Finding Mrs. Warnecke

The Difference Teachers Make

Cindi Rigsbee

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470608784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungsbiographien

Finding Mrs. Warnecke tells the inspiring story of Cindi Rigsbee, a three-time Teacher of the Year, and Barbara Warnecke, the first-grade teacher who had a profound and lasting impact on Cindi's life. Cindi, an insecure child who craved positive attention, started her first-grade year with a teacher who was emotionally abusive and played favorites in the classroom. Two months into the school year, her principal came into the classroom and announced that half the students were being moved to another classroom--a dank, windowless basement room, with a young and inexperienced teacher. This change turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Cindi. Her new teacher, Mrs. Warnecke, made learning come alive for her students. She went overboard caring for each child, made her classroom "magical, " and encouraged students to pursue their dreams. Although Cindi was reluctant to explore her creativity as a student, Mrs. Warnecke encouraged her to read and write poetry, which became a lifelong passion. The two kept in touch for several years but lost track of each other when Mrs. Warnecke moved out of state. Cindi spent many years trying to reconnect so she could thank Mrs. Warnecke for making such a difference in her life, but to no avail. Eventually Cindi became a teacher herself, and thirty years later she has taught more than 2, 000 children and been named Teacher of the Year for her home state. She later came to realize that all those years she wasn't really trying to track down Barbara Warnecke, but rather, she was trying to "find Mrs. Warnecke" within herself.

In Fall 2008 Cindi and Barbara were reunited on Good Morning America; the show's producers had tracked Barbara down and brought both women on-set for a tearful reunion. Barbara was floored at this attention--she had no idea she could have made such an impact on a former student's life. As Cindi travels around talking with new and veteran educators, she is always approached by audience members who are moved to tears and want to share the story of the "Mrs. Warnecke" in their own lives. Finding Mrs. Warnecke not only tells the story of this teacher who made a lifelong impact on her students, it illustrates the importance of the teacher/student relationship in the classroom, and offers principles for other teachers to follow to make a positive impact in their own classrooms.

FOUR

Exploring the Magic

As the years go by, I continue to find more and more evidence of how vital good student-teacher relationships are to students’ success in school. At the same time, though, I’ve found that that connection by itself is not enough. Yes, Mrs. Warnecke had cared for her students, but I had many caring teachers during my school years. Another question I started to consider in my third year of teaching was, what was the difference between those teachers’ classes and Mrs. Warnecke’s?

Teaching can be a claustrophobic proposition, regardless of whether it’s happening in a trailer, a state-of-the-art classroom, or a below-ground improvisation like my first-grade room. Here we teachers are, grown adults, but still governed by bells that tell us when to arrive, when we can leave, and when we can attend to personal needs. (I sometimes refer to my colleagues and myself as “Pavlov’s Teachers” because we respond so well to bells.) The broken-down trailer I taught in during my third year was particularly claustrophobic. It was no more than twelve feet wide by about twenty feet long. Its entire length was lined with windows—in various states of functionality—which gave a view of the parking lot, the railroad tracks on the far side, and beyond that the roofs of the little town where I was teaching. I would stand in the room, look at the bell tower of the town hall in the distance, and think, The world is out there, and I’m in here.

One day, standing gazing out in my usual reverie, I started to think about how my students must feel. Middle and high school students have six or seven classes a day where they sit in uncomfortable desks for hours at a time. Even though many teachers work hard to engage their classes, it has to be difficult for the kids to be there. If it’s hard for adults, who’ve had so much practice at it, it must be that much harder for young people.

Yet, thinking back on my school days and to the windowless basement where I attended first grade, I remembered it as a magical place—much more than four walls, rickety desks, and a blackboard. There must be, I thought, some way to recreate that feeling. And so I began that year to test some ideas for making the classroom a place where kids would want to be—a room like Mrs. Warnecke’s.

Later on, after I left the language arts classroom and became a reading resource teacher, the issue of environment became even more critical to me. I realized that if I wanted students to be successful in my class, they needed to come there willingly. After all, I would be pulling them from other classes; they might be missing basketball or band or art—something they loved. Further, the stigma of a remedial reading class is always a concern. So over time I’ve come up with ways to make my classroom a special place, and I guess they work: my principal, Jason Johnson, said to me once, “I’ve never seen so many students beg to go to a reading class.”

I thought, I’m trying to make it magical in here . . .

Here’s what I’ve learned in twenty years about making the classroom a place kids want to be.

Breaking Down the Walls

To alleviate claustrophobia, I try as often as possible to get the students out of the classroom. Teachers know that learning is about discovery, and there’s more to discover outside a school building than in it. Students have given me beautifully written descriptions of spider webs, flowers, blades of grass, clouds—it would be difficult to find that creativity inside four walls. Last year, for example, after we took a walk on a trail in the woods behind our school, my student Savannah wrote in her journal, “The skinny twig hung off the branch as if it were asleep.” I didn’t see Savannah’s twig that day, but I can see it now.

Every year, I begin my writing instruction by taking my classes outside for an exercise in sensory writing. I tell my students that they are going to use all their senses except one—the sense of sight. I assign partners and loosely blindfold one student in each pair. The partners lead each other around the schoolyard as they listen to and feel everything around them. Once they are back in the classroom, they write reflections on their experiences, like this one of Brian’s, a seventh grader:

I was walking and trying to feel my way around the schoolyard. I felt the roughness of the bark on a tree, but I couldn’t concentrate because I was nervous about falling or walking into the street. It made me appreciate the sense of sight even more than I already do, and it seems like concentrating on the way a piece of bark feels made me understand it in a different way.

I once taught at a school that sat beside an old cemetery. In the fall, I would take my classes out there to do gravestone rubbings so that the students could better determine what had long ago been carved into those weathered stones. Placing a piece of notebook paper against the gravestone, the students rubbed a pencil or crayon back and forth across the paper, and the names, dates, and other inscriptions magically appeared on the paper. My students were always thrilled and fascinated to see words on their papers that were illegible on the stone itself.

That cemetery had a long row of gravestones, seven in all, that appeared to be the graves of an entire family: parents and five of their children. We used these in a cross-curricular activity: after looking at the dates and doing the math to determine the children’s ages when they died, my students would write beautiful stories about the family and how they lived in the seventeenth century.

I’ve always found getting the students out of the building to be a wonderful motivator, but it’s certainly not an original idea. Pass by a school in the spring, and you’ll see children all around, doing one activity or another in the sunshine. In my early years of teaching, I so wanted to be outside on the first warm day that I tried to be creative when thinking of activities that would match the learning goals for my class but could be done just as well out of the classroom.

Another way to escape the stuffiness of a classroom is to use the entire building whenever possible. My classes routinely do “reader’s theatre” presentations in the auditorium—reading aloud the different characters’ parts from a dramatic text—to an audience of one: me. The short walk from my classroom offers a change of scenery and loosens up the kids.

One year, after my class had turned in a particularly grueling research paper, I took them to the gym. There was only one rule. The entire class had to fit in the “jump ball” circle in the middle of the court. Once they got there, they could talk, scream, or dance, but they had to stay within the confines of the circle. The restriction ensured that the activity would be challenging, because the students were pressed against each other like a dozen clowns trying to cram into a Volkswagen. It was funny to see these middle school kids falling out of the circle but trying like crazy to stay in, and they loved it! The entire activity took only ten minutes, including traveling to and from the gym, but when we returned we were all more focused, having had the opportunity to “break down our walls” once again, while at the same time being a little silly.

Another twist on expanding the classroom is one I began while teaching summer school. Many times during my “summer career opportunities,” I was teaching students who had displayed a strong work ethic throughout the year but still hadn’t been able to pass their standardized tests. So, because it was summer and we had to be in a classroom, I told the students that we would be bringing our summer inside with us. On the classroom wall I wrote a poem (which was a little too reminiscent of my first-grade poetry):

All of our friends are out there
in the world so wide.
So since we want some summer, too,
We’ll just bring it all inside.

Corny, I know. Still, around that poem on the wall we posted anything and everything “summer” that my students wanted to bring in. Some brought pictures of swimming pools and boats, some brought seashells, and others preferred to create their own artwork: drawings of flowers and summer scenes. At any time during my summer school classes, the students knew that they were allowed to go “get some summer” by taking a break in the back of the room. Even I got frustrated sometimes and headed back there myself. I would whine loudly, “I just want to be outside,” and all the students would laugh at the crazy teacher who didn’t want to spend her summer inside a classroom any more than her students did.

Walls with a Message

When I first started to reimagine what I wanted my classroom to be like, I made the most important and biggest test my own: Did I want to be there myself? If not, surely my students wouldn’t. If I’m going to be in a classroom all day, I want it to be a pleasant place to be.

Fundamentals matter, of course. Twice I’ve painted my own classroom walls. (I even showed up once in the summer to paint the halls of the school!) But some teachers go to greater lengths. Beth, a sixth-grade science teacher in my school one year, painted a mural of tropical fish that covered one entire wall of her classroom. Her students were so excited when they first saw it at Open House; they felt like the luckiest sixth graders in the building to be in that room.

When I first started to reimagine what I wanted my classroom to be like, I made the most important and biggest test my own: Did I want to be there myself? If not, surely my students wouldn’t. If I’m going to be in a classroom all day, I want it to be a pleasant place to be.

Some would probably argue that this type of physical labor is not in a teacher’s job description. But I have to say that any amount of personal attention I can give to my classroom and building makes it more meaningful to me to be there every day. And because many of my students live in deplorable situations, I’ve always wanted to ensure that they have the best possible environment when they’re at school.

Fresh paint is only the beginning. Prefabricated borders for bulletin boards and the other classroom decorations available from teacher supply stores are well and good, if on the pricey side (clearly, someone is making a great deal of money selling these things), but they probably aren’t terribly meaningful to students.

I have always remembered fondly that the decorations in Mrs. Warnecke’s room were made by her—few companies were selling classroom supplies in 1963. She taught us how to tell time on a handmade clock she had drawn with a human face and hands, the latter affixed with brad fasteners. But after my first-year bulletin board spelling error, it was about four years into teaching before I attempted anything more artistic than “Welcome Back to School.” I used to joke that my Welcome Back message was still on the board in April!

I’ve relaxed a little since then. One type of decoration I often use is what I call “story starters.” I cover an entire wall with pictures of some kind (it varies from year to year), and when students get stuck for writing ideas, they can look at the wall to get a jump start. For instance, every day when my students enter the room, I have them begin with a warm-up activity. To get them focused I provide a prompt—a question or quotation—and the students respond in their journals. If they draw a blank, the wall is there for inspiration.

The first year I did story starters, I decided to use several posters of cute little babies that I had gathered. There were babies sitting in unrolled toilet paper, babies with food all over their faces, babies snuggling up to puppies. But there was a problem with these pictures—all the babies were white. In the back of my mind, I knew this was a problem when I hung the posters, but Open House was approaching, and I didn’t want bare walls when the parents came to visit. Then I forgot about it until sometime in October, when one of my students, Brandon, asked me, “Mrs. Rigsbee, why don’t you have any black babies up there?”

I wanted to crawl under the floor. I’d been thinking that I had finally gotten this teaching thing together, but I’d blown it again. I hadn’t meant to be insensitive to the majority of my students, of course; I just hadn’t been able to find any posters of black babies or Hispanic babies or Asian babies. I told Brandon that, and that I would continue looking. And I did, but as I had figured, there were none to be found. So one day I went in and pulled all the posters down.

Then I explained the problem to the students and asked for their help. For weeks afterward, they brought me pictures of babies—themselves as babies; their brothers, cousins, nieces, and nephews as babies; their neighbors’ babies. It was a babyfest! And they loved writing their baby stories whenever they chose the story starter wall.

One year, I wanted to have a board that highlighted student poetry. So I cut out letters that read “Dive into POETRY.” Then I asked Charlie, the best artist in the class, “What would be a cool picture to go with this?” Charlie got right to work, and the next day he came in with the cutest frog, long legs outstretched, jumping off a diving board (nicely placed on a lily pad) into a pond. After stapling Charlie’s picture to the board, I added student poetry all around as the water. That board was a turning point for me in my attempt to make a classroom for and about the students. From that point on, I stopped buying classroom decorations from stores. I now use student work and projects, and we make our own wall designs every year. And student artists get a venue for showcasing their creations.

For the last two years, I have taken a large piece of bulletin board paper, ripped from the roll so that the edges are jagged and rough, and written “Reading Strategies We Use” on it. (I’m not an artist, so this is my idea of abstract art.) Then the students choose their own pieces of paper, also abstractly ripped, and they write strategies on them. We place all these on the wall, like a huge collage, and I point to it all year when talking about what we do when we read. I’ve also seen the students look at it while they read—it’s a reading guide and artwork, all in one. It’s colorful and decorative (not to mention cheap), and you can’t find it in a teacher store. And because it’s unique to my classroom and my students, it feels like ours, and makes us feel at home at school.

Mrs. Vail

Though it was decades ago, if I close my eyes, I can still see my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Vail. Her classroom was a big, bright frenzy of huge paint jugs, stacks of vivid paper, and cups of colorful crayons. Every day her lucky students were excited, inspired, and creating . . . truly learning with joy and love.

During one memorable Show and Tell, Camille stood before the other boys and girls and slowly opened her brown paper bag. We all gasped as she held up the butterfly wings she had worn as p...