I saw a familiar face at the intersection of Pratt and President Street.

About a week ago, I pulled up to a fairly crowded intersection in Downtown Baltimore. For the past six weeks I have been training with a resident teaching program, training as a high school English teacher, and teaching an hour-block of summer school. At the intersection, I saw one of my kids as a squeegee boy, a window washer wearing through crowded intersection. I shouted his name, he got embarrassed and ran away from me. This kid, who I'll call Thomas, came up to me privately to talk to me the next day at school. He asked me not to tell anyone he was working as a squeegee boy, as it was his first day on the job and he would have been really embarrassed.

I was somewhat disappointed that Thomas ran away from me on the intersection in the first place. Seeing one of your students working hard on a Sunday night is something that makes you proud, not disappointed as a teacher, and I joked with Thomas that I would have tipped him $20 if he hadn't run away.

It was a glimmer of humor and hope in a city that has been largely maligned in the national media, by our very own President. The overwhelming majority of people I've met in Baltimore are good, kind people. Baltimore is a place that rings with a whole lot of hope, especially in places like Sandtown-Winchester, where I go to church, where people looking with a lens outside-in do not understand.

It is easy to get offended at President Trump's tweets calling Baltimore "disgusting", "dangerous" and "filthy". Trump said that "no human being would want to live there." But I asked some of my 10th-grade students in summer school what they thought about his tweets.

I had one student say, "he's right, Baltimore is terrible and I want to leave here."

I had another student say, "yeah, he's right, but we can say that about Baltimore because we live here. He can't, and isn't it his job to fix it?"

On July 27, 2019, the Baltimore Sun Editorial Board wrote an editorial addressing Trump's tweets titled "Better to have a few rats than to be one." With a clever title and a take on defending the city, I clicked on the article with intrigue.

I finished the article with only disappointment and extreme disappointment. The Baltimore Sundefended the city with beautiful landmarks alike the Johns Hopkins Hospital, the "beauty of the Inner Harbor or the proud history of Fort McHenry." The editorial attacked Trump's critiques of Baltimore as racially motivated and completely wrong, and resorted to attacking Trump as a "useful idiot of Vladimir Putin" and concluded with the sentence that it is "better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one."

The only part of the editorial that I thought was well-put is the line that "if there are any problems here...they are as much his responsibility as anyone's." Baltimore's elected officials on a local, state, and federal level. But the rest of the editorial caters to a certain audience of wealthy tourists and surface-level of glamor of the city, that doesn't represent the reality and harsh conditions that many residents, like my students face. Even that one line, saying "if there are any problems" is one of complete denial: there are many problems in Baltimore, ranging from murders, poverty, addiction, homelessness and unemployment, that you can see evidently, that good, hard-working individuals are actively working to fight through or alleviate.

The part of the editorial that touted the beauty of the Inner Harbor or Fort McHenry especially rubbed me the wrong way: these are not places that the majority of Baltimore residents live. After I saw my student as a squeegee boy, I browsed through the Internet to see opinions about squeegee boys, and the results broke my heart. Waze has put alerts for squeegee boys. Posters in the Baltimore Reddit page have equated squeegee boys to potholes after bad interactions with them.

While the experiences of drivers who have been harassed by squeegee boys are valid, I have found that exchanges and experiences are cordial as long as you treat kids as human beings, not "alerts" or "potholes".

Ask yourself what would bring a teenager to even have to get a job as dangerous and precarious as being a squeegee boy, weaving in and out of an intersection, putting himself in the real danger of being hit by a car every time the light turns green? Clearly, there are systemic issues like rampant unemployment for inner-city youth that the city, the state, and the federal government are not addressing, and being a squeegee boy should by no means be a long-term job for a kid.

Just because we're being forced to confront poverty and a lot of us don't like it is a reflection of our own biases and blind spots, not the character of inner-city kids. My students are some of the strongest, nicest, and most resilient kids I've ever met, who've been through more than anyone else I've met who's their age in other, more sheltered parts of the country.

"When I see them, I see my kids. Despite their innumerable struggles, these kids, our kids, have found a way to make a living for themselves, and, to be honest, I respect their hustle. I know where else they could be and I'm always and forever grateful that they're at my intersection instead," said Lena Tashjian, English teacher at Baltimore City College High School.

"My kids are survivors," Tashjian continues. "I've taught kids who have watched their friends die...kids who have been homeless...These experiences are not atypical. These are the experiences of our children; these are the experiences of the children turned entrepreneurs you see on the street washing your car windows."

The overwhelming majority of people I've met in Baltimore are good, kind people. Baltimore is a place that rings with a whole lot of hope. And that isn't to deny that Trump captures some things that are true about Baltimore: yes, we see thousands of vacant homes all over town. Many of our highest-ranking politicians, including two recent mayors, have been corrupt. Baltimore has a higher murder rate than El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, just passing 200 murders on the year. Driving through town, it is no secret that Baltimore has a huge drug addiction and homelessness problem. The poverty rate is over 22%. Catching national attention right now is a 4-year-old boy who suffered severe, untreated burns for days before dying, and then being put into a trash bag, tied up, and placed into a dumpster by his mother.

It would be folly for Baltimore's defenders, like the Baltimore Sun, to deny that the city doesn't have its issues, as any postindustrial city like Detroit or Cleveland has, and to pretend that Inner Harbor Baltimore reflects the state of affairs of the whole city.

The beauty of Baltimore is not in the Inner Harbor, Fort McHenry, or Johns Hopkins Hospital. Rather, the beauty of Baltimore is in its people.

This something "The Wire" captures brilliantly in its characters, but also something I have experienced first hand. So what if Donald Trump is right that Baltimore is rat-infested place that no one lives? Baltimore is a city of survivors, of people who find hope in a place where hope seems non-existent, who have lived in this city that Trump has maligned for their whole lives. No matter what life throws at the people of Baltimore what

I see it in my students, many of whom grew up in single-parent or adopted homes. I see it in the homeless people standing on the same intersection all day during a 100-degree heat wave, in the squeegee boys like my student who get cursed out by aggressive drivers, yet still clean windows all day. I see it in the teachers I work with that give back to the city they grew up in. I see it in my congregation at church, whose work in the community goes largely under the radar, to my Uber and Lyft riders going home from their second job to take care of their ailing parents in projects like the McCulloh Homes.

You want to find toughness and character? Come talk to the people of Baltimore. You want to see resilience and perseverance? Talk to the people of Baltimore. You want to find real survivors? Come to Baltimore.

You want to find beauty? Then don't look to the Inner Harbor, but look to the people of Baltimore.