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photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS (CLASSROOM) |
My Real Education
By ABBY MCCARTNEY A second grader is chasing me down the hallway, shrieking. “You’re the lady with the candles!” she exclaims. It takes me a minute to figure out what she’s talking about. Then I remember: Hanukkah! She must have been in the class I visited last year to talk about the Jewish holiday. “Did we light the candles together?” I ask her. “Yeah! And there was chocolate!” Well, at least it was memorable. Sometimes walking the halls of John S. Martinez School in New Haven, Conn., makes me feel like a celebrity. Other times, I feel frustrated, or overwhelmed, by how far we still have to go. But being there, reading with the students, teaching them about Hanukkah or fractions or the Revolutionary War, is unquestionably the most important thing I do. Ours is a generation raised on service, from Boy Scouts to high school graduation requirements. Fund-raisers and neighborhood clean-ups have become part of the rhythm of our lives. But when we grow up and start our own lives in college, no one is peering over our shoulder, counting how many hours we have spent helping others. At most colleges, service isn’t a requirement. It’s a choice. Yet in many ways, college is the ideal time to serve. Those of us lucky enough to be full-time students have flexible schedules and plenty of unstructured time, an advantage that few working adults can manage. And we also have something even more important: our youth. No wonder many volunteer organizations actively recruit and depend on college students to carry out their missions. In my college town, students are indispensable. They supplement the skeletal staff at City Hall by interning in the mayor’s office, translate at health clinics for recent immigrants and provide the only health education that is available in our public schools. In the process, they learn research skills, practice foreign languages, gain teaching experience and learn to be leaders and organizers, both on campus and in the community. These skills are invaluable. Nothing I’ve done in the classroom at Yale has been as difficult as bringing students, teachers, a principal and volunteers together around an idea for an after-school program at Martinez. The creativity, patience and leadership I learned from that effort have been useful in everything else I have done. By the same token, the time I spend at Martinez and in other service organizations adds new depth to my academic work. It’s one thing to learn about segregated housing patterns; it’s another to walk through a neighborhood full of recent immigrants. Talking to my students about their perceptions of the world, and seeing how much they struggled with grammar and math, adds a whole new layer to my classes on education policy and urban poverty. My education could never be complete without these real-world experiences. Although something as simple as tutoring once a week can be hugely rewarding, service in college is by no means limited to traditional volunteer work. Every year, college students come up with new and innovative ways to make a difference. A few examples from my life: The Roosevelt Institute Campus Network was founded by undergraduates after the 2004 elections to give students an opportunity to contribute to the political discussion. Today it is the nation’s only “student think tank,” with chapters on 80 campuses that teach students about policy and promote their work. No exaggeration: Working with Roosevelt’s Education Center fundamentally changed my view of the world and my goals for myself and my career. Challah for Hunger was founded by a student at Scripps College who liked to bake challah (a traditional Jewish bread) for herself and her friends. Her bread was so popular that she decided to sell it to raise money for hunger relief in Sudan. Today the organization has 30 chapters at schools across the country. I just baked my first loaves! Teach for America, an organization that recruits top college graduates to teach in low-income schools, was founded by a college senior who believed her peers were looking for a way to make a difference. The organization now has over 24,000 teachers and alumni, some of whom have founded their own schools or become superintendents of large districts. It has also dramatically changed the conversation about educational inequity and brought hundreds of new leaders into the field. I’m proud to say that I will be joining Teach for America next year to teach middle school in New Orleans. College is a time when opportunities seem endless, when we can put our idealism into action. The important thing is to get involved. After all, service isn’t just a rewarding and valuable experience. It is, as children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman says, “the rent we pay to be living.”
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