Teachers Get Crash Course on Living in L.A.

El Segundo has no bar scene. In Torrance you won’t find a discotheque. And Venice is too much of a commute if you’re going to teach in Pasadena.

That’s what 65 fresh-faced teaching recruits, members of the national service corps Teach for America, were told during Monday’s crash course in where to live in Los Angeles.

Helpful hints included the difference between a bachelor pad and a single (there is none), the definition of a Thomas Guide: the only thing that may save your life in Los Angeles. The prize tip: a New York City native who told recruits that Hollywood is a real dangerous place.

But the most important advice that the teachers-to-be, all recent college graduates who have been selected to teach in the nation’s most beleaguered rural and urban schools, got was that they should move to the communities where they will work so that they can better understand their students.

“If you think about ‘Mayberry RFD’, Andy Griffith lives there, Barney lives there, and so does Mrs. Krump [Opie’s teacher],” said John Gust, a teacher who moved from upscale Manhattan Beach to Watts 1 1/2 years ago so he could better understand his elementary school students. “Extend your classroom beyond its four walls,” he told recruits gathered at their temporary home, the Quality Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport.

Gust told recruits that while life in his neighborhood can sometimes be emotionally taxing, it has paid off. He has learned as much from his African American and Latino students in Watts as the students have learned from their white schoolteacher. And the experience has improved his teaching skills.

In fact, Gust raved so much about the move that fellow teacher Meghan McChesney, 24, moved in with him six months later. McChesney was teaching in the Compton Unified School District and living in Hermosa Beach.

Since moving to the Craftsman-style home on 107th Street where she and Gust reside, McChesney has learned what it is like to be part of a community. She and Gust led an effort to refurbish a playground at the Hacienda Village Housing Development, and she says she’s on a first-name basis with her neighbors, some of whom drop off home-grown vegetables and food for the two teachers.

McChesney, a two-year member of the program, and Gust, a former educational analyst who reviewed the program, have headed the effort to get recruits to move to their communities. Teach for America was founded in 1989 by Princeton University graduate Wendy Kopp..

In Los Angeles County, members of Teach for America work in the Los Angeles, Compton, Pasadena and Long Beach Unified school districts. Since the program started in Los Angeles in 1990, more than 700 teachers have been placed in area schools.

While some of the new recruits were intrigued by their colleagues’ stories , many said that if they move to the inner city it might not be until they’ve at least gotten used to the idea of living in Los Angeles.

Bostonian Vonetta Taylor plans to live in Venice even though she will teach elementary school in the Pasadena Unified School District.

“It’s my first time out here,” said Taylor, 22, a recent graduate of Cornell University. “Teaching is just one of the many things I want to do with my life.”