Stories of Our Lives : Retiring teacher recalls wild, crazy ride of teaching which spans 33 years
Posted on Wednesday, June 18, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/rhtn/Editorial/4056/
As a recent college graduate and a newlywed just starting my teaching career, my life seemed to stretch out endlessly before me. Retirement seemed a lifetime away, as indeed it was.
I just didn’t realize how short a lifetime would seem.
When I quit teaching in Georgia to have my first baby, I didn’t even consider leaving my money in the retirement fund. My immediate needs seemed much more pressing. Retirement ? What’s that ? Who needs it ?
Now I have gone from being the youngest member of the faculty to the oldest, and retirement is at hand.
During that first school year of 1966-67 I once popped a huge bubble gum bubble just as a parent walked in for an after school conference. Parents would say things to me like, “ You don’t have children of your own, do you, Mrs. Averitt ? Some day you’ll understand. ” Well, now I do understand. I have children who are older than most of the parents of our school, and I am older than most of the grandparents.
Another time during that first year a lady, who lived in my apartment complex and who saw me come and go loaded down with school books every day, asked me if I would be interested in doing some baby sitting. I thought I just might be interested until she said it would be overnight. When I told her I wouldn’t want to be away from my husband overnight, she was shocked. She thought I was in high school. No one has made that mistake recently.
My age, weight and hair color are not the only things that have changed since that long-ago time 42 years ago. I have taught in two districts in suburban Atlanta and several districts in Arkansas, including Little Rock, Sheridan, Junction City and Rogers. I have taught classes that were all white, all African-American, all Hispanic and classes that were a mixture of all three. I have taught classes with a Jewish minority. I have taught children in grades kindergarten through sixth grade, as well as adults, including elementaryschool teachers, principals and daycare workers.
I have seen many methods and programs come and go. There was once a machine called a tachistascope, which would either scroll sentences or flash words onto a screen; it was designed to increase reading speed. A program called Wisconsin Design had us place individual skills on cards, attach them to a skewer and shake them. Somehow those that fell off were the skills not mastered, or maybe they were those that were mastered. I can’t remember. That was but one of the many mastery learning programs that broke reading up into discreet skills that had to be mastered. Mastery was calculated at 80 percent. You dared not leave a skill until it was mastered, even if it took all year.
The language experience approach had us providing experiences for the children to write about — everything from popping popcorn to science experiments that sometimes flopped. PET had us write the objective on the board and teach to the objective. It taught us many new terms, such as set, guided practice, and monitor and adjust — always keeping in mind Bloom’s Taxonomy and those higher-order thinking skills. I’m sure I have forgotten many of the programs, but new math, whole language, values clarification and Project WILD come to mind.
That brings us right up to the present with balanced literacy, ELLA and accountability.
Standardized tests have taken on a life of their own. The first ones I gave were in little booklets. The students marked their answers directly in the books. They came with an answer key, so we graded them ourselves. After that, they were never mentioned again. They were for our own information and use. There were no security measures and no high-stakes consequences. I went for many years without giving any standardized tests at all until the Arkansas Minimum Performance Test came along. That gave way to ACTAAP, and you know the rest.
Class size has changed, along with duties and interruptions. My first class of 33 was never interrupted. There were no scheduled breaks, recesses, planning periods or interventions except for lunch every day and library once a week. I ate with my children and took them to recess whenever I saw fit. We could provide as much or as little recess as we wanted, but it had to be supervised play. Sometimes, being at a loss as to what to do in the classroom and being young and energetic, I provided much more recess than did the more experienced teachers, running up and down the basketball court as referee or coming up with elaborate rules for a game of tag, always wearing a mini skirt, of course.
When I walked into my first Reading Recovery training session, it was love at first sight. I had taught reading classes for years, both as a classroom teacher and pull out teacher. I had worked hard at it and enjoyed some success, but I also had enough experience with it to know something was missing. Remedial reading, as it had always been taught, got to children with too little too late. They had already developed a sense of failure and had found many ways to cope and avoid — most of them negative. Here was a chance to reach children before they failed, while they were eager to learn and still believed they could. It gave new life to my teaching and caused me to look forward to Monday instead of Friday — honest.
It has been a wild and crazy ride. I am glad I am leaving the profession while I still love it. I want to go out at the top of my game before I lose enthusiasm, so that I can look back with lots of humor and very few regrets.
Ann Averitt retired from teaching June 4 after 33 years. Her most recent position was at Bonnie Grimes Elementary School in Rogers where she taught Reading Recovery and Early Literacy.