I knew about MTC for a good three or four years before I actually applied; the nexus of poverty, education, and "rurality" fascinated me, but I wouldn't commit body and soul to the program's professional demands. As a liberal arts major at a Big Ten school, I involved myself in Alternative Spring Break and similar short-term service projects while developing an interest in alternative and alternate-route education. I tracked MTC's progress online while researching TFA, the Peace Corps, NYTF, DCTF, etc. MTC stood out for two major reasons: (1) the free in-house no-hassle graduate education, and (2) the opportunity to live in rural Mississippi and to explore the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow, King Cotton, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Tennessee Williams first-hand. I'd never been to the deep south.

Ironically enough, I teach at Jim Hill High School in Jackson, Mississippi -- the state capital and one of Mississippi's largest cities. An inner-city Title I school in a district that serves 30,000 k-12 students, Jim Hill employs 70+ racially diverse teachers for roughly 1100 students (99% of whom are African-American). My school is actively pursuing improvement but faces many financial, cultural, and historical challenges. My students want to learn but are rarely prepared to pursue their goals and are almost never on grade-level.

The hardest thing about MTC is maintaining my identity as a person in the face of overwhelming changes and challenges. I came to Mississippi as an introverted Emersonian night-owl in a blue bandana and torn jeans, but I spend most of my time now as an extroverted "professional" morning-person, entertaining and educating teenagers. I'm a role model at grocery stores (where my students work) at restaurants (where my students work) and on the roads (where my students drive). I enjoy teaching and thinking about education; I enjoy investing myself in the field and in my students -- upwards of 16 hours a day -- but too often my personal interests are sacrificed. With side projects, grading, after-school clubs, graduate work, the actual (and exhausting) act of teaching, and the perpetual desire to improve, the poetic notions of "living deliberately" and "stick-it-to-the-man-eosis" that drove me here drop by the wayside; the ubiquitous mantra of "social responsibility" wins out. How does one weigh his hobby against 50 students' opportunity to meet a senator?

Obviously, I am here for the kids. Impacting the life of a child is a very real thing. Sometimes it's a tangible, visible, immediate change in attitude, behavior, grades, or lifestyle; other times it's a subtle, almost imperceptible change over many months. It can also be a give-and-take battle of high-drama frustration. But that's why we're here; far and away, the two most rewarding aspects about teaching in MTC are helping the kids to excel scholastically and to mature personally.

The Mississippi Teacher Corps is the most competitive alternate-route teaching program in the country. It is a two-year program that recruits recent college graduates to teach in critical-shortage areas in the Mississippi Delta, in exchange for a full scholarship for a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Mississippi. The program was founded in 1989 by Amy Gutman, a Harvard University graduate student, and Dr. Andy Mullins, then Special Assistant to the State Superintendent of Education. Since 1989 more than 350 participants, reaching an estimated 70,000 students, have taught in critical-needs school districts as part of the Mississippi Teacher Corps.