already the children of privilege, possessing advantages most of us could only imagine.
It's a decision I have to make soon; the private school needs an answer by Friday. At the moment, though, I have no idea what I'm going to do.