Teach for America, Please |
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A visit home for my brother's graduation has me reflecting about my own post-collegiate experience and how I became a teacher.
While visiting home recently I spoke with one of my younger brother’s friends, Gary, who is preparing to graduate from college in the spring. Besides the transition from not having my brother and his friends ask me to buy them beer (Busch thirty packs), I’ve also had to come to terms with these once four-foot tall Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle maniacs entering the American workforce.
Some of them will end up in front of classrooms such as mine through programs like Teach for America, which Gary is applying to, or a myriad of other alternative certification programs that recruit non-education majors to begin teaching immediately. The big idea behind all these programs is to fill public schools, mostly struggling ones, with teachers, mostly young and eager to make a difference.
An alumni of one of these programs myself, the New York City Teaching Fellows, I contend that they are good – mostly. I met a lot of incredibly talented and intelligent individuals in my summer training program three years ago. I would comfortably wager that less than half are still in the New York City public school system.
Point – these programs attract quality candidates.
Counterpoint – a lot of them either get overwhelmed and never finish the program or simply realize that after two years, having their aunt Diana say “good for you,” over holidays, is not enough gratification to sustain them in the career.
Of the twenty or so teachers in my school, half have been alternatively certified. These programs offer very limited student teaching experience in addition to the crash course in contemporary educational catch phrases like “differentiated instruction,” “high impact teaching strategies (HITS)” and the incredibly poetic, “soft bigotry of low expectations.” While I agree that you learn the most about teaching after being alone in your own classroom, I do often begin to feel cheated somehow when my traditionally trained colleagues make reference to their extended schooling or when they effectively differentiate their instruction.
That being said, I did choose not to major in education as an undergraduate, even though teaching was always in the my mind as a possibility. I’m grateful that I got to take “Impacts of Globalization” and not one but two Hemingway seminars, instead of finger painting and learning recorder in the Education building (an exaggerated justification of my past education choices). I have no one to blame but myself for not feeling confident in saying I am a Master of Science in Education after completed two years of course work in the City University of New York system.
Most NYCT Fellows I’ve talked to acknowledge that they put teaching first and their graduate work second while working to complete the program. But that also was a choice we made, not to get the most out of our night classes regardless of how tired we were at the end of a day of teaching. We could have studied more. We could have pushed beyond our professors’ low expectations.
If Gary is really committed to working hard and has the resilience to continue to do so after his morale is inevitably beaten down from time to time over the course of the school year, he is a fine candidate for alternative route certification and teaching in general. I believe it is people who enter these programs looking for a way to spend a couple of years as they “figure it all out,” that drop out, often times leaving classrooms poorly managed for the remainder of the year and schools with a large percentage of inexperienced teachers.
Maybe if we made more movies about these teachers who don’t make it in tough schools, less people would be looking to unrealistically play “Freedom Writers” or “Dangerous Minds.” Of course, those movies wouldn’t sell nearly as well.
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