In the beginning, on January 28, 2011, I came across an article about Teach For America. Having graduated from a small state college more than 10 years ago, I had not heard about Teach For America when I was in school. There was no campus recruiter...or if there was, they weren't looking for me. I was actually fairly uninvolved in college life.
So January 28th, a mere two months ago, was my first introduction to Teach For America. I was immediately intrigued and wanted to apply. I figured that at least I should apply and then if I received an offer I could decide if this was really really something I was willing to do.
I read all about the TFA mission and began getting excited about the opportunity to be a part of reforming education in America. I sent in my application 7 days after reading that newspaper article to meet the February 4th final deadline.
After my application was sent, I continued to read more. I started to get more invested in the possibility of being a teacher. And then I came upon information about TFA's highly competitive application process and low acceptance rate. I wondered how I would compare to young ivy league grads. I read that in 2009 nearly 10% of Princeton graduates applied to the program and only 25% of those who applied were accepted. I started to become concerned that this newly hatched dream may not become a reality.
So I started making contingency plans. I discovered that there were other alternative certification programs, many other programs. I quickly became overwhelmed and tried to narrow down my options based on cities that I thought I would want to live in, cities I could afford to live in, cities that weren't laying off significant numbers of teachers already, cities in states that weren't completely bankrupt, and programs that seemed to offer some financial incentives.
In the end I applied to:
- Memphis Teaching Fellows
- Because of the comparably lower cost of living and comparably higher teacher salary, and while knowing very little about Memphis the idea of it appealed to me
- teachNOLA
- Because I love New Orleans
- Mississippi Teacher Corps
- For the program benefits and although I knew nothing about the Mississippi Delta, it sounded intriguing
- DC Teaching Fellows
I was offered in person interviews with each program except for Mississippi Teacher Corps (Mississippi Teacher Corps does not do in person interviews).
I will detail my experience with each program in greater detail in coming posts. However, as of today 3/31, here is the status of each:
- Teach For America
- Phone interviewed, In-person interviewed, waiting for results to come in 4 days!
- Memphis Teaching Fellows
- In-person interviewed for an English position, received an offer!
- teachNOLA
- Received an offer to interview for a Special Ed position, but didn't sign up quickly enough and wasn't sure if I could afford to live comfortably in NOLA on a teacher's salary
- Mississippi Teacher Corps
- No phone interview or in-person interview, received rejection email :(
- DC Teaching Fellows
- Received an offer to interview for Elementary Education, but canceled the interview mostly because I didn't think I could afford to live in DC on a teacher's salary and it sounds like things in the school district are a particularly big mess
So now I'm weighing options of my current job, Memphis Teaching Fellows, and hopefully a 3rd awesome TFA option next week!
Okay, well maybe these statistics won't be shocking to you, but having not paid much attention to the state of elementary and secondary education since leaving it myself 15 years ago, they were shocking to me:
- Only 50% of students in low-income communities will graduate from high school and those who do graduate perform on average at an 8th grade level
- Fourth graders going to school in a low-income community are already 2-3 grade levels behind
- Only 1 in 10 students growing up in poverty will graduate from college
- About 1 in 10 young male high school dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention (compared to 1 in 35 young male high school graduates)
- Nearly 1 in 4 young black male high school dropouts are incarcerated (compared to 1 in 14 young male asian, white or hispanic high school dropouts)
- Taking into account the cost of lost tax revenues, since dropouts earn less, and the cost of providing food stamps and other aid and increased cost of potential incarceration - the collective cost to the nation of each high school dropout is $292,000
- Young female dropouts are 9 times more likely to be single mothers
Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/education/09dropout.html, http://www.teachforamerica.org/what-we-do/the-challenge/, http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication/documents/The_Consequences_of_Dropping_Out_of_High_School.pdf, http://www.wearetheundercurrent.com/2010/03/the-achievement-gap-should-be-a-priority/
At work today, one of our business partners said they use a decision tree to help determine the right financial investment for their customers.
Maybe I need to make a decision tree to help determine what path I should take with my career/life this coming year.
The options are:
1) Make no changes. Keep same job, same house, same city, same friends, same free-time activities. Everything is actually going numbingly well - so why change?
2) Take the exciting teaching plunge.
Perhaps you see already which path I am inclined to take? I do yearn for a new exciting adventure...but at what cost?
I have a good job that pays me well. If I continue working at my current job for another year, I could potentially save $10,000+ which would create a huge financial safety net - something I do not currently have. After working in personal financial services for many years and having just recently dug myself out of debt, I don't take likely the importance of financial freedom.
I also live in a great house with a great roommate who has a great dog and who helps take care of my great cats and in the summer we lounge by our great backyard pool and throw great BBQs and did I mention I live in the great city of Los Angeles?
Yet, despite all of these great things I don't feel great. I don't feel passionate about these things (except for maybe the dog)... but I do feel attached to them. I am attached to my comfortable life. This attachment makes me nervous.
The same way I became nervous one day in college when I realized I really needed a cup of coffee in the morning. I hated the feeling so much that I immediately stopped drinking coffee and ever since I refuse to drink coffee on a daily basis for fear of needing it.
Now I've come to fear that I'm addicted to my pleasant life and that if I don't immediately stop and change course I might get too comfortable and never do anything too challenging, too hard, or too great again.
So why teach? Why not change my life in some other significant way? I have read many accounts of others who have taken the plunge into teaching in a high-need public school describe and they generally describe the experience as exhausting, miserable, and frustrating. A few lucky ones also feel rewarded at the end of some days.
The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) reported in 2003 that approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half leave during the first five years. So why do it? Why leave my career to go into a profession that I may only survive in for a few years.
Well, mostly because I feel called to do it. I read an article about teaching, I read some shocking statistics about the state of education in America and I felt immediately drawn to do something about it. I feel like I may actually have something of value to offer students and I feel like it's time to focus on helping others after a long run of having the luxury of focusing my life on myself.
Joseph Campbell wrote about the basic pattern of a hero's journey in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He identifies a pattern that repeats itself in narratives found around the world throughout centuries of literature.
The first stage is the "Call the Adventure." The hero starts out in a mundane situation of normality from which some information is received that acts as a call to head off into the unknown.
The second stage is "Refusal of the Call." Often when the call is given, the future hero refuses to heed it. This may be from a sense of duty or obligation, fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or any of a range of reasons that work to hold the person in his or her current circumstances.
I'm not saying I'm a hero or a future hero. But I definitely feel like I'm at the "Refusal of the Call" stage. I'm making excuses to stay in my comfortable life and calling them rational arguments in defense of not going. While they may actually be rational, the point is not to think but to act. And I know that I must act...I just haven't committed to do so quite yet. Though the clock is ticking - I must decide within the next 3 weeks. I'm giving myself until April 15th.
