My MTC Experience:

The Mississippi Teacher Corp is the experience of several lifetimes.  I have surmised that my age is triple what it was before I started.  When teaching in the delta, everyday is an adventure of creatively climbing obstacles.  Whether the school is on lockdown for the morning, or the afternoon is spent in one long basketball game between the junior and senior classes, or the school is half empty because the weather is bad that day, each day has its own surprise and obstacle around which we attempt teaching.  And attempt teaching we do well; three weeks into this year they switched all my classes around so I could teach Algebra because I had the highest passing rate of students in the State Algebra Test.  My comrades in the other schools have similar success stories and I wonder at the magnitude of what such a small class of teachers has done across Mississippi.

The first year of teaching is comparable to learning to be the various staff at an airport – piloting a commercial airliner, screening people as airport security personnel, serving as the steward or stewardess on the airplane, loading and unloading the luggage, and fixing the airplane as an airplane mechanic all while maintaining a professional atmosphere with the customers and the flight administration in a third world country.  I might add in a psychologist but it breaks the picture of an airport.  MTC is the crash course necessary to adjust to these various functions within a school; it teaches one not only survival but guides one with the skills to excel as a teacher in a school system most teachers would avoid.  Through my experiences, the MTC is more than just two years teaching; it is far more than a graduate degree; it is more than a group of people sharing the cultural shock of a third world existence in the delta of Mississippi.  It is called the Mississippi Teacher Corp program but the name is so small for such large experiences.

The Mississippi Delta is one of the greatest teaching grounds, almost a rite of passage for real teaching.  I have gone through more arduous perseverance and discipline in the first year of teaching than four years at a hard engineering school.  Through the hard work and perseverance, teachers are molded into the greatest educators in the country.  Nowhere is there such a school of hard knocks as the Mississippi delta and the Mississippi Teacher Corp is the great boat that carried us through the storms.