I just put up a new blog post on my TFA blog (http://mke2phi.teachfor.us/2008/07/05/induction-week-1/) but I had one more thing I wanted to add, and I felt that wasn't the appropriate forum:
Reflections on Being a State School Kid in an Ivy League Program
One of the really weird things about being in TFA is that I keep meeting graduates of schools that I could never dream of having gone to. I have met graduates from Brown, Yale, Georgetown, Penn, Columbia and Dartmouth. My collaborative group (the people that I work the closest with) graduated from Stanford, Maryland, and Dartmouth. Additionally, I know graduates from UNC-Chapel Hill, Michigan, Ohio State, Notre Dame, William and Mary and UC-Berkley. It seems like everyone I know has out-pedigreed me, and at times, it can definitely shake the confidence. I mean, how did I work my way into an elite program that turned down people from Yale, Harvard, and Penn? I come from a school in the north woods of a state no one has heard of, and now I'm in a place where I rub shoulders with the elites.
I was pondering on this point at induction, and the verse that came into my head was from Amos, "I was not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet. I was a shepherd, but then God..." I was reminded of Sharon Cohn's talk at Urbana about that verse, about how it was that Amos, a great prophet of justice, was a nobody. He was a shepherd, on the lowest rung in the socio-economic ladder of Israeli society. Yet for some reason, God called him to be his mouthpiece. And as I was pondering that, I was reminded that I am not here because of me and my desires. I'm here because I'm following God. And because of that, my pedigree is just as good as everyone else around me.
So here's to the nobodies God chooses to turn the world upside down.
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