Read Online Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote - Free Book Online Page B

would bear a much greater resemblance to boot camp than to a college orientation program. Gone was the most basic of university freedoms—the right to manage time. In its place was a carefully choreographed sixteen-hour day—every minute of which would be accounted for. There would be no more waking at nine or ten and pulling on a T-shirt and jeans for a midmorning class. Under the TFA regime, the working day began at dawn and went pretty much until midnight. There was a grown-up dress code, too. For men, that meant a button-down shirt, tie, and slacks. For women, it was a skirt or dress of “reasonable length,” or slacks with a blouse.
    Breakfast was served each morning beginning at 5:45. Big yellow buses packed with bleary-eyed CMs clutching red lunch totes left the Long Beach campus about an hour later, headed for school sites. On-campus training lasted the length of the school day—from 8 a.m. until 4:05, when the buses ferried exhausted CMs back to the dorms for a break and dinner before the evening sessions began at 6:30. The day didn’t end three hours later when the nighttime workshops were wrapping up. After that, CMs were expected to prepare a lesson plan for the following day. Few got to bed before midnight, many not at all.
    Locke was the school assignment site for 139 TFA recruits. The Locke cohort was divided by teaching subjects into nine groups of fourteen to sixteen CMs, each headed by a corps member advisor (CMA). Each CMA group was further divided into four-person teaching teams. The recruits bonded quickly. TFA encouraged this with various ice-breaking exercises, but it would have happened anyway. There was an up-against-the-wall mentality to the Locke institute—and a gallows sense of humor.
    The first week was devoted entirely to curriculum course work. By the second week, recruits were working in classrooms with summer-school students. The TFA teacher-prep program stood the traditional student-teaching model on its head. Instead of having a student teacher shadowing a veteran educator at work, the TFA rookies took turns teaching while a paid faculty advisor (FA) from Locke’s staff observed from the back of the room. In the mornings, team members taught summer school; in the afternoons they received feedback and sat in on specific curriculum tutorials, like “The Five-Step Lesson Plan” and “Building a Culture of Achievement.” During week four, each recruit got to teach an entire day solo. By the end of the five-week crash course, student teaching was over. Each CM had spent the equivalent of about three full school days teaching. The next time they stood in front of a classroom of students, they would be the teachers of record.
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    Hrag Hamalian, toting his lone suitcase, arrived at Teach For America’s summer institute dressed in a wife-beater T-shirt and shorts and thought:
Wahoo! It’s L.A.!
Days later, he was sitting in slacks and a dress shirt at the welcoming ceremony, astonished at the turn his life had taken. Hrag, along with the other corps members assigned to do their teacher training at Locke High School, had rehearsed a cheer for the evening. It was like a rap:
Stop. Locke. Time to teach, Open up shop.
He was surprised—and not a little embarrassed—to be rapping during institute, but that hardly prepared him for the spectacle that was unfolding in the auditorium of Wilson High School in Long Beach. The gathering of all 639 trainees felt like a football rally, or even a religious revival—not a meeting of smart and serious college graduates and soon-to-be professional teachers.
    For the welcoming ceremony, the L.A. institute corps was organized into groups, each representing a different training campus or permament-placement site. In they marched, bands of cheering coeds, each lot shouting louder than the last, until the noise was literally deafening. Standing in front, watching it all,