Char-What? Char-lotte!

I am at infamous Institute. This is teacher boot camp. Some of it is very camp: as we stood in an auditorium cheering “Char-what?” “Char-lotte!” and trying to drown out the Miami-Dade corps, I had a definite surge of camp spirit adrenaline. Some of it is very boot: they take up our time with stupid things simply to make our actual practical time shorter and stress us out.

Gorgeous campus

Tulsa Institute is the biggest Institute in the country this summer. Out of the 6,000 people going into the 2013 corps, 750 of them are in Tulsa. We’re here from Charlotte, Oklahoma, Miami, Indy, Kansas City, and the Twin Cities, and we’ll be teaching a good several thousand kids. Note: Tulsa is much greener than I expected.

The first day of Institute, the focus was on inspiration, not information. Which served to frustrate all of the type-A personalities waiting to hear about their summer classrooms. But they’re making up for it with a deluge of practical advice and practice, albeit still buttressed with an uncomfortable amount of fluffy shoutouts (“yee-haw” because we’re in Tulsa). Still, it’s the advice about having kids raise their hands with pencils in them to let you know they need a sharpen, and the Do-Now activity when they walk into the room, that are going to make those tiny, incredibly important differences.

I've quite literally been living on peanuts while they
figure out kashrut here

One of the things I’ve been thinking about most is TFA language. They talk a great deal about closing the achievement gap. This sounds great, but I’m not a fan. Norway has closed the achievement gap into a sandwich of average that a competitive American will eat for lunch. Instead, I like the idea of closing the opportunity gap. Every student ought to have the opportunity to fulfill their potential. That’s very different from everyone achieving at the same level in a Vonnegutian “Harrison Bergeron” world.

My Collab, the two people with whom I’ll be teaching this summer, is awesome. They’re both from the Bronx, and we’ll all be teaching high school social studies come fall. Which means our summer assignment of 6^th grade gen-ed leaves us all scrambling to grab the reading and writing section instead of math. But next week, I’ll be heading up place value and… stuff. Haven’t really looked further than that.  Our CMA group (the crew of people under the same advisor) is pretty cool. 

I'm definitely the hungry one

I’m already finding myself in difficulty working in a group. Because my style is so input-focused, I don’t even want to be talked to until I’ve read the entire rubric. Then, once we each have our ideas, we should bounce em off and polish. But my collab partners prefer figuring stuff out, out loud. This takes so much more time than my usual practice! I also prefer snap decisions, with quick feedback to redirect or change my mind. Talking everything out with all this repetition is slightly agonizing.

Thus far, all my posts have been about myself. That’s because for the past two weeks TFA has had us focus entirely on ourselves: our identities, strengths, visions, values. I can’t wait for the students to come in and snap us out of this selfishness.