Thursday, February 10, 2011

a triple-header tonight--procrastination at its finest

Check out this little quote: the 8-year-old son of Teach for America founder, Kopp, interviewed her for a project at school:

She quotes her son Benjamin, then 8, after he had interviewed her about her life's work for a school project. His final question was: "If this is such a big problem -- you know, kids not having the chance to have a good education -- why would you ask people with no experience right out of college to solve it?"
Interesting, no? I ask this same question many times. I think TFA has lots of good points, but many, many bad. I'm not a fan of those who think it's a vacation between college and law school (no offense to those who have done so). Teaching should be a decision, a career choice, and TFA should encourage that career choice through preparation and encouragement to stay in the ranks. Says I.

4 comments:

Alison said...

There is a similar, but better-run, program offered at Notre Dame called the Alliance for Catholic Education (http://ace.nd.edu/). ACE is different than TFA is many ways, but perhaps the most important is that teachers finish their time with a Master's degree in education. That means (a) a degree is education will be useful to them because they probably intend to teach and (b) they get a lot more training and support in the classroom.

A better model than TFA, perhaps?

Anonymous said...

Feel free to delete this post, but I know you know better. It's with an apostrophe is the contracted form of it is. Its with no apostrophe is the possessive adjective: su de una cosa, no es su de ella ni de el. The title needs to be corrected. Glad you're posting again.

Reading the District said...

hahaha, thanks Anon.! What a terrible mistake for an English major to make! Glad to know that I'm being read. Thanks!

@Alison: I think that the MEd + classroom experience is exactly what's needed. That's what I did--but I think the way TFA is marketed, it's as if it were for the almost-not-serious. I wonder what would happen if TFA adopted the ACE model...

Anonymous said...

I would almost expect an English major to make mistakes in grammar and usage, as grammar teaching and learning is terribly out of fashion. English and ELL teachers, generally are the ones to know or care about grammar. Thank you for not going off on me for calling you out on the mistake. Please keep posting. People do read your stuff.