West side (teaching) story

Truman Capote famously said of Jack Kerouac’s work, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Capote at his bitchiest, perhaps, but I think he was at least partly correct. And, regarding education, I would add: If you’re not meeting your students halfway, that’s not teaching, that’s talking. I learned this first and best from my students on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

When I followed my wife’s academic career from Oakland, California, to New York City, I told myself it wouldn’t be so difficult. Sure, I had no prospects at the moment, but I’d find something. And I’d taught two years in the Bay Area; how different, really, could it be to teach in the Big Apple?

Very different, it turned out. And not just in the obvious New York-versus-California ways that any Yankee or Dodger fan will enumerate without provocation. The kids in my 8th-grade Oakland classroom were more laid back than their NYC counterparts. Check. New Yorkers moved faster and talked louder. Double-check. But the East Bay and the Upper West Side were both heavily Latinx, right? That, at least, would be familiar.