Teach For America Day

Teach For America Day marks the halfway point of a corps member's training at the Summer Institute. It is a half-day off for corps members to unwind, to get some sleep, or to catch up on personal life. TFA goes out of its way to entertain the overworked CMs, such as offering movies and sports, popcorn and snow cones, as well as an evening cookout.

I took Tuesday off work to volunteer for Atlanta Institute's TFA Day. Beside lending a hand to the TFA staff and celebrating a milestone in the CMs' accomplishment, I wanted to personally tell each 2009 CM, "Thank you." I wished to thank each of them for choosing to join TFA, catalyzing education reform, and toughing through what may be the most challenging two and a half weeks they have ever known. As an alumnus who taught in a classroom for four years, I appreciate these CMs' courage and commitment. TFA couldn't have been what it is without them; the students whose lives they will influence can't do it without them.

Between the churning popcorn popper and the sweltering Atlanta summer, saying thank-you was the one thing I forgot to do. If you are/were a TFAer reading this, I thank you. If you meet a dedicated teacher in the grocery store, at the airport, or in his/her classroom, whether he or she is a Teach For America teacher or not, please say thank-you for me, too.

Registration Day at TFA Summer Institute

Luggage lined the Georgia Tech sidewalk as the new corps members who just flew into Atlanta queued up inside the building to go through their Teach For America Summer Institute registration process.

From Sotomayor's Racism vs. Diversity Awareness to TFA's Diversity Training

Judges don't receive mandatory diversity training like teachers do. Otherwise Sonia Sotomayor wouldn't have had the desire to say, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Lawmakers apparently don't have mandatory culture awareness training, either. Therefore Newt Gingrich presumed his own righteousness and called Sotomayor a "Latina woman racist." If only judges and lawyers have annual diversity and culture awareness training, neither Gingrich nor Sotomayor may have made/needed to make their contentious remarks.

When I joined Teach For America in 2002, there were disproportionally low representations of ethnic minorities in my corps. Being an Asian, I felt especially like the minority of minorities at the summer institute. While the institute's Diversity, Community, and Achievement (DCA) training provided useful pointers on interpreting cultural traditions and behavioral protocols of the Hispanic students I was about to teach, that training did not impress upon me any paradigm change about diversity awareness.

In mid-May the TFA Atlanta Regional Office held an alumni dialog on diversity. When I walked into that meeting, I was wondering: Am I going to hear about TFA's latest effort to increase the matriculation of ethnic minorities in the corps? Given the summer institute experience I had, I was expecting to get a handful of statistics on the incoming corps members' race and ethnicity ratio and discuss strategies to make minority corps members feel welcomed and supported.

Instead, I was treated to a preview of the 2009 summer institute's DCA curriculum. The defining moment of the preview was an audio interview in which a 2008 corps member and a parent who newly moved to the school district both described their unpleasant first impressions of each other, their respective pictures of respectful teacher-parent interaction, and the parent's praise of the corps member's dedication after they overcame their differences in perception. There was a punch line: both the teacher and the parent were African American.

With a semester of graduate work on cultural diversity and four years of teaching in a primarily Hispanic community, I thought I had already walked the walk when it came to understanding and respecting diversity. Yet that 10-minute preview taught me more about uncovering unseen aspects of diversity than I had known all my life. Recalling my share of parent conferences that could have gone better and interaction with angry customers at my current job, I wish I had been trained using this new DCA curriculum. After this year’s incoming corps members complete their DCA training, I have high hopes that they are more likely to become effective teachers and have more positive teaching experience than TFAers in the years past. I am also hopeful that through the new DCA curriculum, the underrepresented ethnic groups will find their TFA experience more rewarding and supportive, thus promoting their matriculation rates as TFA continues to grow and serve.