...and why you should too.
First of all I am not talking about the highly profitable non-profit known as “Teach for America” or TFA, an organization which sends “corps members” (their words) into poor schools doing very little for children (as demonstrated by peer-reviewed research) but definitely making the executive board very, very rich...using your tax dollars to boot!
Corps members, no matter how good their intentions may be, are not teachers any more than an undergraduate with 5 weeks of training is a doctor or a lawyer or a masseuse, all of which require some sort of extended period of training before earning a license.
I’m not talking about that TFA because I’ve already problematized it here, and here, and too many to count have done stellar jobs debunking the organization’s claims of success.
Rather, I’m talking about why I teach for the United States of America, flawed as it is with its inequitable distribution of wealth, with its war on women, with its states that engage in a white-washed ethnic cleansing that is reminiscent of the late 1600’s when it was widely acknowledged that most Americans should be kept stupid, and you could be put in jail for teaching a slave to read and write.
Why teach for such a place, and why ask others to do the same?
I teach for America because this country was made, and as it was made it can be remade, so let me stress the FOR because the America I live in today is ground zero FOR becoming the place we read about when we are children, but it won’t be that place without people such as yourself teaching it into existence.
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