Current/Recent Reading List

21 May 2007

Reason #2: The Mansion on the Hill

(With apologies to Hank and Bruce)
I had an English professor in undergrad who loved - LOVED - to reference the moment Clyde Griffiths, from the torturous An American Tragedy, walks into the lobby of a high class Kansas City Hotel and forever falls in love with all that money can buy.

Well, I hope I come to a better end than Clyde, but after working for five years in a cramped fifty-year old building that is replete with immortal ant colonies, equipped with one computer lab that is impossible to schedule much time in, serviced by a severely undermanned janitorial staff, and air-controlled by boiler heat and window unit a/c, it was impossible for me not to feel the allure of a clean, equipped, orderly, and comfortable school house. Who wouldn't feel it?

There is a measure of guilt here. Don't the poorer kids where I've been teaching deserve the same facilities and opportunities? Without question they do, and in a transcendentally just world they would get it. But we don't live in that world, and I can't resist getting excited about the more spacious rooms, the plentiful LCD projectors, and just the relative sheen of it all. (And this isn't even the spankiest school building in the county).

I appreciate you (we) taxpayers, I promise.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's OK. Judge Howard Manning has decided to take the money away from the nice school to which you're moving and give it to the poor school from which you're going.

My prediction? No effect. Even the best school can rarely make up for a poor home environment.

School Master P said...

Judge Manning is on quite the roll lately, ain't he?

I would agree about home life, which is by far the #1 predictor of success in school (at least that is what my anecdotal research indicates)