Honestly, Instapundit finds some of the most incredible gems on the internet.
This story really moved me.
"Adam Green, straw-haired and earnest but with a rebellious streak
running through him, enrolled at Bronx Science in 1987, one of the few
New York City schoolchildren to be accepted among the 25,000 who apply
each year. He hated it. He transferred to a private school and hated
that too. He felt he was getting a curriculum, not an education."
"This
was the best society had to offer, and it didn't do much for me at all,"
he says. "I thought, screw this. I'm not going to do anything I don't
want to do again." During college a teacher friend who worked with an
environmental educational group asked Green if he would volunteer to
help some students build a boat. It sounded like fun, and in doing it,
Green noticed that the kids picked up some math skills in the designing
and building of a boat, skills they hadn't gotten from textbooks or
standardized tests."
"In 1996, Green founded Rocking the Boat."
"Green soon realized that his modest after-school boatbuilding program
might double as a form of therapy for these very poor, sometimes deeply
troubled kids. This was wonderful in theory, but Green wasn't trained as
a therapist.
"In the first year alone, three different girls told him on
different occasions that they had been sexually abused by their
mothers' boyfriends in their own homes."
(Always the boyfriend. Women sell their souls and the safety of their children for the boyfriend...)
"I thought, okay, I officially
got in way over my head," he says. Rocking the Boat soon hired its first
social worker."
Read the whole thing.
It's absolutely delightful.