Induction Day 3

After a day of sitting in a lecture hall, we got to get out and see the community today.  TFA is a two-year commitment, and today all of the teachers who just finished their first year of teaching joined us for community service day.  There were a number of great volunteer activities to sign up for in advance, and I chose to learn about an organization called "Bridges."

www.bridgesusa.org

This organization provides leadership training to Memphis youth through "experiential learning."  For example, our experiential learning task today was to try to build a puzzle out of wood planks in the fastest time possible.  We had a group of 25 people and everyone had their own approach on what to do and how to do it best.  It was interesting trying to get everyone on the same page.  There were a number of different opinions and you could see some people trying to assert themselves more fully, others disengaging, others sitting back and observing.  After making a few attempts, we debriefed and discussed what we learned and how we can apply the lessons from this activity to teaching in the classroom.  It's a very cool organization and I would love to be involved with them and get my students involved with them this coming year.

In the evening we attended the National Civil Rights Museum.  The museum is at the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, the Lorraine Hotel on Mulberry Street in Memphis, TN.

I went to this museum when I visited Memphis last March, before I knew if I would be accepted into a teaching program and definitely before I knew I would be in Memphis.  

I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't even know MLK was shot in Memphis and then to find myself standing in the location where that occurred surprisingly emotional for me.  The first time I came, I was struck by how recent all of these events occurred.  In my parents' lifetimes.  In the lifetimes of men and women who are still of working age - people I have worked with who may have personally been denied the ability to sit at the same tables in restaurants or use the same restrooms as other people due to the color of their skin.  

I wanted to ask my parents, who would've been young adults at the time - what were you doing when all of this was going on?  They was not dinner table discussion about any of this in my home growing up.  I suspect that being white and not in the south, these events didn't affect them very much.  

During my second visit tonight, I was struck by how young the leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement were.  Young college students joined protests, sit-ins, and freedom rides, left school to help get black citizens registered to vote, and came as unpaid volunteers to teach at Freedom Schools set up to give black citizens the basic education.  MLK himself was only in his early 20s when he began working in the civil rights movement, and died before he reached the age of 40.


Both times, I come away inspired by all of those who came before me and motivated to continue their work towards equality in this country.  It's so easy to see how working in education to close the "achievement gap" between the wealthy and the poor is part of a larger historical movement.  It also humbles me to read about so many others who took much greater risks than I am taking now.  The risks of my plight were such things as not living in the same city as some of my friends, leaving a city I love, not being able to take improv classes, and receiving a smaller salary, where as their risks were being disowned by friends and family, arrest, beatings, and murder.  Their bravery gives me courage and reminds me that I can do even more.

Also, I walked to the museum tonight.  It is literally only 2 blocks from where I now call home.