Gifted Teachers Cause Indelible Effects

Every adult who attended public school knows the truth of this statement:  there are teachers and there are gifted teachers.  We are taught by the former, but we are inspired and grow at the feet of the latter.  Gifted teachers are extraordinary human beings.  It is the nature of their extraordinary being that makes them gifted teachers.

What do we know?

A school faculty is much like a professional baseball team.  While all pro ballplayers met a high standard of screening to make the team, there still are significant differences between players who hit .250 year after year, the league average, and those who hit .300, a threshold for Hall of Fame candidates.  An MLB roster has 28 players.  A successful team lists an all-star or three, several players with all-star like statistics, and twenty or so who are steady and dependable players.  The combination of steady and dependable players and a few all-stars content for league pennants.

Most teachers in a school faculty are .250 players.  Day in and day out they are present and prepared to teach their assigned curriculum to children in their classrooms.  Day in and day out they don’t make significant teaching errors.  In the same days, they also don’t teach many supernal lessons that light up student learners or cause children to have “Aha” moments.

Some may read this a putdown of many teachers, but it is not.  The strength of public education is the steady and solid work of regular classroom teachers.  They are how we know and understand reading and writing, history and geography, math, art, music, PE, and speak at little Spanish.

Most teachers on a school faculty may be good at several skills sets for quality teaching; a gifted teacher elevates the performance of skills sets because of innate qualities of insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, and friendship.  These qualities certainly lie within regular teachers, but they remain fallow compared to the same qualities that burn brightly in a gifted teacher.

Game changers.

Children know.  They know their teachers who light them up on a frequent or daily basis versus their teachers who turn on the classroom lights and say, “Take out your books”.   A teacher who lights up children is a pathfinder to deeper learning.  Their insights into curriculum and pedagogy are 3D.  They know the sequence of facts and ideas and skills children need to learn to climb Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, but they don’t stop at Remembering and Understanding.  They push harder with “Tell me more, explain that in your own words, how is it similar to and different than”.  Their students are used to the “so what and now what can you do with this” questions.

I marvel at the fact that gifted teachers, real game changers, don’t know who they are.  They just are.  They are unconscious of the ways they teach and relate to children. 

I am told that mathematics is the creation and use of elegant solutions to explain our world.  Simplicity and insightful are words that few strugglers with trigonometry, like me, understand.  Yet, I watch gifted math teachers help children to patiently unravel a math problem into understandable questions in their native language.  Gifted math teachers teach students to see the math question within the forest of words and digits on the page.  Insight is understanding what one is being asked to learn and the ability to state it in simple terms.  These teachers see problems, not just mathematical problems, differently and they teach children to see and think differently.  It is a gift.

My favorite band teacher is just a boy in man’s clothing playing his horn.  When he wears a tuxedo and waves his baton, his bands make wonderful music.  He is best, however, when he sits beside a child and together, they model and practice, model and practice, model and practice.  He slowly builds musical skills and the ability to read and interpret musical scores until children fit into an ensemble of players and then he gives them more difficult pieces to play.  He personalizes and perseveres and never quits on the individuals who are his band.  He grows musicians through patient and skillful instruction.  It is a gift.

“So what?” and “what do you mean by that” are the kinds of questions that cause many children to hunker down behind the child sitting in front of them hoping not to be called on.  Lots of hands go up when a teacher asks questions about facts; not so many when the questions require deeper inquiry.  A love of intellectual inquiry tolerates children who are reluctant to share and whose sharing contains inaccuracies.  Gifted inquirers know that these can be teased out and corrected.  It is the chase for understanding and reasoning they pursue.  Gifted teachers also know that children can learn in the periphery and listening to how one child sews together a reasoned response helps others with their own.  A gifted inquirer will smile and applaud louder for the unexpected yet slowly developed thinking of a reluctant sharer more than for the quick and always on point response of another child.  Chasing a well-reasoned and thoughtful response is a gift.

Some children come to school to learn to read, others to play an instrument, and others for the joys of recess and athletics.  Every child should have their own “go to” place in school.  I smile now thinking of an art teacher whose empathy for children caused him to seek out all children who had not found their school place.  He caused them to be artists and then to be proud of their artistry.  I remember him in his layers of baggy clothing and Birkenstocks helping a student with charcoal find depth through shading and a student at a potter’s wheel find the feel for drawing a vase out of a lump of clay.  It is easier to teach children who have a sense of who they are; it is more difficult to teach children who are lost in themselves.  His gift was in turning on the lights within wandering children.

Every child is different with a combination of admirable qualities and some things that cause us to shake our heads.  I watched a gifted science teacher who never shook his head because he focused on admirable qualities.  His teacher’s affect was as inviting as new snow and his expectations for student learning were as elevated as snow capped mountains.  It did not take students long into a new school year to know that his reputation was real.  He accepted who they were, found their strengths, and every day helped each child to build their understanding of Biology and AP Biology and computer science.  He was never in a hurry but, with his patience, caused all students to engage and learn.  Like Mr. Rogers of TV fame, he built students up and, in that building, taught them.  It is a gift.

Indelible effects that last a lifetime.

At their 50th reunions, alums invariably share stories about their school experiences and the teachers who taught them.  The passage of time has a way of rounding corners and evening out the particulars alums remember.  It is difficult to assign causation between a student’s schooling and their life at the age of 70.  However, the language and the tones change when alums talk of an exceptional teacher whose insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, or friendship made such an indelible imprint that it lasted 50 or more years.  The ability to cause such lifelong effects is a gift.

Lessons learned at recess

We learned a lot in elementary school.  Mrs. Wogen and Miss White taught us to read and to add and subtract.  Mrs. Wendlendt taught us to love good stories and Miss Blaine taught us to write complete sentences.  Miss Lubbock taught some of us to stand tall and smile and try to blend in because we could not carry a tune.  And Miss Phillips taught us that respect is earned.  We were taught well, and we learned many academic lessons in the early grades, but our elementary schooling was more than what our teachers taught.  It also was what we learned from each other.

Grade school for kids is time in the classroom and time on the playground.  Ask any third-grade boy about his day at school and you are more likely to hear a story from recess than what happened in his reading group.  The classroom and playground are essential for a childhood; they create a balance in a kid’s life, if we let them.  That balance is achieved because teachers make up and enforce rules in their classrooms while on the playground, kids make up and enforce the rules for recess.  With unspoken agreement, kids set the standards of how to play and how not to play, who wins and who loses, and how to treat each other.  In hindsight, recess rules ruled us when we were young, and they became unwritten, indelible rules for our entire life.

These are ten recess rules I learned and have practiced for more than half a century.  They applied to me and my friends when we were running and playing across the playground, and they applied to me in my career and in raising a family.  You may have rules from your youth that have served you well.  Consider these and remember your own.

  • There are my guys and there is everybody else.  The law of magnetism says likes repel and opposites attract but those rules do not apply on the playground where likes attract other likes.  We were 300 children spilling out the school doors for recess when we grouped ourselves in “likes”.  Generally, boys grouped with boys and girls with girls and the dozen or so boys I found myself with were those who loved any game with a ball that required movement, throwing, and catching.  Also, we all lived within a radius of several blocks from each other, so games on the playground became games after school and then Cub Scouts and summer swimming classes.  Other kids on the playground found their “guys”.   Guys back then was not a gender thing.  We referred to other boys and girls as “you guys”.  There were more than 100 children at my grade level and I knew everyone by name and face and considered them all to be my friends.  The guys, my special friends, were spread across the three classrooms in our grade level.  When the bell sounded recess time, we rushed down the stairs from our separate classrooms and gathered at the place where asphalt became a field of grass.  That is where the recess games began.  A real game for guys back then was football or softball or keep away.  The games that mattered were my guys against any other group of guys.
  • Things happen with, for, and against.  Even then, I could categorize what happened at recess in three ways.  I played with the guys.  I did all I could for the guys.  Together, the guys and I played hard against the other guys.  Those prepositions were involved in every story we told about recess.  Later, the same words applied to our junior and high school sports.  I played with my teammates.  I did all I could for my teammates.  Together, we competed against other teams.  And, later still, with and for applied to how I approached my work life. 
  • Be on time and be ready.  When recess started, the games began.  If you dawdled in the hallways or restroom, no one waited.  In fact, the guys sized up who was ready to play and started almost before the ringing bell stopped echoing.  Joining a game in progress was not easy.  If you were not on time and ready, you were a spectator until the next recess.  When you were late or not ready, you knew who to blame – yourself. 
  • Don’t knock down a girl.  It was easier then; boys wore pants and girls wore dresses.  You never ran into, threw a ball at, or knocked down someone in a dress.  This is not to say that guys didn’t get carried away and sometimes a game crossed into where girls played.  It happened and there was hell to pay if you were the one who knocked down a girl.  There were phone calls that night between parents and when parents got into talking about recess, that was a bad thing.  You could get sidelined for nothing more than mud on a dress.
  • Fast is fast; you can’t get faster, but you can get better.  Among our guys, I was not the fastest runner.  It used to pain me that, try as I might, I could not pick up and lay down my feet any faster than I did.  I was not slow; just not fast.  Early on it was clear that if I could not improve my foot speed, I needed to find things I could improve.  I worked on three ways to be better than faster: catch the ball and keep the ball, look for the smart next move, and, if someone runs into you, make that person feel the pain.  Learning how to improve upon what genetics provided proved a good lesson for recess and good for high school sports and life in general, even the idea of physical collisions.
  • Know your role.  Somedays you lead and somedays you follow.  Every recess you have a place and role in what is happening.  The games gave each of the guys chances to step up and step aside.  Of course, being young boys, we sometimes did not do either gracefully or needed one of the guys to tell us.  Knowing when and how to lead and how to follow was part of being with the guys and we had plenty of opportunities to learn to be a role-player.
  • Leave it on the playground.  Because you win some and you lose some, it was important to leave the games of recess on the playground.  Miss Blaine did not care which guys won a softball game during the lunch recess when she called on kids to talk about the plot of a story in afternoon language arts class.  By the same token, the kid who put the hurt in your bruised shoulder sat two rows to your right and neither you nor he wanted anyone in class to know why he smiled, and you frowned.  It was best for everyone when what happened on the playground did not enter the classroom.  And there will be a recess tomorrow, Bruce!
  • Competition breeds respect and respect builds new friendships.  Some of the other guys lived in distant neighborhoods.  We did not see each other except at school.  Some lived in bigger and some in smaller houses than mine; that was a way of knowing something about a guy.  Bigger house guys had newer Chuck Taylor Converse shoes with good tread and the gym shoe tread for guys from smaller houses usually was worn off.  Tread mattered back then.  Recess, though, gave every group of guys an equal chance to shine.  While I wasn’t fast, I admired guys in other groups who were.  Some had better hands or better throwing arms.  After a while, I knew which of the other guys hit the ball harder or ran faster.  I also knew what I had to do to beat them, if I could, and when we each tried to do our best, I wanted to know them better.  They weren’t one of my guys, but they became some of my good friends. 
  • Games are games not life; know the difference.  Miss Phillips, our principal, watched us at play.  Although she looked like someone’s grandmother, she had a quick eye that twinkled when she talked with me.  “Nice catch”, she would say.  Nothing more; just enough to let me know that she was watching.  More importantly, she also said, “I saw your ITBS scores, and you did very well” and “Miss Knapp told me you held the door open for her when she had her hands full.  Being a good student and well-mannered won’t score runs but they win the games that matter”. 

  • Memories of the playground live forever.  It is not surprising that the first people I look for at our high school class reunions are the guys.  After elementary school, we went to the same junior high and high school.  After high school, we split and went separate ways.  Some to college, others into the military, and some into adult life.  Years passed and life happened.  Yet, when the Class of XXXX gets together, that old oppositional magnetism works again.  We find each other and talk always wanders back to the playground.  “Do you remember ….?, starts our first and last conversation. 

My elementary school has closed.  Across the city, school enrollments decreased over the years and the economics of public education regrouped fewer children into fewer school buildings.  My elementary school stands empty, windows dark and doors locked, but the four acres of playground are filled every good weather day with youth football, soccer, and softball.  Younger children climb the jungle gyms and gather for rope jumping on the asphalt.  A playground calls children to play and children will always answer that call.

As I watch, I see children still are learning some of life’s essential rules on the playgrounds and I wish them well.