Who Will Teach?

He is a brilliant college graduate who majored in Chinese at the highly selective Georgetown University. He still has student loans to pay off. Yet he chooses to teach kindergarten at a public school in South-Central Los Angeles. Why?

“The First Year,” a PBS documentary airing this morning at 11 on KCET, confronts the question of why people teach by following Maurice Rabb and four other neophyte teachers as they plunge into their tumultuous first year in Los Angeles-area classrooms. Watch it.

Educators may find themselves pondering their own decision to teach as they observe their colleagues’ joys and frustrations. The rest of us will step away from our televisions with another question lodged in our minds:

America will need at least 2 million new teachers over the next decade to address a growing student population and replace retiring baby boomers. Who will they be? The documentary, funded by California State University and the J. Paul Getty Trust, provides clues.

They won’t be people primarily motivated by money. Maurice Rabb is the kind of teacher all parents want for their children. Dedicated. Persistent. Willing to do whatever it takes in the classroom. But during his rookie year at the 99th Street Accelerated School, this young African American teacher’s monthly take-home pay was $1,871.

They won’t be people concerned with prestige: Society reserves that for doctors, lawyers and those who get on TV as entertainers, not educators. To understand the type of person who is attracted to teaching you need to watch these young idealists in action.

Watch Rabb as he tries all year to get help for a little boy with a speech impediment. When he can’t get it from the school’s speech therapist or at a local hospital, he works with the boy himself. When parents fail to show up for teacher conferences he tracks them down in their homes if necessary.

Watch Joy Kraft-Watts, who can’t get a permanent classroom or even her own desk because of overcrowding at Venice High School. Even as she carts books and papers from one borrowed classroom to another, she manages to connect with her students.

Watch Nate Monley. When an angry little boy who has lost his mother ridicules the fifth-grade teacher at Ford Boulevard Elementary on the Eastside, Monley takes the boy to lunch; takes him fishing--anything to break through the hostility.

Why do these people teach? Corny as it sounds, they want to make a difference. But it’s a tough job, and one out of three teachers in urban districts quits before his or her fifth anniversary. Who will replace them? Who will teach our children?

The Web site of “The First Year” offers good resources for aspiring teachers: https://www.teachersdocumentary.com.

Anyone up to the challenge?