blog response #3

I picked this article because Teach For America is another one of my hot button issues (imagine that, another education article that I want to respond to!)

This article immediately plays to the reader's emotions by describing children as "just nasty animals trying to secure their share of the food supply." This is additonally shocking to the reader, creating a tension. This tension is relieved (release and relief theory) through the article's source, The Onion, which is known for its sarcasm and satire. Thus, the reader is uncomfortable with a statement like this, but the tension is relieved because it is supposed to be viewed as sarcastic.

To me, the interesting part of this article lies in the fact that one again, the Onion has written about an issue that has some truth in it. TFA does not supply its candidates with adequate enough teaching to handle inner-city districts, especially since many of the applicants are English or Ethnic Studies majors like in the article. The Onion writes from an extreme standpoint (one person saying the entire country is fucked and no one can do anything about it), but in reality this is what happens to many of TFA participants. They aren't prepared to handle everything that teaching in an urban disctrict throws at you (I'm in the education program, and after 4 semesters of education training and experience I'm not even sure I am well enough equipped to really make a difference to children in an inner city).

We additionally experience some of the ambivalence theory when reading this article. The points they are making are not only depressing ("In the end, you've gotta resign yourself to failure and move on with your life"), they are a conflict to what we want our own lives to be. As a future teacher, this article caused a huge conflict of emotions in me!!! People do get frustrated in this profession--that can't be disputed--but there are plenty of opportunities to change the world too. Even if you only influence one child in your entire year of teaching you are still not a failure. The problem with programs like TFA is that they never really communicate many of the important points about teaching that I've learned here at UW. A TFA teacher is better than no teacher, I suppose, but many of them will end up (although slightly less radically) like Cuellen in this article.

Before doing these blogs, I never really noticed how the Onion took issues that were basically true (like the pitfalls of TFA or the healthcare issue I responded to previously) and over-truthed them to make them humorous (I'm making up words again!). This article would be sort of factual if everything wasn't over-emphasized, but I think that steady readers of the Onion understand this.