Monday, October 31, 2005
Deadline Night
Tonight is the first application deadline for Teach For America's 2006 corps. I have the pleasure of working the phones until midnight Pacific.... otherwise known as 3 AM Eastern.
By around midnight, we start getting calls from people who are frantically trying to submit before the deadline. People are tired, frustrated, and typically tech-unsavvy. I keep getting the same question over and over.
"I've tried to upload my document like 50 times, and it doesn't work!"
So my favorite response is, "After the twentieth time you tried, did you consider trying the tip listed in the directions at the top of the page?"
Invariably this works, they are super thankful, and I kiss their ass with, "Thank you so much for applying!"
(Also, I'm really not the passive aggressive asshole I described above. In fact, I am exceedingly pleasant. EXCEEDINGLY.)
All in all, these people are great. But damn, tech support at 2am really tests one's patience.
2:02 AM
Thursday, October 27, 2005
I know what I'm doing this Halloween
Teach For America's first application deadline is this Sunday at midnight (pacific). Therefore, I have been crazy busy lately, and I will continue to be hella busy until next week.
I just found this online, and I have NO DOUBT that I will be checking it out on Monday. If you don't know, Reggatta de Blanc by The Police is my #1 absolute favorite album of all time. Some band is preforming this album in its entirety on Halloween night. I will be there in full costume.
Jackie has once again come up with effing sweet costumes for us, so I'll wait and post pictures sometime next week.
In other news, Jackie and I saw OK GO last night at Irving Plaza. The band was fantastic, ARoss was in top form, and the crowd absolutely loved them. And of course, they did their little dance at the end of the show.
Haven't seen the dance? It is spectacular.
A Million Ways (quicktime)
11:06 AM
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Another Hello Nurse Interview
Our answers are so good - it's obvious this was an online interview where we were able to agonize over every meticulous word choice before submitting. Yeah Right!!
Love The Scene interviews Hello Nurse
Here is my favorite excerpt.
Us: (To Christian) Growing up in Detroit, what led you to choose rock over, say, rap?
Christian: As 1 of 3 white kids in my entire school growing up, let’s just say the cards were stacked heavily in favor of me becoming yet another Eminem wannabe. In eighth grade, one of the toughest of tough guys in my school gave me a dubbed cassette of Nirvana’s Nevermind. I played that tape over and over and over, I wore a flannel over my school uniform, and I stopped getting a buzz cut to let my mop grow. Before I knew it, I was like every other Kurt Cobain wannabe in the country!
Always the follower, I guess.
11:36 AM
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Attention New York Employers: Katrina Employment Exhibition
Does your company or a company you know offer services that would be applicable to a displaced victim of Hurricane Katrina living in New York? Please see the press release below.
A friend of mind at work, Flora Cervantes, has poured countless hours into this project, and I hope the event connects people in need with available services.
Please forward this information to anyone that might be interested.
National Student Partnerships
Katrina Employment Exhibition
National Student Partnerships (NSP) and Praxis Housing Initiatives invite your company, to the Katrina Employment Exhibition, to be held November 2 from 3:00 to 7:00pm at One Chase Manhattan Plaza.
The NSP-Praxis Katrina Employment Exhibition is designed to support families displaced by hurricane Katrina by connecting adults to job opportunities that will offer vital income and stability. The NSP-Praxis Katrina Employment Exhibition also offers New York businesses and individuals the chance to provide tangible assistance to those affected by the devastation in the Gulf Region.
Who – Approximately 100 Katrina evacuees who have been displaced to the New York area in addition to New York residents will be attending in search of employment opportunities.
What – The NSP-Praxis Employment Exhibition will feature qualified employers with current job openings looking to attract new talent. Employers with the following job opportunities are encouraged to attend: food service, cashier, office clerical, construction, sales, customer service, hospitals, hospitality, shipping/moving - teaching, non-profit health and human services, advertising, communications, TV/video, the arts and music.
Where - 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, New York, NY 10005; 28th floor
When – Wednesday, November 2 from 3:00 to 7:00pm
How to get involved – To reserve an employer station or for more information please contact Gardner Tripp at gtripp@nspnet.org or call 917.887.5430.
National Student Partnerships is a student led non-profit organization that links people in need with the resources and opportunities necessary to become self-sufficient. NSP operates a national network of resource centers staffed by student volunteers from area colleges and universities. Working one-on-one with low-income community members, NSP volunteers provide intensive on-site and referral services that enable clients to: locate employment; secure affordable housing, health care, childcare, and other services; and pursue long-term career and life goals. www.nspnet.org
Praxis Housing Initiatives is a New York City organization which supports homeless people by equipping them with skills to become independent and healthier in a place they call home. www.praxishousing.org
8:38 AM
Friday, October 14, 2005
Hello Nurse tonight at Scenic
I have so much blogging to catch up on, especially an account of the Teach For America 15 Year Alumni Summit I attended in DC last weekend. It was so inspiring, so hopefully I'll be able to write more about it this weekend.
But here is the urgent info:
Hello Nurse at Scenic
TONIGHT!!! at 9PM
25 Avenue B
(bet. 2nd and 3rd streets)
www.scenicnyc.com
Scenic serves Colt 45 and hamburgers. Did you hear that??
COLT 45 AND HAMBURGERS
Yes it's raining. It's been raining all week. But a $3 umbrella and come listen to some rock'n'roll.
FYI: Comedian David Cross sometimes tends the bar.
8:50 AM
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Google continues to impress me
Today I discovered Google's Personalized Home. Personalized Home is a way to configure the basic Google.com search page to include personalized information and RSS feeds.
For example, my Google search page now includes the 9 most recent e-mail messages in my inbox, the weather in New York City, and top headlines from the New York Times, Google News, ESPN, Slashdot, and Boing Boing. I also added the 5 most recent entries on the New York Craigslist Free section, as well as recent posts from some blogs I read: Gothamist and Brooklyn Vegan.
There is also a list of sites I have bookmarked - such as the Hello Nurse website, some cycling and left-wing news sites, MySpace, and Overheard in New York. For fun, I even included some random things that Google offered, such as Word of the Day, "How to" of the Day, and random stuff from Ask Yahoo.
Now all the information I click to in my morning routine is laid out on one page, which happens to be the most useful page on the internet: Google Search. This is fairly similar to Dashboard, but since I'm too lazy to install the new Tiger operating system on my Mac, I'll settle for Google's Personal Home. Plus, since I spend more time on my PC at work than on my Mac at home, this is a web-based tool I can access from anywhere.
To get started, just go to Google.com and click Personalized Home at the top. If you have g-mail, you can just use your g-mail login.
Sample image, not mine
9:44 AM
Monday, October 03, 2005
Teach For America in the New York Times
October 2, 2005
Top Graduates Line Up to Teach to the Poor
By TAMAR LEWIN
Lucas E. Nikkel, a Dartmouth graduate, wants to be a doctor, but for now he is teaching eighth-grade chemistry at a middle school in North Carolina, one of nearly 2,200 new members of Teach for America.
"I'm looking at medical school, and everybody says taking time off first is a good idea," he said. "I think I'm like a lot of people who know they want to do something meaningful before they start their careers."
For a surprisingly large number of bright young people, Teach for America - which sends recent college graduates into poor rural and urban schools for two years for the same pay and benefits as other beginning teachers at those schools - has become the next step after graduation. It is the postcollege do-good program with buzz, drawing those who want to contribute to improving society while keeping their options open, building an ever-more impressive résumé and delaying long-term career decisions.
This year, Teach for America drew applications from 12 percent of Yale's graduates, 11 percent of Dartmouth's and 8 percent of Harvard's and Princeton's. The group also recruits for diversity, and this year got applications from 12 percent of the graduates of Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Atlanta.
All told, a record 17,350 recent college graduates applied to Teach for America this year. After a drop last year, applications were up nearly 30 percent. Teach for America accepted about a third of this year's Ivy League applicants, and about a sixth of all applications.
Teaching does not pay much. It is not glamorous. And the qualifications of most young people going into the field are less than impressive. A report by the National Council on Teacher Quality last year said that the profession attracts "a disproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability."
But then there is Teach for America, whose members typically have top academic credentials - the average G.P.A. is 3.5 - experience with children and determination to get results.
Teach for America officials see their recruiting success as a sign of the post-9/11 generation's commitment to public service, and to improving the quality of education for low-income children. "The application numbers we're seeing reflect college students' belief that education disparities are our generation's civil rights issue," said Elissa Clapp, Teach for America's vice president for recruitment and selection.
Many corps members talk passionately about the importance of education, and the need to close the achievement gap between white and minority students. But part of Teach for America's allure is that it is only a two-year commitment and a way to put off big life decisions, like where to live and what career to choose, decisions that people in their 20's are delaying ever later in life.
"I don't think very many of my peers know what they want to do," said Nathan Francis, who graduated from Yale last spring, was accepted to Teach for America, but declined the offer because he was unsure that he could be a good teacher for disadvantaged students after nothing more than the group's summer training. "A lot of people who just graduated are looking for things to do, so it seems very appealing to have something to do that's worthwhile and short term and gives you two more years to think about your career."
In fact, Yael Kalban, who helped organize campus recruiting as a senior at Yale last year and now teaches second grade in the Bronx, said that even a two-year commitment was daunting to many of her classmates.
"We'd tell people we thought they'd be great, and they'd say they didn't know if they were ready to commit two years," she said. "So we would get alums to come in and say they'd done Teach for America, and now they were in medical school, law school or architecture school, and that those two years weren't that much, and had actually helped them get into those schools."
Although more than half the Teach for America alumni remain involved with education, often in administrative or policy positions, many of the applicants do not plan a long-term teaching career. In fact, many also interview for competitive jobs with investment banks and management consulting firms.
"This is a generation that thinks a lot about keeping their options open," said Monica Wilson, assistant director for employer relations at Dartmouth. "For students who want to look for an alternative to the corporate world, Teach for America offers a high-profile alternative. They put on a real strong marketing blitz, and they are very much a presence on campus."
Rachel Kreinces first heard of Teach for America as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. She had been thinking of going straight to law school, but after starting a writing program for middle school students in Philadelphia, she was intrigued by the prospect of teaching for two years.
After taking a five-week training program over the summer, Ms. Kreinces is teaching sixth-grade special education students at Public School 123 in Manhattan, arriving at 7:30 a.m., prepared to offer as many tutoring hours and after-school meetings and gimmicks as it takes to help them learn. Before school started, she bought gold envelopes and cut out round "I'm a champion" medals for each student.
"In training this summer, we watched videos of this incredible teacher," she said. "He had this 'Mission: Impossible' theme going, and his kids were clamoring for more homework, and we were all sitting there thinking, 'How can I be this kind of teacher?' And my idea was this Classroom of Champions. I want so much for these kids to do well."
Teach for America grew out of a senior thesis by Wendy Kopp, a Princeton student, proposing a national teacher corps. Ms. Kopp quickly got seed money from Exxon Mobil, then, with a small staff, began a grass-roots recruitment campaign that yielded 500 fledgling teachers, who were placed in six regions in 1990. Teach for America has grown rapidly, with backing from corporate partners, philanthropists interested in education reform and Americorps, which provides the teachers with $9,450 after two years, to repay education loans or to pay for future schooling. Since 2001, the group has benefited from the same surge of interest that has brought record numbers of applications to long-established groups like the Peace Corps.
Teach for America is a growing presence in many school districts, including New York City's, which has about 800 of the group's members this year, twice as many as last year. All told, Teach for America has about 3,700 teachers - 2,190 in their first year and 1,520 in their second - teaching in 22 areas, from Los Angeles and Baltimore to the Arkansas Delta and the Pine Ridge Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The group only operates in regions certified as high need by the federal government and willing to employ teachers who lack certification.
As much as anything, Teach for America is a triumph of marketing. The group, based in Manhattan, recruits on more than 500 campuses and spends about a quarter of its nearly $40 million budget on recruitment and selection. The bulk of its members come from 141 top schools where it hires students, at about $500 a semester, to help organize recruiting events and act as headhunters.
"It's very intensive recruiting, to meet the goals Teach for America sets for us," said Mike Kalin, who was a Harvard recruiter his junior and senior years, and teaches in the South Bronx. "Some of my friends might have thought I was a little too intense my first year. There were some individuals we really wanted to go after because we thought they'd be great. It helped that the class president, for the previous two years, had joined Teach for America."
It has also helped, on all campuses, that Teach for America now has a track record: An evaluation last year by Mathematica Policy Research found that Teach for America members produce slightly higher math achievement and no worse English results, than other teachers. And a June 2005 evaluation by Kane Parsons & Associates found that 63 percent of the principals in the schools where they work regarded Teach for America teachers as more effective than the overall faculty.
However, a study of Houston student achievement released this year by Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford and others found that although Teach for America teachers performed as well as other uncertified teachers, their results did not match those of certified teachers. Teach for America officials contend that the study was flawed.
While most parents do not know that their children are being taught by Teach for America members, some New York City principals say, they love having Teach for America members assigned to their schools.
These days, Mr. Kalin's intensity is being poured into his American history classes.
"I'm having trouble sleeping, but I'm really enjoying it," he said. "It's frantic but fun. Classroom management is the hardest thing for me. I've learned that the minute I turn my back, it's a volcano in the classroom, so I won't be turning my back anymore. There's three other T.F.A. teachers in my school, and we're getting through it together."
6:19 AM
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