Relentless Pursuit

About a week ago, I received a comment from Knopf’s publicity people offering a free copy of a soon-to-be released book, Relentless Pursuit : A Year in the Trenches with Teach For America, by Donna Foote. Seeing as it was Spring Break, I took them up on it. I’m so glad I did! Even as I tried to take a week to not focus on teaching, I found the book absolutely worth reading and now worth recommending.

More than anything else, Ms. Foote deserves tremendous credit for her candid and unbiased writing. If for no other reason, I would buy, read and recommend this book to support good journalism. In our polarized edu-world, it was wonderfully refreshing to read anything that seemed written with a purpose of information rather than persuasion. Her book is neither critique nor praise of TFA; it is a chronicle revealing the program and its participants in their moments of both excellence and failure.

Throughout most of the text, Foote follows four first year corps members, a TFA program director, and an alum-cum-assistant principal, all working at L.A.’s Locke High School. Mainly, we walk with the CMs through their legendary First Year Phases, deep into the lows of disillusionment and up through the clouds as they finally make tangible progress with their students. Foote tracks the PD’s struggles to connect with and support his charges and provides a human face for the often uber-professional cadre of TFA staff. In the story I found most deeply moving, she records the AP’s descent into a deep dissatisfaction that leads him to abandon Locke for a charter school.

The absence of idolizing or demonizing allows Foote to really capture the personal details that so memorably mark most first-year TFA experiences, from the sudden and shocking transition to adulthood to the disconnection with former friends and fellow recent graduates now lost in the corporate or grad-school world. Professionally, teachers are as varied as their students, but Foote has managed to isolate four educators whose diverse teaching traits will allow TFA alums to happily impose the faces of their colleagues, from the math-minded super-star to the supremely suffering special educator.

Though dealing with a profession where two-minute drop-ins often pass for observation, Foote clearly spent hours and hours with her teachers and their students. It shows as she relays the whole gamut of moments we teachers experience. Relentless Pursuit contains both the ugly moments that any teacher faces, usually thanking God there is no one there to see, as well as the great triumphs that validate our work, and are also often utterly unobserved. Day in and out, teaching is a lonely art. Many educators will find it encouraging to read of the experiences they share with Foote’s four and so many others.

At times, I found Foote’s account of the personal and professional agonies of the first-year CMs to be a little too accurate, as it led to my recalling memories of the anxiety and misery of those times that I still would rather let alone. My fiancée, another TFA alum, refused to even pick up the book for this reason. In this vein, however, I would earnestly recommend the book to any pending TFA applicants, as it is a far truer distillation of the first year experience than they will get at any official recruitment event. It is hard to imagine that despite all of TFA’s best efforts, its cachet as, quoting the book’s website, “the hottest post-graduate experience” will not lead to an increase in enrollment by high-achieving young people not prepared to live out their challenging commitment to their kids and schools. This book could be a great asset in the vital work of dissuading such inadequately dedicated resume builders from matriculating.

Unfortunately, the engaging stories are interspersed with runs of pages spent on Locke’s, LAUSD’s and TFA’s organizational history and operations. Rather than ceding over whole chapters, Foote attempts to weave the background into the narrative, but the real effect is to draw us out of the compelling chronicle of the lives of the educators and back into the abstract world of “educational reform.” While not worth the literary sacrifice, I think many professional readers will enjoy the knowledge and it furthers the text’s credibility as an objective and informational source.

Those who live with, work with, or hope to be TFA corps members will find this book a great resource for understanding an experience that is both terrifically difficult and utterly defining. Those in The Trenches will enjoy knowing that their tribulations and triumphs are shared. (Or they may say, “My God! I live this every day! Why would I possibly want to read about it?” Present it to a teacher with caution.) Those with no TFA connection at all should still pick up the book and read what all the fuss is about!