Boot Camp

I have been here for four days and it feels like I have been here a month. By day two, girls were crying. By day three, everyone was exhausted beyond their wildest dreams. I drank 5 doses of caffeine yesterday to stay alert. Yes, this is Teach For America institute. And it is only the very, very beginning.

I am lucky in some ways. In fact, I have it very easy. When my elementary education friends are working on 6 or even 9 lesson plans, I am only working on 3. And when they have to explain abstract concepts like "picking a book thoughtfully," I work on vocabulary lists. Some of them are practicing this summer on 2nd graders when in reality they will be teaching 6th graders. I am teaching exactly what I will be teaching in the fall: Spanish 1. So, in many ways I am very lucky. But I hardly call getting four or five hours of sleep a night a gift!

Let me explain my schedule. Each morning, we are out the door of our Temple University dorm at about 5:40 am to the dining hall to eat breakfast and fill our coffee canteens. Then out the door we go, grabbing a bagged lunch on the way to big yellow school buses that take us to our "school sites." I have been placed at South Philadelphia High School about 20 minutes away- and well, lets just say that I am there for a reason. The school is four stories high and was built in that classic 1950's soviet bloc concrete style. The windows have iron bars over them, as do every glass surface in the building. The bathrooms have no stall doors, and large spray painted warnings tell you DO NOT DRINK WATER. Imagine- a school with no potable water running through its pipes! There have been attempts to spruce up the place- a few beautiful murals here and there- but over all it is falling apart.

Once at the school, we sign in and next week will start ACTUALLY teaching summer school. I will teach one hour a day- and three of my peers will trade off with me, each taking a turn and completing an hour as well. The students attending have already failed various subjects: perhaps for academic reasons, perhaps for attendance reasons. In any event it will be our job to cram a year's worth of knowledge into just 4 short weeks. We got our diagnostic tests back today: most of the students I will be teaching scored an average of 20 on the test. They most likely got this score by randomly guessing on the multiple choice format. I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Besides this one hour, the rest of the day till 4:30 is spent fervently trying to learn how to "BE" a teacher. So many things go into it, so many formulas! Classroom management, Class culture, student investment, rules and consequences. Each must be thought out BEFORE actually meeting the students. Never mind the lesson plans themselves! Each minute must be scripted. At this point, we have no other choice.

After we return to Temple, the day is hardly over. If you're lucky you can get in a run and eat dinner. Then, there are night time sessions to attend about diversity and team building, and always, always more work. Something about it all seems a bit amiss- I want to believe that my "rewards and consequences" formulas I've been slaving over this week are going to work, but I have a looming fear that come Monday morning the kids just aren't going to buy it.

There's a loud fight in the hall. The bathroom reeks of pot. No one can get a drink, and I'm supposed to cover a year of Spanish in 20 days.

But this is why we're here right? I have to believe that there wouldn't be so many brilliant, motivated grads and veterans here with me if SOMETHING didn't give.

Until next week. Peace and love.