“I’m a little ambivalent about the idea of promoting capitalism,” said Oberlin graduate and Teach for America volunteer Eric Schedler, expressing a typical Oberlin sentiment. “But I see these kids as the victims of capitalism.”

What separates Schedler from the prototypical Obie enumerating the injustices of society from a bar stool at the Feve is that he’s actually doing something to address those injustices.

For the past two years, he has been teaching at Central High School in Helena, Ark., a poor town on the Missisippi delta, and has been using an experimental classroom management procedure to reach students typically ignored by the educational system.

“The most important thing is getting students to come to class,” Schedler said. “My students get paid in fictitious money for coming to class and they can get privileges with that money. They can get more depending on how hard they work. Once they start coming to class, they’ll be more invested.”

Schedler, a College music major who also studied math and German while at Oberlin, was actually pleasantly surprised by the school he was assigned to work at by Teach for America.

“It didn’t look like it was falling apart,” he said. “My classroom is actually pretty nice.”

Even with his experimental behavior management scheme, Schedler still said motivating his students can seem like a full-time job in itself. When he’s not tutoring students or teaching classes, he’s on the phone with parents.

He says the busy schedule suits him fine since in Helena “there’s not a lot to do, and the students will tell you that, too.”

Schedler feels that living and working in Helena, a school district that is over 95 percent African American, has given him a new perspective on the roots of educational inequality in America.

“I thought that integration happened and was done with,” he said, “but districts like this are really common in the south. Basically, the school a person goes to when they grow up determines the options they’ll have in the future and what job they’ll have. That seems completely unfair.”