![]()
1
A Teaching Life
I was thirty-one, had three daughters (aged three, seven and nine) and a loving husband, and was ready to go for my first teaching job. We were living in Los Angeles but there were no jobs there, so I went to Simi Valley, a new and fast-growing suburb, but which was thirty miles from home. I got a job as a sixth grade teacher and found that I had forty-five kids in my class in my first year of teaching. Although it was over fifty years ago, sometimes it feels like yesterday.
I had gone to UCLA and was fortunate to have one of the last of the John Dewey followers as my teacher. You were supposed to engage the students in learning, find out what they knew by creating an environment where they were being presented with a lot of information, some of which they knew and some of which was to be found out. Our college preparation was that we were to DO everything we were going to teach. If you were going to take a class field trip, you needed to take it yourself and write about it. If you were going to have students write about something, you needed to take the challenge and write something yourself. In this way we were to learn what we were going to teach, understanding its nuances through our own experience!
We ended up having a box full of ideas that we were actively involved in creating; we all called it âThe Box Courseâ. The Box stayed in the closet and I worked hard to figure out how to involve the students in a variety of subjects, some that I loved (Social Studies, Literature, P.E.) and some that I needed to learn more about (Science, Math and more). But it was complicated. How do you handle the two kids who were brilliant, the seven boys who couldnât read, and all the rest who were sometimes eager, sometimes bored, sometimes highly engaged, sometimes somewhere else in their mind and body?
Our principal was always showing us the latest research on teaching. No one talked about what we knew as teachers, nor what we experienced in our classrooms. There was always a lot of information about âwhat research saysâ. Some of us were actually curious about the research, but it failed to hold our sustained interest as it never included the complexities of our teaching lives and the daily nature of our work. It seemed more like an interesting set of abstractions! Somehow most of us couldnât figure out how to make these abstractions connect to our work in our classrooms.
I think some of my best education about teaching took place there in the classroom. How do you involve this huge array of learners? How do you switch from subject to subject? How do you organize a whole day so that you have greater periods of intensity, time to relax, sometimes heavily involve students, group kids differently, deal honestly and openly with a full curriculum and keep the momentum going? How do you deal with students who are totally disconnected from what you are hoping to do with them? Us newbies had no one to talk to. Although Ms. Evans came once a month to DO staff development with us, it had nothing to do with the context of our classrooms or the culture of our school, and it seemed like a lot of ideas unrelated to our teaching lives. She would bring all kinds of ideas for classroom use, but somehow what she brought seemed to have no connections with what we were experiencing as teachers in our particular contexts. The ideas were interesting, but none of us could figure out how to use the ideas, learn about them over time, and somehow get supported in the process.
Living the complexity of a classroom
It was here that my angst began! Those of us in the classroom were learning all kinds of things every day in our classrooms, but nobody seemed interested at that time. We were learning about the incredible differences among our students, what worked, what failed, and what seemed unrelated to our studentsâ lives and understandings.
For openers, many of the girls were clearly in their adolescence, while most of the boys seemed so much younger and not quite there yet. The normal three groups that you would organize in a regularsized class (thirty students or fewer) didnât work in my class. The seven male non-readers were a special group and clearly needed special help. (We did not have anyone else in the school to help.) How to think about the momentum of this big class was huge â not only how to engage students wherever possible, but actually to find room for them in this regular-sized classroom. It was up to us as individual teachers to figure all this out by ourselves. I wondered if there was a different way or someone to help us learn strategies for use in our classrooms! Was teaching always like this? Take a curriculum and somehow figure out how students could learn it?
Talking it over at home and figuring it out!
The way I solved my need for help was to talk with my husband about three or four kids â Every Night. Like most teachers, I was good at telling stories about the kids, but knew nothing about getting to the point, picking out salient characteristics, always talking too much⌠Finally, my patient husband said to me one night, âCanât you just give me an outline? Tell me one big idea about a kid, shorten your descriptions âŚâ I needed to learn how to do that. But it took time. I was concentrating on how to keep a certain momentum in the classroom, otherwise I would lose them, and giving up on details seemed hard.
I figured out that I could put the class schedule on the blackboard. I did that and had no idea whether the kids ever read it, but it helped me think about TIME and how to move from subject or strategy so I could organize my time for the day. Of course, things went over the time allotted, or someone would interrupt the class, or things could get really involved, but it was a crutch that I used for at least the first six months of the term. And somehow it helped me move to another strategy when the students were almost finished, to think quickly about how to change the tempo of the involvement of students when it seemed necessary, and, in general, to keep me mostly on the road to keeping track of the kids, the assignments, the noise, the involvement, the subject matter, and the time everything took.
The car pool: Sharing our work!
Since I lived thirty miles from our school, I was fortunate to find two other teachers at my school who lived fairly close to me. We created a car pool so that all of us would not have to drive sixty miles a day alone over two mountain ranges. There were no freeways in Los Angeles at the time, and to get to our school you had to go over two mountain ranges before you got to Simi Valley from the San Fernando Valley. But our car pool turned out to be a glorious ride! We talked about our class, the kids who were hard to reach, the things we tried that somehow worked, where we tried something and it bombed, and ideas we had for faculty meetings, for lunch, for our principal, for just connecting teachers to each other. We talked loudly, fast, furiously and in a fun-loving manner. We all looked forward to driving to school and I volunteered to talk with our principal about our ideas. He was a really nice guy, but new to the job and was trying to be a âgood principalâ. We were both the same age and both had kids. He and I had a very good rapport. (He had a book that gave directions for what to say and how to behave as a new principal.)
I think he liked our ideas, but never really used any of them. He too was trying to figure out how to get through the day, so our ideas â even if he thought they were good â interrupted how he was learning to do his job. He was stuck on playing tapes of lectures during lunch. And we were just trying to eat our lunch and relax for twenty minutes. We all wondered why the joy we felt coming to school couldnât ever be replicated. When we arrived at school, we were met with silence and struggle without the comradeship that we felt in the car..
Teaching and research: Were they in conflict?
One thing that seemed certain to me was that without the teachersâ involvement in helping to think through what needed changing or improving, there would be few, if any, changes or improvements in our classroom work! Research, we were beginning to learn, was for people in the university who picked things to study from the outside. They needed to study lots of teachers and principals because numbers were all that counted in those days. Getting close to a teacher, finding out how they think and work, we reasoned, could never happen. This was to become a passion in my career and professional life. I didnât know how to do it, didnât really know how to even think about how teachers could be involved, but I was passionate and positive that without our involvement no one would ever get the whole story â the inside view and our questions â as well as the outsiderâs view and theirs.
After school: Outside researcher needs the inside view!
One day, our principal called us all to the office after school and introduced us to a woman who was doing research on elementary principals. She wanted us to fill out a questionnaire that seemed to be about our principal, his role, behavior, and effects on us. I zipped through the questionnaire very quickly and went up to talk with her. I asked her what she was doing and why this paper with all these questions about the principal was important to her. Her answers fascinated me! She said she was doing research for her dissertation and it was about the role of the principal in elementary schools. Further, she said she needed to have at least fifteen schools (and principals) so that she could find some common themes. Principals were âkey actorsâ in the elementary school, she said, and she wanted to find out the obvious and subtle reasons why this was so. Needless to say, I was intrigued. She was asking us to talk about the principal and his effects on us! That was an amazing idea to me. I knew nothing about research, but had plenty to say about our principal. The idea that you could frame that kind of idea and go and ask teachers for their views really got to me. Maybe research could be framed with teachersâ as well as researchersâ questions? Maybe we could design a way of talking about our teaching lives and our students? Maybe we could describe the realities of teaching, student learning, and how they are connected? Maybe we could describe the hundreds of decisions you make, the dynamics of classroom life, and how you struggle to meet the learning as well as emotional needs of your students?
Learning by doing: The Volcano Project
Although I knew little about the arts and how to involve students in doing something artistic, one day while reading about volcanoes and how they grow and change, I decided we could actually make a volcano in our classroom. To me, this seemed like an important idea that might make the material about volcanoes much more interesting for the kids. I read that you needed chicken wire to create some kind of a cone, which you could attach to a piece of wood and shape it so that it looked similar to the shape of a volcano. Then I had the kids tear newspaper into pieces and soak the pieces in paste until the chicken wire was fully covered with the newspaper. I did know how to make papier mâchĂŠ. We then left it for a few days while the paste dried. Several days later, a group of students painted it red and brown to simulate what they thought a volcano would look like on the outside. There was a small opening at the front, so I thought â since the kids had done so much work â that we could put a small candle inside which would draw attention to this incredible thing that they had built. Little did I know that when the paste got warm it would start to drip down the sides â the students stood up and yelled, âLook, the volcano is erupting!â Sure enough, as the paste, warmed by the candlelight all around the volcano, was dripping down the sides. It looked very real to all of us! We were all stunned and for well over an hour we all stared at this tremendous monument of a volcano that was âeruptingâ. I donât know what the kids learned, but I realized that learning could be greatly enhanced by students engaging in serious âhands-onâ projects along with their reading and studying. I was to learn again and again how many different ways students could be âinvolvedâ in learning, not just passively listening or even reading what others have to say. Again, it showed me how exciting it was for the students to be involved in creating something and how it could then lead to wanting to know more (and do more).
Although that first year was long ago, it left an indelible imprint on me. It taught me so much about what it meant to really engage students and how much more complicated it was to be a teacher. No one ever taught us to make connections between what the kids were âdoingâ and how they could ask questions of their reading and figure out what was worth writing. Those kinds of connections did not come naturally and took time to really understand by experiencing them in a variety of different ways.
Although involving students in our teacher education program to learn about teaching was about âdoingâ things, making things, engaging in figuring out how students could be physically as well as intellectually involved, it didnât really take until it happened in my classroom. How could us âinsidersâ somehow develop a voice? Teach people how complicated teaching is? Get people outside schools to recognize that school cultures and teachers in classrooms are anything but simple? That learning to control the momentum was a critical part of keeping students involved⌠that sometimes the best of plans do not work, while other times you try things and they take off? The Volcano Project was an important part of my learning to understand why experience was important and how it could lead to intellectual work, reading, studying, and deepening studentsâ learning.
A tough lesson: Learning to deal with problem students
Perhaps one of the biggest lessons I learned in teaching that first year was that sometimes doing the obvious doesnât work with problem students, so you have to be lucky too. I was very involved with having students write stories, poems, or basically anything that interested them. So I set about engaging students in how they could write (about their favorite character or friend â a made-up character â a family member, an event, a story etc.)
One of the biggest problem students I had was a boy who would deliberately drop his book about ten times a day, I assumed to get attention. I tried all kinds of pleas, ideas, little punishments, etc. but nothing would work. Given the opportunity to write, Carl wrote about a Martian Man. I told the class that the best story would also get music and lyrics written by my husband (who was a songwriter and lyricist). Carlâs story was actually very interesting and I chose him. My husband wrote music and lyrics to his story. And, to my thrilling surprise Carl was so excited that he stopped dropping books and became a very involved student. At Open House he showed his parents his story and the song that went with it, and took them all around the room showing them all kinds of things that our class did. He became a model student! How do you explain these kinds of things to an outsider? All I knew was that the classroom was an incredibly complicated place â incredibly different kinds of students with different learning styles, huge differences between boys and girls in the sixth grade, many subjects to teach, figuring out how to engage students in a variety of subjects and strategies â and somehow keeping up the interest of forty-five kids! So far, I was lucky! I hit a home run in physical education, facilitated a volcano eruption, and got Carl to stop dropping his book and join the class.
Learning to deal with the complexity
I was learning slowly that teaching was a constant struggle. You are always trying to connect to your students in ways that encourage and support their interest, excitement, engagement and learning. And, it was clear to me that you had to learn that sometimes you could be exhilarated, often exhausted, and always struggling to put it all together. It was getting better, but it still reminded me of knitting somehow. Sometimes you were so satisfied with the results. Other times you tried something and it really didnât work, while other times you experimented, it worked and was even better than you expected. It was not an exact science, but rather working with many human beings was almost always messy. So I learned to get used to it. I was always trying to make it all come together, but realized that sometimes it wasnât going to happen.
I learned from our car pool that there might be ways we could learn, not only in the car coming to school, but that school itself could be a place where we talked, learned together and supported each other. But how? How was this to happen? Who would do it? What would it take to replicate the connection we felt toward each other? Could we ever break the isolation that we all felt when the bell rang to begin class?
Expanding our knowledge
Waller (1932) put forth the idea that teachers should be involved and it str...
