Why did I leave TFA?

I’ve noticed that another round of TFA interviews must have just passed as the traffic to the site bumped up and people were reading my past TFA posts.

For those of you checking out this site to get tips for your interview and caring to explore my more recent posts may be surprised that posts about teaching have ceased after a year.  Well, I’ll tell you up front, I dropped out, left the program, went on my own way.  The first thing that I ever quit before my committed time had run out.  But I don’t regret it.   For me, it was the right decision.

Without further ado, here are my reasons in no particular order:

• I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t feel like I was making an impact.  (As I look back, I am sure that I did, for some students, but there were just so many that I don’t feel like I was just another teacher who didn’t teach anything)
• I didn’t feel like I taught anything, except on certain days, with certain classes did I feel like anything I said mattered.
• I didn’t feel respected by students or the administration at the school.  Stuck out back in the trailers, never visited by principals, never listened to, etc.  I know this isn’t entirely the students’ fault in that I did not do enough to earn their respect.
• My life changed.  Between the time of applying (and thinking that this will be my life for 2 years, not knowing what else was out there) and getting accepted I met a beautiful girl and missed her tremendously throughout the year.
• I didn’t feel fun anymore.  I was not there for people who depended on me when I felt that I HAD to be doing what I was doing.  I still feel terrible.  After days of stress in teaching, and being constantly poked, yelled at, teased (some students did, and even when they were teasing others, I remembered my days of being teased in school), my threshold for being poked fun of outside of school lowered and I became more irritated.  I still am working on getting back to my goofy, childish self.
• I wasn’t in it.  By about halfway through the year, still not holding control over my day-to-day activities, I began to lose heart.  I just couldn’t find the effort to try something new, with earnest.  I longed for the ‘easy fix’ that isn’t ever there.  It started to become very apparent when at TFA meetings in the beginning, everyone would be asking about how to get their class under control, but while time progressed, conversations switched to doing different and other activities.  It is very frustrating still feeling like you are square one, just trying to get control, let alone worrying about other activities.
• The grass was greener.  My other options, doing research, going back to school, moving in with my girlfriend, etc. seemed so much more attractive.  I am glad that I left, but I do still think about it, and wonder how everyone is doing.  I keep in touch with my roommates, who I loved living with.

Don’t let this list deter you from the program.  It is merely a glimse inside myself, for me so that I can get all of this out, and for you so that you can consider another point of view.  Your mileage may vary.

Background on the first banner

Upon consideration of changing my photo banner for this blog, I thought it might be a good idea to let you curious folks in on what’s happening in each picture.

From left-to-right / top-to-bottom:

My lovely girlfriend, Angela.

Angela and I watching the sunrise at Bethany Beach.

Two of my cousins, the second’s wife, and my grandmother at a third cousin’s bat mitzvah.

Welcome ceremony at summer institute.

Cool picture from children’s museum in Pittsburgh.

Angela and I at the John Williams concert in Pittsburgh

Me in my graduation garb.

Another shot of Angela

Angela and I as a snack.

Me at Phipps Conservatory

Me, John, Ben, and Amos during summer institute.

Shubh, Dr. Armitage and I at dinner after my graduation.  (I researched in Dr. A’s lab and worked with Shubh).

Angela and I at the bat mitzvah. 

The compression of the spring.

As the year winds down, I fear that the students will be winding up. Luckily, I’ve just been informed that I will not need to teach on the last day of classes for 2007. There will, instead, be “synergizing testing” for science that day. It will probably be totally useless, but alas I am at the mercy of the administration.

On another note, today is the first basketball game for EJ. (For those who don’t know, I have been assistant coaching the boys basketball team. I’m not very good, so I don’t handle the ball too much, but I do point out a few things now and then, and I am learning pretty quickly.) Obviously, I’m hoping that they win. I’m going to bring my camera in an attempt to remember to take pictures.

On an even brighter note (the paper kind), a student wrote about how much they liked me as a teacher:

Mr. Shuy Mr. Shuy Mr. Shuy Mr. Shuy Mr. Shuy

I really appreciate you teaching us stuff about science. You’re the best. I also wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I really am happy that you’re my science teacher this year, and I will miss you next year when I’m in 8th grade. And I wouldn’t have gotten this far if it wasn’t for you and your great teaching. Thank you so much! Yours Truly.

And on the outside of the note:

Life is Hard

Even

for

beginners

But that’s no reason for you to give up.

Mr. Shuy’s card.

(With some spelling corrected)

As they say…

This is why I teach for America.

The crackdown.

With the help of an administrator I have established some sort of control over my 6th period. With a no-nonscence set of consequences, namely no more warning, some of my students are starting to act better. Students are getting detentions, getting removed from class, and receiving ISS when they misbehave. I figure that’s probably a little better than a slap on the wrist when I originally said I would give detentions, etc. Now, they are starting to realize that I’m not playing around.

My 7th period, however, is still kicking my rear. I have started giving more detentions, and I think that when the students actually start having them, things will start to shape up. However, I do need to start sending some of those students out of my room as well. They are, by far, my biggest source of stress at school. Even the “good” students, talk insessantly and raise a huge stink when I assign them detentions. I hope that their parents will back me up, I am going to go call some of them now.

Workday

Today was a teacher workday.  Basically, it turned my job into a regular desk job; yet, it felt like a vacation.

I successfully renovated my classroom by moving the projector screen to the wide side of the room, allowing me to have wider rows of students and preventing the “I can’t see the screen, let me move to the front,” which roughly translates to “My friend is up front and I want to talk to him/her.”

Not only that, but I switched out my tables for desks.  Old ratty desks, but individual little islands for each student.  Small enough that they will be forced to keep the desks clear.   Large enough for their own work, and separate enough to keep their elbows from intruding on the individual sitting next to them.  And there are no chairs to be moved around, I will be establishing and enforcing a strick “no moving the desk unless I tell you to” rule.

Hopefully, the shock factor will keep them quiet for a day or two.

Some rowing, a wedding, the frr, and Welcome to the Monkey House*

 I’ll start out with a re-cap for the last few weekends.

Two weeks ago, I flew up to Pittsburgh (the plane actually took off, AND landed at a different airport) to visit Angela, and participate in some rowing events.  It was a great weekend, as usual, packed with a ton of stuff.  I rowed in the alumni 8+ in the Head of the Ohio regatta, beating the thrown together CMU men’s varsity 8+.  The anual HOTO banquet followed that evening, which was nice, and a bit weird since it was held in Mellon Institute.  I tend to wonder what other people think of the place, people who hadn’t spent 3 years doing research there.  It was kind of a thrill to be back there again for something that wasn’t science related.  Later that night, I went with Angela and David to Kennywood frightnights.  I pretty cool, totally decked out set of haunted houses and some rides.  I hadn’t gone since my freshman year, so it was nice even if I had a couple of scaredy-cats hanging on my arms.  Sunday was mostly relaxing and then flying back home to lesson plan.

The following weekend, I met Angela in Philadelphia for a wedding of one of my high school friends.  It was a nice ceremony, the first Christian one I’d been to, and the reception was nice and relatively low-key as well.  They had a roasted hog, too!  One the way out of town I stopped with my mom to see my step-dad’s mother who has been in the hospital.  It was sad, a woman who had been quite full of life a few years ago, and seemed to have a healthy weight, lying frail and having difficulty breathing, hooked up to dialysis.  It was nice, however, that she recognized me and was able to see me there, and refreshing that she still had her caffeine free diet-coke preference even while holding on to life.  She’s made the decision not to stay on dialysis, so she will probably pass away soon.  She will be missed.

This past weekend, Angela came to visit me in NC (I know, 3 weekends in a row, an amazing change of pace from 5 weeks without seeing her).  We went to the NC state fair Saturday night (the locals call it a fur, but really with less vowel sound, so I’m going with fr or frr) .  The amount of oil in that place could probably power Henderson for a month.  Every food imaginable was fried,  snickers bars, oreos, reeces’ cups, dough (multiple forms), potatoes, ice cream, and of course vegetables.  A excess of spinny rides kept me planted to the ground, but we did go to see the petting zoo, and the agricultural exposition.  The exhibit about the bees was facinating, as was staring at the 1178lb pumpkin.  This thing was deformed under its own weight, and was over a half-ton! Ridiculous! (Also a new NC state record).  The animals were cute and stinky.   As usual, a great weekend with my girl.

Back to school.  This week has been interesting.  My first 2 periods continue to behave fairly well, and my last 2 do not.  I still get virtually no work done in my 6th period (2nd to last) and even less in my last.  I turn around for a moment in the last period, and nearly everyone is out of their seat moving around talking.  Yesterday, I even heard students making monkey sounds.  I threatened to bring in cages today, they seemed to like that idea.  I just feel like that epitomizes my situation with those classes.   Responding to basically nothing, and when they do respond, they forget about their fear of me 2 minutes or closer to 10 seconds later.  (I called a parent, leaving a message saying that “their child”, not indicating who it was, was behaving poorly in class, everyone was silent for a moment.)

We’ll see about today.

* suggested by Angela

Is it a bad sign…

…that the best day of my week is when school was canceled due to a water main break?

pros:

don’t have to deal with the chilren

ordered my new passport

mailed a package

ate an omlete

played wii before noon

don’t have to rush to write my lesson worksheets

cons:

don’t have the pleasure of dealing with the children

The need for differentiation

Today I attempted to have a demo to show condensation (ice water in beakers) and have students try to figure out where the water came from.  I also built my own psychrometer to measure the relative humidity in the room (kinda worked, but the chart in the book only went up to 20 degrees celcius, and it was pushing 28 during one class), so that took some extrapolating.

Well, this was pretty well suited for my first and second periods, but my 3rd period continued to push my buttons (even though 4 of the most talkative and noisy students were in ISS).  We still did most of the demos, but it was much more forced.  Then my last class came in.  I was already a bit upset from the previous class, but they would not sit down and behave.  I forced the entire class to leave the room and try coming in silently one at a time.  First, I couldn’t get them to quiet down outside (probably another disadvantage of being outside in the trailers), then once I gave up on silence (who wants to learn anyway?), I started letting one student into the classroom at a time.  This worked for a little bit, but then the students inside reached critical mass. The students outside no longer had anyone to talk to, so they were quiet, but inside there were plenty of kids. The students who had come in first began to finish their work and get restless, the new students coming in had people to talk to, it was a nightmare.  The rest of the period involved me talking at them about how they couldn’t even get to do a simple demonstration.

After talking to another team teacher, my new resolution is that those 2 classes must earn the right to demos by working from the book or worksheets for a while.  I’m not even going to try it anymore.  This is a little extra planning for me, but will hopefully reduce the throbbing veins in my forehead during class.

I don’t know how I’m going to get through this if I don’t see even a little improvement soon.

Getting ready for the final interview

So I wrote about choosing where to go and what to teach (remember: it’s OK to be picky). Now, here are some tips and things to expect from the final interview.

#1: Only a small part of the day is for “personal” interviews, the rest is done with a group of other applicants. Be prepared to work together.

#2: Be on time. This might require you to scout out the location ahead of time. My interview was close, and next to an area of town I was familiar with, but I hadn’t actually been to this location. I drove past the place a couple of times, and searched for parking. That blew my extra 15 minutes that I gave myself, and I walked in after they had started (I swear I was on time and they just started early).

# 3: Be ready to ask questions. The first portion of the interview was devoted to learning more about TFA, getting some first hand experiences, etc. However, those experiences seemed a little tamer than what I’m seeing now… don’t take it all as fact or the experience that you will have.

#4: Work together. You are given a problem to solve as a group (these groups were about 7-8 people for me). You want to take an appropriate amount of leadership in the group, yet still allowing everyone else to share their ideas.

#5: Prepare a 5 minute lesson plan. Don’t go crazy! If you are spending hours on this, you are going to be in for a world of hurting when you need to write 1-1.5 hr lesson plans 5 days a week. I taught a lesson on naming simple hydrocarbons (I wanted to teach HS chemistry). You don’t need to teach in your subject area, but do something that you are comfortable with. Remember to give enough time for teaching, and checking for understanding. Ultimately, you want to give instruction, guided practice (where you help them through a problem), then let them answer one on their own. Finally, you want to try to assess or check for understanding.

(I didn’t do all of that and I don’t think you really can in 5 minutes, but try to use some of those ideas)

#6: Bring a book: The afternoon is reserved for personal interviews. There were 7-8 people interviewing with 2 people, so most of the time you are free to do anything. Don’t wander too far; I went to lunch down the street.

#7: Be honest. The last thing that you want to do is lie to get yourself into a position that only the person you were trying to be could handle. What I remember from the personal interview:

being asked about my essay, and another time that I have overcome difficult times.

getting a scenario about a teacher who was teaching a unit on something and then was told by the principal to start teaching for an assessment test. It was my job to argue with my principal to get my way and not teach the test, but instead keep teaching my material. I think that I ended up coming to some negotiation.

I was asked about my organizational habits

Can’t remember much else now.

#8: Get your recommendations. It’s getting pretty close to too late to get them. If you haven’t yet, better start begging now.

#9: Plan ahead. Obviously, if you need a ride to the interview location, find one ahead of time.

Last year the financial aid applications were due at the time of the final interview, but I haven’t seen anything about this yet.

#10: Fuhgeddaboutit.  Don’t think about it until Nov. 6 when you find out the results.

Good luck!

Did you get a final interview with Teach for America?

You’re probably receiving your selection to proceed to the next round of interviews today, and wondering what to expect next..

Here are the things that you’ll need to do before your interview…

Pick where you want to go and what you want to teach.

Get your recommendations submitted on-line (I’m not familiar with this, last year letters were carried to the interview by the applicant).

Develop a 5 minute lesson.

Get prepared for the interview (mentally and organizationally).

I’ll tackle each of these things in separate posts over the next few days. I still need to flesh out my lesson plan for tomorrow, and I only want to procrastinate a little.

Tips on picking where you want to go…

#1: Go somewhere that you can see yourself going if you weren’t teaching. (ie. somewhere you want to be). If being 30 minutes from a grocery store isn’t your idea of a good time, you might want to try somewhere else. Then again, teaching in rural SD could allow you to save up some money for your time elsewhere (rent = $75 – $200, and I thought $250/month was cheap).

#2: To some extent, you are embarking on an adventure, but really just let the teaching be that adventure for now. While I’m sure it can be done, I wouldn’t recommend giving yourself too much new stuff to get used to. If you’ve never lived in a big city, the NYC corps might not be the thing you need. You don’t want to be learning how to live in your region while you’re also learning how to teach. Bottom line, let the teaching be your challenge, not your style of living.

#3: I still think those people who check the box “put me where I’m most needed” are crazy. This goes along with #1 and #2, go somewhere you want to go…

#4: Corollary to #3.. be careful what you wish for. Make sure you really do “highly prefer” your highly preferred regions. From what I was told about the 2007 corps, Phoenix snatched up anyone who asked to be put anywhere, and anyone who had Phoenix on their highly preferred list.

#5: Think about what’s around you. Do you have family nearby, or at least close to an airport that flies relatively cheaply and direct? (I live 1hr from an airport that flies to my Mom for ~$100 round trip). I thought that ENC was pretty good, rural (low cost of living), yet close to larger cities (40-60 minutes from Durham and Raleigh). Grocery store down the street, or 3 towns over? How many Wal-marts within 20 miles, these are the things you need to think about now.

#6: The Big Point: Don’t be a hero any more than you already are. You’re going to have plenty to deal with in school, make sure everything out of school will go as easily for you as you can get it to.

#7: Similar rules apply for choising a subject to teach. I wouldn’t put too much stock into what subject you are selected for. I guess it is supposed to play into what region you are selected for, but to be honest it is subject to change. For example, I was accepted with a position as a HS Chemistry teacher, but guess what, I’m teaching 7th grade science. That was still on TFA’s end to have me interview with a middle school and to let them hire me. Once you get hired into a school, that’s where the fun can begin. Don’t expect anything to be set in stone once you are accepted, even the region placement. One of TFA’s mottoes might as well be “subject to change (with little to no warning)”. My neighbor across the street recently lost one class she was teaching to have it replaced with another, similar subject just a different skill level.

Good luck, and check back often. (As always, comments are welcome.)