Steve:  The whole reason to be a teacher, for me, is because I want to be in that classroom.  I can plan and I can set things up and that's very essential to the whole process but it's not until I'm in that moment and I'm teaching that, that I get it to those students.  It's real time thinking.  I could have turned and run but this experience has really shown me that I want to be in that classroom forever.

Jane:  The urban semester is an immerging program for secondary students in all disciplines.

Annette:  The students who choose to participate in this program have a very big advantage over the students who do not do it because basically, they will still have to go on and student teach at some point.  When we designed the urban experience program we began this back in, the planning for it began in 1995 and what we found was that there was a lot of research that indicated that if we wanted to prepare teachers to be successful teaching in urban schools, that they needed to have something different from the traditional on-campus experience.

Steve:  The sooner you're in the classroom, the sooner you know what your job's going to be like.  I feel like in the college environment, you sit around, you discuss what its like to be in that classroom, and you make lesson plans of here's your student but when you're in that classroom and those kids are looking at you, you know the pressure's on but it's a good thing; you're really working for those students.

Annette:  One of the aspects of this program that is typically not done in most on-campus classes is that we give our students training in dealing with students of poverty.

Steve:  These kids try to deny it quite a bit; it's all about your look when you're in high school, in any high school, but in this high school there's a huge emphasis of how you dress to look wealthy; to look good.  There are certain kids in my classroom; they're parents are selling drugs and they sleep on a mattress on the front porch until their parents come home at midnight and let them in the house, a house with no running water, with no heat.  A lot of my kids are dealing with that sort of thing so that's going to filter into your classroom and you're going to have kids, they're going to sleep through class and you're going to have kids that are showing up for the free meal and that's the only reason they're there.  They're there for breakfast and lunch because that's the only way they can survive, but you really try to focus on maybe one day you're going to bring that kid in, and you're going to reach that kid on some level.  You're just trying to engage them in some way that could somehow impact their lives.

Jane:  It is very intense and it's very demanding and the students that do this program are much better prepared to go into any kind of teaching because of their expanded number of hours in the classroom.

Steve:  That's what you're looking for; its little steps in these children's lives.  In my small school, there's about 400 kids. Our goal is to get 16 to pass the graduation exam this year and that would quadruple that from last year; only 4 passed it last year.