Four Weeks

In between college semesters, I was a teacher for a month. In reality I was a teacher for just a few days, or hours, or perhaps mere moments. I felt like a real teacher when the voice in my head piped up to say, what you’re doing right now matters to people — it’ll be missed when you go away. As a sophomore at an elite technical school, I never feel this way on campus. If I weren’t enrolled at MIT, someone equally qualified and committed would be in my place. Not so for teaching.

My host teacher understands this, since she is one of a mere handful of STEM mentors at her school. She’s earning her teaching credential through Teach For America, one of the largest national organizations in the field of education. TFA trains mostly freshly minted college graduates to teach in the nation’s most underserved schools. By that I mean schools in poor communities that serve mostly students of color and tend to be located in inner cities or rural areas.

Despite an intense summer training program, most TFA teachers learn on the job. Some are excellent; others crack under the stress of a new environment and give up on their students. Some enter the program with savior mentalities reminiscent of the White Man’s Burden, others participate to gain “real-world experience” after college, others simply want to serve, and yet others want a fast track to a teaching credential. I’m happy to say that my host was in fact overqualified to teach her subject, that she cared about teaching well, and that she invested time and effort in understanding each of her students. She certainly didn’t deem herself their savior.

I believe that TFA is overall a good organization with noble goals. However, that does not make each corps member an automatically good teacher, much less a saint. If, for example, you majored in a humanities field, haven’t even taken math yourself since high school, and have no passion whatsoever for that subject, then you probably shouldn’t be teaching it. In many cases, TFA will still let you. Since decent STEM teachers are hard to come by when more lucrative industry jobs exist, TFA lets virtually anyone in their corps teach math and science.

I had relatively little preparation, certainly less than a TFA participant, for the drastic change in environment I experienced when I began teaching in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. As a Bay Area born and Silicon Valley raised MIT student majoring in a technical field, my view of America was limited to tech-focused places full of high schoolers bound to elite colleges. I was vaguely aware that most of America was different, but the gap between knowing and comprehending was, in my case, profound. Further narrowing my view was the fact that both my parents, and in fact all four of my grandparents, attended college. My parents are engineering PhDs. There had never been a doubt, financial or otherwise, that I’d attend college.

My strikingly different socioeconomic and educational background made me initially wary. The Valley (not the CA but the TX one) was racially, religiously, culturally, socioeconomically, culinarily, linguistically, and educationally different from anywhere I’d lived. While I took in the sights of flat plains, water towers, grackle-covered power lines, and drive-thrus enthusiastically enough during our daily commute, being on campus made me nervous.

I’m naturally introverted. I was somewhat shy during my first week at the school. In the classroom, I didn’t initiate many conversations other than homework help. Mostly, I sat in the back as my host taught her lessons as usual. During the engineering project sessions I led, I went over technical concepts with groups of three or four students. I didn’t know how my name and ethnicity would be perceived, so I went by a generic name (one with no hint of my ethnicity) for simplicity.

While most of the school’s teachers were welcoming and exchanged more than a few words with me, others treated me coldly in the staffroom and even said not-so-nice things about me to my host. I sometimes had to interact quite gingerly, in a manner that made me even more acutely aware of my differences. There were teachers who referred to me as “MIT.” I was even handed a poorly-written science fair grading rubric with MIT written on top in place of my name. The residue of these odd interactions seeped into the classroom, where I perpetually feared being misunderstood or viewed as a privileged snob. I worried that I was inadvertently and genuinely elitist when I noticed English teachers making grammar mistakes and Math teachers doing sample problems incorrectly — was it my duty to speak up? Many of the juniors I taught were below grade level, and I had to cover the basics of fraction multiplication and addition before I could explain how to simplify trig expressions. I resented every math teacher who had encouraged using a calculator as a crutch, leaving the students stumbling blindly without one. In the back of my mind, a constant reminder throbbed: I’m just three years older than these kids.

It took me more than two weeks to realize that a focus on differences is counterproductive.

Once I started mentoring after-school activities more regularly, I learned how to interact with the students on a personal level that rendered all other circumstances irrelevant. Nobody thinks about socioeconomic status in the heat of a soccer scrimmage. Nobody cares about ethnicity when trying to drive a robot. Nobody cares about your native language when playing with an LED circuit. Teaching comes into its own outside the classroom, since the best conversations do not usually contain tested content.

The first lesson I taught went fairly well; I believe I fell short of no standards but my own — I thought I could have done better. A mere three days later, I taught another lesson. I ran class as usual, taking more liberties to explain concepts in my own way. Start with the basics. Build up. Start again with the basics, and this time ask the students for input. Let them finish your sentences, ask “are you sure?” no matter what answers they offer, and when they start something the wrong way, gently nudge them to realize why what they’re doing isn’t helpful. Most of all, do not ever dismiss them as wrong without explanation. They internalize it as evidence of their own stupidity — which is untrue and completely uncalled for — in a stubborn, heartbreaking way.

I resent the focus on testing. The goal of achieving the maximum passing percentage of students doesn’t incentivize teachers to encourage those already performing well, who are sadly the ones who might do anything in the relevant field after high school. The truly interested students aren’t being encouraged any further. A focus on test scores means that a teacher who instructs the students to use their calculators like life-support will receive a better rating than a teacher who attempts to actually teach math. The students themselves believe they are intelligent or stupid based on what scores they tend to receive, leading to a vicious cycle beginning in elementary school (and I believe the initial input to such a cycle is likely something as simple as having some books in the house or eating proper meals).

I truly loved teaching when I knew it was going well. You feel immense gratification when your normally worst-behaved student asks you after class, “Miss, can you always teach? I like how you explain things.” You feel it when a student realizes, unprompted, that he can find the magnitude of a vector using the Pythagorean Theorem and gives an audible exclamation of excitement. You feel it when a student writes you a letter saying that because of a conversation he had with you, he knows where he wants his life to go after high school. You feel it when, two weeks after you explained over and over how distribution was the opposite of factoring, you see one of your students meticulously explaining it to another. You feel it when a student who usually sleeps in class says that your positive attitude makes him feel like working.

I had more credibility after teaching the lesson on my own. I think I came across as genuine more successfully than ever before. The intense, insightful, hilarious, and profound conversations I had with students in my final week of teaching far outweighed any negativity I’d ever felt in the staffroom. I discovered that one student liked to read Jung in his free time, while another was strongly pro-choice because of a family member’s unwanted pregnancy, and that another possessed a secret poetic streak.

They wrote me letters for my last day. I got wind of it beforehand, tipped off by a few overenthusiastic juniors, and I resolved to write each student a farewell note. They were short but specific, individualized with anecdotes and inside jokes, since I had finally learned every single face and name. The letters I received were sweet, hilarious, artistic, and genuine. I spent nearly all five hours of my flights back to Boston rereading them.

Now that my month of teaching has ended, I won’t claim to have saved anyone, done anything particularly noble, or inherently changed anyone’s life. If anything, I’m the one who has learned.

Some enthusiastic young teachers enter their first classroom only to be disillusioned for life by the impossibility of singlehandedly mending the current, broken education system. While I can understand this sentiment after my month in the classroom, I see it slightly differently. Your job is not to fix the entire education system. Your job is to help your students realize their own brilliant capacity to learn, to care, and to succeed.

It is not impossible.