"First Day"

Although my first day in the office is not officially until this Monday, I think my internship really began last week in New York City.

I was visiting Greg for a few days. Greg's roommate Ned works at Teach for America's New York office. On Thursday, he invited me to visit the office. TFA has done a great job of standardizing its offices. I walked into the NY office and felt like I was back in LA entering the TFA office there--bright accents on the walls, a sea of cubicles, everyone in business casual, looking very hard at work. Ned was still in a meeting so I decided to wait in the resource library. LA has one too. It’s a collection of donated textbooks, teacher's guides, workbooks, and lesson planning resources for new TFA teachers.

I sat at the first table and scanned the room. Right behind me, above my head, I recognized a set of High Point textbooks. I used High Point when I taught ESL in LA. I sat up and picked up the green book--level 2B. I taught 2B for three semesters when I was a teacher. I turned to the Table of Contents and the flashback scenes began right there. I thought of my carefully prepared PowerPoints, 12am-made worksheets, vocabulary games, and High Point tests. I remembered. I was once a teacher.

As I read through the first unit, I was impressed at how much was packed in just one section—book recommendations that supported the themes for each unit, activities, and art projects. When I was a teacher I remember dismissing this “extra stuff” because we had such limited instructional time with our students, but it was such good “extra stuff”! As I began reading through the first reading assignment—three poems by Gary Soto—I was surprised by all the ideas that were coming to me. I could have taken my students on a field trip to the beach and then guided them through writing their own poem. Or for the section on “Talking Walls” we could have taken a walking tour of murals in East LA. At the end of this unit they have to write a fantasy story. I could have showed them the opening scene of Toy Story 3 and modeled how Andy created a fantasy story with his toys.

I wanted to start lesson planning right away. Besides awakening the enthusiastic teacher hiding inside of me, my resource library experienced really served as a true assessment of what I have learned these past two years in graduate school.

So many of us that go back to school after we try out some work experience say we go back to “improve our skills.” We want to address the issues that we care about with more purpose, preparation, and learn from the best minds in our search for policy solutions. I certainly said this when I started graduate school. By revisiting the material I used when I was a teacher, I found a test to measure if I could in fact be better at my job after investing in a graduate education.

So would I be better at it? Have my two years in graduate school helped me to make a bigger impact? It is too soon to tell. But the flood of ideas in the resource library infused me with a lot of hope. If I went back to the classroom now I think I could do a much better job. I have some new perspectives to contribute and a resurgence of enthusiasm to sustain me. Would I be the best? Probably not. The amazing teachers who were born to lesson plan would surely outperform me, but I certainly would be better than the 2008 teacher version of me.