A Brit in the Bronx: an English teacher's tales from New York

Anna Bailey

left the UK to teach art to high school students in New York. We provide a breakthrough in state-level education

share my journey by train in the morning with Amy, deputy director of a primary school near my school and we became friends because we're both consummate master spotters and have been recognized in platform a few days colleagues. Easy to find teachers when you get a train in what is known in the U.S. as a laugh "urban" area, because it will be: a state of mind) as bad, b) walking very fast because Late c) enter a Starbucks as if they were dying and blood transfusion last available on earth.

may be the only white people in the street, which is not to say that there are many teachers black, Hispanic and Asian there (brisk walking, grabbing Starbucks), as there are parts of the United States, where whites do not seem to go unless addressed his classroom. This hypothesis will be deli as he shouts: "Hey Professor What you wan 'on your sandwich today"

So - Amy and myself - we walk to the station steps together to talk about what kind of day we went (a conversation that often ends with one of us happily say "We have put "t punch in the face today. Visit 4:30.") and she tells me one of his teachers who have problems with a particular child, and how the teacher really hate this dude. And it is devastating for her and me. Why? Because you do not have to love them, but you love them.

Let
• opinion: it is not necessary that they love. But we must love them. It is essential, as a priest must forgive everyone in confession or as a physician must treat all patients. Do not become a teacher unless you are ready to sign a sort of Hippocratic oath in the head in this direction, as it will hold on to what a lot of shouting, said sarcastically, before crying or lower a heavy object on the foot of this particular student who drives you crazy every day. Whoever can spit in their coffee when they were not looking, which added the words "sucks balls" to his name on the card, which is still struggling, cursing and walking around the classroom for problems heard a colleague who went home and announced loudly: "., and thank God for that"
get me wrong - I do not speak a sticky, gooey, icky sticky cotton candy with cherries on top types of love. I mean the belief in nature, to be consistent with the class, the class of accounts, type absolutely reliable, boring fatigue, and type more or less invisible.

children, you will always bring a flower or a chocolate bar or a contribution dollars for the bag, they see you looking sadly into space during a particularly difficult lesson and visit your table to say: "You are my favorite teacher, you know?" This is for any reason yourself a pat on the shoulder in the hallway and change a bad day into a good in less than a second. They are easy to love. But there was a time that would have been a mouth spitting coffee pot that has made life a little more of another master of misery, but they were used by the drip drip drip of bored tired, love invisible.

Anna Bailey is a British art teacher who works in a school against poverty in the Bronx, New York. This is the first in a series for the Guardian Teacher Network. She writes under a pseudonym.

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