A Look Back at the Teacher Corps

Facebook on the internet certainly brngs people long forgotten back to the forefront! In my case, people whom I have not heard from for almost forty years are suddenly poking back. Cathy Hannowell, who was a teacher intern in the UMass African Studies Curriculum Development Project in Worcester that I spoke of in the blog before last has contacted me from Washington State. I also heard from or about others in that project. Some are just names so far such as Mary Lea and Pat Corey, but maybe I will hear more from them if they read this!
Facebook has brought back memories. Some not so pleasant. My job after pre-training at Temple and UMass, (Amherst) which ended in August of that moonwalk year, was to find housing here in Worcester for the teacher/trainers in the Teacher Corps who had recently returned from 16 different African ccountries. I had help with this job from Dick Donohue, a Worcester teacher and fellow team leader.
Finding housing for the interns was not easy for several reasons, but one inescapable one was because they were of mixed racial makeup. In one instance, I had two female team leaders staying at my house wit my family for a time: one white and one black. (Marianne was white and Marcia was black.) One morning, one of the neighbors came and rang my front doorbell. I answered the door. The neighbor whom I had known for a number of years demanded to know if I had a black woman living in my house. I explained the situation to her instead of simply closing the door. Marcia was standing in her housecoat behind the door! i was totally embarassed! When I closed the door finally, I averted my eyes from embarrassment. That is what life was like then in that job. But it got better from that point and here we are today....