When Luke Henesy ‘10 began tutoring two middle school girls in East Palo Alto, he thought teaching was a good short-term extracurricular gig. The Stanford sociology major didn’t think it was going to become a career path.

“But tutoring became the most rewarding experience of my entire life,” Henesy said.

Henesy began tutoring at the East Palo Alto charter school his sophomore year through Stanford’s tutoring program Closing the Gap. He was assigned two pupils, Andrea and Vanessa, who were struggling with their World War II history class.

“They didn’t like textbooks because English was their second language,” said Henesy. “I kind of felt their pain because I didn’t get really excited about history until I read Maus, the graphic novel about the Holocaust where mice and rats and cats are the actual characters.”

Henesy decided to try out this approach to spark Andrea and Vanessa’s engagement. He went to Green Library and found a set of graphic novels about the Hiroshima bombings that he thought might capture the imagination of his students. He was right.

“They loved it,” he said. “What I started getting really surprised about was when they became able to retain and repeat back to me info that was factual — for that to happen than at a much higher rate than they did before. So when they would typically do history homework, and I would ask them a question like, ‘how many people died in this battle?’ or ‘when did this happen?’, they would say ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ But after the graphic novels, they were reciting information to me without me having to ask.”

That was the beginning of a steady stream of improvement for Henesy’s tutees. Their humanities test scores skyrocketed.

“Once I realized that I could have that sort of impact on two students with minimal effort, I got really excited about the program Teach for America,” Henesy said. “I realized that I could step in right after an undergrad education and perhaps be better equipped than, say, a teacher that they may be having right now who is under-qualified in a particular subject.”

“I said, ‘this is what I want to do for two years’, and I’m really excited about it,” he added.

Henesy is just one of the more than 10 percent of the Stanford senior class who applied to Teach for America (TFA) this year. Teach for America, the nearly 20 year old Peace-Corps-esque teaching program which enlists college grads for two-year stints and places them in failing urban schools, just received 46,359 applicants for its 2010 corps. The acceptance rate nationally last year was 15 percent of 35,000 applicants.

According to Emily Lewis-LaMonica, the on-campus recruitment director for TFA, Stanford has seen an upshot in TFA applicants the past few years, compared to some of its peer institutions. In 2008-2009, roughly six percent of the Stanford senior class applied to TFA. That number nearly doubled this year. Nearly 12 percent of all seniors at Ivy League schools, seven percent at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and six percent at UC-Berkeley apply for TFA.

For Kelly Gleischman ‘10, an on-campus coordinator of TFA, education policy has been a life-long passion, and she’s been working to close the educational inequity gap throughout her time at Stanford. Gleischman hailed from a well-to-do school district in West Los Angeles and credited her academic success so far to the guiding influence of her teachers.

“The teachers that I had made me who I am and made me care about what I do today,” Gleischman said. “When I have these experiences and I go into these schools and realize that it isn’t happening for these kids around the country, I realize we need to fix that.”

TFA was the obvious way to parley that passion into action. She applied for the second TFA deadline in October and has already received her acceptance into the program. She’s heading to D.C. next fall to teach secondary math in one of the lowest-performing districts in the nation.

“This is exactly how I want to start my life and have those two years on the ground to make a difference within these communities,” Gleischman said

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It was 5:30 a.m. and Jeff Bergquist ‘08 groggily turned off his alarm clock and rolled out of bed.

He was in the classroom by 6:30 in the morning, brewing coffee, setting up his day’s lesson plans and organizing the small room for Íthe rambunctious middle schoolers who would soon be filing in.

Bergquist teaches eighth grade remedial math in the Balsz school district in central Phoenix through Teach for America, at a Title I designated school with a sizable number of Somali refugees. He’s in his second year as a corps member. For Bergquist, an economics major who went to high school in Palo Alto, the program has been a major shift from his sheltered realm of experience.

“My first year was extremely overwhelming,” Bergquist said. “There are so many things coming at you, there are so many things to deal with, and at times you’re at a place where you don’t even know where to start. You have all these ideas, you know all the techniques, but running a classroom yourself is an incredibly taxing experience.”

Bergquist says that his second year has been much steadier, after having gotten his bearings his first year. But he said that setting realistic personal goals has remained one of the most challenging aspects of the program, even during year two.

“There’s a fallacy that you can go in and […] over the course of two years, make all this incredible change,” Bergquist said. “And the reality of it is that that’s not how it works.”

During his first year, he met a student named Nicole who came into the eighth grade at a fourth grade level in math. Nicole could do basic single-digit multiplication and division but was “completely mathematically illiterate” when it came to decimals and fractions. The first semester Bergquist was teaching, Nicole had the lowest grade of anyone in the class. He knew that Nicole needed help, so he tutored her a few times a week before and after school.

It worked. By the end of the year, Nicole had progressed about four grade levels.

“That story alone made me feel like the year was a success and gave me a lot of confidence,” he said, with obvious pride.

But results of that sort come with a cost — an around-the-clock process of plan, teach, review, repeat. Bergquist admitted that the breakneck speed since beginning has been tough.

“You know how exhausted you are when you give a presentation for class? You’re just mentally and physically drained and like, ‘Oh God, I just want to sit on the couch,’” Bergquist said. “Teaching is like giving five of those a day, every day.”

To see just what the hyper-intense regimen of Teach for America does to participants like Bergquist — and their civil engagement when they leave the program sociology Prof. Doug McAdam conducted a pioneering study called “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” looking at applicants from 1993 to 1998. He found that not everyone can handle the lifestyle.

The study compared “graduates,” who completed their two years in Teach for America, “dropouts,” who enrolled in the program, but bowed out before completing the full two years and “nonmatriculants,” who were accepted but turned down TFA.

“About 20 percent of graduates said that they ended their experience feeling disillusioned,” McAdam said. “They didn’t feel effective as teachers and didn’t feel like this was the most effective way to deal with the underlying issue.”

Those results aren’t too surprising to Rob Reich, political science professor, who taught sixth grade in Houston through Teach for America.

“I don’t think anyone who’s a first-year teacher, credentialed or non-credentialed, is an exceptional teacher after one year,” said Reich. “The first year is really, really hard.”

“These are students who have basically succeeded at anything they ever wanted to do,” Reich continued. “You put an obstacle in front of them, and they’ll either work hard enough or have the native talent to do it well […] but they [then] find that a bunch of 12 year olds are eating them for lunch every day.”

But for Henesy, burnout isn’t a concern yet. He just wants to make a difference. Henesy applied to Teach for America over the summer at the suggestion of his big brother in Kappa Sigma — one Jeff Bergquist. He was accepted into the program and will be teaching high school math in the Boston area — his home state. He’s excited, but nervous.

“I think the biggest challenge is going to be for all these kids to look at me, a young white teacher — who am I to look at you and say, ‘you can do this, you can go to college just like I did’, because they’re going to see a disconnect between me and them,” Henesy said. “But if it can even get one student to go from joining a gang to going to any college, then it’s going to be worth me crying every day after school or whatever it takes — literally putting every amount of blood, sweat and tears into it.”