My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [84]
Mysha, twenty-three, understands how difficult it can be to find the path that feels completely right. She had dreamed since she was a kid about becoming a traditional middle school teacher, until her reality check bounced. During her first real teaching experience—student teaching in her last year of college—she was assigned to work in an affluent suburban middle school. She quickly realized that working in such a mundane environment did not deeply inspire her. In fact, the only time she felt in the moment was when she was helping the kids other teachers had written off as beyond help. She gave this feedback to the dean of her college and asked to be transferred to a school with more at-risk students. The dean didn’t like Mysha challenging his placement of her, so he transferred her to an even more affluent school and assigned her to kindergarteners! She quit the College of Education in protest—as a senior.
Mysha was forced to graduate with a different degree from the one she intended, but she was not going to quit just because her reality check bounced costing her her teaching certification. Instead, she decided to pave her own path to help those who most inspired her. Stepping way out of her comfort zone—and going down an all-new path—Mysha joined Teach for America (TFA). This program places recent college graduates in two-year teaching assignments at the neediest U.S. public schools. Mysha, a six-foot-tall brunette born and raised in the suburbs, was assigned to South Central Los Angeles.
FINDING HER WAY
Mysha arrived for her first day of work at a gang-infested middle school that straddles the border between Watts and South Central. About two thousand students in grades six to eight attended the school. The neighboring high school graduated roughly 50 percent of its students—and those were the ones who stayed in school long enough to actually start ninth grade.
Mysha was immediately taken aback by the students at her new middle school. They have seen it all. Many feel angry, hopeless, and victimized. They have gone to sleep with the sounds of gunfire and gangland chaos for so long they can’t imagine it any other way. Mysha was making a big leap of faith in herself by believing she had anything to offer them. And then she learned she was assigned to the neediest students on the campus: the special education students.
It took Mysha one frustrating week just to locate her thirty special education students. In the meantime, she got an eye-opening introduction to South Central: Kids beating up kids, parents threatening teachers, teachers being punched by students. It was so wild that surrounding neighborhoods had drive-by shootings in the middle of the afternoon. Mysha was in shock that first week, but with each passing day she felt more and more alive, determined, confident, and inspired.
Mysha tried every creative way she could to teach her students. It was slow going. These students were trying to survive in South Central while struggling with disabilities from autism to dyslexia. Even though Mysha’s students initially saw her only as “just another white teacher trying to save the world through their school,” she had an advantage in empathizing with her students’ situation. Mysha has muscular dystrophy. Even in her mild case, she knows what a difference a little patience, love, and hope can make.
The low point of that first year jarred Mysha back into the reality of the path she was paving. She went to break up a fight in which a student was punching a teacher in the face. The hallway was crowded with kids cheering and yelling. Mysha broke through the crowd to pull the student off the teacher, but then the student turned around and attacked her. When the police finally arrived Mysha