NEW TEACHER'S IDEALISM BATTERED BY HARD REALITY.

Byline: Mary Ann Lindley Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Last fall Tallahassee, Fla., lawyer Charlie Dodson gave up his career as a trial attorney to become what he had always longed to be, a teacher. At age 44, he traded a six-figure income for $26,000 a year to teach math - with all the rights and privileges thereof: a desk in Room 311 at Godby High School and the chance to expand young minds.

The Friday before Christmas Dodson resigned. Having spent four months attempting to teach basic math to at-risk students, he found himself battling two wrenching emotions. As the son of a coach, he had the unbearable feeling that he was a quitter. Equally low was his sense that he was too old (and life too short) for the rudeness, lack of discipline and stunning indifference that his students conveyed to him each day.

His own part in this equation of despair aside, Dodson knew that part of the problem was clear, undeniable - and resistant to easy solution.

``There are a lot of kids out there with real serious problems and the schools are being asked to raise them. There are too many who just don't respect anything, not even themselves or each other - never mind the teachers.''

Dodson doesn't know what he'll do now. He's not interested in returning to law, saying 20 years was enough. But he does salute teachers who do endure in classroom atmospheres that he thinks most Americans would find shocking.

``For the most part, these (at-risk) kids' skill levels are so low and their behavior so bad that I just couldn't find that button to push. They are so used to time in detention and suspension that nothing fazes them. They're not violent. They just don't care.

Dodson at first felt for the kids whose jobs kept them up late, too tired to do homework or be alert in class. But as he saw them working only to support their cars, his sympathy waned.

``I certainly wasn't teaching any math. I'd have felt good if I could have taught them life lessons. ``But I'd say, `You've got to get an education so you can get a job so you can support your families,' and they would just laugh.''

Dodson knows that as a beginning teacher he was expected to pay his dues; that one of the perks of seniority is to not have to teach the unruly.

But a moment, please, to inquire whether the schools aren't setting up novice teachers for failure when they isolate the ```Welcome Back, Kotter'' kids and hand them to inexperienced teachers. Why isn't the most experienced and specifically motivated teaching talent assigned kids with such great need?

Dodson has coached youth teams and is raising three sons, but he admits he was naive. He measured his new reality by how grateful he felt when midsemester he was assigned a geometry class with no at-risk students. He was in heaven. And he felt something wholly opposite from the rest of his day when he found hope only in two or three at-risk kids who kept trying to learn ``in spite of the chaos around them.''

At no small cost, Dodson went looking for some sparkle. ``That spark when a kid catches onto something.'' What he found was flat, sorrowful and indicative of a future of young people with no skills, no work habits and no hope.

But make no mistake about the teacher Charlie Dodson. Hopeful and optimistic, then discouraged and gone, he is teaching us now.

CAPTION(S):

Drawing

Drawing: REALITY CHECK

Teens and dropouts

School's out

Knight-Ridder Tribune Graphics Network