Ed Boland's new book is The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School.From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir about your year as a teacher?--Marshal Zeringue
A: What’s interesting about this book is that until I wrote the book, I had never written anything in my life. It tells you how urgently I needed to process this.
I had my very powerful experience of failure. So many people were cheering me on from the sidelines—You’re going to be a great teacher, you’re a natural—it made it all the more shameful when it didn’t work out.
For the first year I didn’t talk about it at all, except with my husband. He’s a filmmaker and artist, and said, You need to process this. You should go to a memoir group.
I did. There were all these New Yorkers, and they were as genuinely shocked as I was about what was going on. I thought I was a good liberal New Yorker, I thought I had a sense of what life was like for kids in a struggling school, but I didn’t have a clue.
I wrote the book so people would...[read on]