Leadership opportunities in Teach for America

by Landon Mascarenaz, guest writer.

The power of choice is one of the greatest that we wrestle with.  I found out over Winter Break my senior year of Lewis & Clark that I had been accepted into Teach For America - New Mexico.  I was faced with a choice: to serve a community with high need or continue with the path of graduate school or taking time off.  The choice to serve would profoundly alter the course of my life.

Often I’m asked how to describe the times when I taught first grade on the Navajo Reservation for two years.  After much consideration, I would describe it as listening, learning and leading.

I listened to the stories, hopes and dreams of my first graders.  They listened to my crazy attempts to teach them reading, math, science and writing.  Sometimes they laughed at my classroom activities and other times they stood staring as I tried to impress upon them the notion of success, being good and trying your best.  I listened as they told me about their ceremonial dances, lifestyles of living in a Hogan (a traditional Navajo dwelling) and daily chores with their brothers, sisters and cousins.  Listening required that I abandon all preconceptions about the area and my knowledge and truly open myself to the world that I now inhabited.  It was incredible.  It was humbling.  I never imagined that two classes of 6 and 7 year-olds would enrich my life so much.

All learning requires mistakes, missteps and retrial.  I learned so much about educational realities.  I learned that the school that I taught in was considered last in entering reading scores in the entire state of New Mexico (usually 48th, 49th or 50th in national rankings).  Learning the hard lessons of pushing myself to involve parents or work in a school system taught me so much.  I took classes in educational pedagogy from a university in the nearest city, Gallup, and learned more about planning, setting goals and the right assessment techniques for students.  The 5 week institute that Teach For America runs taught me about patience, classroom management and storing information for future reference.  During this time of my learning, my students were learning as well.  I’ll never forget when Cheyenne came up to me during class saying “Mr. M!  My name is on that map!”  and knowing that she understood sounds and letters.  Learning that Raven could see any combinations of coins and instantly come up with the correct amount or that John loved Spider-Man both held amazing value for me.  At the end of my second year, I learned that I had made more academic gains in my first grade classroom than my Principal had ever seen at the school.

Teach For America says that teaching is leadership.  I cannot understand how it could be anything else.  How else do you describe the need to convince a group of inconvincible individuals to believe that reading is essential for their life?  Or setting ambitious growth targets for your students and working relentlessly to achieve them?  Leadership is the art of motivation, persuasion, progress and overcoming odds.  Last year, I realized that Lewis & Clark had the second highest application rate to Teach For America in the entire nation.  Only one school (Claremont-McKenna) had a higher rate.  In my new leadership role as Executive Director for Teach For America – New Mexico, I am happy to say that Lewis & Clark is the highest represented college in our corps and  the same is true for our South Dakota program.  Not Yale, not Stanford, not Reed (for sure) or Columbia.  Lewis & Clark College leads the way in serving some of our highest need populations in the country.  Maura Ross, Theresa Likarish, Shannon Brady, Bridget Hudson, Tim Kelly and many more of your fellow alums are leading the fight against educational inequity.

The choice to serve is not an easy one.  It takes time, deliberation and balanced thought.  But I believe that the future leaders of our country will come from those groups of individuals that have decided to serve their community or nation.  I also believe that those same future leaders, through their formative experience of listening, learning and leading, will be the ones with the credibility to challenge those institutional forces which need to be challenged.

I hope that each of you reading this article reflects on the listening, learning and leading that is possible within yourself and considers the choice to serve our nations students.  Only from you will the opportunity for all children in the nation to receive an excellent education achieve reality.