Teacher Corps-? What I have found (and only what I have found):

Experience dictates, to a greater extent than I ever realized before this program, how we handle ourselves, conduct our business, negotiate professional relationships, navigate personal relationships, uphold our integrity, maintain and loose the sanctity of personal space, and hold together the pieces of our hearts when we are under pressure from every angle.

I cannot imagine another experience through which a person learn as much as one does in teacher corps in so short a time. Maybe Peace Corps.

It brings out parts of you that you've never seen, turns you into a fierce version of yourself that you don't recognize, tattered at the edges and concentrated at the core into stronger stuff than you knew you contained. The intensity of the failure is completely destructive if you are afraid of failure- and who isn't?

You make inexcusable mistakes. And you have no choice but to forgive yourself, eventually, or give up and fail completely. You learn, though, that you are stronger than you every guessed, that you have been given everything that others have been denied ( and not to say it's right), that you have to find what you are made of and use it to fight if you want to do what you believe it good; there is no limit to how hard you are willing to push for this. And you fail at it. Over, and over, and over, and over.

Teacher corps shows you that life is unfair, even if you knew before. Mostly, your students will not want your help and they will need it desperately. Mostly, your administrators will criticize every move you make when you are already criticizing your own every move.

Your successes will be sweet moments of joy that you tuck away and protect and cling to ferociously. They will increase over time.

If I can survive teacher corps despite all my mistakes, if I can teach my kids something, if they learn how to learn or write or want to learn or believe in something worth fighting for...I think it will be worth it. I have not once truly wanted to walk away.

Other parts of the experience (besides the overwhelming parts that are the kids, the other teachers, the Delta if you live there, the culture, the poverty, the cruelty of circumstance, the horrible, horrible waste of brilliant potential):

The kids, the kids, the kids.

Your peers. They will blow you away.

Your classes (and professors): There are some classes you take for Teacher Corps you will, really, really, get you thinking. They show the depth of the problem and set your mind spinning away and ways to fix it, and probably leave you angry. Anger’s good, here, it gives you one more thing to fight with.

Athletics: I have never cared so much about a darn football or basketball game. I didn’t even care this much about my own crew races in high school.

Beauty and pain: You’ll see.