Training Days

When Sarah Sentilles began teaching 1st grade in Compton, California, 10 years ago, she knew that working in one of the nation’s poorest and lowest-achieving school districts would be an enormous challenge. But she was confident of her ability to meet it. Sentilles was, after all, an idealistic 21-year-old graduate of Yale University who had succeeded at everything she’d ever done—one of the nation’s best and brightest.

But as she relates in Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton (Beacon), Sentilles quickly came to feel like a failure. While she loved her 36 students, she realized that hard work could not compensate for her lack of experience and cultural awareness. Most troubling, she writes, was “that I was practicing how to teach on real children.”

Reached by phone at her apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts—she’s now a doctoral student in theology at Harvard University—Sentilles talked about the inadequacies of the Teach for America program (which sends new college graduates like her to impoverished schools), the transformative power of her experience, and a return visit to Compton last year.