At first it was fun, having a different teacher every day – new faces, a new round of name games, an optimistic perspective on my unlimited genius. Arriving every morning to a fresh smiling face greeting me at the classroom door, each one ensuring me that today we were going to learn something new and exciting, made me giddy for the hours ahead.

After the teachers got us settled down, a challenging process in and of itself, they would introduce themselves with flamboyant hand gestures. Then, inevitably, we would spend the morning miming the English alphabet, struggling not to roll our r’s and to make our j’s hard. Soon, it’d be time for a snack. After snack came naptime, which, after we refused to lay down or stop talking, would inevitably turn into a soccer game. We’d play for a long time, sometimes until school was over. Each day, I would go home tired and content.

I learned the alphabet 20 days in a row that first month; the first month a new teacher came every day. I learned the alphabet so many times that the letters lost their meanings and turned into sounds that I made without thinking about what they could be combined into.

On the eighth day, I stopped trying to learn the teacher’s names.

On the 12^th day, I stopped doing the homework the new teacher wouldn’t get around to checking.

On the 20^th day, I realized I hadn’t learned anything new in 20 days.

On the 30^th day, I started showing up late.

**

Imagine that every day your teacher was a different person.

Imagine that there was no continuous lesson plan, curriculum, or structure.

Imagine that a stranger, who didn’t speak your language, was put in charge of your schooling.

Imagine that your academic future relied on a person you’d only know for one day.

Millions of children around the world right now are experiencing just this situation. Instead of training local teachers, or even hiring experienced teachers from abroad, volunteer placement companies are delivering well-meaning volunteer “teachers” for as little as one day of work, often without any experience or training.

A strong and ongoing relationship between teachers and students has been identified as being central to student success. The longer a teacher stays at one school, with a particular group of students, the stronger the student-teacher bond, the more the students experiment and challenge themselves, and the better they perform. Not having consistent teachers, and instead instituting a revolving door of unknown faces, undermines each student’s ability to create these connections, and greatly diminishes their chances of success.

If an untrained 17 year old were to walk into a public school in the United States and ask to take over a classroom for a day, there wouldn’t be a discussion. The answer would be no.

For some reason, these same young people are being placed into schools in the developing world as the head instructors, tasked with the responsibility of teaching subjects that they have yet to master themselves.

If you wouldn’t want your children to be taught by someone who, as well intentioned as they might be, isn’t qualified, why do you think that they should be allowed to teach someone else’s kids?

Why does poverty, or general lack of resources, mean that someone else’s children deserve less than ours do?

**

There are hundreds of companies and organizations in the United States, if not more, that do short term teaching placements in exotic locales. Carnival Corp. became the most recent to the scene with their latest announcement, the launch of fathom, a new cruise brand, which will give 37,000 passengers a year a volunteer-infused vacation on the sunny northern coast of the Dominican Republic.

Photo: Fathom

Unloading in Puerto Plata, fathom travelers will have the opportunity to volunteer with partner organizations. Activities will include planting trees and teaching English to students and adults at schools and local community centers, which sounds pretty cool in theory, but think back to that girl trying to learn from a new teacher each day.

What incentive exists for schools to invest in teachers, when they can get ones from fathom who pay-to-play? What businesses will expand, creating jobs, when they can siphon free labor off of a floating city docked right at their doorstep?

I was able to talk to Tara Varga Russell, fathom’s President, about their high aspirations for impact, and whether short-term volunteer engagements can ever truly deliver. Russell said that the Puerto Plata community identified learning English as a much-needed skill, something that I have little doubt is true.

However, rather than seeing this as an opportunity to use fathom funds to endow teaching positions at local schools, fathom saw it as a chance to plug their clients, people who Russell confirmed “most likely don’t speak Spanish,” into one-day volunteer placements. When asked why fathom wouldn’t support the hiring of a teacher instead of, or at least in addition to, volunteer involvement, Russell replied, “schools in the north of the DR might long to have a native English speaker teacher on staff at the schools year-round, but they don’t necessarily have the resources to do that.”

Photo: Fathom

I found this strange, as fathom has the very resources that the schools so desperately need, namely funds for up-to-date books, workable classrooms, and, of course, a high-quality English-speaking teacher. Pushing a step further, and echoing a question I ask of many short-term volunteer programs, I asked what percentage of fathom’s trip fees would it take to hire a teacher were they to determine that one teacher working with students consistently would be more impactful than daily volunteers. Russell responded, “I don’t know the answer,” then adding, “I’d say you can do some homework on that.”

So I did. Based on a base fare of $1,540 per passenger and a projected 18,000 passengers in the first year, fathom could endow a comfortable teaching salary for a native-English speaking teacher at a local school for 0.09% of that first year’s gross revenue. As they are expecting to gear up to 37,000 travelers annually, and $1,540 is the lowest base fare, the cost to them of sponsoring a qualified teacher would actually be significantly less than half of my estimate.

The reality is that Russell, along with entire team behind the fathom brand, are, as far as I can tell, kind, committed, and loving people who genuinely want to help. But wanting to do good quickly with a large group of people and actually creating sustainable long-term impact are not easily aligned.

Where do I find hope in situations like this? From Russell herself actually, “if we find there to be harm in our engagement and involvement of course we would migrate off of whatever that engagement was.”

I hope she’ll keep that promise, and maybe even hire a real teacher in the fathom traveller’s wake.

Our actions have consequences. As world travelers and aspiring adventurers, it is our responsibility to think critically about what we do, why we do it, and what impacts our actions may have both now and in the future. Choose to invest in communities. Think before ‘volunteering.’