This American Life recently ran an interesting story about a memoir written by millionaire Steve Poizner. The book recounts his volunteer half-year as a social studies teacher at Mount Pleasant High School in East San Jose, California. Poizner’s portrait of a dilapidated, violent, underachieving school in a stinky, blighted low-income neighborhood stirred the indignation of members of the school community and district, who maintain that the school scores about average academically, has a low dropout rate, is not at all dangerous, and is located in a well-kept middle-class neighborhood. In other words, Poizner lied, or to be more generous to him, made mistakes in his perceptions of the school.
photo credit: motionblur
Poizner’s motives for exaggerating Mount Pleasant’s struggles seem clear: he first ran for public office two months after leaving the school, and is currently a candidate for governor of California. An excerpt from his memoir is posted on his campaign site. But the story made me wonder: what biases and motives do we embed in our own representations of what happens in our classrooms? Isn’t even the most humble, self-effacing teacher story from “the trenches” (as Poizner calls the high school classroom) a manipulation of power, since it only reveals the teacher’s angle? When is it fair to turn our experiences in the classroom into a self-aggrandizing anecdote for a job interview, a cautionary tale for a blog post, or a punchline for our friends—and when is it a betrayal of our students’ confidence?
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