Reading Response 7: Hopkins

Even though I do not plan on becoming a teacher, I thought this passage was very insightful. The author was a first grade teacher, and she was a member of Teach for America (TFA). In her she talks about the struggle of TFA because she felt unprepared, and she did not have a deep understanding of her students or the community. She says that like most other teachers she left after three years. Hopkins however, did not write this to complain about the things that went wrong, but to say what they need to improve. A good point that I think she mentions is that they need to have incentive for the corps to teach more than four years. She backs this up by saying that 80 percent or more of the corps left their job about their third year. This shows the audience that there has to be something wrong with TFA if that many people leave. The Hopkins goes on to talk about the Teach Residency, and a point she brings up is to have them teach in more urban higher education schools. This is a good idea to me because they can take what they learn for that and bringing it back to the less high performance schools to help them. She also talks about funding, and that is always a big issue with schools, but she says how they should pay the TFA. In that Hopkins has good evidence to support her idea. Hopkins brings up a lot of good ideas with clear evidence to back it up, and that makes this paper a well executed paper on how to change the TFA. I also found it enjoyable and interesting to read about.