Andover, Mass. — Brown University graduate student Dallas Lopez remembers when the faculty at the Institute for Teacher Recruitment here in this historic New England town had given him so much assigned reading that he simply wanted to call it quits.
“I had not been sleeping. There was more reading than I could handle. I got to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore,” Lopez, 24, recalls. “I said, ‘Enough is enough. I can’t do it.’”
But then the faculty informed Lopez that the heavy reading was being assigned on purpose to prepare him and his fellow IRT students for the demands of graduate school. The program was founded in 1990 to help diversify the ranks of America’s educators at the K-12 and collegiate levels. Instructors helped Lopez learn how to skim material for important points rather than reading books from cover to cover.
Today, Lopez, a 2009 IRT alum, says he’s thankful for that and other experiences he got at IRT. He will soon wrap up his graduate studies in high school English.
Like other IRT alumni, Lopez, a member of the Pima Tribe of Arizona, says he likely would not have made it to or through graduate school without the help of IRT.
“I think they challenged me a little bit past what I thought I could handle,” he says. “They supported me through that so I could handle it.”
Similar accounts of IRT’s impact were easy to collect over the weekend as Lopez and dozens of other IRT alumni gathered in this old mill town and former Underground Railroad stop to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the program.
