Exceptionalities

I want to be a better writer and so I've been trying to produce something more substantive and coherent than what I normally do. I don't think the effort worked out. It took me an absurdly long time, and the end result is far lengthier than it has any right to be. I'm sorry.

In the spring of 2009, I was rejected by Teach for America. This is what definitively convinced me I should become a teacher. I am not kidding.

I was living in Little Rock and working a temporary job as a writer at a digest that monitors state legislation, and I decided that aw heck, I might as well go ahead and apply to Teach for America because that always sounded kind of cool to me and it was about time I did something with myself anyway, can’t sit around forever, right? If you know anything about TFA, you probably know how far I got in the interview process. My essay earned me a phone interview in which I evidently failed to impress; I was casually flicked aside via email as the great combine of the organization continued to sift through its heap of thirty-five thousand-odd hopefuls. (That number has grown to 45,000 in 2010.)

I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was culled, because I already knew the size of the applicant pool and because I knew many people from college – smart, talented, impressive people – who’d applied to the program and been denied. The thing is, TFA doesn’t just want impressive – it wants exceptional. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was surprised, and angry. I was puzzled at how dejected I became, in fact, at what a blow it seemed. I decided that that was because I hadn’t realized how much I actually wanted to be a teacher and that I really did feel some kind of calling to the profession. So, the summer after I was rejected from TFA, I began the first really concerted attempt in my life to start a career.

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Some background: there are basically two tracks to being a teacher: “traditional” certification and “alternative” certification. Traditional certification means that you learn how to be a teacher via a university degree program. Alternative certification refers to any of the wide variety of shortcuts into the profession that are sanctioned by states or school districts experiencing teacher shortages. This means that you can become a classroom teacher without receiving any real training for the job other than an abbreviated summer program. Teach for America, for example, trains its teachers for about five weeks the summer before they are shipped to various sites around the US. They then find a job in a high-need school, where they are contractually bound to stay for two years.

TFA is the best known alternative certification program, but it is not the only one. A somewhat vaguely defined organization called the New Teacher Project has established alternative certification programs in many major cities, one of which is the program that I eventually joined -- TeachNOLA. Many state university systems (including the University of Arkansas and UNC) also offer fast-track programs for college grads and career-changers to enter the classroom without getting an education degree. The requirements for entry into an alternative certification program vary widely. While TFA and the New Teacher Project select only about 10% of their applicants, getting into Arkansas’ alternative certification program, from what I can tell, is about as easy as getting into a warm bath. Incidentally, Arkansas has the lowest qualifying standards for math in the US – in theory, you could be deemed academically unfit to be a math teacher in every other state in the union and still be A-OK in the Land of Opportunity.

As I have heard it said many times before, it’s bizarre that we would entrust a job that’s commonly considered to be extremely difficult, delicate, and important to individuals (no matter how exceptional they may be) with only a few weeks of training under their belt. But alternative certification programs have become commonplace today, for a couple of reasons. First, although there are many many people who want to be teachers, most want to be teachers in specific places – where their families are located, where the pay is good, or – most crucially – where the school system is functional. Second, the traditional university coursework for education majors tends to be a mind-numbing, money-sucking waste of time that does almost nothing to prepare new teachers for actually doing their jobs – or so I have heard from many a teacher who has gone the traditional route.

I decided from the beginning that I wanted an alternative licensure program and the all-or-nothing, headfirst commitment it would entail. So, I started taking math classes online, since math tends to be among the subject areas in highest demand in most districts. I found a job tutoring children at an elementary school to gain experience. I did extensive research on teaching requirements in various states and cities. I shut down my former (profanity-laden) blog because it’s the first thing that came up when you Googled my name. And having been turned down by TFA, I was determined to join one of the highly competitive programs sponsored by the New Teacher Project. I applied to almost a dozen of their sites around the US: New Orleans, Philadelphia, Chicago, Memphis, Minneapolis, Nashville, Baltimore, NYC, DC, and Baton Rouge, LA. The New Teacher Project’s programs are explicitly patterned after Teach for America’s model: they aggressively recruit thousands of people who seem to possess ample professionalism, intelligence, and sincere interest in struggling schools. Then, an interview process whittles down the number of applicants to a small but dedicated and exceptional “corps” (their word) of “teaching fellows” (their phrase) who are trained in an intensive “summer institute” (that one too) and emerge ready to endure the pressures of urban schools.

This is the narrative. This is the appeal.

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To explain how I ended up in TeachNOLA and thus set down the inexorable path towards my demise as a teacher, let me talk about TFA a little more. According to a New York Times article published last summer about Teach for America, 18% of the 2010 graduating class at both Yale and Harvard applied to TFA. These are incredible figures, and they constitute a mystery. Why is the applicant pool so crowded, and why especially is it populated with so many Ivy League go-getters? I’ve often heard veteran teachers and many others bitterly dismiss TFA as a farce: a couple throwaway years of moderately lucrative poverty tourism and fantastic resume padding for the children of the bourgeoisie in transit from upper-crust undergrad college to upper-crust law school, grad school, or MBA program. They don’t stay in the profession, the argument goes, and thus contribute little to the chronically failing schools to which they’re assigned, since almost nobody learns to be a truly effective teacher in only two years. There is an element of truth to that – as its reputation has grown, Teach for America has become a valuable adornment for a resume indeed – but I have known too many vastly dedicated, driven teachers from TFA to really believe the cynicism wholeheartedly. I have also known plenty of TFAers who have continue to work as teachers long after their two-year commitment to Teach for America is over.

On the other hand, the organization itself would have you believe that what motivates its members is a passionate dedication to educational equity. I think this is partly true. In a fascinating article in Harpers a few years ago called “Army of Altruists”, an anthropologist named David Graeber presented a theory that a “frustrated desire to do good” underlies much of our daily actions and life decisions. Beginning with an examination of what drives men and women to enlist in the army (in military surveys, he reports, the most common motive that soldiers give for their own enlistment is a hope “to do something to be proud of”), he concludes that,

“our [social] theorists are constantly trying to strip away the veil of appearances and show how all such apparently selfless gestures really mask some kind of self-interested strategy, but in reality American society is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave altruistically. Selflessness - or, at least, the right to engage in high-minded activity - is not the strategy. It is the prize.”

The figures about TFA applicants support this argument. Maybe what motivates so many young people to apply to TFA is the desire to do something good in an era with so few opportunities to do that meaningfully or in a way that requires sacrifice. Politics seems somehow both amoral and basically impotent, and social activism is reduced to shopping at a farmer’s market or requesting fair trade coffee at the campus Starbucks (ha ha). Indeed, TFA thinks of itself as being a part of King’s moral arc of history and as carrying on the work of the civil rights movement and the Freedom Riders -- although TFA (and, generally, its corps members) would never be so unprofessional as to start squawking such gauche things outright. For that matter, another reason for the organization’s popularity is just that -- its studiously apolitical professionalism, its aura of competence, its youthful well-scrubbed cheeks and perfect posture and calmly composed muscle tone. TFA is different from the insulated little nests of the nonprofit world. TFA seems driven, not deluded. TFA combines the fervor of a righteous social cause with the standards and aesthetic of a Fortune 500 company: ambitious, engaged, intelligent, bright-eyed-yet-straightlaced, bland. It’s no wonder the TFA brand has become so popular with applicants and donors alike, or that copycat organizations – among them, TeachNOLA – have sprung up to emulate its success.

But still, something in this explanation doesn’t quite fit. As I mentioned, there are many ways to become a teacher quickly. Universities in Arkansas, North Carolina, and many other states offer a means for college graduates to rapidly enter the profession, but for some reason UALR isn’t being deluged with applications from Princeton graduates hungry to teach at Horace Mann. I myself decided to pass on my home state and instead beg and bullshit my way into a TFA knockoff. The reason, I thought at the time, was that Arkansas’ uncompetitive program sounded like a low-quality product. Though I was sure I could handle being thrown into a classroom, I also wanted a program that would give me good training. TeachNOLA sounded professional and classy. But in retrospect, maybe I was less concerned with the quality of the product I’d receive than I was with what that product would say about me.

And I believe that this is the deep appeal of Teach for America: its selectivity. Like a top-tier college, the scarcity of its brand defines its matriculants as exceptional. Elite. Unlike a snobby college, though, being a part of TFA means you are doing something courageous and good. This is a combination beyond reproach. TeachNOLA tried to emulate that as well. At every step of the process last year, the organization reminded us of how selective the program was, of how many other people had been culled along the way, and (by implication) of how special we must be to be accepted, how good and even more importantly how valuable. What could be more precious here in this vast, strange celebrity-worshipping nation of faceless millions jostling for validation, each of us simultaneously so narcissistic and so hyper-aware of our sameness and dispensability? The distended bloat of our egos indicate their chronic undernourishment. I doubt many people who are accepted into TFA are calculating its impact on their future earnings, but they most certainly are getting something of enormous rarity and preciousness. They are being chosen as those worthy to do good.

This is also why the bitter experience of being rejected from TFA has stuck with so many people, and one reason it attracts such animosity from many quarters. What could be worse than to be told by the people in charge, “you’re not good enough to join the Freedom Ride”? A gnawing resentment towards those more elite and powerful than ourselves is something deep and old.

TFA turned me down for the dance (that stuck-up bitch) so of course I asked out her younger sister instead. And she said yes, so I moved to New Orleans.