NYCTF Experience

Keeping a blog is a high maintenance activity, but I am determined to do so.

Recently, I was accepted into the New York City Teaching Fellows. The program is intended to recruit new teachers from other disciplines, fields or fresh out of college. Fellows receive intensive training in the summer preceding the school year. Before the school year begins, fellows are hired as teachers in their assigned subject areas and borough. While the program trains fellows to teach in New York City's under-served public schools, each fellow is responsible to secure a teaching position at a school in his or her assigned borough and subject.

In preparation for training, fellows must conduct a school visit during which he or she observes a class for not less than two hours. The experience is intended to immerse fellows in a school's culture and give them a taste of what their new career might be like.

In my own experience, I contacted a fellow who teaches biology in the Bronx and observed his classroom. It was unlike any educational experience of my own. Students were loud and rowdy. A few sat in the back of the classroom, physically separated from the students in the front. Those in the back either had their own conversations, completely unrelated to the class, or slept. In the front, students noisily, albeit enthusiastically interacted with the teacher, engaging the material. The whole process was simultaneously exciting, terrifying and motivating.

While the teacher warned me that his classes tended to be more lively than others, I was still glad to see his portion of the student behavioral spectrum. I left feeling ready and excited to begin my new career.

Some time later, I found the teacher whose class I observed kept a blog of his thoughts and reflections about his experience teaching. His record keeping inspired me to keep such a record myself in the form of this blog. While he has kept his since the second semester of teaching, I hope to maintain a more comprehensive one that starts from the beginning. I would like to document the Teaching Fellows process from acceptance to pre-training to training to teaching to the unknown.

Hence, this is the beginning of what I hope will be an insightful record of events upon which I may look in the future and others may look in the present. It will illuminate the inner workings of the Teaching Fellows program and the raw experience of teaching in New York City.