me and MTC:
At Amherst, I took personal interest in the intersection between education and social justice (it seems, in retrospect, a natural mesh of Jesuit-influenced commitments to community service and empowerment, and my English-major gravitation toward literary and cultural theory). Though I did not take as many opportunities as I should have during the school year to cultivate this interest, I did so during the summers: after freshman year, I spent the summer of 2002 living in Harlem, NY and teaching for Summerbridge (now Breakthrough Collaborative) at the Town School in the Lower East Side of Manhattan; after sophomore year, I spent the summer of 2003 living in Beijing, PRC and - among other things - teaching English.
During my senior year at Amherst, I was conflicted as to whether I wanted to pursue purely academic interests in cultural/literary theory, or if I wanted to engage directly in and with communities themselves. Quickly realizing that I had little direction and less experience contributing to what would need to be a very convincing bid for postgraduate work - I was more than happy to resume my passions for education (knowing that I may very well continue in this path of commitment to social justice, or else be drawn back to academia, with more substantial ideas about culture, identity, and power - now built upon sufficient experience and reflection). As my previous classroom experiences had been drastically urban (NYC and Beijing), I was interested in pursuing a more rural environment in my next bout - and so sent applications in to MTC, TFA, and WorldTeach (ironically, I would be placed in Mississippi’s only urban district - Jackson Public Schools).
My decision to commit to MTC was hardly a difficult one. The program’s organizational perks - full certification by the beginning of your first school year, a paid-for master’s degree, and a substantial support network - made it vastly more attractive than what seemed to be its larger and more impersonal counterpart, TFA. Furthermore, conversations with the program director, Ben Guest, provided a clear sense that I would be joining a intimate group of profoundly dedicated people. Though there are obvious (if not understandable) flaws in the organization itself, it is my second assertion - the opportunity for inclusion in a small group of dedicated people - that has predominantly defined my MTC experience, and the benefits I’ve gained by having the honor to collaborate, argue, and learn from my colleagues have vastly outshone any institutional weaknesses we’ve had to weather.
a personal history:
I was born on Dec. 12, 1982 in St. Louis, Missouri - the oldest of what would become three boys, one girl, and the occasional dog. My parents and I moved to Cleveland, OH in 1985, where I lived (shifting suburbs every once in a while) until leaving to attend college in Massachusetts. As for my K-12 schooling, all of it was parochial: K-8 at St. Angela Merici School, a Catholic grade school; 9-12 at St. Ignatius High School, an all-male Jesuit Catholic high school. As for my ethnic/social identity, I’m technically a 1st-generation Latino American - my father was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and - though emigrating to the US at a very young age - split his childhood between North and South America. However, due to my father’s relatively European lineage, my mother’s unavoidable whiteness (she’s Irish-German), and the fact that I grew up in an environment well-saturated by the cultural coding of a predominantly white middle-class/suburban identity, there is very little “Latino” about my day-to-day sense of self. That being said, every once in a while I have to remind both myself and others that, yes, there’s some coffee in this cream.
From 2001 to 2005, I attended Amherst College in Amherst, MA. I showed up convinced that I would not be an English major who wrote a poetry thesis - these felt (and still do) too obvious - but despite my valiant attempts to branch out, by my senior year I was intensely studying and writing poetry under Writer-in-Residence Daniel Hall, eventually churning out a mess of a thesis and wishing I had taken more math classes. On top of courses, I had two extracurricular commitments that helped define my experience at Amherst: as I had excelled in track and cross country in high school, I looked to walk on to the Amherst teams, eventually having the honor of being co-captain and All-American for the Lord Jeffs; as I had a healthy obsession with independent music and music culture, I got involved with WAMH, Amherst’s radio station - eventually serving terms as Music Director and Publicity/Promotions Director.
In May of 2005, I walked off the graduation platform and into a U-Haul that would take me down to Oxford, MS for my first summer with the Teacher Corps.
introduction
