Dear 1st Year Coming For The Summer:

Challenge yourself, especially during June, as to whether MTC really is for you.  Teaching in a critical needs school is a great way to serve our society, but it is not the only way.  Mississippi Teacher Corps has a time-tested method for placing, training, and supporting alternate route teachers in critical needs schools, but participating in MTC is by no means the only way to make a difference in the lives of our nation’s children.  Be honest with yourself before you start signing contracts.     

Coaching sucks.  Coaching takes too much of your time for not enough pay to be with young people who often act no better during practice than they do during class.  But for better or worse, the simple act of coaching gives wider, more immediate credibility than good teaching, and the sweet moments (typically during games) make all the frustrations worthwhile.   You might not have a choice, but if your principal asks you over the phone in mid-May whether you want to coach a sport or lead an activity, just say yes.

Don't listen to everything you hear.  This summer, people with very little (1-2 years) teaching experience will generalize their own brief experience into blanket rules for how teachers should act, and instruct you accordingly.  Don’t be fooled.  No one will be in your classroom on your first day except you and 100-150 teenagers you’ve never met (and maybe the security guards, if they come when you call for them).  The key phrase in the prior sentence is “your classroom” and what works for someone else, even the coolest 2nd or 3rd year teacher you meet this summer, won’t necessarily work for you.

Don't ignore everything you hear.  This summer, people with infinitely more (1-2 years) teaching experience than you have will share with you the hard lessons they have learned by trying to do it their own way.  You will listen to some of most outrageous stories certain that you are different, that you would have made it work, that you will be your own person in your classroom no matter what.  Go with that.  Just don’t be afraid to remember what people said during the summer when you want to quit at 10:15 a.m. on the first day because four students who left 30 minutes ago to use the restroom together haven’t returned, and you think (but can’t really be sure because no one will let you get close enough) that two girls (or are they boys?) are fighting over there, in the corner, where you asked them very nicely four times not to sit, and the security guards you buzzed at least 1 minute ago still haven’t arrived.

Take the program manager, Ben Guest, with a grain of salt (but do take him).  He likes to open the door during MTC classes and trudge to the front of the room no matter who happens to be talking.  He scowls as he does this.  Then, with all the gentle subtlety of Zeus on a grumpy day, he blurts out his refrain, a rhetorical broken record: “Do you have rules?  Do you enforce them?  Do you enforce them consistently?”  His content and delivery strip the romance and mystery and excitement out of classroom management, so be prepared to be annoyed.  (But don’t write him off completely, because most problems do seem to go back to those three questions.)

Get out of Oxford as much as you can, and take the back roads.  If you are not from Mississippi, you will notice on the first bus ride to summer school in Holly Springs that Oxford is not a representative cross-section of the Magnolia State.  Mississippi is amazing in beautiful and appalling ways.  Go see for yourself.  If you prefer not to get lost when you go exploring, for $20 you can get DeLorme’s Mississippi Atlas & Gazetteer, which shows pretty much every drivable surface in the state other than cotton field turn-rows, logging roads, and residential driveways.

Be free with constructive criticism.  Nobody likes a whiner, but Ann Monroe and Ben Guest and others who run MTC are more open to specific suggestions for positive change than just about anyone I’ve known over the years.

The summer goes fast.