My name is Tamam Tracy Moncur and I 'm a 6th grade math teacher in the Newark Public School system. I’ve lived in Newark, NJ for thirty seven years…longer than I've lived anywhere else. I’m originally from California…born and raised there for the first eighteen years of my life. On a ferry boat ride to San Francisco during one of my visits back, a lady told me that you can take the girl out of California but you can’t take California out of the girl. My formative years were spent in the Bay Area. I grew up in Oakland, Berkeley, and a couple of years in San Francisco. I attended middle school and high school in Berkeley. Berkeley took me, molded me, stamped me radical and then shipped me to the east coast. I’ve lived here ever since.
I wrote a book entitled “Diary of an Inner City Teacher”. I said in that book and I reiterate it now; the educational hierarchy still remains oblivious to the reality of the social issues clogging the lines to the minds of the American youth. These words are simply magnified in the inner city.
At one time in my career I was enrolled in a masters course at Montclair State University and we were assigned a book to read filled with essays dealing with public education. One essay in particular grabbed my fancy. It was written by a Rutgers professor and basically stated that the public education system is inherently designed to maintain the class status. In other words if you’re in the economically deprived class, the working class, so called middle class, up to that 3% that controls the American wealth that will be your economic destiny. There will be some exceptions but for the most part the masses will remain right where they are, and of course the word mass is not part of that 3% club.
Question: How does this premise shape the reality of inner city teachers?
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