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Marjorie Clark is a white teacher in a Washington, D.C. high school where more than 95 percent of the students are black.

She grew up in Albany, Ore., in a rural, white, middle-class community before attending UCLA. Almost all her students live in poverty, qualifying for free lunches distributed by the urban district.

Clark is different from her students, but she loves them. She loves them though they have frustrated her to tears, told her things she would never have thought of saying to her teachers.

They call her a bitch. They don’t listen. They get into fights in the classroom.

But then there are the other moments, such as one afternoon at an impromptu open-mic session on campus.

“The first kid stood up, and he said ... ‘A lot of teachers just say whatever. But Ms. Clark, she never gives up on us. And that’s why, that’s why I like her,’” said Clark, who is in her first year with Teach for America.

“There are so many stories,” she said. “I love these kids. I really, really do.”

Clark’s investment in her students begins every day at 5:15 a.m., when she gets up for breakfast, showers, and drives to work. From 8 in the morning until 4 p.m. she teaches, tutors and fills in for absent colleagues.

Once or twice a week after work, she attends graduate school for about three hours. Weekends and evenings are spent grading and planning.

“The time constraints are incredibly difficult. I’ve seen a lot of breakdowns,” said Clark, who took a few years to pursue other interests between finishing college and joining TFA. She said of about 50 TFA teachers in her area, about five have left the program.

Clark recalls how during training in Los Angeles last year, she was constantly contact with advisers. They helped her teach summer school and taught her to write lesson plans.

But when the five-week session in Watts was over, help from TFA staff also ended. Some teachers did fine without the support, but the transition after summer was tough for Clark.

“They throw you into the school and give you a pat on the back,” Clark said. “They need to work on what they offer to their corps members because too many of us feel like all they do is say, ‘Good luck, you can do it.’”

She found herself alone in fall, with 35 teens in a 10th grade world history class. Support came from administrators and other teachers with their own problems.

There wasn’t enough paper at school. There was a shortage of pens and pencils. Teachers came and left, and those who stayed struggled to win the faith of students who were used to seeing their instructors depart midyear.

Clark was distraught by winter. She was tired of breaking up fights, writing referrals, tired of calling unreceptive parents.

She is married but no longer spends time with her husband. The brief hours they have together are between 7 and 9:30 each night, after he comes home from work and before she goes to sleep.

“I called TFA in December ... and said, ‘I am emotionally unstable and this is taking a toll,’” Clark said. The program representative with whom she spoke told her to focus on maintaining high expectations for students.

Four times a year, a TFA advisor comes to Clark’s school to observe her and talk about students’ progress.

Clark will explain her day. How one student will throw an egg at a classmate. How another will call her a bitch. How papers will fly everywhere.

Her adviser will respond by discussing standards, asking about students who received lower than a B on a test.

“A friend of mine told me yesterday,” Clark said, “the sad thing about TFA is that (some) people just survive it. They don’t enjoy it, they don’t love it, and they don’t stay in teaching.”

Still, Clark gets advice from other TFA members and veterans and says teaching has become easier. She said that by spring, she felt she had earned students’ respect. She loves teaching and wants to stay in the occupation.

Clark says that though she wishes TFA had given her more support, she admires how it places people like her in urban America. The program has taught her to think more about race and discrimination, shown her a slice of the country she had not seen before.

“(TFA) is the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life. Exclamation point,” Clark said. “It’s discovering that in America, there’s this whole other world that you never thought about. And it’s poor, and it’s sad, and it’s tough.”

The days are long and Clark is exhausted. Some of her hardest-working students still write at a seventh-grade level.

But then there are those moments, such as at the end of last semester, when she wrote a personal note to each kid.

One kept the message in a notebook. Another hung his on his wall, framed.