Teach Well. Be More.

Today was the first official day of institute. I will be teaching fourth grade at P.S. 53 in the Bronx for the next five weeks. The school itself is pretty nice, except for the fact that it doesn't have air conditioning...in New York...during the summer. It's a huge elementary school -- with a school size that rivals Williams' at 1600+. While I haven't actually met my students yet (that doesn't come until next week), I think I will have about twenty under my care.

We just got out of the Teach For America Welcoming Ceremonies which was pretty great at pumping me up for my future in education. We got to hear from Wendy Kopp, the founder and president of TFA, and also a bunch of TFA alum. The alum were reading excerpts from their diaries, and one of them was actually someone that I had seen in the CNN documentary on TFA. It was great to see her because I was especially interested in how her experience would turn out -- she was the one who struggled the most in the documentary and definitely seemed as though she wouldn't make it.

Turns out she did. And she achieved some pretty incredible gains. It gave me hope to know that regardless of how hard things may seem...one can always recover and then excel.

One of the alum from Baltimore had a pretty great experience. He spoke specifically about one of his students who made it through his class, who won a prestigious award for academic excellence in Baltimore and got a free ride to U of Maryland (and a pretty hefty scholarship at Johns Hopkins). What was especially great was that she spoke to us afterwards as a TFA Operations Coordinator...Needless to say there were a lot of standing ovations tonight.

Tonight, I am so proud and excited to be a part of this incredible movement as part of the B-more 2004 corps.