Why did you join MTC?

I joined MTC for the money and the women.

What has been the greatest challenge?

It has been a constant struggle for me to acclimatize to the culture here. Both the culture outside of class in my daily life and that of the schools where I work are so vastly different that it has been a difficult and ongoing adjustment.

What has been the greatest reward?

Academic progress is so slow that it's hard to notice it on a daily basis. One of the greatest rewards was when I had an IB assessment to evaluate and realized that some of my students have made serious leaps and bounds in French class this year. I needed the distance that the IB assessment afforded me to realize that they are truly learning, but the reward is the realization that I actually do make a difference in some students' lives.

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.