Intro to Teach for America

Hi friends,

In light of the interest folks have shown in my recent move to Louisiana to serve with Teach for America, I’ve decided to revive my old travel blog. The name Wanderhaus only implies adventure, and I decided that need not be limited to international wanderings.

To answer a few FAQs:

What is Teach for America?

In a nutshell, kind of like a domestic PeaceCorp for teachers. It’s a nonprofit that sends fresh college grads (and some middle age career changers) who are passionate about educational equity to areas of the country that have been identified as really struggling to provide quality education for all of their students. These students attend schools in neighborhoods where funding has been lost as richer students move to nicer areas, where structural racism and poverty put downward pressure on economic mobility and where it is difficult to recruit highly qualified teachers due to these problems. These areas have high teacher turnover rates and many students are stuck with long term substitutes when teachers bail after just a few months.

The program has been controversial over the years for a number of reasons (mainly putting non-education majors into the classroom after only 6 weeks of intensive training), but they have made significant improvements in the last decade, and on TFA teachers perform on average as good or better than first year teachers who have taken a traditional route into education.

The organization just celebrated its 25^th anniversary. For more info check out https://www.teachforamerica.org/.

Why am I doing it?

I had heard of Teach for America throughout college because they recruit on DU’s campus, but I had always been skeptically due to the criticisms I had heard. My area of expertise has become leadership and character development throughout my time with a number of youth programs, but I didn’t realize there was room for that kind of instruction after having coffee with a TFA recruiter who had been given my name by one of my Leadership professors. I’ve realized from conversations with other teachers that SEL (social emotional learning) is a hot topic in education right now, but one that few schools really know how to teach well since you can’t teach empathy the same way you teach math. From my thesis research I discovered that social emotional skills aren’t just a warm-and-fuzzy, feel good concept—they actually impact student success in very tangible ways, from academics and school completion to prison incarceration and teenage pregnancy rates. It’s the non-academic side of education that is so often ignored, but I want to develop this as an area of expertise and see how it can be used to help at-risk kids succeed inside and outside of the classroom.

Did you get to pick Louisiana?

Yes! I was part of a pilot program where I got to choose between 5 regions that I identified as good fits for my interests and needs, and I picked Southern Louisiana due to the strong presence of charter schools (where there is generally more room for experimental practices and social emotional development) and the strong and colorful culture of the region. Also, Colorado's stark lack of diversity (at least in the communities I've worked in) isn't conducive to an environment where I can grow in awareness about structural racism and my own identity. As I put it to one friend, there's only so much you can learn from people who are just like you. I picked the South because I knew it would challenge me. I don't expect this to be an easy experience, but I do expect it to make me grow in ways I can't yet imagine. 

How long will you be there?

I’ve signed on to a two year commitment, but if I were to choose to stay for three I could do a free master’s program at Louisiana State University in any subject. I’ve also been told that Louisiana has a high number of TFA alum in the area because so many people fall in love and never leave. We’ll see…