“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.
