Shaky Reason for Joining TFA #2. You don’t know what else you would want to do after college....
OR, You're not yet ready for grad school, but you have to do something after graduation.
Many of the people who join TFA, including myself, do so for a combination of reasons 1 and 2. A lot of TFA corps members I’ve known were, in their last year of college, idealistic but directionless, and Teach for America seemed like the perfect solution to their problem: That (relatively) short two-year commitment looked like an excellent opportunity to help people (see Reason 1) while taking some time to figure out what to do with their lives or to rest up before grad school. In a lot of ways, TFA acts like a surrogate parent after college. It gives you something to do, helps you pay your bills, and tells you where to live. Even better than a parent, it provides you with a ready-made network of friends your own age whose interests are similar to your own.
All of this can sound very attractive to worried college seniors. But Reason 2 is a terrible reason to join Teach for America, for several reasons (reasons within reasons, here):
1. While TFA can solve some of your new-graduate problems, immersing you in a community of friends, helping you with housing, and giving you a direction in life, it will also unload on you the problems of at least equal magnitude that come with being a new teacher in a new (and sometimes hostile) environment. At the same time, you’ll be paying bills, maintaining an apartment, preparing your own meals, monitoring your bank balance, wondering why your car is making that funny noise and if you can afford to fix it; in other words, you’ll still be adjusting to all the adult-world obligations with which many college students are unfamiliar. New personal obligations combined with an amazingly difficult new profession can result in misery.
2. Teaching will help you decide whether you want to be a teacher. It will most likely not help you decide whether you want to be a lawyer, a doctor, an artist, a manager, or whatever other occupation you were thinking about before you joined TFA so that you could stop thinking about possible occupations. Teaching will make you (intimately) acquainted with your weaknesses and strengths, and so may indirectly help you figure out what sort of profession suits you, but there are less painful ways to learn what you're best at.
3. The beauty of many jobs, especially entry-level ones, is that they leave you a fair amount of free time to pursue other interests. If, for example, you think you might want to be a social worker but you majored in finance in college, it’s not too difficult to find a job in business that will leave you free in the evenings and on weekends to read books about social work, or to train as a volunteer counselor, or to talk to people about your career goals. Teaching, on the other hand, can easily soak up every spare minute you have. As an inexperienced teacher, it’s easy to spend nearly every moment planning or preparing handouts or grading papers, and to spend every moment you’re not doing those things staring numbly into space, exhausted. TFA, in other words, may not leave you a lot of time to consider what you want to do when you leave TFA.
4. From what I’ve observed and experienced, finding a first-job-out-of-college and settling into a life outside of school is stressful, but it is far, far easier than TFA. First job = frying pan, TFA = fire.
Many of the people who join TFA, including myself, do so for a combination of reasons 1 and 2. A lot of TFA corps members I’ve known were, in their last year of college, idealistic but directionless, and Teach for America seemed like the perfect solution to their problem: That (relatively) short two-year commitment looked like an excellent opportunity to help people (see Reason 1) while taking some time to figure out what to do with their lives or to rest up before grad school. In a lot of ways, TFA acts like a surrogate parent after college. It gives you something to do, helps you pay your bills, and tells you where to live. Even better than a parent, it provides you with a ready-made network of friends your own age whose interests are similar to your own.
All of this can sound very attractive to worried college seniors. But Reason 2 is a terrible reason to join Teach for America, for several reasons (reasons within reasons, here):
1. While TFA can solve some of your new-graduate problems, immersing you in a community of friends, helping you with housing, and giving you a direction in life, it will also unload on you the problems of at least equal magnitude that come with being a new teacher in a new (and sometimes hostile) environment. At the same time, you’ll be paying bills, maintaining an apartment, preparing your own meals, monitoring your bank balance, wondering why your car is making that funny noise and if you can afford to fix it; in other words, you’ll still be adjusting to all the adult-world obligations with which many college students are unfamiliar. New personal obligations combined with an amazingly difficult new profession can result in misery.
2. Teaching will help you decide whether you want to be a teacher. It will most likely not help you decide whether you want to be a lawyer, a doctor, an artist, a manager, or whatever other occupation you were thinking about before you joined TFA so that you could stop thinking about possible occupations. Teaching will make you (intimately) acquainted with your weaknesses and strengths, and so may indirectly help you figure out what sort of profession suits you, but there are less painful ways to learn what you're best at.
3. The beauty of many jobs, especially entry-level ones, is that they leave you a fair amount of free time to pursue other interests. If, for example, you think you might want to be a social worker but you majored in finance in college, it’s not too difficult to find a job in business that will leave you free in the evenings and on weekends to read books about social work, or to train as a volunteer counselor, or to talk to people about your career goals. Teaching, on the other hand, can easily soak up every spare minute you have. As an inexperienced teacher, it’s easy to spend nearly every moment planning or preparing handouts or grading papers, and to spend every moment you’re not doing those things staring numbly into space, exhausted. TFA, in other words, may not leave you a lot of time to consider what you want to do when you leave TFA.
4. From what I’ve observed and experienced, finding a first-job-out-of-college and settling into a life outside of school is stressful, but it is far, far easier than TFA. First job = frying pan, TFA = fire.
posted by ex-TFAer at 5:36 PM
1 Comments:
Hey Ex-TFAer,
I stumbled upon your blog (google search for TFA stories) and just wanted to thank you for totally hitting the nail on the head.
I was an '07 Phoenix corps member, "was" being the operative word. I taught middle school language arts until the end of the first trimester and recently re-signed from the corps. Thankfully, my region was as pleasant as possible and helpful during my dismissal.
I still think the mission and intention of the group is good, but I think that I got kind of sucked up into the recruitment without REALLY thinking about what I was doing--teaching! Damn, is that not the hardest job in the world, or what? ESPECIALLY in the circumstances we taught. What is important is that TFA recruiting uses ALL of those weak reasons you listed to suck in potential candidates.
I think my biggest cause of angst was outside of the classroom. My region all but mandated that we enroll in Arizona State's Master's in Ed. program, which we attended Monday nights 5:30 - 10. That pretty much shot one night every week to try to do "teacher" things, and it also dumped a ton of homework on top of our already-demanding commitments. Likewise, our fall "orientation" was very frontloaded. We started teaching Aug. 6 and had Saturday and mid-week orientation commitments with our PD or other people...almost every week! It literally drove me nuts. It was like institute never ended, and finally, I said enough is enough!
I am three weeks out of teaching and moving on to career plans B, C, and D, but I wanted to thank you for articulating my thought processes about the group more accurately than anything else I'v heard/read. Good luck, and thanks!
--John Carlisle
Glendale, AZ
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