Requirements: What makes a good teacher?

According to Teach for America’s website, this is what they’re looking for in a prospective recruit:

We seek leaders who can describe significant past achievements and who operate with an exceptional level of personal responsibility for outcomes. Because our corps members face such tremendous challenges, we seek applicants who have demonstrated determination and persistence when confronted with obstacles in the past. Lastly, we seek people with the specific skills - from critical thinking to organizational ability - that we have seen characterize our most successful teachers.

Source: http://www.teachforamerica.org/looking.html

This thumbnail description of an ideal applicant is not, in my opinion, a description of an ideal teacher. There are many people who have achieved personal success, are hugely responsible, face adversity with determination, possess excellent critical-thinking and organizational skills, and find that they are unhappy and often ineffective as teachers.

But if the qualities described above are often present in people who would not be satisfied as teachers, why are these the qualities TFA is looking for? And what qualities are useful for a teacher to have?

Excellent Reasons to Join TFA

Excellent Reason # 1: You have wanted to be a teacher for a long time.
Excellent Reason # 2: You have taught extensively in the past and loved it.

Excellent Reason # 3 (only in conjunction with ER # 1 and/or 2): You want to work with students at under-resourced schools and to have access to TFA’s training program and support system.

There may be other excellent reasons to join (feel free to post them), but these are the best I can think of. The best and most satisfied first-year teachers/TFA corps members I saw had either prior teaching experience or a genuine and longstanding interest in becoming teachers.

When you decide whether to apply to or join Teach for America, your focus (in my opinion, of course) should be on that first word: teach. Before you think about anything else, forget about helping people, forget about meeting other corps members, forget about politics and community service and grad school and whatever else may be factoring into your decision, and ask yourself this one question: Do I want to be a teacher?

And then ask yourself this one: Am I suited to being a teacher?

Shaky Reason to Join TFA # 4: You’ve never failed at anything in your life, and you’re sure you’ll be a great teacher.

Most TFA corps members have never failed at anything (or much of anything) before joining the program, and every single person I know in TFA felt like a failure at some point (or many points, or all the time) while teaching. This is not to say that you won’t become a good teacher, but you should not go into this program expecting instant success or personal glory. You will most likely be bitterly disappointed.

Shaky Reason to Join TFA # 3: It’s a prestigious program, and you want to do something impressive before applying to grad schools.

There are other ways to buff up a resume, ways that don’t require you to complete 70-hour (and up!) work weeks, endure verbal abuse from 14-year-olds, or experience a nagging sense of failure on a daily basis.

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.

Shaky Reason for Joining TFA #1: You want to help people.

This is, of course, a wonderful motivation; it’s admirable to want to help people. But why should wanting to help people translate into becoming a teacher? Why not become a Peace Corps volunteer who works to raise HIV/AIDS awareness? Or a program associate at a nonprofit that monitors human rights? Or a volunteer who counsels survivors of sexual assault?

A lot of college seniors want a job that feels meaningful to them, that lets them feel that they are making a difference in other people’s lives, and that’s fantastic. But you should choose a way of helping people that fits your interests and strengths. I cannot stress this enough: if you previously have had little or no interest in teaching, and you’re interested in it now only because it would allow you to help people, reconsider joining Teach for America. Teaching is indescribably hard, and, especially in the schools that TFA serves, can be painful, exhausting, and overwhelming. If you choose a way of helping people that wears you down to the point that you can think only of your own survival, it will be much harder for you to help anyone.

There are a lot of ways to help people; please, choose the one(s) that will best suit your interests and abilities.

Issue 1: Reasons (Not) to Join Teach for America

Most Teach for America corps members come into the program straight from college. As anyone who is or has been a senior in college knows, the move from college to the world of work is often confusing and stressful. Many, if not most, college seniors aren’t sure what sort of career path they want to follow once they graduate; they haven’t had enough experience with different types of jobs and with working life to know what various careers require, what they themselves are most capable of doing, and what will make them happy. Lacking that kind of knowledge, some college seniors apply to Teach for America for questionable reasons. Over the next several posts, I’ll describe the reasons that many people join TFA and explain why these reasons may not in fact be good justifications for joining. If you’re thinking of applying to/joining TFA, and your reasons for doing so are included in the following list, I’d strongly advise you to find out all you can about the program and re-evaluate your interest before you decide to become a corps member.

What is Teach for America, and what's the point of this blog?

Teach for America (web site) is a national nonprofit organization that recruits idealistic individuals, most of them recent college graduates, to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools that serve low-income communities. Schools in impoverished districts are often severely underfunded and may lack many basic and essential resources: Textbooks may be outdated or scarce; school infrastructure may be deteriorating, even dangerous; funding for classroom technology and after-school programs is in many cases minimal or nonexistent; teachers are frequently underqualified. In addition to the problems they sometimes face within their schools, students from underprivileged socio-economic backgrounds all too often must also contend with poor housing conditions, limited access to health care, and hunger or malnutrition, among many other difficulties.

For those students, the barriers to academic achievement are unspeakably high. Teach for America aims to lower those barriers in the short term by encouraging its recruits, often called "corps members," to devote all possible time, energy, and ingenuity to helping their students make tangible (measurable) progress in the classroom. In the long term, TFA's leaders hopes that corps members will go on to use their knowledge of the ravages of poverty and the failings of American public schools to work for lasting change.

Since its inception in 1990, Teach for America has grown into a large and well-respected organization. According to TFA's web site, in 2003 more than 3,000 corps members/new teachers were placed in 20 different regions, from New York City to rural Mississippi to Los Angeles. Those 3,000 members were drawn from a much larger pool of applicants; TFA has become a high-profile program on college campuses across the country and has recently begun to receive more than 10,000 applications a year (source: Yale Daily News). TFA is also popular among individual and corporate donors, whose gifts have helped the organization enlarge its budget to $34 million for 2004 (Source: TFA).

College career counselors, mainstream press outlets, and TFA's own representatives have often been vocal in their praise of the program, and Teach for America is unquestionably an organization with admirable goals. But, as a former TFA corps member whose experiences with the program were far from uniformly positive, I am dismayed by the uncritical approach taken by many chroniclers of the TFA story, and by how little prospective corps members actually know about the organization. While many scholars, policy-makers, and educators have made public their discomfort with TFA's approach to education reform (more on that in future posts), many of those interested in TFA have had little opportunity to hear from former corps members who are critical of the organization. That is unfortunate, both because corps members have a unique perspective on the way the program works, and because the viewpoints of recruits who've had negative experiences with TFA may be very useful to prospective corps members.

From what I have seen as a TFA corps member, Teach for America, while widely praised, is a deeply flawed organization that is not designed to effect the long-term change to which its leaders aspire. Although the TFA program is presented to college students as an invaluable opportunity to do a great deal of good—and for some corps members, it is just that—teaching through TFA can also be a brutal, disheartening, and destructive experience. By sharing my thoughts on the program, I hope to provide a much-needed counterpoint to the carefully crafted image of TFA presented on the program web site and by TFA recruiters.

To prospective TFA corps members:

This site is intended mainly for you. I'm not trying to discourage people from joining TFA. Many former and current corps members are very pleased with their decision to join TFA and feel that the experience has been/was valuable for them and for their students. If you're thinking about working as a teacher for TFA, you could very well find the experience highly rewarding.

On the other hand, you could become one of those people--and there are a lot of them, including myself--who are made so miserable by their experiences in Teach for America that they leave the program wishing they'd never joined. The only way to avoid that misery is to make informed decisions about TFA, which means that you should know:

1. Why you are applying to Teach for America, and how your reasons jibe with the realities of program,

2. Exactly what is required of a TFA teacher (and of teachers in general), and what you yourself are willing and able to give,

3. How you intend to deal with the overwhelming stresses and disappointments involved with teaching,

4. Which TFA placement(s) (region, student age, subject area) will best suit your personality and qualifications if you do decide to join TFA.

You should find out as much as possible about each of those issues before deciding to join Teach for America. My goal in creating this site is to provide to prospective corps members with a view on those issues that may not be readily available anywhere else. If you are considering joining TFA and have questions that are not answered here, please contact me. I’d be happy to answer your questions to the best of my ability.