Introduction to my portfolio
My name is Lisetta Shah.
I grew up in Weston, Massachusetts
and attended Williams College,
where I earned my BA in biology and math.
I joined the Mississippi Teacher Corps right after I graduated from
college. During my last year of college,
like many other seniors, I began looking for jobs without a clear idea of what
I wanted to do with my life. I knew that
I was interested in doing social justice work that would give me a chance to
improve the lives of people living in poverty, and I also wanted to work with
children, which gave me the idea of teaching.
In high school and college, I'd done some volunteer teaching, and I'd enjoyed it. I felt that teaching was a job at which I could excel
with enough practice. I wanted a job that
involved interacting with people all day rather than sitting in an office, and
I felt that being a teacher was the best way that I could directly impact children's lives and give them a chance for the future. These considerations
led me to apply for the Mississippi Teacher Corps. When accepted, I decided to join MTC for all the idealist reasons I described, but also because I wanted to challenge myself and grow to
be a stronger, more capable person. I
also liked the idea of working in rural Mississippi;
coming to the Mississippi Delta would give me the opportunity to learn about a
different culture and to be part of a close community in a way that I couldn’t
in a large city.
The Mississippi Teacher Corps placed me at Greenwood
Middle School, where I have taught
seventh grade science (and a little bit of seventh grade math) for the past two years.
My portfolio describes what I have learned about teaching, myself, and my community while living in the Mississippi Delta and teaching at Greenwood Middle School. Browse the links to the left to learn more about my experiences.
