Teaching for the sake of America's children
By Veronica DeSantos, Campus Life Writer
October 22, 2007 | 8:02 p.m.
College students often worry about their post-graduation plans, but what if there were a job that needed a leader to help educate kids in underprivileged areas? Such a job does exist, and it’s called Teach For America.
Teach For America’s mission
Teach For America is a program that works toward helping children in underprivileged areas throughout the U.S. gain an education that others in more socioeconomically stable areas receive. According to its mission statement on its Web site, Teach For America's mission is to enlist our nation's most promising future leaders in the movement to eliminate educational inequality.”
“Our mission has two parts,” said Helen Cosner, the recruitment director of Teach For America at Ohio University. “The first part is to address the education problem in America. The second part is to have our Teach For America corps members take the vision of the program and their experience of being in an undereducated area into the world in whatever their future career may be.”
Teach For America is a two-year commitment, so the process of becoming a corps member is very selective. In order to become a corps member, a student can start the application process in his or her senior year. The application process starts with a written application, which will then be followed by a phone interview if selected, and then finally an in-person interview. After that, it will generally take a few months before a person finds out if he or she has been selected to be in the corps. Once selected, the new corps member can select his or her top choice out of 27 possible locations to teach, and most members will be placed in their preferred place.
But I’m not an education major and I don’t know how to be a teacher…
Teach For America is not just for education majors. Students with a variety of majors are encouraged to apply, and many people go on to do things other than teach after the two years are up, such as law school or medical school.
“Teach For America is not an organization recruiting teachers,” Cosner said. “It’s an organization recruiting leaders. What Teach For America is trying to do is put the nation’s best and brightest in schools. We expect our corps members to make an impact.”
Once selected, the corps members must go through an intensive five-week training period in the summer called Institute. This training is meant to ensure that the corps members will be effective and knowledgeable teachers.
“It was intense,” corps member Jeff Beck said. “I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep.”
Beck, a 2007 OU graduate, currently teaches third grade in South Bronx, N.Y. Although the training was hard, he said that it was an incredibly supportive environment and that he learned plenty of useful information.
What’s it like to be a teacher with Teach For America?
“It’s been hard, but that was to be expected,” Beck said.
Beck said that it’s always hard to be a teacher for the first year. A person has to learn to adjust to a new environment and learn how to connect with his or her students, all while putting his or her training into practice.
“There’s just an incredible amount to do,” Beck said. “Some of your students aren’t really on their grade level, and it can be difficult to try and teach kids who are all on different levels. But it’s coming along. My students are getting into a good routine.”
Cosner also had interesting experiences as a corps teacher in Mercedes, Texas, a city that borders Mexico. On her first day, she went to the principal and stated that it was her mission to get her students to read for 30 minutes at least three nights a week. This was a seemingly ambitious goal because in Mercedes, some of the students’ families don’t even have running water, so it was hard for them to see why reading would be a priority.
“The principal thought I was crazy,” Cosner said. “But in the end, my students latched onto the idea. I called them the Stellar Scholars.”
By the end of her two years in Mercedes, the principal had implemented Cosner’s Stellar Scholars idea into the whole school, and the percentage of students passing the state’s standardized test at that school went up by approximately 30 percent.
One person can make a difference
As stated on its Web site, “Of the 13 million children growing up in poverty, about half will graduate from high school. Those that do graduate will perform on an eighth grade level.”
This is a sad but true fact that says a lot about the quality of education that many American children receive.
“This problem is fixable,” Cosner said. “It isn’t a social problem like hunger or AIDS that can’t easily be fixed. It is fixable.”
“If it weren’t for Teach For America, I don’t know what I would be doing right now,” Beck said. “At least with my job, I’m making a difference. I know it’s cliché, but with Teach For America you are making a difference.”
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If you wish to learn more about Teach For America or are interested in applying, go to its Web site.