Asked to Serve, They Raised Their Hands

They were probably disappointed that I wasn’t Arnold Schwarzenegger or Vivica A. Fox. But the second-graders at Washington Accelerated Elementary in Pasadena had been coached by teacher Jenny Tan to treat me with the polite respect that every substitute teacher craves but seldom gets.

“This is Ms. Banks and she’ll be your teacher for the next hour,” Tan told them, before she disappeared into the back of the classroom. And they sat, hands folded on desktops, expectantly--20 sets of eyes staring up at me--as I began stumbling through my lesson.

“Who knows what curiosity means?” I asked them.

Hands shot up, but none asked the question they were all most curious about: What is this lady doing here?

As a college freshman nearly 30 years ago, I had my sights set on a teaching career. But two semesters spent tutoring struggling third-graders convinced me that there is no more difficult job on Earth. I switched my major to journalism, and today my teaching is confined to kitchen table homework help.

What brought me back to the classroom last Friday was an invitation to participate in “Teach for America Week,” an annual campaign that turns entertainers, CEOs, writers, artists and civic leaders--including Schwarzenegger and Fox--into teachers for one hour, to highlight the need for new teachers and the work of “Teach for America,” a kind of Peace Corps for American schools.

Teach for America’s mission is simple: Recruit recent graduates from the country’s top colleges to spend two years teaching at schools in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods where there is a chronic shortage of trained teachers.

Phrases like “do something meaningful ... make a difference ... change a life ... serve our country” dot the resumes and applications of newcomers to the teacher corps.

Often that altruism slams hard into reality when they wind up in schools where space and supplies are short, teachers are unappreciated and overworked and students are unmotivated and unprepared.

Still, most stay on after their two-year hitch. Of the 7,000 who’ve joined Teach for America over the years, 60% are still working full time as teachers, principals or counselors in schools.

Critics say the program is elitist; that it inflicts a procession of untrained teachers on needy inner-city kids. Teach for America interns lack teaching credentials; their training consists of a five-week summer program, chances to observe veteran teachers and mentoring and meetings throughout the year.

But this nation needs more than 2 million new teachers in the coming decade. More than half of new teachers leave the profession within five years. And few want to teach at schools like Washington in Pasadena, where one-third of the kids come from families on welfare and 90% live below the poverty level.

And I can’t help but feel these kids are lucky, as I watch Tan question them patiently, guide them through their journal writing, then use finger signals to direct them to file into a quiet line at the door. And when they file out for dismissal, she collapses, smiling, in her chair.

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Like most in the Teach for America corps, Tan didn’t set out to be a teacher. She majored in cognitive science and planned to go on to medical school.

“But I needed a break” after graduation from Berkeley, she said. “And I wanted to do something meaningful. Teach for America seemed like a good fit.”

Medical school is on the back burner, for now. Instead, Tan, 23, attends night classes to get her teaching credential and her master’s in education. And she’s at school before dawn most mornings, working on her bulletin board or grading papers.

“My family wonders what I’m doing sometimes,” said Tan, who grew up in San Gabriel. “Like, ‘Why are you always at school? Why do you have to work so hard?’ My mother keeps hoping ... ‘You’re still going to medical school, aren’t you?”’

That’s a familiar refrain to Diane Robinson, who heads Teach for America’s Los Angeles office. She left Vassar in 1991 with a B.A. in political science, an internship with a prestigious law firm and a plan to become a lawyer. But a visit to a friend teaching in Compton prompted her to sign on with Teach for America. Her first year, she had 36 first-graders in one of Compton’s poorest schools.

“My mother still says, ‘I didn’t pay for you to go to Vassar to have you come out and be a teacher,”’ said Robinson, who is from Brooklyn. She spent four years teaching in Compton and Hawthorne, and figures she learned more there than she could have learned in a law school classroom. “Here, it’s not just in a textbook anymore. You see all the problems you read about play out in people’s lives. You get a chance to really make a difference--to teach a child to read, to set goals, to study.”

Still, sometimes she questions her choices, as she thinks about her college classmates and the money they’ve made. “A lot of my friends did really well. They bought homes, even second homes,” she said. Robinson lives in a converted garage in Santa Monica.

“But they woke up [after] Sept.11 and some of them had trouble going to work. They’re asking themselves, ‘What am I doing with my life? What meaning does this all have in the ... world today?’ I never have to ask that question. You look around at the kids and that’s your answer. That’s all the meaning you need.”