When the day after Labor Day arrived in 1950 I was
ready for my first day of teaching. I had decorated the classroom. I made sure
the desks, which were bolted down to 2 x 4 runners, were all perfectly aligned.
I had carefully prepared a set of watercolors and brushes for each student. I
had tried to memorize the names of the 32 students in my room in grades 4-8. I
had bought extra gel for the clumsy purple ditto copy trays. Of
course, I was somewhat nervous but also quite confident. After all I myself had
gone to grades 1-8 in a two room Lutheran school. I had had a full year of
internship teaching grades 1-4. I was excited and ready to roll.
I loved teaching and I loved my kids and I think I
did a fair job. Now some 65 years later I remember especially one teaching
activity that went very well. Tracy was a town of about 10,000. We did a total
classroom project across grade levels. Students got themselves into self-selected groups
with each group choosing one aspect of the city to study and report on. The
groups included: making a map of the city, meeting with the city’s Director of
Recreation, meeting with the Chief of Police, going to the big tomato
processing plant, interviewing the editor of the town weekly newspaper etc.
Each group did its homework and then reported to the entire classroom. As
various city leaders heard how “those kids” from St. Paul’s Lutheran school had
interviewed their colleagues there was a very positive reaction.
I used an organization design for teaching that I had
learned from my father. Religion, social studies, music, and art were
taught to all 5 grades at once. However, reading and arithmetic were
taught grade by grade. I had the kids from each grade come to the front of the
room, gather around a table and we studied and learned together. Meanwhile the
other classes were busy with workbook assignments. We focused on the basics and
our kids really excelled way above state and local norms on standardized tests.
I think I was reasonably effective but I never did consider classroom
discipline to be one of my strengths. We faced the realty of widely different
student abilities with not too much trouble Since we were multi-grade the
brighter kids could join the grade above them for specific work and the weaker
students could get reviews by listening to the lessons taught in the grades
below them.
The 1950’s were days when the whole paradigm of
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod schools was changing and my school represented
the new realities. We made the switch from when all children in the school
were Lutheran to an enrollment predominantly non-Lutheran. We moved from
children paying no tuition and all costs being covered by funds from the
congregation budget to charging tuition and receiving very little (if any) congregational financial
support. My memory is that our tuition was $10.00 a month.
Fund raising was a pretty new thing for Lutheran
schools then but it was central to our financial viability. Thus at least once
a month I was joined by boy students as we used a borrowed truck and went
throughout the city collecting newspaper which, of course, we sold. My other
fund-raising methods were not at all creative and not very effective. I now
often wish I could go back to those days and do a better job.
When I compare my experience with my colleagues of
today I see great differences. All my students were white and native speakers
of English. Pick-up permission slips from feuding divorced parents was unheard
of. Peanut butter allergies were not yet on the agenda. Cell phones and
computers were distant dreams. It was usually assumed that if a student and a
teacher had a conflict the teacher was in the right. Mandatory state tests were
nowhere on the horizon for non-public schools. “Titles” were names of books
and unrelated to government programs or requirements. LGBTQ were random letters
of the alphabet.
I was accountable to a School Board made up of
congregation members (all male). They were very supportive (though I had to agree
to disagree with the chairman of the Board who refused to have his 3 children
in our school vaccinated against any disease).
Naturally, I have some regrets: I had a few kids
with some relatively serious behavior/adjustment problems and I wish I had been
more helpful. I did not teach enough creative writing. I wish I had
challenged the brightest kids more. As a principal I was seriously lacking in
providing support to my teaching colleagues. During my years at Tracy I had two
first-year teachers. I do not think I visited their classrooms for even one
day. I did not seek classroom aides for them. The best I can say for myself
(and that is not much) is that I was available to them and stood behind them
when they had any issue with an unhappy parent.
The boys in the school would probably be in
agreement that the best thing that Teacher Kieschnick brought to their school
was that (for the first time) the school basketball team had uniforms and was
actually allowed to play a game or two against another school team. They
and their female classmates would also applaud that sometimes when we got into
really close soccer games recess time just kept getting extended until one team
of the other scored the winning goal. And I do hope and pray that every one of
my former students went away convinced (and still believing today) that God
loves them.
As it turned out, I ended up spending only 6 years
of my over 50 years as an educator being a classroom teacher. I enjoyed it and
to this day have nothing but the greatest respect for the “ordinary” classroom
teachers who just happen to be among the most important change agents on this
planet.
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