Institute Reflection

The past two and a half weeks have quite possibly been the hardest two and a half weeks that I have experienced in a long time.

During the first week of training, a period of time adeptly christened "Induction," I was excited. Maybe it's because I had low standards going into the experience (a result of the false belief that people that do TFA aren't actually concerned about education..they're just using the two years as a stepping stone for grad school), but I was hugely impressed by the people that I met at induction. I was ready to go close the achievement gap!

Then institue began. I soon learned that waking up at 8:00 AM was a luxury, and that I would probably average about 20 hours awake-2 hours devoted to commuting on a yellow school bus (2 yellow school buses full of teachers, a comical sight), 4 hours with kids (teaching or fulfilling breakfast/lunch duty), 3+ hours of session, and countless hours of lesson planning. As someone who really needs sleep (8 hours), I was miserable. In addition to my reduced sleep, my already compromised emotional stability was exacerbated by the fact that I was not feeling successful in the classroom.

Lesson planning was difficult, and I was having difficulty explaining concepts such as ordering and comparing numbers. At one point, I chalked it up to the fact that these concepts were just things that we took for granted and thus couldn't really break it down to 2nd grade lingo. Yes, I still believe that that's a factor, but I now realize that there was so much more to it.

My execution was atrocious, and it didn't help that I spent the precious 50 min. I had with the students trying to unravel these simple yet complex thought processes running through my mind-"Well to order numbers, first you look to the tens place. Then you order the numbers based on the digits in the ten place. Then you move to the ones place. Then you order the numbers within each set of ten according to the ones place." .....what?

After each unsuccessful lesson, I would breakdown. Sometimes, it was more visible to others; more often than not, it was a mental breakdown during which I would question my place in the teaching profession. After all, I was going into this experience having had more experience than most, and yet seemed to be suffering more than most.

On weekends, I would go visit my boyfriend in New Jersey, and for the two weekends that I visited him, this feeling of dread would come over me each time I departed for training. In fact, the second week, I pushed my departure time from 6 PM to 7 PM to 7:30 PM (I had a meeting at 10, and 7:30 was really cutting it close). It was awful. I was miserable.

But I knew that I wanted to teach. I just hated that I felt like I was constantly failing and resented the fact that I was getting close-to-no sleep. This last week, I was scheduled to teach reading. Which ironically, I feel more comfortable teaching, despite the fact that I am more of a mathematician than a reader. I decided to take my success and happiness into my own hands, and start with a relative blank slate with this new content area. I really utilized resources provided by TFA and google, and got cracking on my lesson plans, well in advance of the draft deadlines. I pushed myself to be in bed by 11 PM, and asleep by 11:30 PM. I played with fire as I pushed back my wake-up time from 5:15 to 5:45 (with a bus loading time at 6:10).

The changes were enormous. Because of my better lesson plans, my lessons made more sense, my CMA (corps member advisor) was able to provide better feedback; because of my increased sleep and prioritizing my sleep and happiness, I was more energetic and more "chill" with my kids; my confidence (also a result of my increased experience in the classroom) shot up, and my behavior management improved ten-fold, and my students were engaged. I felt a "transformational change" within myself and my teaching, if nothing else (i.e. student performance...although that did improve as well, also a result of better daily assessments).

A huge "buzz idea" in TFA is that teacher mindsets. knowledge, and skills ultimately affect student outcome (TAL impact model). This experience proves that there might actually be some validity in the TAL impact model after all.