Illustration by JASON CHEN/Daily Bruin Senior Staff
By Dharshani Dharmawardena
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
As college graduates search for high-paying jobs in the
corporate world, the teaching profession, which already has a high
turnover rate, experiences more vacancies.
But some recent college alumni are choosing to teach through the
Teach For America program, which aims to place graduates as
teachers at sites lacking in both resources and educators.
Cecily Feltham, a ’99 UCLA alumna, found her calling by
teaching at UniCamp. As she talked with a young girl, Feltham
learned the girl had no permanent teacher at school.
“She said “˜We haven’t had a teacher for about
four months,'” Feltham said. “Apparently, they
had teachers going in and out.”
Quarry Pak, a second year graduate student in social welfare,
completed her two-year commitment to TFA in Compton, where she
taught second and fourth grades.
“The biggest problem was lack of resources,” she
said. “They did not have the real things, like books, we take
for granted at other schools.”
The school also lacked a copy machine, but Pak and other TFA
teachers combatted such challenges by being creative and finding
support among themselves, encouraging parents and students.
“It’s easy to get burnt out if you’re not
supported,” Pak said. “There’s no opportunity to
develop yourself.”
Feltham said this lack often discourages teachers from staying
on, creating a shortage not just in under-resources areas, but all
over the United States.
“There just isn’t enough teacher support,” she
said. “It’s like you create and execute your own
play.
“You go home, write an eight hour script, you come to
school and you direct and produce your own play,”
Feltham continued. “Then you go back home and write all over
again.”
Often, both Pak and Feltham needed to visit parents because many
of them were too busy working to attend parent-teacher meetings
familiar to more traditional schools with more resources.
Despite the dearth of encouragement and help prevalent in
teaching, some graduates are still entering the field.
“Once you’ve seen the situation, you want to get
involved in it ““ it’s a crisis,” Feltham
said.
She added that college students volunteering at under-resourced
schools as well as programs like TFA have opened their eyes to the
situation.
“Much is made in the media about this generation of young
people being apathetic, because they don’t vote or they are
all taking high-paying jobs,” said Wendy Kopp, founder and
president of TFA, in a statement.
“Teach For America’s experience shows this simply
isn’t true,” she continued. “Our teachers are
doing something at least as powerful as voting. They’re
creating opportunity for others.”
As part of her senior thesis at Princeton University, Kopp
founded TFA in 1989 as a national teachers’ corps, aiming to
provide education to children in under-resourced areas.
Before they begin teaching at their sites, TFA recruits observe
experienced teachers for 12 hours and write reflections on what
they see.
They then travel to Texas for a five-week training period,
teaching at summer schools during the day and receiving training in
the afternoons from experienced corps members and teachers.
Once they complete training, TFA teachers to go to their sites,
where the respective school districts then hire them at regular
first-year teacher salaries, which range from $21,000 to $35,000 a
year.
Although Pak said her students had little encouragement to
receive a complete education, parents, teachers and other adults
helped connect the missing links.
“They had a high teacher turnover rate, so it was
difficult to have that stability,” Pak said. “I had the
same teacher that my sister did, but these kids didn’t have
that continuity.”
To make up for that lack of stability, members of the school
stepped in to help.
Pak recalled one of her students, a foster child who was
separated from his siblings and prone to acting up in class,
successfully learned how to read at the end of the year because of
the support he received from teachers and other adults.
“It was such a concrete accomplishment,” Pak said.
“He still had the challenges, but he knew he was making
progress. It took so many people, though, his foster mother, social
workers.”
Similar to more than half of all TFA participants, Feltham said
she plans to teach for a third year, hoping to give her students a
sense of continuity.
“My favorite part is getting people’s little
brothers and sisters,” she said. “I want to be around
when they graduate.”
Teaching, though not materially rewarding, provides personal
satisfaction, Pak said.
“You’re making a direct impact in people’s
daily lives,” she said. “Most jobs don’t let you
do that.”
And though she said teaching is the most difficult and
responsible task she’s ever undertaken, Feltham encouraged
UCLA students, despite their area of study, to consider the
profession.
“It’s a civic responsibility at this point,”
she said.
For more information, go to TFA’s Web site at www.teachforamerica.org.