Welcome back to school with YouthTEACH2Learn and Educators Rising California!

As students and teachers head back to school, we wish them the very best for a successful year.  The first day of school always brings with it a slew of other “firsts” and new experiences.  For Project Tomorrow and our Tomorrow’s Teachers Initiative, which seeks to recruit the next great generation of teachers by building new, early career pipelines, 2015-16 is especially remarkable for its “firsts.”  From the first day of teaching for alum from our first YouthTEACH2Learn math class in 2010, to the first day of new YouthTEACH2Learn classes for El Modena High School and Canyon High School in Orange Unified, to the first ever YouthTEACH2Learn Environmental Science course, piloted at San Juan Hills High School, we could not be more excited that the school year is here.

In another first, we just completed the first two days of instruction in a partnership with Loyola Marymount University and the Mathematics Leadership Corps.  Nine AP Calculus high school students from Culver City High School are earning a LMU Extension Certificate as Common Core Math Tutors, and will be providing tutoring during the school day for Algebra I students as part of a pilot of YouthTEACH2Learn.  In the first two days, the students began to learn about the thousands of decisions teachers make every day, from when to question, to listen, to guide, and to model for their students.  At the end of the second day, after role-playing scenarios such as “you are working with a student who only wants the answer to the problem: Solve the system of linear equations 3x – 2y = 12 and –x – 2y = -20,” the instructor asked, “Teaching: easy or hard?”  The students sat in stunned silence.  Like most people, these students had probably not given much thought to the intellectual challenge teaching presents.  Our Tomorrow’s Teachers Initiative programs, YouthTEACH2Learn and Educators Rising California, provide high school students with these challenging experiences so that they will know what teaching is really like, and can experience the rewards of rising to the challenge and making an impact in another student’s life.

Rising to the challenge requires support, so we work to ensure that teachers have the support and resources they need to best meet the needs of the students in our programs.  Project Tomorrow could not do this successfully without the support of our partners and financial contributors.  We are thrilled to acknowledge new support this year for our Tomorrow’s Teachers Initiative programs from Bank of America, Clovis Unified School District, and the Leonetti/O’Connell Family Foundation.  They join continuing and returning sponsors for 2015-16, such as the Annenberg Foundation, the Green Foundation, Pacific Life Foundation, Rancho Santiago Community College District, and the Roosters Foundation.  With their help, we look forward to the challenges, rewards, and successes ahead in 2015-16.

To learn more about YouthTEACH2Learn, visit http://www.tomorrow.org/programs/yt2l.html or click on the logo below.

To learn more about Educators Rising California, visit https://www.educatorsrising.org/ or click on the logo below.