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Final Essay |
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| My experience in the Mississippi Teacher Corps has been one of tremendous personal growth. I may never know if I made an impact on any of my students, but I know that they have made a lasting impression on my life. I applied to the MTC looking for answers, but I am leaving it with more questions. |
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| I am a graduate of public schools in the state of Mississippi. I was born and spent the first thirteen years of my life in Natchez, Mississippi where I attended Kindergarten through half of eighth grade. Although Natchez is not in the Delta, it has similar demographics. In February of my eighth grade year, my family moved to Fulton, Mississippi in the far northeast corner of the state. I attended the second half of my eighth grade year there and graduated from Itawamba Agricultural High School. |
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| I was very successful as a student, and every year that we moved closer to graduation I watched more and more of my peers fall through the cracks and disappear. Out of a graduation class of 120, only 5 of us went straight to a four-year college. |
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When I entered the teacher corps it was in search of an answer to this problem. I spent one year in the Mississippi Delta teaching in conditions similar to those I grew up around in Natchez, and I spent one year in Fulton, in the very school system that I attended and graduated from. The sum of both experiences has made me realize that the problems with education cannot be compartmentalized or isolated.
In the Delta, and other racially divided areas like Natchez, where I grew up, white people say public education is not their concern because their children mainly are not the ones affected by it. Even those white children that attend public schools, like I did, generally manage to obtain an education. In the rest of the state they say it isn't their problem, because it is only a problem in the Delta. After teaching in two different regions of the state, one in a low performing school and the other in a school that performs well, I am left with the shock of how poor good really is. Good is not good enough.
Students in my seventh grade classroom in Cleveland had the same disadvantages as the students in my seventh grade classroom in Fulton, regardless of the color of their skin. The problems facing many of my students are Mississippi's problems, and until they are fixed I am not sure the education system can or will improve. In both regions students suffer from poverty, drug problems, poor adult examples, parents who don't care, poor family life, lack of an emphasis on education in the community and home, poor reading and vocabulary skills and bad attitudes. |
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| How can the state that bore some of the greatest of American writers also graduate students who rank at the bottom of the nation when it comes to reading skills? How can parents not care that their child is failing? What are the problems with education in our state? What causes these problems? Can they be fixed? How? The questions go on forever and sometimes they keep me up at night, especially since I became a new mother of a child who will possibly attend schools in Mississippi. |
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| As the second year draws to a close, I am haunted by children who just want someone to notice them, to listen to them, to take care of them, to challenge them. I am angered by the politicians and parents who don't seem to care. I am saddened by the teachers who are burned out, ill prepared for their job or just waiting for retirement. I am irritated by the people who only want to point fingers, but do nothing to try and fix it. These children might be someone else's problem now, but ten, five, or even one year from now when your tax money has to pay to support them because they won't get a job, or they steal from you because they have turned to a life or crime, then they will be your problem. Some of these children's stories will make you cry when you find out what they are up against. |
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| Although I did not find the answers to all my questions in my two years in the Mississippi Teacher Corps, I am very grateful for the opportunities they afforded me and the experience has forever changed me. The Mississippi Teacher Corps program was the most intense program I have ever participated in. It was energizing and encouraging being around so many intelligent and dedicated people who also cared about the state of education in Mississippi. Hopefully, many years from now, I can look back on this experience and see how I was, for two years at least, part of the solution. |
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