Baffled by Black and White: Teaching in an Urban School and Unlearning Assumptions about Race

“What’s it like to teach in that inner-city high school?” her friends often asked her. Implicit in the question was “why?” In this memoir, a well-meaning white teacher hopes to improve education for black students. She is baffled that not all of her black colleagues are as idealistic as she is. In these first experiences with black people, she makes many mistakes. Misconceptions and mistakes aside, the author loves teaching. Her students motivate her, and she them. The memoir abounds with her students’ stories. It describes, over a span of ten years, the challenges and successes of her special education classroom, the dreams and triumphs of the members of student government whom she advises, and the frustration of both students and faculty with the barriers erected by the administration. She writes with painful but often comic honesty of how her original assumptions about race led her astray, and of how students and colleagues over many years helped her eventually to a better understanding.