Katie Mikush graduated Duke in 2009. As a TFA corps member, she teaches 6th-8th grade Spanish in the Eastern North Carolina region. Earlier this fall, Katie shared her experiences at a dinner at President Brodhead's house. We wanted to share her insights with you - below are her comments. Enjoy!
My name is Katie Mikush, and I graduated from Duke in 2009 with a major in International Comparative Studies. At Duke, I developed a passion for education while working with WISER in Kenya and El Centro Hispano in downtown Durham, so I joined Teach For America to explore that passion. I now teach 6th-8th grade Spanish in Warren County, North Carolina. Although only an hour northeast from the gothic wonderland, Warren County’s tobacco fields, cow pastures and quiet Main Street seem to be a world away from Durham.
As a Spanish teacher for 150 wonderful children, I have a unique placement and an awesome challenge. Because I teach the very basic foundations of Spanish, all of my students start with a blank slate. Any academic deficiencies they might have don’t hold them back in my class, so almost all of my students do really well mastering basic grammar and conversation. I have the advantage of seeing concrete proof that my kids—just like all kids—are really smart and capable of academic excellence.
Last year was my first year in the classroom. I worked relentlessly with and for my students, and I saw their developing knowledge of the Spanish language reflected in very high test scores, but I didn’t want to stop there. I thought about my middle school experience—how even in my foreign language classes, my teachers pushed me to think critically about the world and read and write about my thoughts. Those were the skills that eventually got me to Duke—not just the baseline of knowing Spanish grammar or scoring a certain percentage on a standardized test.
After seeing my kids' ability to quickly master basic Spanish concepts, I knew I could push them to think and write about the world in English—a language they already knew! I soon found out that this would be a much bigger challenge than I originally thought.
After a brief introduction to Latin American geography and culture, I asked students to explain in writing what culture means and how cultures differ from place to place. A 7th grader named Kevasha, who consistently scored in the 90s on her language assessments, handed in this written reflection: “in other cultures, the person stay in different places. in texas and florida they cultures be different than the united states.”
This was a stark reality check for me. By 7th grade, Kevasha, one of my best Spanish students, had not been taught a) the geography of her country and world, and b) how to articulate her thoughts in standard English, both of which are essential for college today.
I knew all of my kids were capable of greatness; I never questioned that. But there were some very real academic deficiencies holding my kids back from the kind of work that opens doors for different life opportunities. Now I saw a much more urgent and difficult challenge—my kids needed to learn how to explore the world around them and articulate their thoughts and feelings in Standard English in addition to mastering basic Spanish grammar and conversation. In short, we needed to work on literacy—both standard and cultural.
Working with my TFA supervisor, my former boss at Duke's Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, and a number of veteran teachers from my school and elsewhere, I developed a plan of attack for incorporating literacy into every aspect of my teaching. We worked to develop meaningful curriculum around Spanish, culture and identity, and I started teaching higher-level English vocabulary to make my students better readers.
In class, we wrote and wrote and wrote—when we got tired, we wrote some more. We also read—news articles, short stories, short novels. We acted them out, rehashed them to make sure we understood, and then related them to our study of language and culture.
So many times when I stepped into my classroom, the academic challenges my students faced seemed impossible to overcome. It would have been so much easier to return to Spanish vocabulary and grammar, high test scores and easy-to-plan class activities. But the urgency of my students' needs and the support of TFA staff and others around me convinced me to keep pushing.
By the end of the year, my students had made tremendous progress in their critical thinking and writing skills. Kevasha, the student whose first reflection showed a lack of knowledge of the world and of her own language, handed in this reflection toward the end of the year, in response to the prompt, “Why is it important to know about culture while traveling?” Kevasha wrote, “It is important to know about culture while traveling because all cultures look different. They’re not better or worse. They’re just different from each other. When you travel, you might see something that looks weird to you, like a greeting, but it’s just because that’s their culture. You need to know about culture so you would not offend someone else’s culture and so you can make friends.”
Was her reflection grammatically flawless? No. Was it at the level needed for her to be college ready in 5 years? Not yet. But her progress that year was something she could be truly proud of and build on during her 8th grade year. That is the work that we corps members—we teachers—do: work every day to change the academic trajectories of our students – to ensure that our students have the same options in life as their wealthier peers who happen to be born in a different zip code.
After my first year of teaching, a summer off sounded nice—but after a year of fighting the achievement gap and working with students like Kevasha, I knew there was no time for rest. So I decided to work at Institute in the Mississippi Delta this past summer, where I got to meet and work with some of the smartest, most dedicated and inspiring new teachers in the country—teachers like Duke alums Ashley Collins who now teaches in ENC, Ted Holt, who’s now teaching in South Louisiana and Charlie DePietro, who’s now teaching in the Delta.
After a year of teaching, working Institute this summer and bringing even higher expectations into my classroom this year, I believe more than ever that our mission of closing the achievement gap is possible. Teach For America corps members are well trained, well supported, and well prepared to be the excellent teachers our kids deserve. Thank you for your interest in our organization. The opportunity to affect our students is too important and urgent to pass up, and our future as a nation depends on it.
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