Camelot?

Plenty of we the graduates of master's programs in education have spent oodles of time picturing utopia: the school. We know what its teachers are like, what's on the walls, what the classes sound like, what the students feel like every day, and a million other things. I have spent time building this school in my mind in idle daydreams like many girls do their weddings. For two years, I have been trying to shape my school into this place. At every turn, I met resistance. In part, since I did have many victories, this made the job rather satisfying. In other ways, it made it exhausting. Exhausting in the way beating your head against a brick wall is exhausting - you bleed, the wall doesn't.

The students, though, I loved. I love things that are as tough as they are delicate. I don't think I'll ever meet a group of young people more resilient, who went through so much and still somehow figured out how to laugh and trust and learn.

This is why I feel an overwhelming sense of guilt, everyday, for taking my new job. It is an incredible place. So many parts of it are living models of my dreamed-up school. It's uncanny, at times. The art on the walls. The laughter in the classrooms. The passion of the staff. And, in so many other ways, it fulfills all of the selfish needs my other job did not. Money. Vacation. Health care. Better coffee. The list of perks, significant and otherwise, adds up to a situation marvelously sweeter than the last. But...but....

It's a private school. It is the exact racial and economic inverse of my last school.

Can this be utopia?! If a teacher wants to quit her night job, get decent benefits, and teach in a place where art and music aren't subjects of controversy but rather are central to the school itself...does she really, still, in 2009, have to teach only upper middle class white students?

I've been there one month. For the drama session, in which the entire school does nothing but put on a musical. For 2009: Camelot. I tell you, in spite of the magic of this place (and it is magical) neither side of segregation can be Camelot.