Pass the Chalk: The TFA Blog

This post originally appeared on TeacherPop. We have reblogged it with permission.

Emily Southerton (Delta '10) is a teacher and poet who created and runs The Poet Warriors Project.

When we read the lines, “Between Walls/the back wings/of the/hospital where/nothing/will grow lie/cinders/in which shine/the broken/pieces of a green/bottle,” on the last day of my poetry unit, I ask my middle schoolers to discuss in groups what it means to them.

“Even when others are negative around us, we can stand out and be different,”

“Even if we are dealing with something hard in life, we can smile,”

“Even if we come from a bad area/family/school, even if we are broken, we can be successful; we can shine.”

Photo courtesy of Emily Southerton

This is the first of several posts about immigration reform that will be published on Pass The Chalk in the coming weeks. For more information about the impact of the Dream Act on undocumented students and their families, visit United We Dream and The Dream Is Now.

Back in January, our Chairwoman, Wendy Kopp wrote on TIME Ideas about comprehensive immigration reform (CIR), an issue we all know is one of the most pressing agenda items right now in Congress.  Wendy stated, “Every time a student’s potential is cut short by their legal status, our country wastes precious resources and loses out on talent we need.”

Given my work in the Latino Community, I was both excited and anxious about what this position in support of education principles in  the DREAM Act actually meant for Teach For America. I thought about our ability to find meaningful ways to support this position with action. Would we actually take an active stand? Or would we just stand behind the principles of CIR? In order to do right by Latino kids and families in the communities where we teach, I believed we needed to work hard to identify appropriate actions that would allow us to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

Photo by Chzz via Wikimedia Commons

Although by the time I was 11 my grandmother had Alzheimer’s and could no longer speak full sentences, I loved and remember her presence.

It was my ritual to grab her hand and ask her all sorts of silly questions she had no cognitive ability to answer. Like, “Grandma, what’s your favorite football team? Is it the CowBOYS or……or (then I’d whisper really lowly) the Packers?” Occasionally, she’d repeat, “boys,” well, err, more like, “bo,” and I was set! I’d dash into the living room yelling, “See Dad!! Gramma’s a COWBOYS fan like me, not a Packers fan like you! Told ya so!!”

Photo by Miriam Villalta via WikiCommons

I recently was in Austin to attend year two of SXSWedu, the education-focused cousin of the wildly fabled annual SXSWinteractive where startup dreams hope to come true or catch fire. Like its more established cousin, SXSWedu generated buzz about secret film screenings, budding entrepreneurs, and big names like Gates (Bill as well as the Foundation).

Standing still for a moment in a hallway at SXSWedu, I was surrounded by entrepreneurs abuzz about their upcoming releases and how many kids and teachers will benefit from their tools. Many are teacher-preneurs, such as Dan Carroll (Clever), Tess Brustein (SmarterCookie), Nicole Tucker Smith (LessonCast), Scott Messinger and Robbie Earle (Common Curriculum), and Daniel Yoo (Goalbook), who felt specific pain points and are on a mission to alleviate them. They are convinced that had they had their own solution in years past, they would have been more effective teachers through engaging learning opportunities or would have simply saved time. In my opinion this is the energy and spirit that will drive this phase of education innovation to impact.

There were also large initiatives such as InBloom that seeks to solve big data problems by building the infrastructure, or the “plumbing,” through which data analytics and technology come together and in so doing personalize learning for all students. Amplify Tablets also made a splash as an “all-in-one” solution for monitoring and managing students while providing learning content.

Photo courtesy of Nihal ElRayess. The author, second from right, at SXSWedu with, from left to right, Mark Hurty (TFA’s IT Solutions team), Dan Carroll (Clever), and Kevin Tame (TFA’s Admissions team)