Nestled in North Carolina

Hi again. It’s been a year since I left Norway, and I haven’t bothered to blog until now. I spent the year in Toronto, getting my masters in English literature at the University of Toronto. Toronto turned out to be vastly better than I expected, and the only thing you really need to know is that George Eliot saved my sanity and then taught me how to be a better person. Check your pier-glass for egoism, everyone.

I’m heading down to Charlotte, North Carolina to join Teach for America and inspire our country’s youth with a sense of their history. I’ll be teaching high school social studies in a low-income school for two years. According to my TFA alumni friends, this is the hardest thing I will ever do in my life. It probably will be. But right now, the truth is, I am most terrified of the climate. North Carolina will be my chance to learn to love the heat. Because it is HOT. But it is also incredibly beautiful and mountainous, and I will be living with purpose, and so I’ve decided, decisively, that sundresses, sandals, and enormous wide-brimmed straw hats are going to make the next two years awesome.

I don’t yet know which school I’ll be at, since we speed-date the principals while down in Charlotte this week. But when I do find out, you won’t. A touch of confidentiality to protect my future students.

I consider TFA a highly unethical organization. It takes brand-new teachers without the experience that makes them great, and has them practice on the very children who can least afford to be guinea pigs. It offers an unbothered, achievement-gap-bridging, social justicey, warm fuzzy feeling to the post-college, at the expense of the statistically-unlikely-to-go-to-college (though God knows we’re all coming in with grandiose dreams of all our students graduating with full scholarships). Then, once the TFA corps members have spent their two years in the trenches, they sail off into the grad schools of their dreams with stories of successfully having gotten over their mental breakdowns.

The photo my sister sent me upon 
hearing I'd joined the Charlotte corps

So why do it? Only one reason: because I want to teach. I came back from my Fulbright in Norway hard-bit by the teaching bug. Granted, my Katten students were impossibly thoughtful, eager, and intelligent, and no class is ever going to be like that again, but the teaching was addictive, and now I’m hooked.

I want to teach, and I want to teach well. TFA’s program is a helluva lot better at using a constantly evolving, results-based pedagogy than any other program I looked at. Say what you will about TFA’s faults, it teaches you to teach. To be perfectly fair, the fuzzy feeling doesn’t seem so bad, either: I feel with terrible urgency my responsibility towards a world that wasn’t raised with the kinds of parents I have (my dad argues that I’m not that privileged, but I don’t think that word means what he thinks it does), and this seems a feasible place to use my abilities before (or in case ever) my idealism and passion burn out. It just comes with an incredible responsibility to see that my students don’t suffer by having me as their teacher—to make up in energy, intellect, and highly organized creativity what other teachers offer through experience.

The photo my mother sent me upon 
hearing I'd joined the Charlotte corps

My philosophy of teaching is too complicated to detail in a blog post. Besides, it’s going to evolve over the course of my teaching, so you might as well watch it unfold over time. 

I won’t have time to blog extensively, but teaching does require a healthy amount of self-reflection. Blog justified.

Tomorrow I fly to Charlotte for our week-long introduction to the city and each other, horribly named “Induction.” Then to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for five weeks of Institute, our intensive summer training. I’ve heard the rumors. Three hours of sleep a night if you’re lucky, and that’s assuming no tornadoes. Teacher boot camp at its most soul-cramping. So this may be my last post for a while. Until the next. See you in Charlotte!

The photo TFA Charlotte sent me upon hearing I'd joined the Charlotte corps

*A note on the blog’s title. In Norsk, “å” means “to”. Lære means both “learn” and “teach”. I like the ambiguity. I know dragging Norwegian into North Carolina is strange, but let’s face it: Norway got me here. Now to work on my Southern accent…