If I’m honest with myself—and that is the point of this book, isn’t it?—the only reason I kept the job as long as I did was because it gave me a degree of street cred. What I liked most about being a public school teacher in the Bronx was being able to tell others that I was a public school teacher in the Bronx and watch them sit back and think of me as such a good, noble person. But that had no place in my story.
