Pass the Chalk: The TFA Blog

Cheryl Chun is originally from Alea, HI, and is a 2006 D.C. Region corps member. This blog post is reproduced with permission from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, NJ. It was first published on the Human Capital Blog.

Before I was a medical student, I was a teacher.  I taught high school mathematics for two years in the District of Columbia.

Being a public school teacher was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my life. I spent my days trying to not only excite my students about mathematics, but also to help change their life trajectories by encouraging them to go to college.

Neither of these tasks was easy. Many of my students cited math as their least favorite subject in school. And despite the college atmosphere my colleagues and I worked diligently to create, many of my students struggled to accomplish the necessary coursework and SAT scores they needed for college.

There’s an ongoing discussion in the education community about what we can learn from the training of our armed forces to better prepare and develop our teachers. With just 13 weeks of intensive core training, the Marines manage to turn young men and women, most with no prior military experience, into a highly-skilled, effective fighting force.

Yet, as Andy Rotherham writes Time, “in American schools, we still haven’t figured out how to give our teaching force—whose members are college graduates, more than half of whom have advanced degrees—autonomy and accountability in a far less dynamic workplace.”

Teach For America corps members at summer institute.

Over the last 22 years, Teach For America has conducted its own intense introductory training for its corps members: summer institute, which consists of five action-packed weeks split between teaching and soaking up classes ranging from classroom management to lesson planning. The environment is nonstop, with the aim to start optimistic corps members—many with no prior teaching experience—on a lifelong journey of becoming effective educators. The hours are long, hard and, given the stakes, completely warranted.

Summer institute has been on my mind as I recently went through the latest “Pre-Institute Work” for 2012 corps members and found myself pleasantly surprised, but still wanting more. While Teach For America’s training and development of corps members is light years ahead of what I experienced when I was at Philadelphia institute many years ago, we have yet to fully embrace the use—and reap the benefits of—education technology (“ed tech”).

Jessica Eastman Stewart, a 2005 Bay Area corps member, brings us the first post in a new series: TFA Love Stories. Jessica met that special someone at Teach For America institute, and while institute is not quite the "hopeless place" of the Rihanna song, it's probably not where Jessica expected to find love. Stay tuned for more TFA Love Stories in the coming weeks.

Teach For America institute: it brings back a variety of memories for all of us who have participated over the last few decades—good, bad, inspiring, intense, emotional, exhausting, and more.

I don’t remember much from my first day of induction in the Bay Area, but I do remember my first interactions with many of the staff and corps members that I am fortunate to call my friends today. One of those interactions was with a guy with shoulder-length bright red hair—not an easy guy to forget.

Photo courtsey of Jessica Stewart. From left to right, back to front: Amanda Klein, Jonathan Klein, Dana Russo, David Silver, Amy Carozza, Andrew Sullivan, Greg Holtz, Mike Sawyer, Greg Klein, Alicia Hardy, Rebecca Miller, Liz O'Hare, Jessica Stewart, Jonathon Stewart, Emily Novick, Sarah Pratt, Paymon Zarghami, Neena Dass, Allison Henkel. Alumni from the Bay Area, LA, Philly, New York, and Newark regions were present!

The Bay corps headed to LA at the end of the week for institute—we bonded in our shared dorm throughout the summer over lesson plans, printers that never quite met our needs, a rollercoaster of steep learning curve highs and lows, and the SoCal heat. When we got back to the Bay, four of us were lucky to find a beautiful house in East Oakland to rent together. One of my roommates was that hard-to-forget redhead.

Matthew Phillips teaches middle school in North Philadephia.

When I walked into my classroom for the first time last September, I had a vision of what I wanted my middle school science classes to look like: I wanted students working with lab equipment to gain a better understanding of the world around them; I wanted students striving to meet the expectations I set for them; but above all, I didn’t want my students to come back to our school next year.

Matt in his classroom. Photo courtsey of Matthew Phillips.

The school I teach in is an alternative school. My students have all been transferred to here by the School District of Philadelphia for disciplinary infractions. If they show improvement, they get another shot at proving themselves in traditional settings. While the challenge they face can be daunting, I prefer to look at it as an opportunity: each of my students is at a turning point. If they can move in the right direction,they’ll experience a dramatic change in their life trajectory.

It’s an opportunity for me as well: I get to be there to help them at this critical point.