During my senior year at the University of Notre Dame, a time when so many people feel puzzled about the myriad of options available after graduation, I felt less overwhelmed. I knew I was going to teach, I just did not know where. Sitting in a professor's office as I worked to discern, I knew that no other organization would invest as much in me as an individual teacher than the Alliance for Catholic Education's ACE Teaching Fellows program would. So, I joined.
My name is Rachel Hamilton, and I am currently serving my second year in ACE at Santa Cruz Catholic School in Tucson, Arizona. I currently teach middle school Language Arts and serve as the sixth grade homeroom teacher. On a regular basis I encounter saguaro, coyotes, and a variety of creatures that look more space-like than earthly. As a Texas native whose family all lives in the same city and works in the same office, just being here has been an adventure.
As I work through my second year of ACE, though, the reasons why I came here seem increasingly less important. I still value the support and encouragement that brought me here. I value the way the ACE staff takes the time to know each of the teachers as individuals. Yet now that I know my students and this city, they keep me here.
After a year of throwing myself into young-adult fiction, attempting to connect with my kiddos, I decided to flip through a "grown-up" book for the first time in a while. Wanting to feel as grown up as I could, I reached for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest which I labored through during a course in college. One line was marked and stood out to me in particular. It said, "try to let what is unfair teach you." When I thought about it, this is what ACE has been for me.
It is not fair that my students do not always know where their meals will come from, or where they will live next month. It is not fair that they enter the seventh grade six-years behind in reading. It is not fair that sometimes supplies run short, or basketball courts crack. It is not fair that they do not always feel loved or important. It is not fair that they only have me, a hardly-experienced teacher, to help them cope.
All of this can be daunting. At times, I've felt helpless, and completely unworthy. Those are the times that the ACE community: my Tucson housemates, supervisors, and various members of the ACE team have come to my rescue, reassuring and guiding me. The problems have not been solved, of course, but I am trying to let all that is unfair teach me: how to persist, how to serve, and most valuably how to love.
I chose ACE because I thought I would be supported, and I have been. But that is not the reason I am still in ACE. Because what I have learned is despite all of my own deficiencies and weaknesses (with which I have become well-acquainted in the past year), I can learn, I can teach, and I can love.
