ex-TFAer

About Me

At the end of my senior year of college, I joined Teach for America and was assigned to teach in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. After several months as a sorely underprepared English teacher in a chaotic, wildly mismanaged high school, I experienced stress and exhaustion so profound that they exacerbated existing health problems. I left teaching and Teach for America at the end of the first semester of the school year and have not once regretted quitting.

I will discuss aspects of my own experience in this blog, and I may post the entire story some day, but for the moment, I just want to make clear that my reflections on TFA are in no way unbiased. I have tried to be as fair as possible in discussing the program, but my impressions are unquestionably colored by my negative experiences. Because I want people curious about TFA to have access to a wide range of viewpoints, I’ve included in my list of links several web sites maintained by TFA teachers with more positive views of the program, and I also encourage TFA supporters to post comments in response to my posts.

Interests

• education
• teaching
• public policy
• nonprofit orgs

My Blogs	Team Members
Thoughts on Teach for America