Instead of teaching my students that the system is rigged against people of color, I told then they were architects of their own destiny.
Far from the deadbeats I expected to encounter at the Washington Heights high school where I taught English, my colleagues were dedicated, passionate and hard-working. They were also unabashedly leftist. The teachers' lounge was an echo chamber of adoration for Michael Moore documentaries, diatribes about America's hunger for war—accompanied by the refrain"Bush lied, people died" repeated—and promises to move to Canada. I suspected that this ideology seeped into the classroom.
In the Herculean effort to prepare students for college, work and life, I believe there is no room for the unchallenged belief that our country is irreparably broken and the system is rigged against people of color. Especially in the school where I taught, where the student population was mostly Hispanic and African-American.
Florina Rodov with some of her students at their graduation. Rodov worked as an English teacher in a New York school between 2005 and 2009.
Two of my students played George and Emily when we read the play aloud, then students wrote heartfelt stories set in towns of their choosing that incorporated the play's universal themes of family, love, sacrifice and mortality, which we published in an anthology.Florina Rodov
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