Pass the Chalk: The TFA Blog

Olubunmi Fashusi is a member of the 2011 Teach For America—Baltimore corps.

Between 8:40 and 8:50 a.m. on the third day of school, I sat at my desk with my head nestled into the palms of my hands. I was feeling overwhelmed and defeated. I had just finished testing a sixth grade student whose family arrived from Vietnam in July. Throughout the exam, I watched in anguish as he struggled to understand what he was being asked to say, read, and write. I wanted to stop the test so he wouldn’t have to struggle further, but I didn’t. Having the test results would help me understand exactly what he needed to learn, and that would be more beneficial in the long run.

Photo Credit: Alex E. Proimos via Flickr Creative Commons

Lora Cover, ’96 Washington, D.C., works on TFA’s Human Assets team. 

I first met Avi in Moody Towers.  For those of you that weren’t TFA corps members circa the mid ‘90s, that was where every corps member lived during institute in Houston.  We were meeting our fellow D.C. corps, playing an uncomfortable game of two truths and a lie, and trying to sound cooler than we were.  I highly doubt I succeeded.  Avi, on the other hand, was cute and confident, seemingly the opposite of how I felt in that first week as a corps member.

People love institute.  They have fond memories of being part of a larger group of like-minded people living and working together.  I wasn’t one of those people.  I spent the summer incredibly anxious.  How in the world was I going to start teaching on my own in the fall when teaching in a collaborative group was so hard?  What if Teach For America had made a mistake selecting me?  Would I actually have a placement in D.C. at the end of institute?  (We were routinely reminded to “bend like a willow tree” when discussing things like where we would be living in the fall.)  So even though I wanted to impress the cute, confident guy over Blimpie subs, I was way too preoccupied to even have a conversation with him.

Lora Cover with her family. Photo courtsey of Lora Cover.

Robert Rigonan is a member of the 2012 Teach For America-Las Vegas Valley corps.

In the dawn before my first day as a full-time teacher, I couldn’t help but revert to the Robert of eight years before. In my childhood, the final days of summer were spent playing video games into the early morning, sleeping in, and watching TV all day. I needed to treasure my finals moments of freedom—the calm before the storm. And every year, on the night before the first day of school , I’d have trouble sleeping, tossing and turning for hours on end. 

Luckily, I grew out of playing video games all night and watching TV all day (although I haven’t grown out of the temptation to do so). The final days before my first day of school as a teacher have been spent tackling a never-ending to-do list. Still, the strange but familiar mixture of nervous, excited, scared, and anxious that bubbled in my blood during my schoolyard days remained the same. As I finalized my syllabus, tightened up my classroom rules and procedures, and thought about how my broad classroom vision will apply to my students, my mind raced with an infinite number of thoughts and emotions. 

Credit: Eric Molina, via Flickr Creative Commons