Teachers experience hardships, challenges

JESSICA HUANG
news@columbiamissourian.com

Like most corps members, Schokmiller is busy every second of every day. When she isn’t teaching, grading homework or volunteering to earn school supplies, she’s taking nine credits at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and working toward a master’s degree in middle school education, curriculum and instruction. She is scheduled to earn her degree and teaching license in May. She believes she can make a larger difference in closing the education gap from an administrative position. She wants to be a principal someday.

“Teaching isn’t really a job,” Schokmiller said. “It’s a lifestyle.”

TFA volunteers must be hired by a school district. TFA guarantees placement for each of its corps members and ensures they have met the minimum requirements for the district they’re placed in. In some cases, corps members can meet all the requirements before the first day of school. In others, they are granted temporary certification. Regardless, by the end of their two-year commitment, they’re certified to teach in their region.

At first, Smith was disappointed that she wasn’t placed at her St. Louis alma mater, Vashon High School. But she couldn’t be happier with her Northwest classroom, she said, and she coaches cheerleading at Vashon. Smith was able to create a community of teamwork within her classroom; her students now rally together to help a classmate who is lagging behind. Plus, the level of Smith’s students’ enthusiasm for algebra has increased dramatically since the beginning of the year. Sometimes she has to kick them out to get them to leave her classroom, she said.

Smith is constantly working to combat low test scores. TFA has offered some teaching tips: Smith was encouraged to make sure her students had mastered a certain set of skills before moving on; she was told how to teach troublesome topics through repetition without seeming to dumb things down; and she was told how to teach some students harder subject matter than others in the same class.

TFA expects students taught by corps members to understand 80 percent of the subject matter in math and to improve 1 1/2 grades in reading after one year. Smith hasn’t been able to meet the math benchmark but said she hasn’t found anyone who has.

“I’ve been asking TFA for a successful math model,” she said, “but so far, nobody has been able to show me this.”

Kim also felt help from TFA was limited after she got placed at her St. Louis school. But her challenges weren’t limited to teaching methods.

After barely two months in the classroom, she was accused by one of her students of witnessing a playground rape. Even though Kim was out of school with bronchitis that day, she became the subject of an investigation. The police came to her classroom and pulled students out one by one for questioning. Kim’s principal told her the school would provide legal support if needed, though it never came to that. On an especially bad day, Kim cried in front of her class.

And when Kim called her TFA program director for help, she said all she got was the answering machine. She said she then called TFA headquarters; no one responded.

So a month later, when a troubled student interrupted her class by screaming in Kim’s face and knocking over desks and trash cans, Kim said she didn’t have a lot of faith that TFA would help her figure out how to handle the situation. The student had a medical diagnosis; his bad behavior wasn’t really his fault. At one point, he kicked her. He tried to run out of the classroom and out of the school. She had to lock the classroom door and teach a math lesson while blocking it.

She said she again tried to reach TFA. She left a phone message. She sent an e-mail. By the time she reached someone, she said, three months had passed. And when the program director — Kim’s guaranteed support — finally came out to observe Kim’s classroom, the student was taking medication and there was no longer an issue, Kim said.