So, when you sign up for TFA, tons of happy people tell you that they made ‘big gains’ with their students. If you ask them what a ‘big gain’ means, they might talk about percentage growth and a few of the more bold individuals will even invite you to browse their glorious excel document that tracks every moment of student progression.
They don’t tell you that during institute, you will give a misaligned, 3 hour long test in 40 minutes to a room full of high school students sitting at desks clearly designed for middle school students (‘Miss, my legs don’t fit.’) and use that as the base level measure of your student’s achievement. They neglect to mention that in your high school algebra summer school class, the average student will score a 8%, and you will be too embarrassed by the unfairness of what happened to ever show them the endless red marks on those pointless sheets of paper.
You also go on to find that you will be forced to use an incredibly complicated, and mandated, excel document, not unlike those proudly paraded before, and calculate their ‘growth goal’ which still places the students far below the level they must reach to pass any state test or even be mathematically functional, and then cry because you are being asked to stand in front of a group of students whose failure has been predetermined by a microsoft office program.
The shining poster alimni don’t mention how you’re forced to rigidly and blindly plow through a pre-set curriculum that leaves not a moment for reviewing the fact that negative numbers exist, although most of your class needs to know that. They don’t talk about the fact that if your students score an 8% at the beginning, they only have to answer maybe 3 or 4 additional questions to reach their embarrassing growth goal. They also omit the fact that when you administer the test the second time, you will give the students a full two hours to complete a shorter test, and that you will be expected to have the audacity to celebrate YOUR hard work at the end of these 5 weeks even though you know in your heart, deep down inside, that the 35 high school students who needed a chance more than anything and looked more like your high school and hometown than your college EVER will have simply been used in some type of sick experiment for you to grow as a teacher (and ironically you didn’t grow in your own eyes, but that doesn’t matter because you’ll get measured on some esoteric rubric with abbreviations that you won’t bother to look up but someone somewhere will use to continue to judge you for the next 2 years).
They don’t tell you about how the entire summer, people in your group will refer to your students as ‘these kids’ and ‘those kids,’ and for that reason you will sit through 2+hours of diversity training each week which really amounts to character training. Maybe they never felt this way, maybe the connection wasn’t there for them, but they don’t tell you about how you will burst into tears in the middle of a hallway because your mentor is in your face about checks for understanding and other bullshit and all you can think about is how much the faces in the classroom reflect the faces in YOUR algebra classroom and how your poorly planned lesson and fatigue allowed these kids to fall even further behind.
Yeah, institute is hard. The hours are long, and sometimes the students are tough, but the hardest part is waking up every day for five weeks knowing that you are noting getting the 35 students in front of you the information that they need to graduate from high school and that you have no idea how to even begin to get them all that they must learn. If you actually understand that every second is dire for these students who are so far behind, the difficulty doesn’t lie in the rote bullshit that’s forced upon you, but instead in the taxing emotions of watching YET ANOTHER group of black and Hispanic kids become checked off as casualties without anyone standing up to hold anyone accountable for what is happening to them while you go through the motions of teaching something that might actually be better than what they’d get otherwise but is still not good enough.
