Heads of the Class

School has ended, but the students are still here. Michaela O. Daniel ’03 has asked her 7th and 8th grade Humanities students at the King Open Middle School to use their half-day to finish up their class project. No one is complaining.

The brightly lit classroom is part birthday party, part serious academic endeavor. Daniel has brought in pizza and other snacks to sweeten the deal, and the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong drift up from the stereo. Groups of chattering students are sprinkled around the room. Some sit at the round tables covered with paper, markers and other debris. Others are splayed on the floor with their materials spread around them, and a few are cozied up on the overstuffed couches that line two of the walls. Daniel bounds around the room in response to different students’ calls for assistance. After a silly question from Carmen Acosta, Daniel does an impromptu dance move as she answers. With Max, an eighth-grader with spiky blond hair and a mischievous grin, she is infinitely patient as he tries to wheedle his way out of reading. He gestures for Daniel to come over, and when she stands inquiringly by him, taps his forehead and says, “What was I going to ask…oh yeah, I forgot the plot.” He smiles winningly at her. Daniel has clearly been through this before. She pats him on the back encouragingly, leans down, and patiently explains the importance of skimming. A few minutes later, Max waves Daniel over with a pained look on his face. “You’re going through the chapters,” she reminds him. “Skimming. Remember, you’re fond of it! You’re interested!” Daniel confides, “He hates reading. He won’t do it. It’s not that he can’t, he just won’t. It’s the most stubborn thing ever.”

Daniel, an honors Afro-American Studies concentrator, teaches full-time at the King Open Middle School. She arrives at around 8 each morning, and doesn’t leave until 3:30. With assistance from her mentor teacher, she leads her two classes through a combined curriculum of English and History—right now, they are reading The Joy Luck Club and learning about Chinese culture simultaneously.

Daniel is one of 19 students enrolled in the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program (UTEP), which began in 1985 as a joint-initiative between the College and the School of Education. The idea is to allow undergraduates to get their teaching certification for public schools by the time they graduate from the College. In addition to taking four required classes at the Ed School, students must complete two semesters of field work—pre-practicum, which involves observing a teacher for six hours a week, and practicum, which is what Daniel is currently doing. When they apply for the program, students must specify the subject they want to teach—math, history, English, or science—and whether they want to be in a high school or a middle school. They are then matched up with a mentor teacher in one of four Boston public schools—Cambridge Rindge and Latin, South Boston High School, King Open Middle School, and Madison Park Technical High School. UTEP Associate Director Christopher C. Kim ’98 says that the practicum is the most critical stage in the program. Students learn by “simply the experience of being in the classroom. I cannot describe it to you—it’s like The Matrix: ‘I cannot tell you what it is, you must experience it for yourselves.’”

Since August, Kim has served as the Associate Director of the program. A UTEP alum himself, Kim graduated from Harvard and went on to teach for three years in a high school outside Boston. He hopes to be able to make the program more accessible to students. “I’m not trying to be the UTEP salesperson,” he explains. “I know UTEP works for some people but it doesn’t work for a lot of other people. But what I try to tell students is that public service doesn’t just have to be an extracurricular activity—public service can be a lifelong commitment.”

Most UTEP students are interested in teaching because they see it as a way to have an impact on the world. Daniel Koski-Karrell ’03, who balances his UTEP commitment with varsity crew and his Study of Religion thesis work, says, “A lot of people here say they want to help out and do good for the world—the way I’m convinced I can use my skills and energy to improve society is through teaching.” Koski-Karrell and his roommate, Eric G. Brown ’03, a History concentrator, are both in the program, plan to teach history, and are doing their pre-practicum at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. The two have encountered some surprised reactions when people learn that they are working toward their teaching certification. Brown says, “When I tell people I’m doing this, they say, ‘Oh yeah, I was thinking about teaching in a prep school or doing Teach For America.’ They don’t realize that I’m thinking about making a career out of teaching in public schools.” Koski-Karrell agrees, “To most people, it seems kind of silly to go to a place like Harvard and use all these opportunities and contacts to teach high school students—it pays shit.”

UTEP students are put in the unique position of being able to try their hands at teaching without having to commit to the job. At the same time, however, most of them end up in the classroom with students who aren’t that much younger than themselves. Economics concentrator Shanna N. Ricketts ’03 is still getting used to being seen as an adult figure. On one of her first days in the classroom, she was introduced as “Ms. Ricketts,” and her reaction was, “Oh no! I’m not used to anyone calling me that.” Liana R. Tuller ’99 remembers one instance when she’d told a student of hers at Charlestown High School to turn off his Eminem. “He got all excited that I knew who the rapper was,” she says. “From then on, he thought I was really cool and even tried to ask me out on a date.” According to Daniel’s students, college-age teachers mix it up in a good way. “A lot of times student teachers are better because they’re younger,” says Julia Widdig, a seventh-grader in Daniel’s class. Aliazar Asefa, an eighth grade student, pipes in, “It’s cool because you feel like you can talk to Michaela. She takes time out of her social life to help us out. And she brings us pizza.”

Teaching seeps into many different areas of UTEP students’ lives. Daniel says, “The hardest thing is that I don’t feel like I’m part of the Harvard campus at all. That’s the thing I’m struggling with the most. Between all the work I have to do, and the fact that I’m physically not ever on campus—I mean, thank God for my roommates or else I’d never see anyone.” At the same time, the students emphasize how much they enjoy getting away from Harvard. Ricketts observes math classes at South Boston High School each week and says, “I feel like at Harvard we talk about Boston but we really don’t know that much. It’s refreshing to leave Cambridge and explore another place.” Koski-Karrell notes, “Spending a day in high school and coming back here makes it apparent to what a degree we live in a bubble. It’s not that people’s problems at Harvard are any less important—they’re just different.” Daniel has been frustrated at times by her dual lifestyle. “I feel very much a part of the Cambridge community,” she says, “and I’m glad to have that, but it’s hard to live between two worlds.” When people complain about being worried about all the stuff they have to do, Daniel admits that she can get frustrated. “I don’t want to sound bitchy, but sometimes I just want to say, ‘I have the lives of 34 people in my hands, and that’s stressful.”