How Did I End Up Here?

More than one year ago, as a junior at Ohio State, I began my application for Teach for America's 2015 teacher corps. As a political science major, teaching wasn't necessarily what I had always imagined doing. With a forecasted graduation in spring 2015, I had previously imagined that I would launch my career as a low-level staffer on a presidential campaign for the 2016 election. There were a lot of exciting names being tossed around as potential candidates for the 2016 cycle and, more exciting for me, it seemed like this might be the best chance America had seen to elect a woman. Yet somehow even with my excitement at the prospect of being part of a ground-breaking campaign, I lacked a degree of certainty. There was still something pulling me away from this path.

That was when I received an email from a campus recruiter for TFA. The early admission deadline was fast approaching. TFA had always been in my periphery as a post-graduate option. I knew that one day I wanted to go into policy work or politics, and I knew that education was the most important issue to me. What ultimately influenced my decision to apply, however, was the time I had spent during high school observing my mother's journey as a special education teacher. Through her eyes it became clear to me that legislators making laws about teaching without setting foot in front of a blackboard would always be a part of the problem more than they would be part of the solution. I knew then that I didn't want to be one of those legislators and the best way to avoid that outcome was to teach, to figure out for myself how government and society can better support teachers AND students instead of a viewing them as opposing forces. So I took a leap of faith and applied to teach.

The application process was a long one, but the advantage for me was that the time and energy demanded of me during this process helped me to realize how much I wanted to this. As a friend put it, he hadn't been sold on me as a teacher until he saw how much passion I was approaching this application with. That passion convinced me, too. By the time May rolled around and I was notified of my admission, I knew that applying had been the right choice.

Then, a bombshell was dropped. I had ranked TFA's regional placements as soon as I was informed of my admission, but it wasn't until a week or two later that I received my official regional placement, something that was more or less immutable. I had agreed to go almost anywhere that I was needed when I ranked my regions, with one or two exceptions based on budget, but in my ranking I had placed a priority on the kind of environment and distance to family with regions in California, Texas, and the Midwest ranking near the top of my list. I was eagerly awaiting a placement decision and crossing my fingers for my first choice of Sacramento when I logged onto to the TFA admission portal to find the biggest shock of my life waiting for me: Mississippi.

That's right. Mississippi. Tree hugging, city girl heads to the heart of the Deep South. It sounded like a cheesy coming of age story, or worse, a horror movie. For a brief period, I let fear get the best of me and thought about pursuing another option. After all, Mississippi wasn't even close to any family and it just wasn't what I had pictured, but I did some research and it turned out Mississippi had a lot to offer (I'll get to that in a future post). Ultimately, what assuaged my doubts was something a TFA recruiter had said at some point during the process that has stuck with me ever since: "Remember, it's not Teach for San Francisco or Teach for Chicago or Teach for Delaware; it's Teach for America." I knew she was right so if Mississippi needed me then it was to Mississippi I would go.

But Mississippi wasn't the last curveball to come my way. The next would arrive in November just before I was asked to make an official commitment to teach for two years. It was time for my subject placement. Going into the process, I was anticipating a placement in the humanities. Surely, a person with political science would be teaching social studies or English, maybe even Spanish so naturally I was a little surprised when I once again logged onto the TFA admission portal to see the words "high school mathematics" waiting for me. How did that happen? Well, the best I can guess is this: I'm a political science major, but on the road to that major I've also majored in, at one point or another, biology, journalism, computer science and engineering, and physics. What I really wanted to do in college was learn a little bit about everything, but, as it turns out, "Bachelor of Science in Everything" is not a degree you can get at Ohio State so I ended up with my first love: politics. However, on the long and meandering path to a degree in political science I had completed a good amount of math classes and by "good" I mean a handful more than the average social sciences major. That meant I was more qualified to teach math than a lot of TFA's applicants and the need for math teachers, I'm sure you've heard, is astronomically high. For an hour or two, my commitment to this idea of teaching again began to waver, but I woke up the next morning and just knew that this was still right. I was still meant to be teaching even if it was the last subject I expected in the last place I expected. 

Over the next few months I would make my commitment official and begin the challenging work of dusting off my mathematical knowledge in order to pass the Praxis, the required certification exam for teachers in Mississippi. I took the test in January and am happy to report that, by some sort of miracle, I passed. Now, in addition to preparing to teach math, I'm also preparing for the move to such a foreign place. That transition is part of what I hope to document here and I hope you'll enjoy the journey with me.