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My name is Deanna Gutierrez and I'm a high school teacher in San Jose. Getting my first
teaching job was quite interesting. I went to Northwestern University in Chicago and
graduated with a degree in theater and was set to be a professional actor and head off
to New York and just for fun I applied to Teach For America as my fall back not thinking
I would ever get in. Seeing as they only accept 6 to 11 percent of applicants. I did get in
and my plans changed and I got a letter in the mail that I was to teach secondary English
in New York. I was excited about New York, was packing my bags two weeks before graduation
and I get a call from the national headquarters. I'm sorry we made a mistake. You're not going
to New York. You're actually going to be teaching high school English in the bay area. Two weeks
before graduation I'm going to another coast. So I packed my bags and literally after graduation
I am in Compton teaching sixth, seventh and eighth grade ELD language arts. And Teach
For America helped me get certified and put me through a process that was pretty intense.
Teaching during the day, going to classes at night and we were expected to pass both
CBEST and the CSET in English without having a bachelors in education. And it was very
clear that if we didn't pass both of those tests we would be sent home. I was terrified
and I studied all night and I passed both tests and the next thing I know I was interviewing
for a charter school in San Jose called Escuela Popular. This is the first time TFA had ever
sent a core member there and I was really nervous and I ended up teaching adults my
first year who had just come in from Mexico and Ecuador. And they mixed it in with high
school students from the public school systems. So I had adults and high school students in
my classroom which was crazy. But I learned so much. And I learned quickly on my feet
how to come up with lesson plans and novel units, making mistakes as I went and trying
to be consistent. The most rewarding part about first year was bringing in the guest
speakers. We did a unit on the Holocaust and brought in Holocaust survivor from Eli Wiesel's
book Night, to talk about his experience in the camps. And 99 percent of my students were
Latino, had never been exposed to the Holocaust and they got through the book and they got
a great experience. And actually after that first year I wrote my first college recommendation
for one of the students. And just being out of college myself that was pretty incredible.
And I will always remember Teach For America and that experience and if it weren't for
them I would be somewhere else. My name is Deanna Gutierrez and I'm a high school teacher
in San Jose.