TeachForAmerica - Institute Day 2, 3 & 4

On Monday I talked a bit about my disconnect with the methods that TfA was using in 'encouraging' or motivating me or whatever. SOOOO much has happened since then...well here are a couple of stories, and then I'll drop some interpretations down at the end.

On Tuesday, our classroom sessions focused on Planning, Rules and Consequences for our classrooms. Obviously these are extremely important aspects of teaching, but our classroom sessions were basically a restatement of the pre-institute reading, except with some examples, guided practice and independent practice. Our independent practice was the development of some rules that we might be using in our classroom.

Later that day, our group got a chance to work on our Management Plan, which is basically a overview of how the Rules, Consequences, incentives and everything fit together. My collaborative group and I were discussing possible themes for our classroom, alighted on a Construction Theme, and decided we could name our 'mascot' FWBR, the acronym for the rules we had developed. I started looking around for my rules sheet, since I remembered developing these rules. But I couldn't remember *when*. It took me a couple of minutes that it had only been 2 hours since developing those rules.

On to day 3 our core member group had a session on Diversity, Community and Achievement. The session was entitled "Life Map". The task for this lesson was to draw a map, or write or whatever we wanted to do to express the major stages in our life that brought us to our current place at Institute with TfA. We were given markers, paper, pencils, whatever, and put to work. Once we were all done with our efforts, our Corps Member Advisor (CMA) asked for volunteers to share their life maps.

The first person to share was Bernard. Bernard grew up in Texas, and was exposed to race and class based disparities for his entire life. When he applied to and was excepted to Rice, everyone in his high school attributed it to Affirmative Action. In subsequent, turns a woman who married a Hispanic man talked about the insults and isolation put upon her children, and the turmoil that caused her in turn. Disha talked about how her parents moved to the US from India, and she grew up being friends with everyone, but then went back to India and witnessed the poverty and shameful teaching practices (beatings for wrong answers in class).

Today our classroom sessions focused on the implementations of classroom Procedures and the benefits the can yield. We went through the development of a procedure, and continued learning about lesson planning. We had a lot of working time to prepare a large set of deliverables for tomorrow morning at 8 am. In fact, I put in a 6 hour session this evening locking down my contribution to these deliverables, including the development of 2 procedures (a listening posture and call&response) and 4 reading lesson plans (I will be teaching about predictions, cause and effect, and story elements on the first two days of class).

And now for the decompression: I am exhausted, first and foremost. This entire process seems as if it is almost more a test of will than a test of learning ability, but maybe that is the point. Two of the 5 behaviors that TfA is emphasizing is continuous improvement and relentless pursuit, and how can those be taught and emphasized if we are given a cake walk of a school? Secondly, in these diversity discussions, I end up feeling like my story lacks significance. In the words of my Diversity text, I am from the "Power Culture". I am white. I am affluent (middle class, but affluent in the world's perspective). I am male. I am Christian. I am heterosexual. These are the dominant norms of this US culture, and as a result I have *always* been given the benefit of the doubt. It is hard to expose my story in the midst of ones that seem so much more relevant to the issues that this society faces, and ironically, I am afraid that I will be judged because I come from a 'Power' background. But then I share anyway. And I guess that I know that my story does have meaning, and that I am doing the things I do not because of some debt that the Power culture owes, but because it is the responsibility of *all* people to act in the service of society. And in the mean time, I will do what I can, currently TfA, to change the disparities that are oh so real, and I can come along side Bernard and Disha and Christina and my heart will break hearing the pain they suffered, and I will shed tears with them.

I hope I can handle this.