The storyline is a familiar one: An idealistic new teacher, full of hope and enthusiasm, embarks on a career at a tough urban school. The plot then takes one of two typical turns: Either the fervent novice, facing the unyielding and ever-increasing pressures of the classroom, leaves teaching and emerges with insights on improving urban schools—or the newbie, due solely to individual moxie and an untiring work ethic, achieves seemingly miraculous results with a hard-to-teach student population. One of the latest iterations of this all-too-common narrative is found in a new memoir on teaching that has seen its share of plaudits and detractors . In The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School , Ed Boland recounts his brief stint in 2006 teaching ninth-grade history at Henry Street School for International Studies on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Boland encounters numerous challenges in teaching children with what he describes as “ … [Read more...] about The Problem With Books About Urban-Education Heroes