IAMA graduate of a really shitty inner-city public school. AMA.

I see quite a few AMAs about teachers at poorly-performing public schools, I thought I might give another perspective.

I was an immigrant and wound up at my school because my parents and I didn't know how to navigate the public school system and there was no real assistance for us from the school system or the community at all. It was really odd to be there, it was very different from my school back home: metal detectors, lots of dropouts, fights, etc. The school was so bad that it was closed a couple of years after I graduated, because it had a really high dropout rate or something. AMA.