Teach For America a valuable program
This letter is in response to Lara Loewenstein’s column about Teach For America (“Band-Aids won’t seal education divide,” Jan. 11)
My first day of teaching in a low-income neighborhood in Houston was challenging, to say the least.
The principal of my school had just one question for me when I interviewed for the job: Will you stay for the entire year? My life was about to be turned completely upside down.
As a student at UCLA, I spent my days studying psychology and hanging out with friends, and my nights working in “the industry.”
I was the one who filled celebrity gift bags at special events. But I was soon as far away from the glamorous life as possible. I was signed on to teach eight special needs students for two years through Teach For America. I wasn’t in la-la land anymore.
Teach For America is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to end educational inequality in the United States.
It hopes to accomplish this by recruiting college seniors and recent graduates to commit to teaching in urban and rural underprivileged communities with the hope that after two years of dedicated teaching, they will continue to work in education or take the lessons they’ve learned into leadership positions in other sectors.
In my district there happened to be a serious need for special-education teachers, so I stepped up to the challenge.
I was assigned eight students between the ages of 5 and 13. Academically, they were all on a pre-kindergarten level.
My principal, who had great vision for our general-education students, did not have the same plans for my students.
As a result, I had to develop my own curriculum. I created a 100-page reading and writing workbook and began observing kindergarten classrooms to see how the teachers taught math.
I also began making home visits and watching my students interact with their parents and siblings.
In addition to reading, writing and math, I knew the class had to practice their social skills too, so I applied for and secured grant money.
I wanted the kids to practice interacting with the community (and for the community to learn they had nothing to stare at).
We spent afternoons taking public transportation and going to the store. The students learned about money and counting change, how to order food at a restaurant, and how to thank a store clerk. They learned, in effect, how to live their lives.
At the end of my two years with them, all eight students were granted classroom time with general-education students.
As for me, my life has changed too. Though I’m no longer a teacher, I’m in the classroom every day through my work as a program director at Teach For America.
I have no illusions about the challenges in classrooms and the complexities existing within public education.
The debate about how a nation should provide equal education for all excites me. I appreciate when people ask me skeptically about Teach For America.
I know that one corps member, one classroom and one day at a time, change is happening.
On a Native American reservation in New Mexico, there is a science class being taught by a biochemistry grad from the University of Michigan.
In the Bronx, a Columbia Law graduate is teaching American history.
And a psychology student from UCLA helped a group of overlooked kids in a special-education class read, write, and feel more empowered in their daily lives.
Tritia Samaniego,
UCLA Class of 2003,
Program director,
Teach for America, Los Angeles