In her latest blog about teaching in a Bronx middle school, Laura Klein writes: “There’s a lot to criticize about the way special education works in this enormous system. It is cloudy and incongruous, difficult to define, and difficult to find any universal truths when you talk about it.” The failures command more notice than the successes, she said. “What I have struggled with in the last few years is to define what aspects of it specifically fail the students — what is the problem that we aren’t solving.”

A Bronx middle-school teacher writes: “Because of their impermanence, people often think of paraprofessionals as replaceable — one may be substituted for another from day to day. But at graduation this year, Ms. Javier sat on the stage and cried while she watched the students that she had helped get there. “Do you think next year I will have a student like Allie?” she asked me, mourning the loss of one. To the students, she was not replaceable — and certainly not to me.”

A middle school teacher in the Bronx writes: What about the awards we don’t hand out to students? “How about an award for my student who isn’t the best or the fastest, but who always helps her peers, and is kind when they don’t understand something? Or for the student who brightens everyone’s days with his sense of humor, and his perfect comedic timing in a tense moment? Where do I find the award for the child who has overcome the most this year — who has been heroic in his or her personal survival?”

A Bronx middle-school teacher who blogs about her experiences writes: “My students don’t have it easy. But every year I go to prom, and I see them at graduation. They are happy, looking their best, feeling successful, cheering for themselves and for one another. I see their parents snapping pictures of them, and hugging them, and smiling proudly. And I realize that for many kids, that is a rare occasion.” When some of the children can’t afford prom and graduation, some people are happy to help, because “feeling for one day that they have done something worth celebrating is a cause worth investing in.

Laura Klein, a middle school teacher and blogger, writes: “Perhaps all teachers have one student for whom they are teaching. Sedina was that student for me. Even now, when I am no longer her teacher, she’s still the one.”

In her latest blog post about teaching at a South Bronx middle school, Laura Klein writes about visiting a student at an in-patient psychiatric facility. As a teacher, she writes, it’s easy to take comfort in knowing that her expectations for troubled students provide “simplicity in a world that is chaotic and scary.” But when an incident occurs, she writes, it reinforces that, “We don’t have the solutions, and even if we did, we don’t have the power to fix the things that are broken in their lives.”

Laura Klein, a middle-school teacher in the Bronx, writes that test prep is in full swing at her school — as it must be, given all that rides on the results. But the problem is not in using precious school time to teach to a test. “Our failure is that we struggle to inspire them beyond the test,” she writes — and students have to be reminded why learning must continue in the sunny months of May and June.

Laura Klein, who teaches at a Bronx middle school, says she has had a tough time getting her students interested in current events. But the Trayvon Martin case practically walked into her classroom. When she gave her students an assignment related to the case, she writes: “They got right to work, quiet and focused, only pausing to discuss the issue with their peers. This was an issue with which they clearly connected.”

For Laura Klein, a middle-school teacher and regular SchoolBook contributor, the tragedy of Kiara was not just that she was 17 and still in the eighth grade. The tragedy was that she was giving up on herself at such a young age.

A teacher who blogs about her experiences teaching in a Bronx middle school writes: Often teachers who pull the best out of a troubled student are considered to be transforming — even magical. But kids who succeed because of us are not kids who have the tools to succeed in the long run. Relationships matter — but they aren’t enough.