With a Heavy Heart. . .

This is the blog that I wrote for ASIP. They asked what challenges we face that complicates or affects our job as interns. Here is my response...

Alot of times we are asked to tell how challenges within our internship affect us. I don't really have any challenges though. We have an amazing boss and all of our work is managable. So for this post I'm just going to talk about something relevant to my job.

Being in Mississippi has been a learning experience for me in so many ways. I've learned about Mississippi's rough history, where they are now, and where they are trying to go. Many of our fieldtrips through the Delta really open up my eyes to disparities in education that are present in the United States. People often joke about living "on the wrong side of the bridge" or "the wrong side of the tracks" but I've never actually seen it. Going to Greenwood and Indianola, you can see the blatant differences between the white neighborhood and white schools which are on one side of the train tracks and the black neighborhood and black schools on the other side of the tracks. So let me change my previous statement; I do face challenges in my internship. It is extremely difficult for me to see this and not know what to do. I struggle with this everyday that I am down here. How do we make it better? How do we make the teachers stay? How do we prevent teen pregnancy and break the vicious cycle of poverty and illiteracy? What are the answers to these questions? I don't know. And that is my greatest challenge; wanting to help but not knowing how I can make an impact in a system that's so broken and damaged.

This post got a response in which a fellow Amherst College student in an educational internship presented the following quote, "The best way to predict the future is by creating it."

As I sat there reflecting on it, I realized that it's true. I keep asking how? how? how? can we change "the inevitable." But we, as concerned citizens, have to take matters into our own hands rather than accept that these inequalties exist and that some people just have to deal with a poverty cycle that started with their great grandparents and seem to never end. We have to find a way to change the course these kids are on. And I think there are many programs out there that seek to do just that (like Teach for America or Mississippi Teacher Corps). We just need to figure out how to magnify them so we can reach more kids.