I’m going to be honest: I’m not totally sure how I’m going to use this blog. When I started it, I was cynical. I knew that TFA wasn’t perfect. I knew that I myself had joined for some very selfish reasons. And so I thought I would try to point attention to it in every post. I would try to poke holes in TFA’s glamorous veneer in an effort to find salvation for myself. If I said often enough that I did not agree completely with TFA, perhaps I would not be blamed.

I thought maybe I would write about my students. But their stories aren’t mine to tell. The things they say in class, the math concepts with which they struggle, the math concepts they’ve mastered, and the lives they lead are not owned by me.

I thought maybe I would write about how horrible of a teacher I am. (Because I am oh so bad after just two days.) But that didn’t feel professional. And it’s not news. This is my first time really teaching. I’m going to be bad. No one is great at the beginning. (What other profession constantly tells the world how bad they are? What other profession is expected to?) I’m going to get better.

I’m crazy about saying something original. About being someone who gains some kind of fame for my words, for critiquing TFA from the inside, for being insanely honest. But the truth is that any post like that (like the first post I drafted in this one’s place) is about me trying to find acceptance. I want TFA-critics to think of me as the exception. But I’m no exception. I’m just Mr. Smith.

I’m so exhausted from critiquing. My students need quality lesson plans. They need a teacher who fully believes in what he’s doing. They need to learn Algebra. So that’s what I’m going to do. No more wondering if I’m in the right place or not. That’s the difference between being here and pontificating in a dorm room. Here is real.

I just finished packing for Institute, and before that crazy adventure starts, I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on my pre-Institute work. A major caveat before I begin: Mostly, I only did the reading that was required of me. I rarely chose to investigate the optional resources, and I acknowledge that necessarily limits my analysis. That said, here are a couple of thoughts:

1. I wonder if the time spent on understanding the “achievement gap” would have been better spent on learning pedagogy.
The survey about the pre-Institute work I took after I was all finished asked if I better understood the achievement gap and possible solutions for it. I think I probably do. And I think it was really important for me to read a variety of literature that talked about how poverty affects communities. But I still have very few real ideas about actual classroom strategies. Even the passages we read from Teaching as Leadership were focused more on community-building and building relationships with students and parents rather than pedagogical technique. I think that’s all really important, but I’m thirsty for pedagogy. I’ve been ensured that I will get that at Institute so I’m really looking forward to it.

2. I worry that much of the discussion of “the achievement gap” revolved around deficit thinking.
Many of the resources focused on things that communities with high levels of poverty do not have. Very rarely did a resource make it clear that communities have many identities, one of which is income level. In fact, the pre-work often focused on “cage-fighters” and “latch-breakers.” individuals who are working to “better” communities. A lot of these individuals are doing great work, but there seemed to be a dearth of information about communities that are bettering themselves. A high proportion of the examples given were about TFA teachers (which was alright, considering that’s what I’m doing. But wouldn’t it be swell to see non-TFA teachers, too?!) or individuals who came from outside a community. In basically every instance, this made me feel uncomfortable. It made me feel like I was being trained to think of my future students and community as needing help. And, like, they do need help. But so does everyone everywhere. There were two notable exceptions of this pattern. First, this video from Cory Booker:

watch?v=y7XgBxpMk3E

Although Cory Booker is often accused of the same things I take issue with in the previous paragraph, the hero of this story is a woman who forces Booker to stop thinking he is a savior. I like that.

Second, this video from Jeff Duncan-Andrade.

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2CwS60ykM8s

I have mad respect for Jeff Duncan-Andrade. I saw him speak in New York once and found him extremely impressive. He lives in the same neighborhood as his students and routinely has his students over for dinner. The student-teacher relationship for him is extremely intimate, and I think his work serves as a really well-thought-out alternative to the “no excuses” model.

3. I really enjoyed the Detroit-specific pre-work.
I found it much more pertinent than the rest of the pre-work. One of my main arguments with the rest of the work was that it often felt like I was being told that communities in low-income areas have enough similarities that learning about one will help you in another. I’m not sure I totally agree with that premise. So having work that was specific to Detroit was really awesome. I even spent a lot of time looking at optional texts in the Detroit-specific area. I’ve read or am reading several of the recommended books, including Made in Detroit by Paul Clemens, The Origins of the Urban Crisis  by Thomas Sugrue, Hidden History in Detroit by Amy Elliott Bragg, and Reimagining Detroit  by John Gallagher. These last three are amazing, I highly recommend them. Sugrue’s book is especially informative.

4. Made in Detroit may have been racist.
Made in Detroit is a memoir by a white man named Paul Clemens who grew up in the region between Six Mile and Eight Mile in Detroit in the early 80s. Clemens, the son of working-class parents attempts to argue that Detroit in the early 80s had the opposite racial power structure as the rest of the nation. He claims that since the city had its first black mayor in Coleman Young and since the majority of the population in Detroit was black, white people were often victims of oppression. For instance, affirmative action programs in law enforcement instituted by Young resulted in holding white policemen back (since the majority of the population was black). But claims like these ignore important historical truths. Like, for instance, that although the black population grew steadily throughout the 1900s, black people remained chronically underrepresented in law enforcement. Likewise, when Clemens complains that his family and others had to retreat to further outskirts as neighborhoods were overrun by crime, he ignores one racial component while pointing to another. He’s quick to point out that these crime-ridden neighborhoods were predominately black but never tells his readers that black people experienced a long history of real estate discrimination and disrespect from the city government who often seized predominantly black neighborhoods for city projects like freeways. He also doesn’t seem to connect the dots to the fact that his family had the means to move out of the crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Clemens, confusingly, often quotes James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Ralph Ellison. He takes contention with these writings, claiming an identity as a minority in a “black” city. But Clemens’s interactions with black people are incredibly limited. He plays on a football team with mostly black children in middle school, and as far as pre-college interactions with black people, this is about it. He goes to a private college prep high school with mostly other white students. Then, when he finds out that his wife had been raped by a black man before they had met, he develops a scary hatred for random black men he meets. Perhaps, this is simply an attempt at honesty. But it lacks any recognition of self. In Clemens’s world, he is the hero. Black men have only ever hurt him. He was born into a city that did not grant him the immediate privilege that white people had in the rest of the country, and he was bitter about it.

I am a natural optimist. I’m told that’s one of the qualities TFA recruiters select for. So, in that sense, I’m here because of my optimism.

But since being accepted into the 2013 corps, I’ve had the opportunity to be around a bunch of other optimists, and I’ve realized that there are other significant parts of me that are ignored when I so flippantly classify myself as an optimist.

Because I am very excited. But I also have some very real concerns about what I’m doing.

I’m excited to join a nation of educators.
I know dozens of amazing educators, both TFA corps members and TFA detractors, both young and old, both urban and suburban, and I’m psyched to get the chance to learn from them. Teachers are among the most incredible individuals I know, and I’m honored and humbled that someone somewhere thought I could be a peer in that group.

I’m excited to build into my community in Detroit.
Over the past couple of years, I have learned how much power people have in local politics. And I’m so excited to live in the same place that I work so that the decisions I make socially and politically will have real impact on my community and surroundings.

But I’m concerned about what I’ve been chosen to teach.
I have a degree in English, but I will be teaching secondary mathematics next year. It would be unfair to place all of the responsibility for this decision on TFA. Of course, I made it clear that I preferred to teach English, but I also marked I was capable of teaching math on my application. When I thought of my life as a teacher, I always imagined those idealistic clips from Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams has his class stand on desks and read poetry. I was about that life. And I was so pumped to be that kind of teacher. But that’s not in my immediate future. I’m afraid my students will find me out. “He’s not a real math teacher,” they’ll say. Or worse. I’ll fail them. And then the responsibility will totally be mine. I will know I should have turned down TFA’s offer.

I’m concerned about my race.
Historically, teaching was among one of the first professional careers to open up to African American women in Detroit in the mid-1900s. And there is research that shows that it’s beneficial for students of color to see themselves reflected in their teachers. According to the Detroit Public Schools District Profile, almost 90% of the students are African American. I am not. Thus, I worry I may be depriving my students of a teacher of color. And even when I start to be okay with the fact that I am an individual, and my fate (and my students) should not be decided by race, I reflect on the fact that my 2013 Detroit corps is nowhere near 90% African American, meaning even if I am an amazing teacher, I might still be part of an organization that is whitening the teacher pool in Detroit, even when there is research suggesting that this might be detrimental to students.

So I’m excited and concerned.

Then, there are things I know and things I don’t know.

I know that I am not doing TFA for solely altruistic purposes.
In fact, most of my reasons for doing TFA specifically, are selfish. I’m in education because I want to make a difference and because I like the pursuit of knowledge. But I chose TFA over traditional routes because I didn’t want to spend the money on more schooling, because I wanted an opportunity that awarded me a little more mobility and a little more prestige than the traditional teaching route. I have no illusions about why I’m here.

But I do not know whether or not TFA, as an organization, will be responsible for “transformational change” in Detroit.
Mostly because I’m still lacking important knowledge about the existing teachers there. That’s mostly my fault. If I was better researcher, if I was more comfortable with asking difficult questions, I might have some of these answers. But TFA was sold to me as a solution to teacher shortages across the nation. I don’t know if Detroit is a region with a shortage or what subjects are specifically lacking.

So, yes, I’m an optimist, but sometimes I like to mix in a dose of realism.