A few days ago, on an interview, I was asked to describe my relationship with education, why I was dedicated to becoming a teacher. While it’s a question that I’ve been asked dozens of times by numerous hiring professionals, I was somehow caught off guard and responded using a word that I have never used before in conjunction with education: vendetta. Reflecting on my response, though, ‘vendetta’ may be the most apt way to describe my feelings towards education in America.

I was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. From an early age, my parents stressed the importance of reading – I was reading on my own by three – and some of my fondest memories are of reading novels with my mother before bed, bit by bit. As I grew older, my parents scrimped and saved to move me out of the city – and the terrible high school I was slated to attend – to a small, idyllic town in the western suburbs of Chicago. I went on to graduate from a blue chip high school, attended a respected private university and am now a graduate student living in New York City. My cousins, though, were not so lucky and – despite the fact that I am not the oldest – I am still the only one to have graduated from high school, much less college. Because here, in the richest country in this history of this planet, we have a third-world educational system. So to say I have a vendetta is putting it lightly.

I first became involved with Jumpstart as a college student – having a long-established interest in education and urban inequity. I was not prepared, though, for the true scale of the infamous “achievement gap”. My first day working as a Team Leader with a group of 20+ preschoolers was characterized by kids who struggled to get past ‘D’ when reciting the alphabet, kids with serious and unaddressed behavioral issues, unavailable parents. Those struggles, though, only made the end result more rewarding: the very same kids volunteering to read stories, writing stories of their own, working together, responding to properly modeled interaction.

My time with Jumpstart exposed me to problems in practice that, until then, I had only been able to consider in theory. It solidified my commitment to education. As it so happens, my time with Jumpstart may very well define a large portion of my life, despite the fact that I’ve moved on. Speaking of moving on, the interview I mentioned earlier – where I mentioned my vendetta against the state deplorable of education in this country – was for a teaching position in the South Bronx. As it so happens, I was offered the position and am now the newest biology teacher at the Bronx Leadership Academy II and a graduate student, studying education, at the City University of New York.

Mere months removed from my Jumpstart service, there’s no telling the breadth and depth of its eventual impact on my life but – I can honestly say – I wouldn’t be the person I am today without that service. I just hope that, over the course of those 300 hours, I was able to have as positive an impact on the lives of my students as they had on mine.