Graduating students of all majors and backgrounds at Cal Poly will get the chance to serve their country – but in another way than in the military. Thanks to Teach For America, those recent graduates will enrich the lives of other, younger students – in the classroom.
Teach For America is an organization that trains and places recent college graduates as teachers in low-income area schools in 25 different regions of the United States, from California’s Bay Area to Connecticut and the Miami-Dade area, in both urban and rural communities. These teachers serve a two-year stint; most are placed in their first-choice region.
“I joined Teach For America because it’s a good way to spread some love and serve others who don’t get to grow up with a quality education like many of us do,” said Eric Martin in an e-mail, a TFA participant who is teaching in the Bay Area. He graduated from Cal Poly in June.
Applicants go through a very strict selection process, which includes interviews both by phone and in-person. This process occurs multiple times during the year – new applications are accepted in September, November, January, and February – with new applicants each time, in order to encourage as many interested applicants as possible. The upcoming deadline to submit applications, which according to TFA’s information packet should include “personal and academic information,” a one-page resume, a letter of intent and an essay each 500 words long, is Feb. 18. Regardless of when students apply, they will be trained during the following summer.
The experience has proved to be difficult yet extremely rewarding for many of the teachers. Erica Weybright, a 2005 graduate of Cal Poly and TFA participant teaching in Houston, Texas, described in an e-mail her struggle to deal with a particularly difficult student to inspire last year, and the unexpected gift he gave to her: “He would often be asked to leave my (6th grade) class, receive lectures on his behavior outside of class, be an unwilling participant in parent conferences and sit in in-school suspension. Students like this draw the very life from you. This year, as a 7th grader, Jesse came to me with a letter he was asked to write in his technology class. (He wrote:) ‘Thanks for teaching me. I thank you for giving me an example of how people should act. I thank you for that.’ Knowing that the students are always watching and taking what you do for them to heart makes all of the heartache and frustration, that occur on a regular basis, worth it,” Weybright said.
Dianne Hardcastle, a TFA participant teaching in Philadelphia and a 2005 Cal Poly graduate, has come to a grim realization as a result of her time teaching in the community. She said in an e-mail, “First.something must be done about education in America. Knowing all the statistics, information, important studies, or whatever will never prepare a person for what my students experience. The situation is worse than you could ever imagine – dangerous, hopeless, racist, and terrifying. So many issues manifest themselves in educational failure – unsafe housing, terrible nutrition, living wage issues, social services (or) the lack thereof, and parental education.”
This is the first year that TFA is making an established effort to draw applicants from Cal Poly, so organizers are striving to “get the message across, (and get) good applications. It’s about quality, not quantity,” said Christopher Ho, Cal Poly’s campus campaign manager for TFA. The organization has campus campaign managers at colleges and universities all over the nation to help generate interest and facilitate the application process.
For more information on how to apply, students can contact Christopher Ho at cpho@calpoly.edu, Recruitment Director Pearl Esau at pearl.esau@teachforamerica.org or go to Teach For America’s Web site at www.teachforamerica.org.