Today was the start of Institute, TFA’s five week long training program. There’s all sorts of Institute lore that I’ve heard – that it’s a bootcamp for teachers, that it’s intended to break you, that no one gets any sleep. There was some effort to prove those ideas false, a lot of talk of managing workload and getting adequate sleep.
Still, a lot of my fellow corps members were pretty stressed today. I feel like TFA is turning me into a type B person, ever so slightly. There are a lot of things where I’m not sure what’s going to happen next, but I feel surprisingly calm about it. I feel like everything will work out with Institute, even if I don’t know how it will work out.
Today they told us what we’ll be teaching during Institute, and I’m going to be teaching math to students who are entering third grade. I’m so excited – this matches pretty closely to what I’ll be teaching in the fall, so it’ll be good practice, especially for classroom management.
The CEO of Teach For America, Elisa Villanueva Beard, spoke to us this morning. She said that when she was in school, people from her background and her neighborhood were not expected to go to college, much less graduate college. She also said that people were genuinely doubtful that students from low-income backgrounds could achieve at the same levels that students from middle and high-income backgrounds could, and that TFA is one part of the effort to prove that false.
I was surprised that she referenced some high-performing charter networks in her speech. Charter schools have been so absent from the conversation within TFA-MS, because many have said that they aren’t exactly relevant to a rural context. There are only a few charter schools in the whole state, and the general attitude that I’ve heard from TFA-MS staff is that improving public schools is the best option for the Delta. I’m not sure what the status of charter schools is in the other regions at our Institute, but I’d be interested to learn more.