Teach For America

My 21 year old cousin, a recent college graduate from the University of Texas, is a new participant in Teach For America. She, guided by her idealism, requested to be placed in one of the most high risk areas in the country, as rated by the program: Inner city Oakland, California. I just received an email from my mother, updating me on how Amanda is doing in her position as a 7th grade teacher for an especially troubled group of kids. My mother reports that she is having an extremely tough time and cries on the phone to her parents, my aunt and uncle, nearly everyday. Apparently her class consists of a group that has been together since the third grade, and not a single teacher they've had has lasted longer than 6 weeks! Amanda is supposed to have an aide, but there is not enough support to supply her with one. Just the other day, one of the male students started to beat up on one of the girls in the class. Amanda sent him to the office and they sent him right back.

In our last class discussion we spoke of how difficult it must be for someone to break out of the mentality that they have been raised with and that they experience in their home life everyday. How hard it must be for one, who is struggling to simply survive day-to-day, to go beyond that life and be motivated by another aspect, such as education. We all talk about this in class, and we believe in hope and ideals for these young people, that maybe someone can show them the way out of that life. However, it seems so much different to see it first hand. My cousin is seeing this, and I wonder what her thoughts are now.

We discussed how there are inner city minorities that do make it to bigger and better things, and do not fall back into the "ghetto mentality", the drugs, the violence, and why, if they can do it, can't everyone else? I hear about my cousin and her class and think back to how vulnerable and sponge-like I was at 12 and 13. I was influenced by everything around me, my peers, my parents, my teachers, movies, television. These kids in Oakland are soaking up all that they see in their everyday lives at home, at school, after school. If the only one trying to push them in a healthy direction is my young cousin Amanda...well, that just isn't enough. Which leads me back to the original question in our last class: what do we do?