NOTES FROM A NEW YORK CITY HIGH SCHOOL 1981-1996

How did these letters come to be in my possession? To answer these questions, we have to travel back to 1981. As a struggling teacher working in the NYC school system with a wife and six children, l needed a second full-time job to make ends meet. As it happened, I had already been working part-time with the custodial staff at my school during the vacation periods such as Christmas, Easter and summer, so I asked the custodial engineer if he would hire me full-time on the night shift from 3pm to midnight, which he did. It meant that I would be working a long day from 8am to midnight five days a week, but "necessity is the mother of invention." I started as a cleaner responsible for maintaining about twenty classrooms and four bathrooms. The first thing I would do in a classroom was to empty the trash can next to the teacher's desk. Out of boredom, I found myself reading the notes the students had written and discarded in the garbage. I have to tell you that these notes were fascinating. They illuminated a side of student life that I never would have known. These notes were usually emotional: angry, funny, sad, but always compelling; so much so that I began to collect them thinking of putting them together in book form one day, but I never seemed to have the time. These notes, thousands of them, have been sitting in bags in my attic for more than forty years., and now they've been organized in book form for your reading pleasure.