It's back!

Welcome back to the Gettysburg College Teach for America blog....back for a brand new year, with some brand new voices and some brand new perspectives on teaching America's children. As someone who was fortunate to attend Gettysburg College for my undergraduate education, I am stoked to share this blog with a lot of my friends who have joined the ranks of Teach for America all over the country. Though many people tend to paint all of TFA with the same broad brush, I hope that the insights shared on this blog over this next year will accentuate the differences between each of our placement regions. Some of us teach in sprawling urban cities and others in spacious rural communities, but we each get up every day with the same goal in mind: to entertain, engage, teach, and inspire our students onto greatness.

Let me take a quick moment to introduce myself. I am a 2010 Gettysburg College graduate who recently joined Teach for America in the Mississippi Delta. I have been teaching math at a rural high school in Mississippi for the past month. I would be lying if I told you that this experience has been a walk in the park. Everyday has been a struggle and every moment in front of kids is an opportunity for me to flex my newly founded teacher persona - sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it miserably fails - but everyday I wake up and tell myself, "Today is going to be a good day".

If you would have asked me just a year ago where I thought I would be after graduation, living and teaching in one of the poorest regions in the country definitely would not have been the answer. Though much has changed about my life, I have quickly embraced the uniqueness of the region that I live in and all of the pleasantries that it has to offer. I tried fried pickles for the first time and have developed an extreme appreciation for the miles and miles of open fields and the slower pace of life. Having grown up in the North east my entire life, my transition to living in the deep south has been an interesting exercises in immersing oneself in a new culture.

Everything about the delta fascinates me. During one of our initial TFA meetings, one of the community members told us that Mississippi is filled with extremes: there is poverty and opulence (and many times they live only blocks from one another), there is entrenched racism (though Brown v Board of Ed officially desegregated schools, the Mississippi schools have been resegregated by design because of the distribution of wealth - the white students - who can afford it - go to private school and the black students attend the public schools), but also a deeply rooted sense of community (I can't tell you the amount of conversations that I have had with random people around the delta - they welcome me to the community and always show a genuine interest in what I am teaching). There is a strong faith community (this area is sometimes considered part of the bible belt) but it also has one the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country.

At times it feels like I am living in a completely different country then the one that I grew up in. For example, recently I found out that in the county that I am teaching in here in Mississippi, over $1 million is filtered through the food stamp program every month. Every month. As one of my roommates' ignorant friends recently put it, "It would just be easier if there was a flood in the delta that would wipe them all out so they would stop draining our welfare system." Comments like this one (and there are plenty of others that I have heard since making the decision to move down here and join TFA) are extremely frustrating - especially to someone who is working to provide better educational opportunities to the children of the delta. As I drive around the streets of Mississippi, I do not see a society that is draining the welfare system, instead I see a community that is ripe for opportunity. And it is this sense of opportunity that I hope to instill in my students so that they will embrace all of the educational opportunities around them and then work to improve their own community.

As I look forward to this academic year, I am excited to share with all of you my insights, experiences and thoughts about education, transitioning to teaching and specifically teaching in the Mississippi Delta.

Until next time - peace.