Blog

I don’t actually know the future of teaching. I left the classroom for good after 2009 and started my own company. I left because the huge high school where I taught was where ideas went to die. Every grant I applied for and received; a poet in the classroom, a digital storytelling week in Washington DC using the National Museum for our visuals, organizing Poetry Out Loud events resulting in a student going to Springfield to recite her poem, a special class to study the short story at the University of Chicago, a weekend seminar on Mark Twain and the final insult, the theft of my proposal for a writing center supported by Northwestern writing tutors and the head of the Northwestern Writing Center was greeted with indifference and in the case of the Writing Center, betrayal.

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Recently, I became interested in the idea of grief as an inheritance. I am a second generation Irish American, whose father, because of the Great Depression, was left in an orphanage for a year at age six, whose grandfather, whom I never met was described to me, or at least as I can remember through the mysterious prism of childhood, as dying in an alley. He was an alcoholic, his charm reported to be boundless but whose thirst killed him alone and penniless. My father was a brilliant, funny, loving man whose personality was transformed when he drank to excess into a violent, angry, and cruel man. He suffered deep guilt but did not stop drinking and that was our family’s shadow.

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This was the headline in the New York Times: Rate of Killings Rises 38 Percent in Chicago in 2012. My son had just graduated from one of the selective high schools in Chicago and my main thought was, “Get him away from this city.” He had had a largely idyllic childhood in Chicago Public Schools but there was a concrete sense that Chicago was entering the summer in a dangerous state, gangs, guns and random shootings. The history of education in this country included this court ruling, “In 1954, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. "Racially segregated schools," the Court concluded, are "inherently unequal." The Court found support for its decision in studies that indicated that minority students learn better in racially mixed classrooms.”

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