My first year, re-evaluated
A lot of what has motivated me throughout the past twenty-one years has been the desire to redeem myself for what I considered to be an unacceptable first year of teaching sixth grade math during the 1991-1992 school year at Deady Middle School in Houston.
Nowadays, districts pay a $5,000 recruitment fee to TFA for the opportunity to hire the new TFA trainees. I don’t know if back then TFA got any money for me. I hope they didn’t. At my school that year there were about 150 teachers. Three of us were new, me, Jon, and Mitzi, all TFA. I don’t know who the school would have hired if not for us, so it is hard to say whether or not we were a positive or negative influence on the school compared to what it would be without us. Though that year did nearly break me, and wasn’t so kind to Mitzi or Jon either, I’ve always felt that, in the scheme of things, we didn’t do ‘damage’ to our students. One reason for this was that we taught middle school so I was just one out of seven teachers my students had each day. The other six teachers knew what they were doing so in some ways my class became an opportunity for students to try to learn self-control since the teacher wasn’t doing a very good job at creating a controlled learning environment.
Sometimes I hear TFA defenders say that while it is true that five weeks isn’t nearly enough time for someone to learn how to teach, four years isn’t enough time either. This is nonsense. With