And I'm Ms. Andersen again...!

Finally an update from the Delta, folks!

So I’ve been here in Mississippi for over two weeks now. Note the correlation with the two weeks since my last post. I have not worked this hard this sustainedly…well, ever. I occasionally worked hard in college, but never for days and weeks straight, and always with more sleep than five hours per night.


I wake up at five every morning. Dining hall for breakfast, pick up my sandwich and chips for lunch, throw them in our Delta State lunch bags, and then load onto the school buses that drive the 70 of us that work at the Merritt school site. (There are almost 700 people here at Institute, from different southern regions. We’re divided up among maybe 10 or 11 schools within about an hour’s driving distance from Cleveland, where we’re all staying.)

The school buses have no AC, but in the mornings this is usually okay. I try to sleep.

We get to our school a little before seven. Unload from the buses, and make our way to our classrooms. Each class is taught by two teachers. I teach the first hour of class, and do one complete lesson, then my partner teaches the second hour and she does another complete lesson. This week it’s World War II. Tomorrow I’m talking about rationing, War Bonds and the GI Bill. Yes, that’s a lot to cover in one 60-minute lesson, but the way things are structured for this summer school program, and for TFA, it’s …just really structured. Lots of material and not a lot of time. And all aimed for a test that will be used to judge our effectiveness, based on how many objectives our students met before and after our four weeks of class.

I am exhausted a lot. Today I’ve been able to take it a little easier tonight because I managed to get ahead this weekend. I don’t remember ever in college working this hard, or being this intentional about getting ahead in my work. In college, the only stakes were my grades, which I knew I could keep high without killing myself. Here, the stakes are real kids and their real futures. It kind of changes how you think about motivating yourself to get stuff done. I kind of miss just being responsible to myself, but then again...that’s a pretty surface-level way of living life.

I have a class of 22 high school juniors. Some of them know a lot already, from having taken the class already (even though they failed it). One student today volunteered that he knew the names of all the leaders during World War II, so he called them out as I wrote on the board “Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill…” and so on. Some of them don’t know a lot already, and clearly didn’t retain anything much from their first attempt at the class. And some of them might know things, but their literacy is so poor it takes a lot more effort to figure out what knowledge they are actually absorbing.

One student was getting 30s and 40s on his quizzes until I started going over and reading them to him, and then reading the possible multiple choice answers, and asking him to rephrase things to me. He got a 100 yesterday. But I suddenly see now how kids get written off as “dumb” or “lazy” when the truth is they have just never been given BASIC literacy skills. Like…basic basic. It boggles my mind how our country can so utterly fail so many kids. We’re the greatest country on earth and we can’t teach our kids how to f-ing read? Like, when did that even become acceptable? I don’t know…it just truly makes me angrier and angrier the more I see how we’ve given these kids this pathetic excuse for an education and acted like that’s good enough. They’re not going to do anything with their lives anyway, so why do they need to know how to read a novel.

As an example of what I mean about smart kids who haven’t been taught how to write, here are a few examples from my last homework assignment about the decision to enter World War II.

“No, I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have want to go to war because there wer no gruaraty we was going to win and if we lost we would have lost more then our love ones.”

“The my president we should stay out of World War II because of we would run out of America soldiers. President not saying we would lose but we have a good chance on having a lot of Americans crying and weeping instead of less.”

And this assignment was to write a letter home from Stalingrad.

“I Just Got finsh kicking some major butty. The Germans thought they had us but we went ham in that bit. But stuff been going good, Germany team was sick so some soilder die. So the war is goin good so far. I’ll see you when I get home. Bye.

And then there are some that are just sweet.

“I’m in Stalingrad fighting. Its cold and I’m getting sick. I’m so ready to come home mom. We are loosing this fight. I hope I come home safe to you mom. love you”