Teach for America Induction week, day 1.
Today I officially started my journey with Teach for America. The new recruits assigned to Atlanta moved into Crecine hall on Georgia Tech's campus to learn just what exactly it means to be a corpsmembers.
This week is called induction, but what we do is very similar to church camp. First, we sign in and receive a nametag, and a massive stuffed binder, just for this week's activities. Our nametags have a small sticker in the top right corner, the sticker's color designates your small group. They aren't called small groups, of course, that's a church camp term. They call them transition teams, but really, it's a small group. We eat together, reflect together, and do teambuilding activities together.
That's the first thing we 'did,' a teambuilding activity with our transition team. Then, we attended a welcome reception -- essentially an hour of lite snacks and mingling. After that, we moved onto the "Theory of Change" dinner. It was essentially the formal welcome dinner where several speakers reflected on TFA's mission and the theory of change. Two alumni spoke, as well as a cm (corpsmember) who just finished her first year and one cm who is brand new. And guess who got asked to speak on behalf of this new class? Yours Truly! It was kinda random, and I got picked because I figured out who my program director is and asked her alot of questions, which she took as initiative. But it was nerveracking but alot of fun.
I really enjoy public speaking and, despite my even keel sometimes stoic personality, I come alive when speaking about certain topics. I felt envigorated, energized, and electric. However, how did I sound? Shaky, nervous? Probably, but I got some good feedback so I think it went well.
After the long walk back to the dorm, we have about an hour break before 'study sessions' for those who have not taken or passed their GACE (Georgia Assesment for the Certification of Educators) exams. And I'd like to shower before this event, which will happen at 9:30, so I'm going to sign off.
I'm excited. Excited about this opportunity. And I'm excited that I'm excited enough about this opporunity to sit down and write a blog post. I hope to keep up a daily reflection of my experiences. If you're interested in hearing about them, please comment and encourage me if these updates become infrequent.
-Mike
Comments (1)
Update, yo.
xxx