Becoming a Teacher IV

In my 50s and 60s pieces I wrote about my struggles as a student and so I won’t repeat it all again. Let it suffice to say I struggled as an elementary student and certainly wasn’t a stellar high school student either. It wasn’t until my junior year in college that things began to fit together.

Many experts believe that the biggest influence on the way teachers teach is how they were taught as students. I would tend to agree with that. If they felt they were really successful in school, teachers tend to teach like their teachers did. On the other hand, if they struggled they might choose methods they think might be more effective. I would be in the latter group.

I was fortunate to student teach with a teacher who was open minded and encouraged innovation. She modeled effective instruction for me everyday and was a big influence on me. I adapted many of her ideas and techniques for my own classroom.

Marsha Cammack also heavily influenced me. Marsha taught special education in the room right next to mine. She was an incredibly positive person and had a big impact on me as well as her students. Marsha and I were doing mainstreaming (now called inclusion) of her students in my regular education classroom in 1971. We were pioneers for what is now commonplace. One unintended side effect of the success we were having with special needs kids was that for the rest of my teaching career I was the person that got the special needs kids and the discipline problems when they got to my grade level.

John Becker, the person who hired me and was the principal of the building, also influenced me. John was a progressive educator who was open to new ideas. He had a reputation as an outstanding teacher, himself, and that added credibility. He encouraged me and had confidence in my skills as a teacher.

I would have to say that my own daughters had a big impression on me, too, as I formulated my ideas about learning. They had some of the same struggles I had at their age and I could see what worked for them and what didn’t. I even experimented on them sometimes, probably more with Heather because my thoughts were not as formulated when Angie was younger. I tried different things to immerse them in language as they grew up. I watched as they had different kinds of teachers and could easily see where they prospered.

In the spring of 1972 I took Supervision of Primary Grade Reading at the urging of some colleagues in the building. I really had no business doing it in my first year but I did. It was a University of Iowa extension course offered in Mt. Pleasant. Although I only got a “C” in the course I did get a lot out of it and it bolstered my emerging beliefs about learning. The teacher wrote me a note at the end of the course saying she couldn’t recommend me for graduate school. I hadn’t asked her to? Her comment haunted me for years.