Teach For America

I applied for Teach For America this last month. I was really looking forward to being apart of this program. I really wanted to help children in poverty and was especially interested in helping in Native American reservations. This program was what I really wanted to do once I graduated this May. But this is not going to happen. I was turned down at the application stage. Why? I'm not sure. They only stated that I was not what they were looking for. I believe it's the lake of leadership positions in extracurricular activities. Or the lack of volunteering opportunities. Which does upset me a bit because not everyone has the time to volunteer or wants to be in a leadership position. My problem is that I have a part-time job at a dog daycare and am a full-time student. While I do extracurricular activities at the university with my professors by helping them in the lab or preparing for a conference. I don't have any real extra time to volunteer in other non-profits. Although I would love to volunteer more often if I had the time.

I am also not the type of person to pursue a leadership position. I like to do team work and work with others. I don't like being in charge and telling others what to do. It's also nice to have someone above me in case I have questions. It's not a lack of interest that I don't lead but it's my personality. I can lead if I need to but I'd prefer if we could all just work together as a big group and collaborate. And unfortunately because of these situations, I am not the type of person TFA is looking for.

But that's ok! Because I am in the process of looking into other Americorps programs that would interest me. And hopefully through one of them I will be able to help a community. Even if it's just by helping one person. In the mean time, here was the letter of intent I wrote for TFA.

As a child I had a very difficult school life. My teachers constantly had meetings with my parents to discuss my learning disabilities. They claimed I was too difficult to teach because I either had ADD and was unable to pay attention or that I had some sort of speech impediment that made me incapable of learning the materials they were teaching. I never had a learning disability. In fact, my parents would sit down with me every night to teach me the things my teachers would not. My parents enrolled me in different schools almost yearly hoping to find a teacher that actually cared for me and would take the time to help me. Yet I always had teachers who asked my parents to put me on Ritalin so that they could place me in the back of their classes and forget about me. I was constantly two or three years behind my other classmates in grammar and math because my teachers never took the time to sit down and help me. By the time I reached high school I had given up on school. I passed my classes but I never tried. I always felt that since no one cared about my education then why should I. 

After spending two years learning how to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently and working as a translator for the Navy I realized that my troubles in school were not because I had a learning disability but because the teachers did not want to take the extra time to make sure I understood the material. This happens to children every day in classrooms. I want to help the children who are pushed to the back of the classes and ignored because they are seen as too difficult to teach. I would spend extra time with the child and find different ways to explain the material to help make it more understandable. By doing these things I hope to show children that their struggles are not their faults. Education is worth the battle and I hope to show this to them by helping them in ways my teachers never did. 

I would feel like I have accomplished this goal even if I reached only one child. That is one child more that will continue with his/her education with a positive attitude. Children can have a more positive outlook on life through having a role model to look up to. This attitude can help create better opportunities through working harder and making better grades. This can create scholarships to schools and could even lead to job opportunities that the child may not have originally had access to. Giving these opportunities to just one child would mean the world to me. I would like to be that role model that helps overlooked children realize that they are as capable as they think they are.