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Title details for Goodbye Homeboy by Steve Mariotti - Available

Goodbye Homeboy

How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement

by Steve Mariotti
Debra Devi
ebook
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One sunny afternoon in 1982, a young businessman experienced a terrifying mugging in New York City that shook him to his core.

Tortured by nightmares about the teens who roughed him up, Steve Mariotti sought counseling. When his therapist suggested that he face his fears, Mariotti closed his small import-export business and became a teacher at the city's most notorious public school—Boys and Girls High in Bed-Stuy.

Although his nightmares promptly ceased, Mariotti's out-of-control students rapidly drove him to despair.

One day, Mariotti stepped out of the classroom so his students wouldn't see him cry. In a desperate move to save his job, he took off his watch and marched back in with an impromptu sales pitch for it. To his astonishment, his students were riveted. He was able to successfully lead a math lesson for the first time.

Mariotti realized his students felt trapped in soul-crushing poverty. They saw zero connection between school and improving their lives. Whenever Mariotti connected their lessons to entrepreneurship, though, even his most disruptive students got excited about learning.

School administrators disapproved of Mariotti discussing money in the classroom, however. He was repeatedly fired before receiving one last-ditch assignment: an offsite program for special-ed students expelled from the public schools for violent crimes.

The success Mariotti had with these forgotten children—including coverage in the Daily News, The New York Times, and World News Tonight—inspired him to found the nonprofit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship to bring entrepreneurship education to low-income youth.

By turns tragic and hilarious, Goodbye Homeboy shares Mariotti's flaws and missteps as he connects deeply with his troubled students, and woos the most influential people in the world into helping them—saving himself in the process.

Today, Mariotti is widely recognized as the world's leading advocate for entrepreneurship education. More than one million young people from Chicago to China have graduated from NFTE programs, and NFTE counts Sean Combs, Chelsea Clinton, Diana Davis Spencer, and many more business, entertainment, and community leaders among its staunchest supporters.

As Goodbye Homeboy powerfully illustrates, a spark of hope really can empower us to overcome life's greatest hardships.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 6, 2019

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781948836302

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781948836302
      • File size: 5618 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      An entrepreneur and educator recounts how he built a business-centric model of pedagogy. In this memoir, written with Devi (The Language of the Blues, 2006, etc.), high school math teacher Mariotti (co-author: Entrepreneurship, 4th Ed., 2019, etc.) traces his path towards teaching after he left the business world. In the mid-1970s, he was a recent MBA graduate when he was fired from his job as a financial analyst at Ford Motor Company in Michigan. He moved to New York City to find a new path for himself; soon, he started his own importing business and found that it gave him a sense of control. After he was mugged in 1981, however, Mariotti turned to teaching in the city's high schools to get over his PTSD, and he was placed in a school in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Without any previous teaching experience, he had to quickly learn how to teach math in a way that interested his students, as well as bring discipline to a disorderly classroom. He noticed that kids paid more attention to his lessons when their practical benefits were clear--such as how to make change, or how to judge value and profits. The school system didn't appreciate that Mariotti brought entrepreneurship concepts into the math curriculum, he writes, but he felt that it gave his students an avenue toward successful employment. He developed his approach in other schools in Manhattan's Lower East Side and in the Bronx, and eventually founded an organization to promote entrepreneurial education in American schools. Mariotti presents his experiences in a light and engaging manner throughout this memoir. However, the work can feel overly optimistic at times, particularly when Mariotti waxes philosophical about the power of education: "The idea that entrepreneurship education can fight poverty, crime, unemployment, and violence, while spreading free-market and democratic ideals, is steadily gaining momentum." The book is strongest when it offers in the details of classroom dialogue with his students over the years. It also provides the author's engaging internal monologue as he worked out his next steps: "What choice did I have? It was either accept this crazy assignment or lose my job." An earnest account that sometimes comes off a bit too sunny.

      COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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