Voices: Aspiring to Teach

This is a guest blog by Himilcon Inciarte, a recent graduate of Norwalk High School. He is currently a senior at Williams College in Massachusetts,  majoring in Anthropology.  In June, after graduation, he will begin teaching elementary school through Teach for America. In this essay, he discusses his reasons for wanting to teach.

I sometimes have a hard time explaining why I want to become a teacher. I’m passionate about the profession, but then again, I’m passionate about a lot of things.  I do have some experience teaching.  I’ve spent my college years teaching in one form or another, including an entire summer teaching about the Federalists and Anti-federalists to hyperactive middle school students.

Recently, I applied to Teach for America (TFA), a program in which recent college graduates teach in under-resourced areas.   When it came time for my TFA  interview, I had to figure out how to explain to this organization, without sounding desperate or trite,  that I really, truly do want to teach. As it turns out, TFA actually made it easy for me to articulate a coherent rationale. 

In preparation for the interview, TFA asked me to read several education-related articles. One of these, in particular, caught my eye. The author argued that in order to raise the achievement levels of minority and low income students, we should (1) eradicate tracking and implement heterogeneous grouping instead; (2) teach about environmental injustice; (3) and make the curriculum ‘relevant’ to poor students, among several other recommendations.

I was dumbfounded. As a former Norwalk Public Schools student, I had been tracked since high school, if not earlier. Our curriculum included nothing about environmental justice or injustice, much less anything that would reflect my experience as a low-income, immigrant student. And yet, I still managed to learn. A lot. For one of the first times after graduating from high school, I was glad and proud to have been a Norwalk student. It could have been far worse, if this article was any indication.

During my interview, I told the TFA representative that I just couldn’t agree with much of what that author had said. I explained that if used well, tracking can be a great way to target teaching and student learning—the key is to hire effective teachers who will help students overcome their deficits and move on to the next level. The fact that students in lower tracks often remain there points to a failure in teaching, not the tracking system generally. I also explained that teaching students about ‘environmental injustice’ instead of making sure they were mastering basic mathematical concepts or acquiring other essential skills was doing them a great disservice. Frustrated, I said that I would never understand how making the curriculum ‘relevant’ would help minority and low income students succeed—doesn’t that assume that kids don’t understand their own less-than-favorable socioeconomic backgrounds?  I was more than skeptical.

That’s when it started coming together.

I want teaching to be all about the student. Not about his circumstances, but about him as an individual. By extension, I think the needs of students should take precedence over adults. Should a conflict of interest arise between the two, the former wins by default.

I believe that every student can learn and do well and that it is the teacher’s job to make sure that happens. That’s why I want to teach, because I think I can make that happen. I also believe that  I should be held accountable for my teaching; if I’m not effective, I need to be told as much. And while I improve, someone else should take my place—someone who’s better. Someone who’ll make a difference.

I concede that all this might be overly idealistic of me. I promised the interviewer that I’ll quit teaching if I ever abandon this mentality. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair to me; most importantly, it wouldn’t be fair to the kids.

I think some people are expecting me—and others like me—to fail and quit after my first year teaching.

I guess we’ll see what happens.