Because Williams does not have an Education major, a graduating Eph who wishes to teach has three main options.

1) Enroll in a graduate school of Education

2) Teach at a private or parochial school (they are not required to hire licensed teachers)

3) Enroll in an alternative-route certification program, such as Teach for America, Mississippi Teacher Corps, New York City Teaching Fellows, Chicago Teaching Fellows, and many, many others.

I am not exactly sure of the typical breakdown between these three options for Williams grads who go in to teaching. My (very rough) guess is that around 10 members of the class of ‘07 ended up in #2, and another 10-20 in #3. I only know of a few people who were considering #1. (Note: Plenty of students also go abroad to teach - the phantom 4th option on my list). Perhaps someone more familiar with these numbers (the OCC must know!) could chime in and correct me…

I hope to get few writers from each of these categories, but I’m starting these entries with participants from alternative-route (meaning: not through traditional graduate school) programs. Obviously, as a current member of one these programs, its the viewpoint most familiar to me. But I am also starting here because it is the category that has been receiving the most attention recently - news articles, columns, books, and lots of good buzz about how a big chunk of our generation has chosen to devote two years of our lives to improving our nation’s educational system.

Most aspiring teachers who choose that third category will find themselves in low-income school districts that have a high rate of teacher turnover — and a whole slew of problems that contribute to it.

More below the jump…

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This is the first post in a summer-long series of “Eph Diaries” about the experiences of recent Williams grads who have chosen to pursue teaching after graduation. As an ‘07 graduate, I just completed my first year in the Mississippi Teacher Corps, a two-year, alternative-route program (similar to Teach for America), which trains and places recent graduates in the critical-needs school districts of Mississippi. I’ll be cross-posting some of my own blog entries from this year, as well as thoughts from other young Ephs in the classrooms. Hopefully our stories, observations, and ideas will provide inspiration for other Williams students who are contemplating a career in education.

Perhaps it seems odd that these entries appear over the summer — school is out, we are not necessarily teaching, and our blog entries will often be outdated. I think, in fact, it is the perfect time for these entries - a time in which students and teachers alike can reflect on the year, on what has (or has not) been accomplished, and on what might be achieved when September rolls around again. To those undergraduates adrift in a sea of career opportunities, summer is the perfect time to begin thinking about the future -and hopefully you might gain some insight from those of us newly “on the job”.

So, without further ado, I will give you an entry of mine, recently written, which was required by my program: a reflection of my first year of teaching. This year, I taught Junior and Senior English at a large high school in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest (if not the poorest) regions in the country. My attempt to reflect on the year is as follows:

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This entry will deviate a bit from a strict definition of “all things Eph,” but when David Kane wants Williams pictures, he gets pictures; when he wants an Eph Diary, he gets an Eph Diary, and when he wants more information about the political economy of the situation, he will most certainly get as much. While sorting books, we met the AmeriCorps team that is working in New Orleans (more on AmeriCorps below), so I am now a bit more qualified to talk about the politics of that area.

Hands On Gulf Coast — formerly run by Hands On USA and now by Hands On Network — has a core mission, which is to rebuild the community by rebuilding houses so that people can move back into them. You have doubtless heard of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, the poorest and most flooded area of the city. Hands On does not rebuild houses in the Lower Ninth Ward, because there is some probability that the whole area will be demolished in the end anyway, and my guess is that any other volunteer organizations in the city have the same policy. Thus, no one can move back into houses in the Lower Ninth Ward (unless they can pay for a contractor) and so there is no community there for people to return to, which is a bit of a self-propogating cycle (the government says the area might not be rebuilt, so the houses aren’t rebuilt, so there’s no community there, so there’s no reason to rebuild the area, etc.).

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Diana and a few other Williams students are off in Northern Louisiana sorting donated books and hanging out by a beautiful lake, but the rest of us are still here working in Biloxi. Today a group of us got to work with the Salvation army, preparing and serving lunches to 350 volunteers. We spiced up their lunch experience with some general silliness and dancing in the lunch line. It was great to meet some other volunteers and see how many people are donating their time to help out here on the gulf coast. We also absolutely loved working with the Salvation Army people, who are helping coordinate large-scale resource distribution in this area…we basically fell in love with them.
Some other members of the Williams team worked on the “Tree Crew,” which actually meant moving a lot of debris, as well as cutting up and removing fallen trees from people’s yards. They were awed by tree climbing and roping mastery of their crazy leaders and are now skilled in the art of avoiding these chainsaw-bearing hippies.
Also…drumroll…the Salvation Army had more bananas than they knew what to do with (we’re talking cases and cases), so we dropped some off at a local church; the rest we brought back and turned into scrumptious banana bread to feed the hungry masses at Hands On.
All in all, it was a wildly fabulous and wildly productive day.
–Katie Craig, Liz Gleason, Kim Taylor, Julia Sendor, Zoe Fonseca, and Whitney Leonard (all class of ‘08)

Today I did surveying again, and this time we actually got to survey people, rather than just advertising a meeting! The survey is 52 questions with demographic information, and then questions on what the person liked about Biloxi before the hurricane, what they think the highest priorities should be after the hurricane, and what they think the most pressing issues for the city are. The idea of the surveys is that the Coordination and Relief Center will compile the information about what the citizens of East Biloxi want and give that information to the mayor and city planners, so that they will either have to take that information into account when they plan what will happen next, or they will have to knowingly go against what the city’s people want.

We first went to two trailer parks, which are not trailer parks in the traditional sense, but just fields full of FEMA trailers that have sprung up after the hurricane. This was to survey people who had lived in East Biloxi before the hurricane, but who were living elsewhere after the storm. Most of the people were not home — who would stay in a tiny trailer on a Saturday if they didn’t have to — but I surveyed one woman who was home. She was 20 and had two small children, both about two or three years old, and they were all home watching Saturday morning cartoons. She was African-American, and worked cleaning casinos before the hurricane. I realized later that I’m 20, too, so we were the same age, but living very different lives.

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Today a group of 10 Williams students went to the local elementary school to do “tutoring.” Unfortunately for us, the most pressing need at the school today was sorting books, so we didn’t get to talk to individual children or do any tutoring. However, I love sorting, and I love books, so it was all right. This school had a lot of its books destroyed in the hurricane, which was terrible, and then it got a huge number of donated books from everywhere in the country, which is also overwhelming.

We went through perhaps 20 boxes of books, sorting them by type (picture book or chapter book) and genre (part of a series, has “God” in the title, Disney or television character books) and boxing them up again. The good thing is that the books are very well sorted. The bad thing is that we didn’t really accomplish anything tangible; we just moved books around.

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Today I did “animal rescue” with another volunteer and the long-term volunteer that does it every day. First, we organized the warehouse where they keep the cat and dog carriers and cages and everything that they can give out to people, including assembling a lot of cat and dog carriers. We really made the warehouse (which was the space under stadium bleachers, in a stadium owned by the Salvation Army) look much better.

Then the “animal rescue” began in earnest. We had a certain section of East Biloxi to cover, so we drove down every street, and every time we saw a dog or cat, we stopped. We asked the people nearby (because there were almost always people nearby) who owned the animal, to which the answer was usually “I do.” We asked them if they would like food for the animal, to which the answer was usually “oh, that would be great, thanks,” so we gave them cat or dog food — and a lot of it — from the supply in the warehouse. We also asked if the person wanted to keep the animal, and usually they did, but in a few cases they were just feeding it because it was a stray that hung out on their property, so we put them on a list to come get the animal next week. (At the end of March, they will drive a cargo van load of animals “up north” to be adopted.)

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About 50 Ephs are or will be in the Gulf Coast this spring break, helping to clean up and rebuild after hurricane Katrina. I’m in Biloxi with about 15 current students and a few alums, and we’re demolishing houses, scraping mold, building things, and anything else that needs doing. I’ll be cross-posting my blog posts about my experience on EphBlog. I’ll start with my entry from yesterday. The other entries follow in reverse chronological order; I’ll post new ones as separate entries in the days ahead.

Building and surveying

Yesterday I worked on building a ramp for what will be a clinic in a town outside of Biloxi, near the border with Alabama. I painted some boards white, and then I cut strips of tar paper, and then for a very long time, I hammered “joist hangers,” which are these metal things that help to hold the joists up. The joists are the boards under the walkway that go perpendicular to the direction you walk, and the joist hangers help to hold them to the edges of the walkway. Each one had 10 nails, which I nailed in. This took me a very long time. Eventually that was the only thing left to do, so the two men and the other Williams student (a boy) hammered the rest of them in with me, which took only about 10 minutes (it took me a few hours to do the first half). My arm was kind of tired from hammering for a few hours.

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I have been working this summer for SOME (So Others Might Eat), a charity in Washington, DC. SOME provides a range of services to the poor and homeless of Washington, including: food, clothing, health care, affordable housing, addictions treatment, counseling, services for the elderly or mentally ill, and job training.

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