In the BeginningI was born and raised in the Plantation-Davie-Sunrise area of the suburban sprawl that is Broward County, Florida, just west of Fort Lauderdale. Even though I grew up going to the beach and Disney World, I knew from a young age that I wanted to leave Florida and didn't necessarily think I would come back. Apparently, I was right. I was very fortunate that my mother put me on the waiting list for the Nova Schools when I was six months old (and even then I only got in for first grade), and, as a "gifted" student, I received a top-notch public school education. Most formative for me was my experience on the speech and debate team in high school. Four years of competitive extemporaneous speaking and critical thinking prepared me for college better than many of my classes, and they also gave me the people skills and confidence that I've needed to succeed.
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Bright College YearsEven with the struggles I sometimes experienced there, I still look back in disbelief over the fact that I got to attend my dream school: Yale University. Early on in life, I had been 100% pro-Harvard, but that all changed the moment I stepped on Yale's campus my sophomore year of high school. At Yale, I tried a little bit of everything. I was heavily involved in residential life through intramural sports and my role as a freshman counselor, I made most of my best friends in my sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and I helped write and edit The Yale Herald, among other commitments. Academically, I was all over the place. I took a course on Palestinian Literature in Translation and another called Theorizing Sexual Violence, with the rest falling somewhere in between. Even though I majored in History, I only took the bare minimum requirements to fulfill the major. My senior thesis advisor, looking over my transcript during our first meeting, finally put the pieces together for me. "So it looks like you're interested in women, alternative histories, and marginalized groups," she said. Why yes, Professor Tannenbaum, well done.
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England for a Year
I studied abroad in Bath, England, the autumn semester of my junior year and further fueled my lifelong love affair with the United Kingdom. During my senior year, I applied for a fellowship at a boarding school in Rutland, England's smallest county. When I was offered the position (coincidentally, on the same day that I received an offer to teach mathematics in the Mississippi Delta with Teach for America), I accepted it immediately! My year living a resident tutor, History teacher, and American universities fellow, was an amazing one in many ways. I lived out of the country (albeit in a place that was more or less familiar to me after studying abroad), I was able to travel, and I interacted with people who had lived very different lives to mine. As much as I loved living with the girls in Buchanans House and teaching among the History Department staff, I knew that for me to do fulfilling work as a teacher, I would have to return to the United States and work in a public school.
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A Brief Stint in FloridaThere was only one problem with returning to the United States: in the consuming struggles of my senior year of college, I had neglected to finish my senior thesis. So while I had technically "graduated" from Yale with the Class of 2011, I did not yet have my Bachelor of Arts to prove it. So I moved home to Florida to finish this daunting task. While at home over the summer of 2012, I began volunteering with Organizing for America, President Obama's re-election campaign. Eventually, that volunteering turned into a job offer, and I served as Field Organizer in Broward County, Florida for the final two months of the 2012 campaign cycle. While I didn't get much sleep and frequently doubted myself (hey, not that different from teaching!) I loved my experiences and made some amazing friends in the process. Once it was over, I let myself ride the exhaustion and relaxation through the inaugural festivities in January, and then I tried to buckle down to finish my thesis. As a means of procrastinating, I searched for jobs, and I re-stumbled upon Mississippi Teacher Corps in the process. After applying and being accepted in March of 2013, the pressure was suddenly on--if I didn't finish my thesis by early May, I couldn't do MTC. (Spoiler alert: I did!)
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Mississippi TransplantAfter turning down TFA my senior year and accepting MTC almost two years later, it felt like I was somehow supposed to end up in Mississippi. I'll always be a Florida girl at heart, but I've come to love this adopted state of mine. So much so, that I'm planning to stay and teach next year, though not in Meridian. I'll be moving to the state's capital, Jackson, to continue my journey through Mississippi public education. As sad as I am for my two years in MTC to come to a close, I am so excited about what the future holds for me here, and I can't wait to explore more of the state in the year(s) to come. Hopefully, I can come even closer to fulfilling the dream that first-grade-Allison set nearly twenty years ago.
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