{"id":1799,"date":"2024-11-07T16:52:06","date_gmt":"2024-11-07T16:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fortworthep.org\/?p=1799"},"modified":"2026-05-04T18:44:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T23:44:03","slug":"learning-to-swim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fortworthep.org\/es\/learning-to-swim\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning to Swim"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learning to Swim<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the summer of 1995, I was 23 years old, newly married, and preparing to start seminary at Baylor University. I wanted to be a pastor, felt called to it, actually, but I had absolutely no experience doing anything of the sort. I put the word out that I was seeking an opportunity to preach in one of the many small churches in the Central Texas area, and I got a call from Cego Baptist Church.<\/p>\n

Cego is a suburb of Bruceville-Eddy, which is a suburb of Lorena, which is a suburb of Hewitt, which is a suburb of Waco.<\/p>\n

Cego is actually an old farming community\u2014except by 1995 there wasn\u2019t much left of the farming or the community.\u00a0But there was a little church, and I got a call on a Wednesday that I was\u00a0to preach on the following Sunday morning.\u00a0And teach Sunday School.\u00a0And lead the music.\u00a0I had never done any of these things before in my life, and I scrambled over the next few days to figure out how to prepare a sermon.<\/p>\n

I preached there all through the summer of 1995\u2014except for one Sunday we didn\u2019t have church because there was a tractor show in Temple.\u00a0And then, from there, I moved to another small church where I served as the pastor for the next three years while I was a seminary student.<\/p>\n

This is the \u201cthrow the non-swimmer into the deep end of the pool\u201d approach to preparing for a new vocation. I wish I could say I excelled immediately, but the truth is that\u00a0it took me a couple of years of regular practice to become at least decently proficient at it.<\/p>\n

The same is true for any profession, including teachers. My daughter experienced a full year of student teaching her senior year at Baylor before she got her own classroom, but many new teachers\u00a0experience more of the thrown-into-the-deep-end approach. Most new teachers in Fort Worth enter their first day of school with little to no meaningful in-class experience<\/strong>. And if, like me, it takes them a few years to get good at it, that is understandable. But it can be a problem for those children who will only be in that grade once.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why FWEP, led by Natalie Jacobs<\/a>, our Director of Talent, is making a serious commitment to teacher residency programs in Fort Worth.<\/p>\n

These residency programs have become the \u201cgold standard\u201d for training new teachers, and for good reason(1,2)<\/sup>:<\/p>\n