I feel a little bad saying it was "crowd control" because those are my words, not my brother's (who was the one doing the program). I think he was a good teacher, and he would probably object to that characterization.

He told me that once he left the room for a few minutes because a kid was sick, and heard a huge crash. When he rushed back in, it turned out that a girl had tried to smash the overhead projector on top of the head of another student. Glass was everywhere This was the result of leaving the classroom for 2 minutes.

But when he was in there, I don't actually think it was all crowd control. He had the respect of the students, and he was able to teach.

You made an interesting observation about the "cultish" quality of TFA. He said that he had no illusions about how much of himself he was giving. He said his attitude from the start was "This school has 30 teachers. Two of us are TFA. The other 28 are just doing their job." That attitude helped him out a lot, I think.