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By Tom Blair
What’s really going on in classrooms? This teacher of the year may not be typical, but all teachers share common experiences, hopes and disappointments. And San Diego city schools’ middle-school teacher of the year Maureen Nolan says things are better than we may think.The battle being waged over reform in our city schools has focused San Diegans as never before on issues of education in our region. That cannot be a bad thing. But the Blueprint for Student Success visited on the San Diego Unified School District by Superintendent Alan Bersin has also served to cloud some of the more basic issues.
Each school day during the year, some 7,000 teachers show up in classrooms across the city, say good morning to more than 140,000 students and begin the daunting task of sharing whatever knowledge and wisdom they have acquired with those children open to learning.
Maureen Nolan is one of the 7,000. Last year, she was named middle-school teacher of the year in San Diego. It’s the latest in a long string of accolades for Nolan, a math teacher at Marston Middle School in Clairemont. Twice in six years at Marston, she’s been the school’s top teacher. Three times during her 20 years at Garvey School in the Los Angeles area, she was chosen that school’s teacher of the year. In 1990, she was named Garvey School District teacher of the year.
Her list of professional accomplishments, her long record of continuing education and tributes from other professionals over a 27-year career all give testament to her talent as a teacher and her devotion to her profession.
If Maureen Nolan is the model teacher, then it should be a good idea to listen to her. Here’s what she has to say to all of us:
Relax. Despite a public perception to the contrary, the state of the teaching profession is good—and our students are in good hands. In spite of the furor of what Nolan calls “the latest reform movement,” teachers are teaching, and students are learning.
“Right now,” Nolan says, “I think the public doesn’t trust us [teachers] to know what we’re doing. I want them to know that most of us really do know what we’re doing. And on a day-in, day-out basis, we are reading their children, and reacting to their children, and modifying what we’re doing to suit the needs of the class in front of us.
“There was an interesting study done years ago about parents’ satisfaction with schools,” she says. “And what it showed was that, in my opinion, parents were following the headlines. The headlines said schools were in trouble, students weren’t achieving—oh, my gosh, our future looks dim. And parents were saying, yes, they were worried about schools.
“But when parents were then asked about their own schools, the ratings were something like 85 percent satisfaction. What you see is the parent looking at the local school and liking what’s going on—but then hearing this rhetoric about how bad things are and thinking, ‘Well, yes, there must be some problem, but it’s not at my school.’”
As for students today, Nolan sees a cup half-full. “There are so many things they don’t know that we took for granted 20 years ago,” she says. “We assumed they’d know their times tables—not every kid did, but that was the assumption. But as schools broadened away from the basics—reading, writing and arithmetic—obviously, when you put your time into something, the results will show it. Right now, we’re putting our time into language development, because we have so many second-language kids. And that means something else is going to lose out. So the students I’m seeing don’t know as much math as the students a few years ago.”
In general, Nolan says, students are sharper than they were 20 years ago—although not necessarily better prepared. “They’re more worldly,” she says. “I meet fewer ‘children’ in sixth or seventh grade than I used to meet. They’re no longer children. They’re consumed with ideas beyond their age. So I think they’re much bigger with social issues. They know a lot about things that don’t necessarily lead them forward in the academic arena, but that doesn’t mean they’re not better prepared to deal with life. They’re more street smart.
“I also see a gap,” Nolan says. “The students who are using the Internet are technologically comfortable. This generation is going to have no problem with computers. So that’s a positive. Of course, we all know that with experience and exposure come a lot of things we’d rather kids not have to worry about. They’re not spending as much time reading children’s books or adolescent literature. They’re spending more time exploring the real world. For better or worse.”
One of the more serious obstacles to teaching today, Nolan says, is a lack of respect for teachers—from students and, sometimes, parents. “We need the students’ respect,” she says. “If a student isn’t focused on you and what you’re presenting to them—if the student is not programmed to respond to what you’re asking them to do, the day is spent fighting and choreographing student behavior rather than educating.
“And it starts at home. There are clearly students who are ready to learn; every day when they come to school, they are ready to learn from me. And there are clearly students for whom that is the last thing on their minds.
“Now, certainly, parents can’t control every moment and every emotion that a student has. But they can set the tone,” Nolan says. “That you don’t raise your voice to a teacher. That you follow, respectfully, whatever instruction is given. It can take me, some days, 10 minutes to get all 30 students to simply sit down and take out a piece of paper.
“I’m dealing with the parent through the child, and it’s a very inefficient way to communicate,” she says. “Sometimes, what the kids are sharing with their parents is that I’m mean; I’m an ogre; I’m a whitey—whatever they might be hearing, they’re hearing it through a child’s perspective. Once I talk directly to the parent, usually within two minutes we’re on the same page. We both want kids to be successful. That would be my best advice to every teacher: Pick up the phone, or set up an appointment, and meet with the parents early on—with any child who’s out of line.
“Occasionally—and interestingly, it’s sometimes with the well-educated parents—they’ll dismiss the problem as insignificant. Not worth their time to come in to resolve. And that has caught me off guard—that parents can think that way. But that’s rare.”
Sometimes, Nolan says, problems with parents are a matter of culture—differences in the way they interact with schools. But that, too, is a matter of education, she says.
“I love the fact that we have parent-education classes at a lot of schools, where parents come in and learn how to help their children study,” she says. “Because it’s often a whole different frame of mind. In the typical Anglo household, the kid comes home, it’s ‘Take out your homework, show it to me, sit down at the kitchen table—oops, you made a mistake there, let’s change that.’ That propels students forward. The one-on-one at home, on the kitchen table, is priceless.
“But I don’t want to leave the impression it’s all cultural,” she says. “A lot of it stems from your own experience. If you grew up with parents who were monitoring your homework, then you tend to do that with your children. We have an awful lot of parents who didn’t stay in school, for financial reasons, and they just don’t have that kind of experience. What the parent-education workshops tell them is: You are capable of monitoring your children’s behavior.”
Despite the increasing pressures on teachers today—including those precipitated by the San Diego district’s reforms—Nolan believes most teachers are dedicated to their profession and committed to teaching. She certainly is.
“Occasionally,” she says, “I’m nagged by my mother’s advice: Never do anything for more than 20 years. Move on, do something else with your life. So I have moments when I think: Is it too late for me to create a new me? But for the most part, I’m happy to get up every day. I love going to work. I love the ‘Good morning, Miss Nolan.’ I love the hugs before we go on vacation. It’s an amazing relationship the kids share with you that I can’t see getting anywhere else in the world.”
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