I envy all the new corps members who will soon arrive for Memphistitute and discover the wonder of the Bluff City. I hope they fall for Memphis as quickly as I did and make the most of their time there, whether it’s two years or a lifetime. I envy those I taught with who are still there, those I know who have made their lives there (for now, or forever). I don’t know if this is a case of the grass always being greener, but I do believe that I could have been very happy if I had just stayed put.

There has been no shortage of Memphis pride lately, what with the Grizzlies’ triumphs and ascension to the Western Conference Finals for the first time in franchise history. Their redemption story is the redemption story of Memphis; their heart, and grit, and grind reflects the same of every Memphian I know. I was there to watch the Grizzlies force a Game 7 against the Thunder, only to lose in OKC (conference semi-finals, 2011). I was there to witness the disappointment blanketing the FedEx Forum when we lost Game 7 to the Clippers after coming back from 3-1 (first round, 2012). I remember watching this season, though, and feeling like something like Fate was orchestrating a different story this time around. Clippers dispatched in 6. Thunder in 5. The road home is sweet – and victory sweeter.

The glorification of sports stars runs rampant, especially among my students, some of whom still haven’t quite realized their shot at going pro is equivalent to mine. And while I hesitate to encourage idolatry, I kind of like that my students might be learning a little something from these Grizzly men. They are a team people had counted out just a few seasons ago, a team maligned for its trades (see: Gasol/Gasol and Gay) and contract decisions (see: Conley) and underestimated for its ability to succeed without big stars (adios, Battier… see you in the NBA Finals?).

So many kids in Memphis have been counted out by their own city. That there is even debate over saving Pre-K is maddening. Cut something else if you must, but don’t cut the education of our youngest, most precious, most valuable assets. So many kids have been maligned for the dumb actions of a few, or worse, mere stereotypes, and underestimated for their intelligence and will.

On Sunday, I will watch my first class of students walk across a stage to collect their high school diplomas. I attended the commencement ceremonies each year I taught and had a handful of students graduate each time, but this will be the first time I get to see at least a couple dozen of them sporting caps and gowns. There’s something about graduation and seeing students so… grown up that fills my heart with the hope that anything is possible for them, that happy endings are out there.

I am well aware of the sobering reality. Last July, I attended a vigil for the teenage brother of a student of mine. It was the first time I’d been to one, and he was the first teenager I’d had any of kind connection to who had died. It made everything feel so hollow: what good was teaching math or ACT prep or life skills when our kids could die in their own streets at any time?

But maybe there’s some redemption still to be wrung out of Memphis, city of the inescapable Growl Towel. GRIT. GRIND. WE DON’T BLUFF. Our schools, our officials, our children just need to follow our team’s lead. We all need to Believe. It’s an exciting time to be in Memphis, to teach in Memphis.

My corps was told at Induction: this is the time, Memphis is the place. It’s still the time, it’s still the place. See you in 24 hours, Memphis.

Today, I discovered via facebook that one of my best – and favorite (let’s be real, any teacher who says she doesn’t have favorites is lying) – students from last year is pregnant. My immediate reaction was something along the lines of “Are you effing kidding me?” She’s not the first student I’ve had who’s had a baby, but she’s probably the most unexpected one.

I had these assumptions, patently unfair, though honest, ones, about what kind of unwed teenage girl gets pregnant. Smart girls don’t. Quiet girls don’t. Girls whose parents are involved in their lives (who have driven to meet me for tutoring on a weekend!) don’t. But she’s all those things, so I was floored. Stunned. Shocked.

I was reminded by a good friend that we knew teenage moms when we were in high school, too. But while a baby doesn’t automatically mean the end of the world for a high-schooler, empirical evidence suggests that it’s lot harder to have one as a teenager in Memphis than in a Pennsylvania suburb.

I reminded myself later of a girl I taught my first year, S., who was just as smart, whose mother was just as dedicated, (who was definitely loud, though, and whose mouth got her in trouble with teachers) and who had a baby that spring. S.’s daughter marked the 4th generation of women in their house. (Where are the men? I wondered.) S. returned to school the next year, continued to get good grades as far as I know, but also continued to have discipline issues. B.’s never had those, to my knowledge, and she has the same things going in her favor as S. does, what with a good head on her shoulders and a dedicated family. So I guess I’m not really worried for her… except that I am.

And do I reach out now, even though I am no longer in B.’s life beyond facebook? What would I write? “I’m happy for you”? Babies are blessings, true, but I don’t want to be disingenuous: I’m not happy. I know my feelings are of no consequence. I know I’m judgmental. I know I’m not a psychic. What I don’t know are the right words to say to a girl I care about whose life is changing faster than I can comprehend.

It was so weird to be back! I think it must be like that for any place you leave and return to, as I have experienced it with Orlando many a time, and I am sure I will feel that way about Penn State when I finally make it back. It’s like nothing has changed, and you feel a sense of being welcomed home, and yet, you know you are not the same, and you no longer belong. Driving (okay, being driven) down the same roads I had been so used to taking felt so familiar, and yet, I didn’t even notice when my cab driver missed a turn to the airport. How many times had I taken that same exact route? (In my defense, I guess, I will say that it was 5:45 a.m. and I had been up past 2 a.m. gabbing with my old roommates.)

Memphis feels so warm to me now, just newly removed, and with so many dear friends still there. Will it continue to be this way, especially as some people inevitably move? Who can say? All I know is that in my 33 hours there, my heart felt fuller than it had ever been here in Philadelphia, save for when my family was visiting. I never realized how much I missed real hugs and real talk. It’s unfair to expect the same kind of relationships to have developed so “soon” here, I suppose, but I know that what I have with my Memphis friends (Memphriends?) – really, a Memphis family (Memphamily!) – is something precious and special. Fittingly, today, a friend posted a link to this photo, which I have now made my desktop background, the first non-default one I have had in over a year.

Though I did not get to see my own kids, I did get to visit a middle school, and I actually teared up in a classroom, looking out into a sea of little heads bent over desks, working on a test. In those uniformed boys, so dapper in ties and sweater vests, I saw miniature versions of my high-schoolers (for whom it was sometimes a challenge just to tuck in a white polo shirt…), and I could not have hoped harder for their education to put them on fulfilling, stereotype-defying paths. There is so much potential in the children of Memphis, the adults, the city itself. I wish even more people, both inside and outside Memphis, would recognize that.

I’ll be sure to catch my students on the next visit or two, which I am planning for May. Out of the blue, though, also during spring break, I got a call from some of them who were in Texas at a robotics competition, and in a week filled with countless highs, getting to talking to them was definitely near the top of the list. One student told me she’d been accepted to a summer program at Andover. I near-flipped out over the phone. Another reminded me of my promise to be there for her graduation in 2014. I assured her I would do my very best both this year and next. It’s things like that, and things like my trip “home,” that remind me how much I treasure my time, my life, in Memphis and everyone I had the opportunity to teach and work with and learn from and get to know.

I still feel so blessed to have been placed in a city I came to love quickly with people I also came to love quickly. For all the new – and current – corps members out there, my greatest wish for you all, on the personal, not professional, spectrum (but those can sometimes be close in relation), is that you find yourself at home in your region. On the hardest days, in the corps, after the corps, it makes all the difference to know there is a home for you somewhere with a family you chose. (Don’t get me wrong, I love the family I was born into, and I guess I feel connected to my “hometown,” which really is just where I went to high school and where my family happens to live, but there is some indescribable beauty in being loved by people you aren’t related to in a city that embraced you when you were an outsider.)

Teaching in Memphis was one of the true joys of my life, and I think and hope I will always consider it so.

Anecdotally: in my first year, I was, admittedly, a frustrated failure in terms of my own perception of classroom time. Somehow, I was rated Level 5, and I swear I was nowhere near savvy enough to be teaching to the test beyond deconstructing standards and published test and practice test questions. Am I proud of my students’ growth? Hell yeah. Does my Level 5 rating go on my resume? Obviously. But if anyone were to ask about it and how I got there, I would have a difficult time coming up with any kind of real answer or reproducible strategy. “I did what I thought was right” sounds like a ridiculous way to describe how to teach.

Lest anyone think this is some kind of humblebrag, the story continues and my point about data finally appears, plus just read some posts from my year 1. I didn’t feel good about what I had accomplished, and even after the scores came in, I didn’t feel like I had lived up to what I imagined a true Level 5 teacher would be.

My second year, almost everything was better. My students were more invested, my lessons were better-planned, and I felt more confident about what I was doing in my classroom. I felt a lot of internal pressure to keep my Level 5 rating, to prove it hadn’t been a fluke, but at the same time, I recognized the challenges of doing so. My first year, I had had my algebra students for double block periods, over an hour and a half each day. In year 2, algebra plus, as those classes had been called, had been scrapped, and I had my students for half the time as before. It worried me a little, but I also realized that a lot less time was being wasted in my classroom in year 2 because I was a better classroom manager, and I had been able to develop stronger relationships with my students.

Going into test season, I felt more confident than I had in my first year. Coming out of it, with students telling me the test was easy, I felt pretty good about being Level 5 again, but of course, it meant more that, regardless of rating, I knew I had done better for my students.

When the scores were released, I found myself stumped by the results. A higher percentage of my students had scored proficient or advanced compared to my first year. The average score for my students was higher than it had been the year before. And yet, I was only a Level 3 this time. Of course I was disappointed. What gives? I thought. By my own feeling and my own calculations, I was a better teacher, but not only had I not kept my rating, but I had also dropped two levels down!

Upon analysis of individual students’ scores, I realized that one student who had been predicted to do relatively well had received the lowest score possible on the end-of-course test. I was stunned. I knew from class that this student, at the very least, knew how to factor – and was very good at factoring – which would have earned him some points. I didn’t know what to do beyond contacting the student, explaining the situation, and asking him to check with the test coordinator at the school about it when school started again. I suppose I could have inquired about test discrepancies or errors with the Department of Education, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t seem that would much make a difference. Maybe he really just bombed that day. And I didn’t expect that it would be high on anyone’s priority list to look into one test score that might have affected the rating level of a teacher who was already out of the system. As far as impact on the student, well, it would probably just lower his predicted score for the algebra 2 test, which wouldn’t reflect what I knew he was capable of, but if he had indeed earned that low algebra 1 score, what more could be said?

I calculated the numbers again both without that one student and if he had at least gotten in the ballpark of his predicted score. In both cases, I would more than likely have been Level 4 or Level 5. It’s interesting how one student can skew data so much to have such an impact. It’s worth noting that my second year, I only had one algebra class and taught only 20 students or so. Since geometry is not a tested subject, my other 100+ students didn’t factor into my value-added data. In my first year, I had had approximately 40 students across two algebra classes (and 50-60 in two geometry classes). I probably should have recognized sooner that this calculation system was imperfect, and I should have been more humble after my first year, when I accepted my rating for what it was, thinking, If I’m a hot mess, and I’m a Level 5, what is a Level 3 teacher like? Or a Level 1?, instead of thinking critically about what the numbers were actually reflecting.

A lot has been said about teacher evaluations and how unfair they can be. I agree, especially for those who teach untested subjects, but I certainly don’t know enough to suggest some better models. Is value-added better than an absolute standard? How much does a rating truly reflect what’s going on in the classroom? How much should student perceptions count? Principal and instructional coach observations? Admittedly, I haven’t looked into the research behind evaluation models; is any school system/district doing evaluations well and consistently? Is it too early to tell with so many new models being implemented?

Because teacher attrition fascinates me, and is hopefully what I will be able to study for my master’s research, I also wonder what role, if any, evaluations play in a teacher’s decision to leave. I want to say the rating itself might not be a key lever, but from my own experience, the kind of support I received and the feedback I got on observations (sometimes none…), ostensibly to improve my evaluation data, did not always make me feel like I was valued as a teacher or a person. A couple of short Forbes articles that Teach For America friends/co-workers and I shared over the past year or so reflected our own feelings about our school and our work, even if they weren’t explicitly about educators. Teaching is, obviously, not about an ego boost, and what I have observed is that it is, contrary to popular belief, a decidedly unselfish profession, but those are no reasons not to value teachers. Which brings me to one final question: does teacher evaluation, as it is, and as it could be, value teachers?

Now, 1,000 miles away, I miss teaching and Memphis more than I expected. (And believe me, I expected to miss them a lot.) I miss my kids. I miss my house. I miss my roommates. I miss being (or just feeling?) competent, even good, at something. At this point, I’ll take even feeling competent. I mean, [I think] I like law school, but there’s so much uncertainty, and I hate that. At least when I was teaching, I could tell immediately when I was bombing…

I try to stay involved with outreach to prospective corps members and accepted corps members, and they ask great questions, but I could never describe in words what their two years (or more) will be for them. Words like “fulfilling” and “challenging” – what do they really mean? There is so much to share: anecdotes, heartwarming moments, awful days that I look back on now and just laugh. Nothing prepares you for the pride and disappointment, the joy and the frustration, of being a teacher. Three years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into, but not a day has passed that I’m sorry I got into it.

Every week or month or something (forgive me these memories that are now 17+ years old), at the beginning of class, we’d park our little plastic chairs in the “foyer” area of the classroom and gaze up at prints Mrs. Lovitt had taped to the wall. She would tell us about them, and we’d talk about them in the way that young children do, excitable and superficial. We were heavy on content, light on analysis. But it was in this way that I discovered Dali, Cassatt, Monet, O’Keeffe (okay, so I definitely learned more about her work after second-grade…); and it was in this way that I “traveled” to the world’s finest art museums from an Orange County public school (just looked it up that it’s Title I today… was it Title I back then too? probably); and it was because of this small, small fraction of class time that, when I saw a Degas exhibition at the Boise Art Museum in high school, I immediately remembered Mrs. Lovitt, and when I finally made it to the Louvre and the Musee D’Orsay in college, especially standing in front of Van Gogh’s Portrait of Mr. Gachet, which I had first seen on that classroom wall, my first thoughts were always, “I wish Mrs. Lovitt could be here with me.”

I had learned from a former classmate years earlier, in middle school, that Mrs. Lovitt had passed away from cancer. It seemed a great injustice, an unfair tragedy, that such a teacher should be victim to premature disease. She was funny, caring, and so, so smart. She was patient with a classroom of precocious seven-year-olds, which I wouldn’t even think of trading for my rambunctious teenagers, and she taught in a way that didn’t even seem like we were learning.

But we were. Because I still remember talking about dripping clocks and creating papier-mâché sculptures and writing about the Statue of Liberty, while I have forgotten thousands of other lessons in the interim.

Hers was a skill I never came close to, and hers is a legacy I can only hope to match even a little, in whatever way lasting impact can be measured quantitatively. As teachers, especially with transient populations (and admittedly being transient ourselves, in many cases), we rely on time to carry the weight of our teaching, and we rely on those “Aha!” teaching moments to be good enough to stick. It’s a testament to Mrs. Lovitt’s passion for art and for teaching that I could instantly recall her and those art lessons by the wall over a decade later.

I have been so lucky to have had Mrs. Lovitt and other teachers who pushed me to “think higher, feel deeper,” as Elie Wiesel says. Teaching was not only a job for them, but an art. If I was Mrs. Lovitt for just one of my students, it would be the greatest compliment, because everything I ever accomplished as a teacher, and nearly everything I ever accomplished as a student, was due to those teachers’ mastery of their craft.

Teach For America 2025?

Since I will be working in Memphis this summer, this end – the end of the school year and the end of Teach For America commitments – doesn’t feel real yet. I left this morning to go home and travel with my family, but the first of my friends to leave the city for good also departed today, and I had a melancholy feeling last night, knowing that when I return, more people will have left, perhaps (though I certainly do not wish this) never to be seen again. I felt much the same way on the last days of school, recognizing that I might not ever see some of my students again, despite the hold they have on my heart, some for two years running.

I finally started reading Relentless Pursuit, and I’m glad I never read it before joining the corps or while I was teaching. I appreciate the corps members’ stories more, knowing that I have been in their shoes and overcome similar challenges in the classroom. It makes me feel a part of a national movement even more. That’s what makes it a little easier to handle the Memphis exodus: there’s pride and comfort in the fact that so many of us are spreading out across the country (and world!) to do great things. In a few months’ time, friends I made in Memphis will be teaching in Denver, Minneapolis, D.C., Charlotte, and New York; recruiting in Boston, Chicago, D.C., and Kansas City; supporting corps members in New Orleans and Dallas; going back to school in Atlanta, Nashville, Clemson, and Edinburgh; not to mention all those, including my corps member roommates, who have been two constant towers of strength for me, staying in the classroom or joining staff in Memphis.

For the end-of-year conversation with my MTLD, I wrote out my story, pages on pages of reflection, and it was a very satisfying exercise. Though I have concluded my official commitment to Teach For America, there will never be a conclusion to my commitment to making educational equity a reality, because everyone deserves the chance to live out their deepest desires.

This was a dream in every sense of the word, from the first time I heard about Teach For America in high school from a friend whose sister had been in the corps, to my two years here in a city I have come to love, where I get to do something I love that challenges and fulfills me in a way no other job has…

When I met with Ashanta [associate general counsel], she recalled that her law school experience was richer for having taught and that her students were part of her motivation to succeed in law school. I hope to feel much the same way. Many of my students may not ever have the opportunity to pursue post-baccalaureate education; I owe it to them, as someone with the opportunity, to take advantage of it and to be successful in my endeavors. One of my biggest irritations is waste – it’s why I value efficiency, frugality, recycling, and economy of speech – and just as I hate to see students with so much potential waste it with misbehavior, I would hate to waste my education and opportunity by not doing my best in law school and graduate school. I also have students who want to be lawyers, and I want to be a role model for all of them, even those who have no interest in law, as a person of color (whether or not it is their own) who is successful professionally.

In terms of the field of education itself, I am driven to continue to pursue roles in education because I have seen the tenuousness of students’ dreams, and I need to be a part of building a stronger foundation for those dreams. Students need to know they have advocates out there for them, and the more people who are working for their increased opportunities, especially for those in such staggeringly impoverished places like Memphis, the less unstable their dreams will have to be.

I’ve felt a lot of personal pressure to do better than I did last year, but there are many different ways to measure “better.” If this year’s students average a lower score than last year’s, but their growth is higher, that could be “better.” If this year’s students average higher, with a higher baseline, that could still be considered “better.” It’s probably unfair to make these kinds of comparisons because last year, I had 35 students (in two classes) for twice the amount of time I have my 21 students this year. This year’s sample size, just one class, is certainly too small to draw any grand conclusions, but there is a wide range of achievement in this one class, so at least growth measures might be useful.

For the rest of year, we will be doing ACT Science preparation. I hope there’s not a lot of pushback over doing work even though the test is over. It will definitely come down to investment. Doesn’t it always?