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Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach for America
Only 50 percent of kids growing up in poverty will earn a high school diploma. Just one in ten will graduate college. Compelled by these troubling statistics, Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America’s most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation.
With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as “The Terrordome,” the altruistic and naïve Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program’s goals but met obstacles on all fronts. The building itself was in such poor condition that tiles fell from the ceiling at random. Kids from the halls barged into classes all day, disrupting even the most carefully planned educational activities. In the middle of one lesson, a wandering student lit her classroom door on fire. Some colleagues, instantly suspicious of TFA’s intentions, withheld their help and supplies. (“They think you’re trying to ‘save’ the children,” one teacher said.) And although high school students can be by definition resistant, in west Baltimore they threw eggs, slashed tires, and threatened teachers’ lives. Within weeks, Lanier realized that the task she was charged with—achieving quantifiable gains in her students’ learning—would require something close to a miracle.
Superbly written and timely, Teaching in the Terrordome casts an unflinching gaze on one of America’s “dropout factory” high schools. Though Teach For America often touts its most successful teacher stories, in this powerful memoir Lanier illuminates a more common experience of “Teaching For America” with thoughtful complexity, a poet’s eye, and an engaging voice. As hard as Lanier worked to become a competent teacher, she found that in “The Terrordome,” idealism wasn’t enough. To persevere, she had to rely on grit, humility, a little comedy, and a willingness to look failure in the face. As she adjusted to a chaotic school administration, crumbling facilities, burned-out colleagues, and students who perceived their school for the failure it was, she gained perspective on the true state of the crisis TFA sets out to solve. Ultimately, she discovered that contrary to her intentions, survival in the so-called Charm City was a high expectation.
With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as “The Terrordome,” the altruistic and naïve Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program’s goals but met obstacles on all fronts. The building itself was in such poor condition that tiles fell from the ceiling at random. Kids from the halls barged into classes all day, disrupting even the most carefully planned educational activities. In the middle of one lesson, a wandering student lit her classroom door on fire. Some colleagues, instantly suspicious of TFA’s intentions, withheld their help and supplies. (“They think you’re trying to ‘save’ the children,” one teacher said.) And although high school students can be by definition resistant, in west Baltimore they threw eggs, slashed tires, and threatened teachers’ lives. Within weeks, Lanier realized that the task she was charged with—achieving quantifiable gains in her students’ learning—would require something close to a miracle.
Superbly written and timely, Teaching in the Terrordome casts an unflinching gaze on one of America’s “dropout factory” high schools. Though Teach For America often touts its most successful teacher stories, in this powerful memoir Lanier illuminates a more common experience of “Teaching For America” with thoughtful complexity, a poet’s eye, and an engaging voice. As hard as Lanier worked to become a competent teacher, she found that in “The Terrordome,” idealism wasn’t enough. To persevere, she had to rely on grit, humility, a little comedy, and a willingness to look failure in the face. As she adjusted to a chaotic school administration, crumbling facilities, burned-out colleagues, and students who perceived their school for the failure it was, she gained perspective on the true state of the crisis TFA sets out to solve. Ultimately, she discovered that contrary to her intentions, survival in the so-called Charm City was a high expectation.
- GenresEducationNonfiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 20, 2012
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June 18, 2017
This is a powerful book. I have a criticism of it and I will start with that, but otherwise this is a book that demands to be read and should be forced on those who seek simple solutions to complex social problems, including the problem of our ‘failing schools’. The criticism may not actually apply to the author here – however, often the Corp members who sign up to Teach for America are not as purely altruistic as is made to seem the case here. Lanier may not have gotten anything further out of this experience than is documented here, but often (and always in Australia) those who complete this experience receive a master’s degree. As such, something more than just disinterested self-sacrifice is at work here.
Nevertheless, I want to stress that what these people are signing up for is anything but a walk in the park. And I also want to declare up front that I taught a group of Teach for Australia ‘associates’ last year. They were amazing – some of the best students I’d ever taught – they were selected from the very top students in Australia and they were seriously smart and so keen it is something else to watch them come to terms with what it means to teach. I got to observe them in classrooms and often they looked like they had been teaching for years. I became very fond of them and protective too. I want to stress all of this up front, because I’m coming to think that the various ‘Teach for’ associations often do a disservice to these keen, intelligent and caring young people. And this book documents that disservice in ways that are heartbreaking and painfully raw.
Teach for America is particularly interesting on this score – young people who have ‘succeeded’ at school are encouraged to sign up for two years to teach in the ‘hardest to staff’ schools in the country. They are given a five-week intensive ‘how to teach’ crash course – you know, crack of dawn till late at night boot camp type thing – and then they are dumped into schools that are under-resourced and populated by people likely to have multiple challenges undermining their ability to have any hope of succeeding at school. Those challenges include poverty, schools without the semblance of resources (the US doesn’t do ‘redistribution of wealth’, so the poor are pretty well left with nothing), parents in multiple jobs or with no jobs, drug and alcohol addiction, family violence, endless racial discrimination and, not least, these young people’s own ignorance of the lives and cultures of the children they are seeking to teach. A five-week training course only goes so far, and if this book is anything to go by, after this crash course this young woman was then left to crash.
The fundamental belief that is instilled in these young people is that the major factor determining success or failure at school is the availability and abilities (or lack of) of good teachers. That a good teacher can turn around any class and rush their children from being well below the national average to at or above average and that they can do this in a year or two is the founding belief here. All it takes is a willingness to achieve and some exceptional teaching – this book makes it clear that will-power alone isn’t enough to turn around America’s schools – even the will-power of nice, young, middle class successful students. It also makes it clear that Teach for America is based on a cruel hoax that too often destroys these young teachers, fills them with a sense of their own failure as being purely due to their own inadequacies, by creating unrealistic expectations of what they might achieve and therefore by creating conditions in which this failure is all the more likely.
And this makes the situation doubly tragic. It is tragic for the students in these schools who are unlikely to live up to the expectations of these nice-middle-class young people shipped into their lives. And it is tragic for the corp members who are likely to blame both themselves and their students for what is a systemic failure to which their own resources are not able to match the demands of the scale of the problems they have faced.
The real problem with this model is the belief that good teaching is something that can’t be taught (hence, putting young people in classrooms after 5 weeks of training and assuming this would just all go swimmingly) and that teaching is, instead, something that someone with enough content knowledge (these young people have all done extremely well at school) and charism (something you can’t really measure until you dump people into a classroom). Other things I’ve been reading lately have shown that this isn’t the case – that if you put people into a classroom that have done a normal teaching qualification (a year or two at university and 70 days or so in a classroom being mentored by an expert teacher) they do better and their students do better than do those who are dumped into classrooms with nothing to see them through but their own wits.
Teaching is improved when you have what is called in the trade ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ – say that you want to teach Pythagoras’s theorem, content knowledge is knowing that the length of the hypotenuse squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides. But knowing that isn’t enough to help you teach it. What you need to know so as to teach is a wide range of ways likely to make that clear to your students and to help them both understand and to want to learn. That is, it isn’t enough to just ‘know’ the content to be able to teach it, you also need to know how to make that content meaningful (in all ways) to your students or they won’t learn. And that means understanding how your students live, what they are likely to already know and understand, and what is likely to motivate them or to confuse them. Teaching might well look like the transmission of knowledge, but it happens between people, and people only exchange things (both giving and receiving) with those they trust.
These Teach for America teachers, by being given 5 weeks to learn the ‘craft’ of teaching, are likely to go into those classes with ‘hard to teach’ students – students who have been failed by the system since they started school – focused almost entirely on ‘classroom management’. This means they are likely to develop what are called ‘defensive pedagogies’ – that is, spend lots of time maintaining order, but at the cost of finding ways to allow learning situations that develop trust and engagement with their students. The author here does a wonderful job at making this clear – particularly when she is discussing her first few months on the job. She shows how she was falling into a cycle of incredibly negative strategies almost designed to ensure no learning would occur.
The lack of support she was given is breathtaking – but in a school that is grossly understaffed, this is hardly surprising.
She comes away from this experience with a series of ‘learnings’ – not least the belief that this was a worthwhile experience because if she had not been at that school it isn’t clear who else would have been. It isn’t hard to believe that you being somewhere is better than no one being there, no matter how badly things work out – although this alone would hardly have sustained me, to be honest. She also says that this deeply affecting experience will mean she will now vote in the future for those who are going to raise funding for urban schooling and so on. All of which is good – but the problem is that it isn’t clear that all Teach for America alumni took the same lessons from this experience – and often they end up employed in positions of power in the education system and that is potentially a problem as they may come away from their two years of experience believing it trumps the decades of experience of other teachers. It also means that the distain for theory that such highly ‘practical’ pathways into teaching imply can then become more the norm than already seems to be becoming the case.
This book provides a terrifying look into the American education system, particularly the system that is provided to those most in need of education. This book is powerfully written and stands as a wonderful counterpoint to the standard films of a charismatic teacher strolling into classrooms, saying ‘how do I reach these kids’ a dozen or so times until finally achieving ultimate success, perhaps teaching them all to become nuclear physicists who disprove Einstein’s general theory of relativity. There is no final redemption here, and the lovely thing about this book is that it makes it clear that for any example of success one can tell from such an experience, one could easily find at least one (or perhaps ten) counter examples of failure – if such simple binaries even make sense of such an experience. Education simply can’t fix all of society’s ills – and it certainly can’t fix those that it wasn’t the cause of in the first place.
This is a powerful book – cruel in that it takes a group of clever and idealistic young people and smashes them against the harsh realities of the USA’s hatred of poor people. This is a book about an injustice – the solution to which isn’t to be found in ‘putting better teachers into our classrooms’ but rather in giving all of the resources these children need (and not just in their classrooms) that will allow them to learn.
Nevertheless, I want to stress that what these people are signing up for is anything but a walk in the park. And I also want to declare up front that I taught a group of Teach for Australia ‘associates’ last year. They were amazing – some of the best students I’d ever taught – they were selected from the very top students in Australia and they were seriously smart and so keen it is something else to watch them come to terms with what it means to teach. I got to observe them in classrooms and often they looked like they had been teaching for years. I became very fond of them and protective too. I want to stress all of this up front, because I’m coming to think that the various ‘Teach for’ associations often do a disservice to these keen, intelligent and caring young people. And this book documents that disservice in ways that are heartbreaking and painfully raw.
Teach for America is particularly interesting on this score – young people who have ‘succeeded’ at school are encouraged to sign up for two years to teach in the ‘hardest to staff’ schools in the country. They are given a five-week intensive ‘how to teach’ crash course – you know, crack of dawn till late at night boot camp type thing – and then they are dumped into schools that are under-resourced and populated by people likely to have multiple challenges undermining their ability to have any hope of succeeding at school. Those challenges include poverty, schools without the semblance of resources (the US doesn’t do ‘redistribution of wealth’, so the poor are pretty well left with nothing), parents in multiple jobs or with no jobs, drug and alcohol addiction, family violence, endless racial discrimination and, not least, these young people’s own ignorance of the lives and cultures of the children they are seeking to teach. A five-week training course only goes so far, and if this book is anything to go by, after this crash course this young woman was then left to crash.
The fundamental belief that is instilled in these young people is that the major factor determining success or failure at school is the availability and abilities (or lack of) of good teachers. That a good teacher can turn around any class and rush their children from being well below the national average to at or above average and that they can do this in a year or two is the founding belief here. All it takes is a willingness to achieve and some exceptional teaching – this book makes it clear that will-power alone isn’t enough to turn around America’s schools – even the will-power of nice, young, middle class successful students. It also makes it clear that Teach for America is based on a cruel hoax that too often destroys these young teachers, fills them with a sense of their own failure as being purely due to their own inadequacies, by creating unrealistic expectations of what they might achieve and therefore by creating conditions in which this failure is all the more likely.
And this makes the situation doubly tragic. It is tragic for the students in these schools who are unlikely to live up to the expectations of these nice-middle-class young people shipped into their lives. And it is tragic for the corp members who are likely to blame both themselves and their students for what is a systemic failure to which their own resources are not able to match the demands of the scale of the problems they have faced.
The real problem with this model is the belief that good teaching is something that can’t be taught (hence, putting young people in classrooms after 5 weeks of training and assuming this would just all go swimmingly) and that teaching is, instead, something that someone with enough content knowledge (these young people have all done extremely well at school) and charism (something you can’t really measure until you dump people into a classroom). Other things I’ve been reading lately have shown that this isn’t the case – that if you put people into a classroom that have done a normal teaching qualification (a year or two at university and 70 days or so in a classroom being mentored by an expert teacher) they do better and their students do better than do those who are dumped into classrooms with nothing to see them through but their own wits.
Teaching is improved when you have what is called in the trade ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ – say that you want to teach Pythagoras’s theorem, content knowledge is knowing that the length of the hypotenuse squared is equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides. But knowing that isn’t enough to help you teach it. What you need to know so as to teach is a wide range of ways likely to make that clear to your students and to help them both understand and to want to learn. That is, it isn’t enough to just ‘know’ the content to be able to teach it, you also need to know how to make that content meaningful (in all ways) to your students or they won’t learn. And that means understanding how your students live, what they are likely to already know and understand, and what is likely to motivate them or to confuse them. Teaching might well look like the transmission of knowledge, but it happens between people, and people only exchange things (both giving and receiving) with those they trust.
These Teach for America teachers, by being given 5 weeks to learn the ‘craft’ of teaching, are likely to go into those classes with ‘hard to teach’ students – students who have been failed by the system since they started school – focused almost entirely on ‘classroom management’. This means they are likely to develop what are called ‘defensive pedagogies’ – that is, spend lots of time maintaining order, but at the cost of finding ways to allow learning situations that develop trust and engagement with their students. The author here does a wonderful job at making this clear – particularly when she is discussing her first few months on the job. She shows how she was falling into a cycle of incredibly negative strategies almost designed to ensure no learning would occur.
The lack of support she was given is breathtaking – but in a school that is grossly understaffed, this is hardly surprising.
She comes away from this experience with a series of ‘learnings’ – not least the belief that this was a worthwhile experience because if she had not been at that school it isn’t clear who else would have been. It isn’t hard to believe that you being somewhere is better than no one being there, no matter how badly things work out – although this alone would hardly have sustained me, to be honest. She also says that this deeply affecting experience will mean she will now vote in the future for those who are going to raise funding for urban schooling and so on. All of which is good – but the problem is that it isn’t clear that all Teach for America alumni took the same lessons from this experience – and often they end up employed in positions of power in the education system and that is potentially a problem as they may come away from their two years of experience believing it trumps the decades of experience of other teachers. It also means that the distain for theory that such highly ‘practical’ pathways into teaching imply can then become more the norm than already seems to be becoming the case.
This book provides a terrifying look into the American education system, particularly the system that is provided to those most in need of education. This book is powerfully written and stands as a wonderful counterpoint to the standard films of a charismatic teacher strolling into classrooms, saying ‘how do I reach these kids’ a dozen or so times until finally achieving ultimate success, perhaps teaching them all to become nuclear physicists who disprove Einstein’s general theory of relativity. There is no final redemption here, and the lovely thing about this book is that it makes it clear that for any example of success one can tell from such an experience, one could easily find at least one (or perhaps ten) counter examples of failure – if such simple binaries even make sense of such an experience. Education simply can’t fix all of society’s ills – and it certainly can’t fix those that it wasn’t the cause of in the first place.
This is a powerful book – cruel in that it takes a group of clever and idealistic young people and smashes them against the harsh realities of the USA’s hatred of poor people. This is a book about an injustice – the solution to which isn’t to be found in ‘putting better teachers into our classrooms’ but rather in giving all of the resources these children need (and not just in their classrooms) that will allow them to learn.
April 18, 2013
There are a lot of things Heather Kirn Lanier, a Teach For American alumna who spent two years in a failing Baltimore high school, does not know, and does not pretend to: She does not know why her brightest freshman drops out of school a year later. She does not know how to magically close the achievement gap between kids born in poverty and those born out of it. She does not know what the small percentage of incoming 9th-graders who graduate—less than a quarter, at her school—ultimately gained from their four years at the institution. She does not know why a student who sleeps through her class for the first semester suddenly connects with her and passes during summer school.
The refreshing and gracefully rendered stream of I don’t knows in this book is all the more poignant when contrasted with the things Lanier does know how to do: How to use humor to get through the shell of a tough-acting 9th-grader; how to get a classroom of freshmen with 6th-grade reading levels through Romeo and Juliet; how to write a coherent unit and lesson plans that tie together state standards, approved texts, writing samples, and engaging activities; how to navigate around an administration that seems bent on undermining its teachers, not empowering them.
Yes, she knows how to do all of these things, but still she still does not know how to perform the impossible task set before her—to do nothing less than overcome the legacy of poverty and transform students’ lives. That particular task, it turns out, requires far more than competent teaching. Lanier’s well-written, nuanced account avoids easy answers, and leaves the reader not only with a sense of how difficult and complex the intersection of education and poverty is, but also of how important it is to continue to tackle it.
The refreshing and gracefully rendered stream of I don’t knows in this book is all the more poignant when contrasted with the things Lanier does know how to do: How to use humor to get through the shell of a tough-acting 9th-grader; how to get a classroom of freshmen with 6th-grade reading levels through Romeo and Juliet; how to write a coherent unit and lesson plans that tie together state standards, approved texts, writing samples, and engaging activities; how to navigate around an administration that seems bent on undermining its teachers, not empowering them.
Yes, she knows how to do all of these things, but still she still does not know how to perform the impossible task set before her—to do nothing less than overcome the legacy of poverty and transform students’ lives. That particular task, it turns out, requires far more than competent teaching. Lanier’s well-written, nuanced account avoids easy answers, and leaves the reader not only with a sense of how difficult and complex the intersection of education and poverty is, but also of how important it is to continue to tackle it.
January 28, 2013
I'm not normally a non-fiction reader, so I was surprised at how engrossed I was in this book. That can probably be attributed to the solid, guileless writing. The prose managed to be poetic. I found myself wishing it was fiction as I read some of the passages.
The content itself was eye opening, even for one who prides themselves on being in touch with the state of the union. I was taken aback by the depths of inequality in education in this country. Sure, I know it exists, but I wasn't really aware of the daily ins and outs of it. Coming from a place where a high school diploma is pretty much a given, reading about a place where it's someone's highest wish and greatest achievement made me realize just how big of a gap there is.
It's been two days since I finished the book, and I'm still going over the issues raised and the points made. It's a lot to chew on in a good way - I wish this was a must read for a lot of people in this country. Kirn points out all the places where the system is failing, and we all have a part in how to fix it.
The content itself was eye opening, even for one who prides themselves on being in touch with the state of the union. I was taken aback by the depths of inequality in education in this country. Sure, I know it exists, but I wasn't really aware of the daily ins and outs of it. Coming from a place where a high school diploma is pretty much a given, reading about a place where it's someone's highest wish and greatest achievement made me realize just how big of a gap there is.
It's been two days since I finished the book, and I'm still going over the issues raised and the points made. It's a lot to chew on in a good way - I wish this was a must read for a lot of people in this country. Kirn points out all the places where the system is failing, and we all have a part in how to fix it.
December 14, 2012
I knew that Heather Kirn Lanier would approach this book with a poet's eye for detail and an acute sensitivity toward the massive challenge of urban education. What I did not expect was to emerge from reading this book--after reading many policy books, quick-fix recommendations, and other works of narrative nonfiction--and to feel like I had finally seen the challenge of urban schooling in an utterly new light. Kirn takes the factors we have heard about, including catastrophic lack of resources and crime-ridden neighborhoods, and makes them suddenly visible, human, and real. I think the difference is that she's present as a key lens for her story, allowing us to peer over her shoulder and truly see her classroom. This is literary nonfiction at its best. She doesn't stereotype her students, hide their troubles, or pull the heart-strings too hard with moments of "triumph" at the expense of her larger goals. She's not writing to impress the reader with the gravity of her experience--even though the experiences themselves are weighty--but to reach beyond that and to understand them. You will immediately trust her careful way with words and believe her affection for her students, yet she never aims to make herself a hero. She candidly shares her assessments of each angle of this puzzle along with the steps in her journey to becoming a teacher. She slips in just enough research to let you learn about educational approaches, but in the fashion of a true teacher, I hardly noticed because I was so enrapt in the narrative.
I so much want this book to win a huge prize and be catapulted to national attention. It is a book I want to send to Oprah. This quiet book sees what so many noisy books and speeches seem to miss. I'm teaching it next semester in my class, recommending it like crazy to my colleagues. I hope you love it.
I so much want this book to win a huge prize and be catapulted to national attention. It is a book I want to send to Oprah. This quiet book sees what so many noisy books and speeches seem to miss. I'm teaching it next semester in my class, recommending it like crazy to my colleagues. I hope you love it.
April 12, 2014
Despite the catchy title, this book didn't grab me. It seemed like my kind of book: a newly-graduated teacher does a two-year stint in an inner-city high school as part of Teach For America. But although I'm sure Heather Kirn is wonderful in person, in the book she saw herself as the Great White Hope who was willing to sacrifice a few years to to lift the spirits of troubled students before moving on to her "real" job on the other side of the tracks.
Since I was already irked with the author, the numerous spelling and grammar mistakes annoyed me more than they usually do. Halfway through the book I finally decided there were many more better books out there, and I deleted it.
Since I was already irked with the author, the numerous spelling and grammar mistakes annoyed me more than they usually do. Halfway through the book I finally decided there were many more better books out there, and I deleted it.
April 29, 2021
Whewwwww. I came to this book because I'm a former corps member, had a very bad experience... and like this author was sent to Baltimore. Unfortunately had to DNF this one; I definitely am not ready to read things about TFA just yet as a former corps member that saw quite a lot of TFA's dark side, much like this author. I cringe at how much self-righteousness is expressed in the book, and at how self-righteous a mindset I was likely in at the time. I was not your typical CM... I'm white so I was typical in that way but I'm also LGBTQIA+ and grew up quite poor. rural poor, not inner city, but poor. TFA always irritated me for saying student success is entirely teacher-based when there are so many extraneous factors as well. not the kids' fault... and not the fault of the teacher either, the way TFA espouses their CMs thinking. There were some cringey editing issues. I also felt like summer institute was underdescribed and rushed through. Then again, the author likely didn't actually remember much details because the days blended together- that happens when you're sleep-deprived. TFA is very into depriving corps members of sleep in summer institute (I remember only getting 2, so not only is 5 weeks insufficient training, but people don't think and learn well when sleep-deprived.
December 8, 2017
This book is offensive and riddled with grammatical errors. Skip it.
April 3, 2013
As a fellow teacher, I cannot help but read this book and I am so glad I did. I was scared and relieved to find many of my own experiences echoed in the author's own experiences. I teach at a disadvantaged suburban school whereas she delved into the heart of a very challenging inner city school in downtown Baltimore for a two year commitment with Teach for America. With a compelling and easy to read narrative Mrs. Lanier relates the story of her years as a high school English teacher. She has many downfalls and some minor triumphs. She conveys very clearly many issues that I and all American teachers currently face: piles of paperwork and documentation that take time away from the more important parts of teaching, evaluations that often don't tell a true story of a teacher, lack of positive feedback from inside or outside our building, etc. She also heartbreakingly describes that although she cared her heart out and maintained high standards for her students that wasn't enough and she doesn't know what the answer is to failing students and failing schools. She confronted the muddy issue of what should qualify as passing and if "trying" is a good enough standard for passing even if that student is so far behind. I found her remarks of a school culture (students, administrators, teachers, and parents) that could create failing students haunting because I have felt that as well in my experiences and neither she nor I has the solutions to any of these incredible problems. The best part of the book is her epilogue detailing her thoughts about Teach for America, the need for advocacy by teachers and Teach for America alumni, and her thoughts about the incredibly inspirational but unrealistic expectation in Hollywood movies that one good teacher can change everything.
This is an incredibly important book. It wonderfully conveys the depth and breadth of the problems currently seen in American education with an urgency and passion similar to that seen in Kozol's books on education. I hope, along with the author, that many people, especially those in positions of education policy, read the book and feel a little bit more in tune with the situation. Mrs. Lanier writes a page turning book and I was fascinated to the very last page. I highly recommend it to anyone involved in education.
This is an incredibly important book. It wonderfully conveys the depth and breadth of the problems currently seen in American education with an urgency and passion similar to that seen in Kozol's books on education. I hope, along with the author, that many people, especially those in positions of education policy, read the book and feel a little bit more in tune with the situation. Mrs. Lanier writes a page turning book and I was fascinated to the very last page. I highly recommend it to anyone involved in education.
June 19, 2014
I need to do some research on Teach for America. TFA turns college grads loose after 5 weeks of training. There is a two year commitment and additional course work on the graduate level. Wendy Knopf and Michelle Rhee are TFA alum. That makes me go I smell a Mickey Mouse. The book chronicles a teacher at an inner city Baltimore HS teaching freshman english. She makes it her two years and then says later alligator. There is no legitimate data for the efficacy of TFA; however, there is a whole bunch of data that indicates the program walks on water. I got a book about TFA from Amazon on ebooks. Am looking forward to more research. The teacher in the book did not make even a little dent in the achievement gap, which is the major premise of TFA.
January 29, 2013
Teaching In The Terrordome--Two Years in West Baltimore With Teach For America by Heather Kirn Lanier is the true story of a young teacher's first time teaching in an inner city school in Baltimore called "The Terrordome." As I read this book, I quickly learned why! I enjoyed this book very much because Heather told it as it was and pulled no punches. It is funny, sad, eye opening and real. I think the best pat is the epilogue when she tells you there is no magic wand that can fix the problem, but to her credit, she still wants to try. If you liked this kind of book about real teaching experiences, you will enjoy this one!
(Gerard's review)
(Gerard's review)
November 9, 2014
Amazing book! It shows the trials of teaching in an urban high school and explains why it will take more than just one teacher to change the landscape of urban education. I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever thought that teaching is easy. It is also an uplifting book for any teacher who has ever felt like she wasn't making a big enough difference in the lives of her students.
March 5, 2013
An excellent account of being part of Teach for America and trying to beat the odds in a falling apart and failing school. I'll remember her stories and her insights for a long time.
February 7, 2014
Not exactly a feel-good account of the inspirational-teacher-changes-lives variety. But probably more realistic.
July 10, 2014
This should be required reading for any new teacher in an urban school, TFA or otherwise.
October 8, 2014
Who knew a harbor city in the US would harbor such chaos. Must read for anyone who talks synonymously of laziness, poverty and education. A book by someone who has been in the trenches.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews