What Did I Miss?

Looking back on my semi-hapless years in the classroom

I was a teacher for six years: four in an alternative school in Atlanta and two in more traditional schools in New York City. I think about those years a lot—what I did well, what I didn’t do well, what I knew, and what I didn’t know.

“What I didn’t know” was the biggest category by far, but at the time, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Each school was a…