About Me

First, the vitals: black male, 30 years old, born, raised, and educated in Maryland and Washington, D.C., married with no children, and generally happy. I’ve never been one to keep a journal/diary/blog of any sort—I’m far too lazy and unimportant for that. I never thought I had much to say that would be interesting enough for others to read about, and my insignificant private thoughts and observations were safely stored away in my head, where they rightfully belonged. Then I became an activist disguised as a teacher, and suddenly things changed.

I started this teaching journey a few months after finishing law school (with no legal job offers in hand despite applying to over 150 jobs) back in 2008. What started out as a substitute teaching gig at a progressive and inspiring law-themed charter school in the poorest section of Washington, D.C. quickly turned into a permanent position teaching special education to 11th and 12th graders. That challenging but rewarding experience led me to apply for, and get accepted into, an alternative teacher certification program in Prince George’s County, MD, which landed me where I am now, finishing my second year teaching English to 10th graders at an under-served, comprehensive high school close to home.

Now let me back up for a moment. Let me admit that I have always wanted to be a teacher. My first major in college was Music Education, followed by English Education, which I eventually cut down to plain old English. I always knew that teaching was more important than just about any other job—and I also suspected that I would be good at it and really enjoy it—but I didn’t have the guts to really commit to such an “average” job. I had always imagined my future with beautiful cars (!), an impressive home with a deep front lawn in a leafy neighborhood, a pampered wife with the option to stay at home if she wanted to, the finest goods and services, and extra money to write checks for all of my close relatives if they needed me to—kind of like Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show, or Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Being a teacher—a middle class profession if ever there was one—just didn’t seem to fit with that vision. Besides, I had enough brains, curiosity, and a solid enough academic foundation to pursue just about any career I wanted, so why settle for a job that would resign me to be financially “average” forever? These ideas are part of the reason why I ended up in law school.

In my law school application essay, I wrote something eloquent about social responsibility and social engineering, and I really believed at the time that law school would afford me the best chance of combining my talents (reading/writing/critical thinking), with my desire to do socially responsible work and make a good living, too. I imagined myself “providing a voice for those who don’t have one” or something similarly idealistic. Unfortunately, no one tells you going in that the legal jobs that people like me would actually want don’t pay much money (unless you’re from a very elite law school and extremely lucky). They also don’t talk much about the huge debt you will have to manage upon graduation, which prevents most of us from taking the low-paying public service jobs we might have otherwise pursued. For us average law students from average law schools, the only way we might make big money is to be an unusually entrepreneurial plaintiff’s lawyer, work for big business clients at a large firm, or do a very large volume of really boring work that has little to do with “social engineering” (insurance company defense, anyone?). Since this blog is about teaching, I won’t dwell too much on law school, other than to say that it simultaneously beat me down and built me up in ways that I could never have predicted—and that the only class I truly loved was Education Law (go figure). Oh, and I’m in a lot of debt. A lot.

So how did I end up teaching? Honestly, I ended up teaching because I always wanted to, because it practically fell into my lap, and because my then-girlfriend and now-wife encouraged me to give it a serious try. She made me aware that I always talked about it (which I hadn’t realized), and she let me know that she was more in love with me than she was with my identity as a powerful, highly-paid lawyer. I had also decided by then that the battle for justice and equality is better fought in the classroom than in the courtroom, because the disadvantaged minorities (particularly blacks) that I imagined working for were usually on the wrong side of the opportunity curve by the time they needed a lawyer. So, with this newfound encouragement and conviction, I decided to jump directly into urban education, focusing on predominantly black schools, in order to gain firsthand exposure to the contributors and solutions to the much-hyped “achievement gap” between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian counterparts. (For the record, I made this decision before school reform became the hot topic that it is today in the wake of films like Waiting for Superman!) I figured that closing the achievement gap is the last major civil rights struggle for blacks, and I see myself as a civil rights activist as well as a teacher.

One day I may take what I have learned in the classroom and use my legal credentials to change the face of education from a policy standpoint. In the meantime, I am a teacher. And I have a lot to say.