This past week I stole a lesson plan from Mr. Murphy, my 6th grade English teacher at Palm Desert Middle School. One project we did in the class was write a business letter to a college requesting information about how to get into the college. It was a perfect thing for me to seize on, so I did, with a few modifications.

I put up a list of colleges on the board, ranging in degrees of prestige. I had everything from Delta State University to Harvard represented. I simply told the kids to pick two places and write a letter requesting information about how to get into them. We'll go through three drafts before we're done and they get their information. I knock out a state standard and I get the kids thinking about how to get into college now.

The interesting thing, to me, is that the kids picked colleges that were far away from the Delta. I very purposefully put up colleges like Delta State and Mississippi State, but they all opted for places farther away. This was odd, because of some things that we were told at institute. TFA corps members think intuitively that children will want to go far away to some place great, but that isn't quite often the case we were told. Children might want to be close to their families and communities, and thus not necessarily like the idea of going far away.

That was not the case in my class. I don't know that any of the kids are writing to a Mississippi college. Some are writing to Texas or Tennessee colleges, but that is because of the sports teams. The overwhelming majority of kids are writing to places far away, mostly in the northeast. About three fourths of the class is opting to write to Harvard as one of their choices. One girl said, "I'm goin' to Harvard or NYU. I'm getting as far away from Greenville as I can!"

I couldn't have been more happy inside.