The Saga

I need to document the past year of my life before I forget it.

Let's start with Teach For America Institute 2010. Working non stop + getting no sleep = quickly developing cold. Turned into high fever and a fainting spell which landed me in the emergency room of Long Beach Memorial. A spinal tap, numerous vomit spells, 3 days of missed institute, and blood clot procedure to fix the hole in my spine, and over $20,000 in hospital bills later I find myself as a lead pre school teacher at an unmentionable Head Start program from hell.

After realizing I was trained to work with 5 year olds in an academic pre-kindergarten setting, I find myself potty training 2 year olds in a day care that refuses to set high expectations or goals for their students. I brought rigor and an academic focus to classroom set in behavior problems, managerial issues, and staff inadequacies.

I have a co teacher who hates me because I am white, a manager who doesn't know what to do with me, and TFA staff who continuously expects me to push the barrier with this organization. A month into my job, a student of mine is shot and killed. In the two months after that incident, which was traumatizing enough to make any teacher quit and never come back, my classroom experienced 3 more shootings and a crazed parent come into the center with a knife threatening a teacher.

I forget what happened in between these next incidents but I specifically remember a child eating a live fish, being bitten through my genes by a 2 year old with Hepatitis B, spending copious amounts of hours in the bathroom cleaning pee, shit, and vomit, looking for a replacement co teacher for four months, being consistently out of legal teacher to child ratios, and hating every minute of my life.

Although, there was Wen Hao, my most precious student who is a total and complete genius. He kept me semi sane through the past 10 months.

Then there was a few more shootings involving my students, physical threats made by a parent, a lice outbreak, a curriculum revamp, a total classroom makeover, me finally getting the hang of not teaching but rather supervising a day care, and then...there was the latest of horrors: BLEACH IN THE EYE. Its exactly how it sounds. Bleach in my eye = chemical burns.

And now, this despicable organization I work for has decided to discontinue their partnership with TFA for next year and I will be getting a new placement for the 2011-2012 academic year. Thank you God.

I think what pains me the most is the injustice that has been done to the children in this situation. I love the majority of my students, despite my hatred of their age. I have seen an immense amount of progress in my classroom and my students going to Kindergarten (yes there are a few) are 100% ready to pursue their academic career in public schools. My younger students, who make up the majority of my students, have also made huge gains socially and academically, despite the difficulties of our center. I have created a positive learning environment and successfully impacted lives of children, but the system that I work within will never acknowledge this fact. They will continue to implement incompetent modes of teaching that will further the achievement gap in low income communities. Unfortunately for the children, I have done all I can to impact their lives and now I will be moving on to other schools that will allow me to teach children and truly make an impact for the better.