Though I didn't know it at the time, this new principal, Lilian Lawrence (not her real name), absolutely loved TFA teachers. Since taking over leadership of the school two years prior to the year I began, she had hired two of them and was supposedly quite enthusiastic about adding more of us to her staff. Based on what I knew about TFA, including my experience at Induction, I could only surmise that this woman loved Teach For America so much because it provided her with eager, high-achieving teachers who would deliver quality education right from the start. It wasn't until later that I began to suspect her love of TFA stemmed less from the organization's magical powers to produce great teachers, and more from the fact that TFA teachers tend to be young, inexperienced in the field, and much more willing to jump on board with high-stakes test centered "curricula" than an experienced teacher might be.
Despite the enthusiasm that Mrs. Lawrence's reply e-mail had relayed in regards to meeting me, she seemed stressed (almost frenzied, really) and rather supercilious when I met her for the first time. Granted, this happened during the last few weeks of school. There was likely much going on at the time. But she didn't meet my eyes when she greeted me. In fact, she barely looked at me at all during the tour of the school, which consisted of her leading me briskly, always a few paces ahead, through the four "pods" (4 wings of the building that housed classrooms) and introducing me briefly to two TFA teachers who had begun employment at the school that year. Ruby Walsh and Jordan Cunningham (nope, not their real names either) taught 2nd and 3rd grade, respectively, and Mrs. Lawrence had only wonderful things to say about both of them as she introduced us.
Overall, the tour was quick and not entirely memorable, save for one aspect. I remember Mrs. Lawrence stopping by a series of bulletin boards which were covered in graphs, numbers, and teachers' names.
"These are our data boards," she explained, with such emphasis as to impart that these boards were one of the most important components of the school. "We track all of our data."
She then looked at me expectantly, and I realized that, as she was looking for some kind of response, I had two options: 1) I could be completely honest and admit that I had no idea what school data boards were, what this particular data even referred to, or, therefore, how to interpret this data, or 2) I could stay silent and nod importantly, as though the data on the boards made perfect sense and I couldn't wait to start tracking my own.
In the span of about one second, I opted for the latter. Weighed down by the self-consciousness of not being a real teacher yet drove this response from me; once again, though, I assured myself that once I had completed Institute, the idea of data boards would make perfect sense and my recognition of them would no longer be laced with dishonesty.
Satisfied, Mrs. Lawrence led me away and I found myself leaving the school very shortly after I'd shown up. I left with a smile and my head held high, telling myself that I was excited to get started at this new school, but the truth was that I felt more than a slight twinge of anxiety -- anxiety over my teaching abilities, my lack of knowledge, my new school and its leadership, and just what I was about to dive head-first into. Again, though, all of this anxiety was fairly easy to push to the back burner since I still had a summer's worth of training ahead of me.
Still, I took some of that back-burnered trepidation on the road with me as I drove five hours from Las Vegas to the Los Angeles coast. Long drives give a person plenty of time to think, and although I tried to keep my thoughts focused on the bright future ahead of me, I couldn't help but ponder what I would do if I didn't leave Institute filled with preparation for my upcoming teaching assignment. Believe me, I became very good at pushing these fears aside as irrational and willing myself to trust the Institute experience.
Institute base was at Loyola Marymount University, located on the coast of downtown Los Angeles. Because of my status as a single parent, I was granted a family dorm -- meaning that, while nearly everyone else stayed in a one-room dorm they shared with a roommate, I got my own two-bedroom flat, complete with a kitchen, living area, and its own bathroom. Although Brendan was to spend the majority of my time at Institute with his grandmother or father, I did plan to have him stay with me on some weekends. Arriving on my own, though, the privacy and space were very nice. I bought some food for the kitchen area (in case I didn't want to go down to the cafeteria for meals or snacks), as well as some wine, and set my laptop computer up in the living room near a window with a clear view of the ocean.
So far, Institute wasn't so bad.
At check-in, I received some readings and a flash drive with work to prepare over the weekend. I also learned that a young woman named Michaela (not her real name) would be my CMA (which stands for corps member adviser) -- or, in other words, she was the seasoned TFA veteran who would guide me through Institute and teach me valuable things about education. Seven other new corps members and I made up her cohort, and she held some level of responsibility for us and our growth during Institute. She would help us develop a vision for our classrooms, assist us in lesson planning, and watch us teach so that she could offer feedback.
See, the big thing about Institute is that, after a week of learning all about planning and behavior management, corps members are thrown right into classrooms to begin getting first hand experience teaching. It's sort of a "learn as you go" approach, but it's also pretty watered down because each corps member only teaches for about one hour per day in a summer school environment (meaning that class sizes are generally pretty small). Corps members are assigned to a "collab," a group of roughly four people altogether, and then each person is given a subject to teach (such as math, reading, or writing). Then, corps members plan for that subject and deliver an hour (or so) long lesson each day. (When a corps member isn't teaching, other members of her or his collab are teaching, so the entire collab is responsible for a shared class.) All of this is done under the guidance of the CMA, and also a veteran teacher who sits in on each teaching session to assist with feedback and advice.
So, of course, I met my collab quite early on during the first week of Institute. I found out on the first day that I would be teaching summer school at Florence Griffith Joyner Elementary School (which many of us came to refer to as "Flo-Jo") in the neighborhood of Watts. On the second day of Institute, all of us loaded ourselves onto school buses and were driven to our schools so that we could do planning and training there, and this is when Michaela divided her cohort of eight corps members into two collabs of four people each.
My collab consisted of me, Athena (an older woman with lots of experience teaching, and yes, I used her real name!), Grant (a young man of Greek descent who had just completed an education-related, neuro-something-or-other, graduate degree at Harvard, and no, that's not his real name), and Desiree (a young woman fresh out of college -- not her real name). Athena and Desiree were both assigned teaching positions in California's Bay Area, and Grant would be teaching in Los Angeles. All things considered, we were quite the diverse group of incoming teachers -- the one thing that we did have in common, though, was that we would all be teaching upper elementary school (grades 3-5) in the Fall, and thus we would be sharing a 5th grade classroom over the course of Institute.
I'll note here that I was actually pretty lucky to be assigned a 5th grade classroom at Institute when I was going to be teaching 5th grade in the Fall. It makes sense to allow corps members the opportunity to practice teaching in a classroom similar to the one they'll be taking on for the school year, but this doesn't happen in a surprisingly high number of cases. I've talked to other corps members who were assigned to teach pre-K at Institute even though they would be middle school teachers come Fall, or corps members assigned to a high school science classroom at Institute even though they would be English teachers in the Fall. I happened to get very lucky that I was assigned to the exact same grade level/subject for both.
From what I remember, most of my collab were also going to be 5th grade teachers. Grant would be teaching science to a combination of 5th and 6th graders at a KIPP school (more on that later), and I think that Desiree was going to teach a general ed 5th grade classroom (like me). Athena, having had experience in education, would be a part-time teacher and a part-time assistant principal (yeah, I'm not sure how that one was supposed to work, either). All in all, though, as a group we had pretty similar goals in terms of learning outcomes, so we made a good team. Over the course of five weeks that followed after meeting my collab, I would become quite close with both Grant and Athena (Desiree never did become a willing member of our little Institute "family," though).
That first day at Flo-Jo, Michaela's entire cohort spent a good deal of time getting to know one another. We took a form of the Briggs Myers personality test (I think I was an INTP type, if you're interested), as Michaela thought that understanding each others' personality types would help us better understand each others' drives and motivations, and therefore help us create a stronger bond and develop a stronger team. We also took turns sharing our personal stories and backgrounds regarding why we joined TFA, and why educational equity was important to us. This certainly wasn't the first time that I wasn't entirely honest about my reasons for joining (see Chapter 1), but I enjoyed getting to be honest about my personal struggles. We sat outside at a lunch table as everyone shared stories that day, and I think we honestly did feel a bit closer after we'd finished. Despite all of our differences, the nine of us -- Michaela and her cohort -- could relate to the fact that we'd all experienced some form of hardship, and that hardship was part of what led us all to the same place at that table.
The first days of Institute wasn't entirely about building relationships and exploring ourselves, though -- we also spent quite a bit of time planning for the summer school classrooms that we were all about to teach. We went to lesson planning clinics, where we learned the basics of "I Do, We Do, You Do" (or, the importance of modeling a lesson and gradually releasing responsibility for it to the students). We learned about the importance of a classroom vision and tangible goals that students could work toward. In fact, Michaela required both of her collabs to create classroom visions that she then wanted to see come to life as we taught.
So Grant, Athena, Desiree, and I found ourselves wondering just what our "classroom vision" was. What was our vision, exactly, for our students? Aside from "learn things," none of us really had a clear idea.
What I would come to find out was that establishing a classroom vision (beyond "I want my students to learn things") is a huge part of teaching for Teach For America. TFA wants its corps members to come up with a vision that speaks to them, represents their passions and ideals, and contributes to student achievement, and then wants to see those visions happening when they enter classrooms. This is a beautiful idea, but not entirely easy to do when the ideas of what a classroom vision is and what one looks like in practice are vague, to say the least.
My collab and I were given copies of exemplar classroom visions -- ones that successful corps members had produced in previous years -- but we still found it difficult to come up with a unified vision and communicate it on paper. This was partly due to the fact that the vision was supposed to be partly about the classroom culture and partly about academic achievement. For example, we were supposed to make such declarations as, "By the end of summer school, students will meet ________ benchmark for _______ subject." The problems, however, were that 1) we had no idea exactly where 5th graders were supposed to be in any subject, 2) how 5th graders were assessed in these subjects, and 3) what the benchmarks were, how they were measured, or even where our upcoming students were at in terms of where they were supposed to be. When you don't know about these things but are expected to still, somehow, know them, it can feel pretty overwhelming. We turned to Michaela for clarification, but by the time we churned out a rough classroom vision, we (at least I) still felt very confused about many aspects of it. (I wouldn't actually understand and develop a strong classroom vision until my second year of teaching.)
As the first week at Institute proceeded, we were assigned a subject to teach (two of us would teach reading, one would teach math, and one would teach writing, and then we would switch it up halfway through the summer school session). I was assigned to teach reading, which, having had copious amounts of education in literature, I was absolutely fine with (I had yet to learn that teaching reading to disadvantaged grammar school children is very different than teaching literature to already educated adults). After this assignment, most of us were up well into the night developing and refining lesson plans that we would take with us the following week when summer school started. We were taught how to identify a learning objective for our students (using phrasing such as "We can..." or "Students will be able to..." or the ever-popular acronym for that, "SWBAT..."). We were taught how to focus our lessons around the objective, how to gradually release students into the work, and how to assess the work. We had to come up with most of the lesson materials, however (readings, worksheets, assessments, manipulatives, and other such things) on our own (which usually either involved hours on the Internet or hours navigating the supply lab provided for us at the university). Once again, when you're new to a field and presented with a bunch of ideas, practices, norms, and things that you're expected to know, but do not know, figuring everything out can be a long and frustrating process.
We struggled through, though, and came to a place at the end of the week that somewhat resembled minor preparation for our upcoming week of teaching. We'd take what we learned and use it, take what we kind of learned and try to use it, and try to forget about what we didn't learn. All in all, it felt like a huge exercise in, "We'll see what happens."
The weekend, though, was our time off, which gave us an opportunity to explore Los Angeles and its surrounding areas. There were beach parties and surfing; bonfires and S'mores; excursions to Disneyland and various clubs and bars. Athena, Grant, and I, did a bit of studying, planning, and eating together during the course of that first weekend, but in all honesty I spent most of it trying to relax while drinking wine and binge watching The Walking Dead on my laptop (this was one of those times when having my own room certainly showed benefits).
The end of the weekend, though, marked the start of the second week of Institute -- the week when we were to begin teaching.
This involved waking up before the sun, showering and putting myself together, and heading down to the main hall of the university where I could pick up my lunch and then eat breakfast (which was usually very nice, consisting of choices ranging from cold cereal, hot eggs, bacon and sausage, warm muffins, an assortment of juices and, of course, coffee). We would then need to be out front (usually right around the time when the sun was rising) in order to catch our school buses so that we could make it to our school sites on time. LMU happened to be rather close to Watts, so it never took long to arrive at the school site. The previous week, my collab and I had haphazardly (meaning, as best we could) set up our classroom. We'd moved desks around, set up boards, and put up as many posters as we could get our hands on, while at the same time doing our best to be conservative. At the end of Institute, we'd have to put the room back exactly as it had been (as is only respectful toward the teacher who used it during the regular school year), and so we didn't want to create a huge amount of work where that was concerned. Still, we had the beginnings of a working classroom that first morning of teaching.
All of the Flo-Jo teachers and their CMAs (and there were quite a few of us) met in a common room at the start of the day for morning inspiration, and then we parted to do last-minute preparations for our students. My collab and I wrote our daily objectives on the board and then paused for a quick photo of the four of us, in our classroom, ready to teach for the first time.
All of us went out to the playground to meet our students, nervous but bright smiles lining our likely overly optimistic faces. My collab had about eight students that day -- nowhere comparable to an actual general education classroom, but a good start, I suppose, for practice.
I'll digress here for a moment to point out that this happens to be another huge criticism of Teach For America (and particularly, its Institute training model). The students that TFA teachers serve are typically from underrepresented and underprivileged communities (all of my collab's students were from either Watts or neighboring Compton). Further, these students attending summer school to be taught by Institute teachers are struggling students (students don't usually attend summer school if they're doing well academically). These students typically need to catch up quite a bit before the new school year -- some of them, even, risk being held back if they're not caught up at least some. So, in other words, the students who come to summer school to be taught by Institute teachers are some of the nation's highest-needs children. They are the students most in need of a high-quality, experienced teacher who can understand and meet their needs. What they get, however, is a wholly inexperienced teacher who essentially uses them to practice being a teacher before being handed a classroom of their own. I'm not saying that all TFA teachers are ineffective at Institute -- that would be a wholly fallacious assumption on my part -- but I do think that there is some merit to criticizing the model presented.
Ask yourself this: If your own child was struggling to such an extent as to need summer school intervention, would you be happy if they spent their time all summer being taught by someone with no background in education (most TFA teachers don't have such a background, though some do), basically playing trial and error in your child's classroom while learning how to teach? It's worth considering.
Anyway, though, my first two days of teaching at Institute felt like a combination of performance (standing in front of an expectant group of people usually does, I think), crisis management, babysitting, a fair dose of "fake it 'till you make it" mentality ... and trial and error. The reading lesson I taught involved the book The Empty Pot, and we were to study various aspects of story elements throughout the week. A few of the students did very well and participated in my lesson, while others didn't seem to grasp the ideas I tried to relay (and, unfortunately, I didn't yet understand the concept of differentiation, or of finding new ways to teach the same thing). One student rolled her eyes at nearly everything I said. Another attempted to leave class in the middle of instruction. And another refused to do anything I asked -- she refused to read, refused to write, refused to speak, refused to move, refused to stand up. She stared at me defiantly until I pleaded with the presiding veteran teacher to intervene.
I was adequately prepared for none of this. Though I only taught one hour out of the day, and attended development sessions for the rest of the day, I returned to LMU feeling both physically and mentally drained. I believed that I had what it took to eventually be a good teacher -- I just didn't know what that would look like, or what it would take. So many things, from data keeping to behavior management strategies, still seemed so abstract.
On the first day back from teaching, veteran TFA corps members lined the LMU sidewalk to give us all high-fives and cheer loudly for us. We'd done it. We'd completed our first day of teaching.
On the second day back, I barely noticed that the sidewalk was absent of a cheer squad. Stepping off the bus, I was making tentative dinner plans with Grant when I turned my phone on (after a long day of, naturally, having it turned off) and noticed that I'd missed about half a dozen calls and at least a dozen texts.
All of those texts had the same ominous undertone. "Call me," they said. "Are you all right?" "I need to talk to you." "Where are you?"
Frowning, I told Grant I'd catch him later and hurried away to a quiet spot where I could listen to my voicemail. There was one from my dad that urgently requested that I call him as soon as possible. But the one that caused a deep sense of panic to rise within me was from my brother in law.
"Kate," it said, his voice breaking, "it's an emergency. You gotta ... you gotta call us as soon as you get this, okay? It's ... it's bad. It's really bad. ... Just ... just call me or Holly. Okay?"
I found an empty auditorium and entered it, my heart nearly beating out of my chest. A million possibilities ran though my head, but most of them centered around Brendan. The darkest corners of my subconsciousness knew -- just knew -- that something had happened to him. Was he okay, though? Hurt? In the hospital? Or was he dead? Had he run out into the street? Wandered off and gotten lost? Was there an accident in the house? Whatever had happened, it was obviously serious ... "really bad," as my brother in law had put it.
My fingers shook as I dialed my sister.
"Kate?" came her shaky, slightly anxious response.
"What happened?" I demanded. "What's going on?"
"Kate ... I have really, really, really bad news." I could tell she was fighting tears.
"What's going on?" I demanded again, sinking almost unwillingly into one of the soft theater-style seats.
"Are you alone?" she asked. "Are you sitting down?"
"Tell me it's not Brendan," I pleaded. "Just please tell me it's not Brendan."
There was a short pause.
"It's not Brendan," she assured me. "Brendan's fine."
It was as I released a huge sigh of relief, as nine hundred thousand of my million fears instantly dissipated, that she revealed, "It's Mom. Mom passed away last night."
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