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By Kyle, February 26, 2011 11:21 am

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It rained in Los Angeles last night, but as the sun came out this morning, it was clear that a new season has freshly landed upon us. My spirit soars on this Saturday as I watch my beloved Mets take on the hated rival Atlanta Braves in the first game of Spring Training.

And while I hope the Mets do well in this game (they’re already down one game to nothing), part of my is equally hoping that they’ll get all their early season jitters and hiccups out of the way right now before the season actually begins come April.

In some ways, I view baseball’s spring training as an opportunity to work out the kinks, that is, to figure out what you’re doing wrong, and to fix it before the year actually begins.

For me, the summer of 2004 provided an excellent opportunity at “Spring Training teaching” for me. As a newbie Teach For America corps member, fresh off the boat of college graduation, I was assigned to teach 1 month of summer school in the notoriously difficult Markham Middle School, located in neighborhood of Watts prior to beginning my full time teaching position at Cochran Middle School later that fall. Like the other 99 members of our TFA cohort, I had had zero teaching experience prior to my walking in to that 7th grade Pre-Algebra summer school class on that first day of teaching at “Institute”.

So how did I do as a teaching that summer of 2004 at Markham? Let me sum up my accomplishments thusly: I sucked.

Kids up and out of their chairs, constant daydreaming, me having to raise my voice on a number of occasions, lesson plans that flopped, lesson activities that flopped even harder, and me going crazy staying up late hours of the night trying to figure out what in the world to do with these kids the next day. In short, I was a terrible teacher during my spring training at Markham.

Yet, I consider that month perhaps to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. Why? By failing so badly that summer, I learned what not to do. And so in the month after my experience at Markham ended (but before I taught a whole year of students at Cochran), I reflected, I revamped, I retooled, and as a result, I had a very good first year of teaching at Cochran. By failing, I learned what exact things I needed to address (for me, it was setting and maintaining student behavior expectations), and I actually had a chance to do it. To this day, I’m so thankful of that experience at Markham.

So much so do I value the act of learning from “falling on your face”, one of my first questions I’d ask new Cochran TFAers in subsequent years was “How was your summer school teaching?” I would cringe with fear when some of these newbie teachers would say “my summer teaching was great”, and find those fears later validated when these teachers, who’d never had the experience of failing in a training, failed in their classrooms. Conversely, when an incoming Cochran TFAer would tell me “my summer was soooooooo hard”, I would think and often say to them, “you’ll do great here!”

So as Spring Training begins for my Mets in Port St. Lucie, Florida, I wish them the best at winning, but dare I say it, Go Braves?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

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Neiliyo – Springtime

Comments (1)

By Kyle, January 11, 2011 11:34 pm

So it’s officially on. My team is that sorry, that even public radio has to start taking low blows to them whenever possible. The following clip was taken from the January 1st episode of one of my favorite programs, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. Have a listen. Less than one minute.

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