E-Mail Exchanges with Mr. Peter Sipe

The following is an exchange of e-mails between Mr. Sipe and myself in regrads to his article Newjack: Teaching in a Failing Middle School. I was motivated to reach out to him after the class discussion last week in which it appeared that the class was emotionally charged and somewhat split down the middle on the contents of the article.

Mr. Sipe,

Good evening! By no means do you know me but I am a 2nd yr. graduate
student at Sage Graduate School in Troy, NY (Upstate). I am about 10 months
away from my student teaching where I will enter the realm of secondary
education...content area being social studies. Anyways, I will do my best
to get to the point in matter here. In a class titled Literacy for Teaching
Interdisciplinary Approaches, our class debated the article you had written
sometime ago comparing your 1st year as an educator at a "hard-to-staff"
school in NYC to that of a correction officer's rookie year at Sing Sing,
interesting. The class was equally divided I'd say in either agreeing or
disagreeing with what you offered us in your article. Some would have acted
with similar thoughts, some thought you utterly failed your students but no
matter what side my peers were on, it was interesting to see the emotions
that this article stirred in all of us.

I'd like to ask you your take on all of this? Where are you now? Have you
moved on to greener pastures, preferrably in a suburban district somehwere
in Westchester Co.? My peers, and I were left with so many unanswered
questions. Who knows, maybe someone equally as touched (or curious) as I am
is writing to you this very second. Before I end all this, let me share
with you my take!

My initial reading of this article left me looking basicallly at what was
on the immediate surface, like many academic readings leave me. But this
one forced me to soon after completing it to really wonder what was your
TRUE motivation behind writing it? I asked whether or not it may have been
somewhat of a personal experiment? Maybe something authors and writers do
to get the inside scoop on reality of a profession. I thought maybe your
parents were school teachers of some sort, and that has left you with this
burning desire for education reform, and this was your contribution to let
the general public become aware of the harsh realities of the NYC school
system (or maybe even the perplexing idea of the New York City Teahing
Fellowship)?

.........the questions could go on and on forever it seems but until I know
for sure that this is an e-mail address that you most certainly check, this
is what I will leave you with for now! I do appreciate a reply and thank
you for your piece. Must be something to know that your work sparked heated
debate in a classroom in Upstate NY of 15+ (soon to be educators) graduate
students. Hey, maybe that was the sole motivation behind the article...to
become "famous"...?

good night -mark a. condor

(the following was Mr. Sipe's resonse to me just a day or two after my initial e-mail)


Mr. Condor -

thank you for your message and for your very kind words.

I would say, very simply, that I wrote the piece out of anger. I wrote it
during my second year as a Teaching Fellow, when I'd come to the conclusion
that our school was a profound failure. It appeared to me that the building
in which I worked didn't merit the term "school," due to its lack of success
in educating children. What angered me even more, however, was the
un-remarkability of this failure. The school simply carried on, as it had
done for years, churning out students, most of whom could not read or write
(and had the state exam scores to prove it). Had I been working in a
hospital with a similar rate of failure, I can't imagine that there would
not be some grave consequence for both the staff and institution. Yet, at
my school, we all drew salaries, stayed on, transferred, or quit, and
students kept entering and then graduating uneducated.

(Another factor in writing the piece was that I was taking a class, for my
teaching degree, for which I had to write a term paper. That kind of
spurred me to put these thoughts together!)

I'm still a teacher. I now teach at Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School
in Brooklyn, not very far from where I taught as a Teaching Fellow, teaching
essentially the same students as those who attended the school described in
my piece. WCCS is a very good school (and we have the state exam scores to
prove it), and I'm quite happy there. It has, to a great degree, restored
my faith in public education for the underserved.

I wish you the best in your studies, and thank you again for contacting me.

-Peter