Jan. 2010: Why you should join Teacher Corps

You should join the Teacher Corps if you would like to be displaced. Not misplaced, but displaced. By this, I mean, placed in an entirely new space, socially and racially. From my point of view, as a white suburbanite from the West, joining the Teacher Corps meant going from hardly ever interacting with, nonetheless seeing, blacks. If you come here and take up the vocation, you will be find yourself a minority in your school. To me, this is exactly what I was hoping for. In fact, in my life beyond Teacher Corps, I hope to be a minority in my neighborhood, workplace, and church – or at least, not belong to a majority group. You should join the Teacher Corps if you can identify with this desire to be socially and racially displaced.

You should join the Teacher Corps if you want to learn new things about yourself. If you are a reflective person who is curious about how society works and also about developing more fully into who you were created to be, then coming to Mississippi to take up teaching is a good idea for you.

You should join MTC if you have an innate philic attraction to school. If you find yourself comfortable within a school’s walls; if you operate well on bell schedules; if your mind is wired towards sharing knowledge; if you are organized and enjoy structured, autonomous work environments, then MTC is for you. This job, in my experience, has been one of never finding myself unoccupied or bored. There is always plenty of fodder for thought – or busywork. But the busywork isn’t horrible (such as unexciting grading on massive scales).

Lastly, you should join Teacher Corps if you adapt well to geographic changes – that is, moving your entire life. If experience has taught you that you handle new environs well, and that you react in a generally optimistic way during your adjustment period, then I think it is a wise choice to choose to move here in particular. The pace of life here is not slow, but it is just right. You can feel the change happening to you: you can feel your mind and heart opening, you can feel yourself growing attached to this city (Jackson) as you drive home from work and you survey its particularities, you can feel yourself starting to like your job after a few stormy first months, you can sense yourself, in a sense, stepping into your “suit.” I feel like I have undergone an enormous amount of personal and spiritual development here and I know that I will always look back on my two years here as some of the very richest of my life. The more I invest here, the less I want to leave.