Relentless Pursuit (7 page)

Manuel had kept on repeating: “They judge you by your character. I went through [the acceptance packet]. Nothing shows me you got accepted for achievement. You got accepted because you're not gonna leave.”

Hrag first heard about the organization in high school when a TFA alum addressed his class. It sounded cool. He didn't really think about it again until his senior year at BC, when he had to decide what to do after graduation. TFA had sent him a personalized e-mail listing his accomplishments and inviting him to apply. At first it creeped him out—the idea that someone he didn't know knew him. But he was flattered, too—and curious. So he agreed to meet for coffee, and afterward the e-mails kept coming. There was no obvious career path ahead for Hrag, no law school, med school, or MBA program in his immediate future. He just knew he wanted to do something that he would enjoy. And if he was going to have to work hard all day, he wanted to have something to show for it when he came home at night. Gareen offered to arrange a meeting for Hrag with her friend Seth, who had just completed his TFA commitment. Seth had only positive things to say about the experience, though he did admit that during his first year he sometimes came home crying. Hrag was unfazed.
Well, that's not me. My first year will be hard; my second will be better. All in all it'll be such a great experience.

Hrag applied and was invited to interview. The daylong process was scheduled for April 1—April Fools' Day. He knew it would be intense. Applicants were required to prepare and deliver a five-minute lesson plan. They had been sent reading material on educational issues in preparation for a group discussion and a one-on-one interview. Role-playing and problem-solving exercises were also on the agenda.

         

TFA made no secret of the seven attributes it was seeking in prospective corps members. Everything was posted on its increasingly sophisticated website and included in the mailings. But Hrag and the others had no way of knowing which combination of traits unlocked the door.

Hrag didn't spend much time worrying about it. He had been on several other interviews already, and he actually enjoyed the process. He was nimble, good on his feet; he liked showing folks what he could do. So he went in with a game plan designed to give TFA what it was looking for. He carefully prepared his mini-lesson. Hrag asked one of his favorite professors, Dr. Krauss, for help in adapting one of his particularly memorable lectures on evolution into a five-minute presentation. The night before his interview, Hrag staged a dry run of the suitably dumbed-down lesson using members of BC's Armenian Club as guinea pigs.

Hrag arrived at Boston's Prudential Center in a suit and tie. TFA selectors watched as each applicant delivered a lesson to the entire group. Hrag came armed for his with fifty colored plastic dinosaurs and a raft of photocopied handouts. The dinosaurs went flying when he simulated the crash of a meteor by pounding his fist on a desk. The dramatics effectively illustrated his point: in the event of a natural disaster, the animals with the broadest niche were most likely to survive. As he stuffed the toys back into a brown paper bag, he reckoned he had nailed the teaching exercise. Everyone else in the room appeared to think so, too.

As part of the initial application, candidates had been asked to write an essay describing a time when they were faced with a serious obstacle. Hrag had written about the summer he spent in Datev, a “Third World village tucked away in a forgotten corner of Armenia.” Hrag and Gareen had traveled there on a service project sponsored by their local Armenian club. Though their parents weren't born in Armenia—Manuel was born in Syria, Claire in Lebanon—both were Armenian patriots. In America, the Hamalians had clung to the cultural roots of a country they themselves had never seen. Their social life revolved around the Armenian community in the greater New York area and their extended families that had settled there. Hrag and Gareen had grown up on their paternal grandfather's tales of the old country he had been forced to flee. The children were proud to be Armenian and thrilled to be able to visit their country to help rebuild a school there.

“Armenia was my homeland,” Hrag wrote, “and no matter how far I was distanced from it as a result of the Diaspora of my people, I was determined to reconcile myself with it.” He went on to tell the story of how he won over hostile Armenian villagers who seemed to resent the noblesse oblige of the visiting Armenian Americans. The breakthrough came when Hrag sent a stray soccer ball soaring over the heads of the young kids playing near the construction site. The children mobbed him for his amazing feat; before long, their parents were inviting him to dinner.

The TFA selector reading the essay drew brackets around the paragraphs outlining Hrag's success at winning over the villagers. Next to the brackets was the notation “I/M,” TFA shorthand for “influencing and motivating others,” one of the key competencies TFA had identified with the help of McKinsey consultants.

At one point in the seven-hour process, the candidates were split into two groups for a discussion based on readings the applicants had been sent. Hrag hadn't studied the articles; he scanned them even as he led the discussion. He didn't really know what he was talking about. What he did know was that TFA interviewers were watching the group to see who would step up and lead the conversation.

During the one-on-one interview, Hrag emphasized his leadership qualities. He spoke about the growth and success of the Armenian Club at Boston College under his stewardship. When he had first arrived at BC, the club was just about moribund. Because the club had only four members, getting himself elected president was easy. The hard part was finding a way to revive the organization. Hrag decided to scan the names of all the students on campus and e-mail the ones with names ending in “ian.” The plan worked. Enrollment jumped to fifteen. With the club showing signs of life, Hrag started holding events on topics he thought would be of interest to Armenian Americans. He then convinced professors to give extra credit to anyone who showed up. The night before Hrag's interview, seventy people attended the club meeting and lecture, a number unheard of before his tenure.

Hrag had also gleaned that the organization put a premium on persistence. TFA called it relentless pursuit. It was the first of the organization's five core values. After all, TFA owed its existence to the fact that Kopp had persisted against all manner of seemingly insurmountable odds, especially in the first five years.

Hrag knew all about persistence. At Boston College, he had taken his GPA from a 3.18 as a freshman to a 3.78 as a junior. Before that, his career as a high school wrestler at Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale, New Jersey, was an ode to persistence. The tale said as much about his father as it did about Hrag.

Hrag made it onto the varsity wrestling team as a sophomore, but he never won a single match that year. His father didn't care. He made it a point to attend every match. And through every one of them, Manuel silently endured the reproaches of another dad seated nearby—a father whose son actually won some matches. “Yank the kid,” the guy would say. “It's embarrassing—to the boy as well as the team. You're hurting your own kid. Stop. It's painful to watch.”

Manuel never responded.

Then, in what seemed nothing short of a miracle, Hrag took on the school's rival in his junior year—and won! And kept winning. In his senior year, he was ranked second in the league.

Hrag's first victory came in the only match of his wrestling career that Manuel wasn't able to make. It didn't matter. That night, when he arrived home and heard the news, Manuel heaved his teenaged son atop his shoulders and paraded him around the house like a Greek god. Hrag savored that moment as much as the victory.

The TFA staffers handling the interview process that day kept a score sheet for each applicant. Candidates were rated on the seven competencies along a sliding scale of 1 to 3, with 1 signifying an unacceptably low score, 2 indicating a solid performance, and 3 representing exemplary, the highest possible rating. Each score on each trait for each candidate was carefully entered, first on the work sheet, later into TFA's burgeoning computerized data bank.

At the end of the day, Hrag was tagged a “Best Bet,” a candidate who had not met one of the six computer profiles that were predictive of success but who had shown great potential. On Hrag's documents, an obviously frustrated selector had asked that his application be reviewed, noting, “I feel like the rubric is not allowing me to select someone who I think might make a great corps member.” After a “selection check” by headquarters, TFA “decided to admit on a BB b/c of strong PR spike.” Translation: Hrag was accepted to the corps as a “Best Bet” because of his strong score on perseverance.

Even after he was accepted by TFA, Hrag continued to go on other interviews. But as the school year came to a close, he realized that all the other positions seemed like glorified sales jobs. TFA was different. It offered Hrag an opportunity to do something good, to be in a position of power, and to feel proud about what he was doing. He signed up and asked to be sent to the West Coast. He was assigned to Los Angeles, close to Huntington Beach, the first place the Hamalians had lived after immigrating to the United States nearly two decades before. It all seemed to click. He bought a plane ticket, packed a bag, and flew west.

Hrag never saw the paperwork, but by early fall he begrudgingly acknowledged what Manuel Hamalian, in his fatherly wisdom, had known all along. Hrag had certainly shown leadership abilities, but it was his relentless pursuit of his goals—academic, athletic, and Armenian—that had tipped the scales in his favor. When Teach For America extended an offer to Hrag, they knew he was a keeper. He would never quit.

Hrag turned his anger on himself. Why hadn't he seen all this back then, in the beginning, before he had made a two-year commitment? He hated the fact that TFA—and his dad—knew right from the start what he had only recently come to understand. Though the thought of leaving had been on his mind since the very first day of school, quitting wasn't an option for a person like Hrag. If he left, he knew he would feel like a failure for the rest of his life. Besides, in the Hamalian family, there was no failing—not like that, anyway.

Hrag felt like he had been sucker punched. Sure, TFA had said it would be hard. But no one had explained that it would be
this
difficult. Nobody had warned him that the job would take over his life and rob him of his youth.
What about the others? Why were they drawn to this Mission Impossible?
Two thousand had signed up with Hrag, and nearly nine times as many had applied. He knew why
he
could never quit. Why were the others still hanging in there?

He couldn't put his finger on it, but there was something about the people in TFA that set them apart. At first he thought it must be a religious thing. There seemed to be a lot of Mormons and Christians in the program. His roommate at institute had been a missionary. Dave Buehrle, a TFA English teacher assigned to Locke, was an unabashed Christian who had attended Calvin, a midwestern Christian college, and had stayed on a Christian missionary base while on a two-month internship in Hong Kong. Elissa Salas, a new special ed TFAer, had actually lived in a convent while doing social justice work in Washington, D.C., the previous summer.

And there was Phillip Gedeon, the new TFA geometry phenom. Hrag didn't know Phillip well, though they worked in the same wing on the third floor. Phillip, too, was a Christian. He believed it was his life's work to teach—that God had ordained it. That certainty was one of the arguments Phillip presented to his single mother when he informed her that he was moving across the country to teach in Los Angeles. She didn't like the idea of losing her only child, but it was hard to argue with God's wishes. Back east, Phillip belonged to the Evangelical Covenant Church. In the early months at Locke, he sometimes traveled with other TFA Christians to area churches. He kept God out of the classroom, but he enjoyed those Sunday-morning journeys in search of a religious home.

Hrag didn't know it, but TFA alum Chad Soleo, the “dean” of the Teach For America teachers at Locke, was also a Christian, though increasingly less faithful and more angry with the God who presided over Watts. Soleo had been baptized a Catholic and attended Catholic schools, but had never practiced after grade school. He was “born again” when he moved to California and became reacquainted with his extended family there. They were Evangelical Christians, and they took him in as one of their own. Though it meant a long commute to Locke, Chad decided to live with them in an Orange County suburb. During the summer between his first and second years at Teach For America, Chad traveled with his California family to China as a missionary. Officially, they were all there to teach English, but the deal was that they were free to speak about their faith to anyone over the age of eighteen. Chad's work during that crucial summer break had a profound effect on his decision to remain in education and to assume a leadership position at Locke. Because he was the only teacher among the small group of fellow Christians giving English-language instruction that summer, the others naturally deferred to him. He liked mentoring them. And they seemed happy to follow him.

Hrag himself was a sub-deacon—a
tbir
—in the Christian Orthodox Church. He was ordained during his sophomore year in high school. Though he had not yet joined an Armenian church in Los Angeles, he and his family were active congregants at the weekly two-and-a-half-hour services at home. He wasn't fanatical about his faith—in fact, he considered himself more spiritual than religious. But a cross hung from the windshield of his red Ford Focus. He was a believer.

Of course, not everyone at TFA was. Some had no real ties to organized religion at all. Taylor Rifkin described herself as Jewish “light,” though she was actually raised without any religion. Her mother was Episcopalian and her father was Jewish. Her baby boomer parents had attended a Unitarian church for a while, but Taylor found Sunday school hokey.