Donna Foote’s Relentless Pursuit, which follows four Teach for America novices at a “troubled” high school in Los Angeles, gets a good
review in the New York Post.
In Foote’s narrative, Rachelle Snyder matures from a teacher who loses control of her class and has a student urinate publicly to an effective special education teacher who can navigate the broken special education system and help students. Hrag Hamalian’s exhausted frustration is tangible as he deals with the fallout of a disorganized field trip that ends with a fight and Hrag himself getting punched. Today, however, Hamalian is on the way to opening his own school.
These teachers struggle, but their tenacity speaks at once to the scale of the urban education challenge and also the very real possibilities of how we can do much better for students than we do today.
The TFA newbies worked at Locke High, which veteran teachers voted to turn into a Green Dot charter school.
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