Age: 23
Location: Chicago, IL
Current
occupation: Employee at
a business consultancy
Last
school attended:
Stanford University, studied public policy and human biology
Biggest
and/or most recent Blueprint Change*: Quitting
TFA for a new job earlier than anticipated
*A
decision you made or something that happened largely or completely out of your
control
Past
Could
you elaborate on your biggest and/or most recent Blueprint Change?
When
I was a senior in college, I applied to Teach for America (TFA) and signed up
for a two-year commitment for TFA in Chicago public schools. So, originally, I
moved to Chicago to teach high school – specifically, high school science.
I
taught high school biology and algebra at an all boys charter school on the
west side of Chicago and it was a wonderful learning and growing experience –
extremely challenging – but after a couple of months, I realized that it wasn’t
a good fit for me, so I left my placement school in Chicago. And, in Chicago,
when you leave your placement school, you also leave TFA – I say that, because
it’s not necessarily true at every region, but in Chicago it is. So I left
Teach for America, which is a very difficult thing to do, given how coercive
the senior corps leadership members are at retaining their members. You
definitely receive a lot of guilt tripping from TFA as an organization when you
choose to leave before your two year commitment is up.
What
motivated this change?
I
primarily chose to leave, because I was in an uncomfortable ethical position.
The primary means of establishing authority at this school was through physical
intimidation and that made me feel very uncomfortable. I am not a very
physically intimidating person and I don’t particularly support physical
intimidation. The disciplinary tactics and educational philosophy upheld at
this school were not exactly aligned to my own morals and because of that, I
was finding myself feeling these ethical dilemmas every day.
And
when I left the school, I guess there was the disciplinarian factor involved,
but there was also some instructional methodology and repetitive change
philosophy behind it. So, for example, I taught math and the math department
was very insistent that you teach math in a very structured way that
incentivized students to memorize patterns and rules for doing certain
operations. And, for me, that felt very unnatural, because I learned math by
playing around with numbers and I wanted to teach students that way as well.
The way that I was being asked to [teach] was not completely aligned with my
own values.
I
felt like there wasn’t anything objectively wrong with the situation, but it
just wasn’t a good fit. And I felt like there were probably a lot of people who
would’ve loved to have been in that particular situation. I just didn’t think
that I was that person. And felt like – if I left, they could find somebody who
was a lot more suited to be in that position and do really great things. The
school found someone who was a lot better suited to the situation, and so I
left.
What
was the most challenging part of this change and how did you adapt?
I
think the most challenging part of the change was probably thinking through the
why behind my decision at a personal level. When you set out to do TFA, you
come in with this sense of “I’m committing the next two years of my life to
this cause” and it is a very mission-driven organization. The mission is to one
day eliminate the achievement gap and that’s a very compelling mission. So when
you choose to leave something like that, you ask questions about yourself as to
why you chose to leave. In my case, it was, “What does it say about me? Does it
say that I’m not cut out to be a teacher? Does it say that I’m not cut out to
be in education? Does it say that I’m not a very good person, because I’m
leaving behind all these students and I’m just one more teacher going through
the revolving doors of the Chicago public high school education system? Am I
just exacerbating the problem of high teacher turnover in schools? Am I just
falling into that stereotype of these young 20 year olds who want to come in,
but then just leave after a few years and aren’t contributing to a sustainable
solution?”
So
all of these questions were going through my head at the time that I quit and
lot of them I didn’t have answers to. And it was tough, because TFA as an
organization also asks a lot of those same questions about what you’ve learned
from this experience. And they’ll say, “You’ve said made this commitment. And
you’ve said you wouldn’t leave. And now you say that you want to leave. How
have you changed in the last year…year and a half...that has made you turn your
back on what you agreed to?” And with everyone, those should be very
serious questions to consider, right? How have I really changed in the last
year and a half – where I was set on making a commitment a year and a half ago
– and am now going back on my word and leaving without fulfilling my commitment
terms?
Present
How
do you feel about your Blueprint Change now?
I
think about teaching high school quite often now too. My current job is in a
normal office. It requires staring at a computer screen for the majority of the
day. I work with adults who are very different from 16 year old children. It
requires very professional clothing and routine, professional work at all times
in a way that is different from being professional with high school students.
It’s a different set of challenges in my current position and, often times, I
think about teaching high school, because in teaching, there is never a boring
moment. Every day, every hour, every minute, you don’t know what’s going to
happen. You can have a really great day with a group of kids one day and then –
the very next day – that same group of kids can be completely off the walls and
asinine to you. It’s hard, because every single day is a new challenge and you
have to consciously be on top of things, be thinking on your feet. There’s a
lot of improvisation involved. Even if you plan, it won’t necessarily go
according to plan and there are a lot of adjustments you have to make at the
last minute.
Whereas,
at my current job, it’s a lot more – I don’t want to say routine – but there’s
a lot more doing things over and over again. You’re number crunching on a
spreadsheet, for example, and you do this over and over again with different
sets of data. Or you are formatting a slide or writing bullet points and doing
it over again. There’s a lot less excitement in my current job from
minute-to-minute, play-by-play. So sometimes – when I have to re-do the same
operation on the spreadsheet for the third time – I get bored and often think
of high school and how I would never ever be bored teaching high school.
But
at the same time, I’ll be really tired on a certain day, for example, and I’ll
sit there on my yoga ball or stand there at my standing desk, and think about
how I can have nice, quiet time to myself, and how that would never happen in
teaching. Because you constantly have to be on top of things and it’s mentally
exhausting to be completely, 100% engaged with children every minute of every
day.
And
in the realm of changes in general - what are some Blueprint Changes you are
most proud of?
I
am part of an interesting living arrangement. I live in a residential community
of 25 to 30 folks in a largely commercial building off the largest social
services center in the Midwest. And most of the organizations in this building
are organizations such as the Department of Human Services for the City of
Chicago or Women’s shelters or a health outreach center, etc. And there’s one
floor that’s residential in this building and it’s focused on
sustainability.
It’s
almost like a college in many ways – we have shared common spaces; we share,
for example, a very large industrial kitchen. There’s also a focus on
sustainability, which means that we have a greenhouse, and we have our own
compost dispenser and we’re going to be installing the second largest solar
insulation in the city of Chicago this coming spring. It’s a little oasis of
people interested in environmental stewardship that I found in Chicago and I
guess I would say that living in this community was not exactly part of my
original blueprint in moving to Chicago. I’d actually imagined myself living in
a house with other TFA people, but after my TFA roommate moved out following a
year of us living in Chicago, I moved into this community of people [for my
second year]. And it’s been a wonderful experience. The age demographics of
this community are extremely diverse. There are some people in their 20s and
30s, not many people in their 40s, and a lot more people in their 50s and
beyond. My neighbor Marge, for example, is 85 years old.
And
it’s so wonderful to go home to this community of folks and be able to have
really interesting and engaging conversations with these people who care about
the earth, care about human development, etc. The building is owned by a
non-profit – it’s called the Institute of Cultural Affairs – and a lot of them
work in community advocacy and community development. The big executive
director of the organization, of example, works in 17 different countries in
Africa doing human development work and he also lives in this community. So
it’s wonderful to go home to this community of people who work with a very
different population from the population I deal with on a daily basis. And we
have back and forth conversations about people, the world, and existential
issues, how we can make people care more for each other, how we can live more
sustainable lives that are gentle to the earth.
It’s
great perspective to be able to go home and have the conversation with my 80
year old neighbors about their medical issues. That is an extremely humbling
experience, because it just puts all of your problems into perspective. And no
matter how bad of a day you’ve had, talking about why your neighbor can’t lie
down because she might not wake up due to chest congestion problems is a very
sobering realization. That makes everything bad that has happened in your day
pale in comparison.
If
you feel overwhelmed with change(s) now, how do you adapt?
Following
my decision to leave the organization, I went soul searching on the west coast
– I grew up in Oregon originally and I went to school in California – so I went
to California and I went back to Portland and talked to a lot of friends and
mentors who knew my original reasons for joining TFA and I talked to them about
what had happened, all the things that were going through my mind, the things
that I felt like I had learned in the process, and used them as soundboards to
bounce ideas off of. Some of my big questions at the time were “What did I
learn from this experience? What did I learn about myself as a result? Leaving
the organization – did it mean that I wasn’t cut out for education? Did it mean
that I wasn’t cut out for teaching?” And so, being able to talk to friends and
mentors in a place that was familiar, in a place from which I draw a tremendous
amount of energy from was extremely helpful. It was returning to the roots of a
place that had sparked my passion and my interest in education and going
through a lot of my motivations and beliefs and questioning them in a safe
environment, surrounded by people I love and people who love me.
So
I went soul-searching for about a period of two months – found answers to some
of my questions. Other questions went unresolved, but I felt a lot better about
them being unresolved. And I came back to Chicago and geared up for my current
job, what I call Part 2 of my time in Chicago. It has been fairly good – the
learning curves have been steep and there are many days where I have an
existential crisis. Last week and this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about
what I want to do. Should I go to grad? Should I not go to grad school? If I go
to grad school, what do I want to study? Lots of existential thoughts running
through my mind. But, for the most part, I feel pretty comfortable with the
questions that are unresolved and I feel like, eventually, I’ll get there.
There’s
a quote that I can’t remember verbatim by this author who very few people have
ever heard of and she basically says – and I paraphrase here – “We’ll often
have these questions and you won’t know the answers to these questions and
that’s okay. But ask the questions now, because one day, without even realizing
it, you may find the answers to them.” So I try to keep that in mind – how it’s
okay to have unresolved questions and it shouldn’t prevent you from asking. I
have analysis paralysis a lot and I have to keep that in mind in order to not
be paralyzed to do anything if I think through issues.
Future
What
sorts of Blueprint Changes would you like to see happen in the future and why?
I
think I’m looking forward to a lot of things. Like you said, it’s a living
blueprint, and I’m pretty sure that the blueprint will change and it will
change in ways that I can’t even foresee in this moment in time. So I guess I’m
excited to embrace the changes that will happen. I’m pretty sure that I
probably will go to grad school at some point - it’s in the blueprint, but [my
blueprint] isn’t fully sketched out yet.
I
mean, I don’t know – maybe I’ll move from Chicago and move to somewhere else.
It’s not out of the question and I can see myself living in other places as
well. Actually, a year ago, I thought I would be living in San Francisco at
this time and I’m still here in Chicago. I don’t know – I’m excited to see what
will happen and at this point, I’m much less attached to a specific blueprint
as I was in the past. And I’m excited for the fact that it is a living
document. I think I’m much more open and much more willing to embrace the
changes that will occur.
What
are you most looking forward to in the time between now and year end?
There
are a couple of trips in the works. I have this goal of visiting all the states
in the next few years – I call it 50 by 30. So visit all 50 states by the age
of 30. And it means that you actually have to go beyond the airport. You have
to actually have a memory in that state, go beyond the airport for 24 hours,
living and breathing and experiencing a city. And there are a couple of places
that I’d want to go to this summer. I haven’t gotten that far beyond summer –
the winter in Chicago made it so that all I really wanted was summer at this
very moment. Any plans beyond that will come afterwards.
A
year ago, I thought that this year I would be applying to educational programs,
trying to explore opportunities to get back into education, but I haven’t done
that yet. So I don’t know, we’ll see. I think my current mentality is to learn
as much as I can in my current situation and I will continue to do this as long
as I feel like I’m learning and growing and enjoying this experience.
Could
you share a piece of advice from your experiences (e.g. something that you
thought about a lot during changes)?
I
would go back to what we discussed in the beginning about how life is an
iterative process and it’s okay to have different prototypes of the path you
take. There isn’t necessarily a hall that you have to go down and it’s okay to
try different things and have it be an iterative process. And for me, that has
been useful to think through, because I’m scared of commitment, so the idea of
having a plan and committing to it and sticking to it is quite terrifying to
me.
So
I think about it in terms of “Oh, this is iterative, this is just a prototype,
I can change it if I want to.” Or, if it goes really well, maybe I’ll stick
with it for a longer period of time. I find that thought very comforting,
because it means that I’m not 100% committed to being a certain player, going
down a certain path.
I
have loss aversion, meaning that I probably put more weight on options that I’d
have to give up than options that I retain. So for me, thinking about how [my
blueprint] is iterative and a malleable prototype is really helpful.
Thanks for sharing, Tara!
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