Email
Print
Feed
We Got Trouble Right Here |
Tweet |
By Thomas K. Arnold
Louise Washington got into teaching 28 years ago because of the children. And today, teaching kindergarten at Hawthorn Elementary School in Clairemont, she finds it’s still the children who keep her going. But at the same time, getting through to children—and increasingly, to their parents—is now one of her biggest challenges.“Values have changed,” she says. “We have working parents, we have one-parent families, and we have children who are getting lost in the mix. I’m very back to basics—flush and wash, please and thank you, do your work and keep your hands to yourself. When I first started teaching, that was taken for granted; now, I’m teaching it.”
Washington says many of her students are shuttled off to children’s centers at 6 a.m. and don’t see their parents, or parent, until 6 p.m. “Kids are stressed,” she says. “They don’t see Mommy or Daddy enough. When Daddy is working one shift, or not there, or Mommy is working one shift, or not there, there’s no quality time, and that hurts. It makes a difference in the way kids act.
“I didn’t make friends with one parent the other day because she came in and said she was working two jobs. My suggestion was that she work three and make her children her third job. She was not very happy with me.”
Washington isn’t happy with some parents, either. She says she routinely encounters parents who are indifferent to the point where homework is returned undone, and the response from parents is a simple shrug.
“I expect parents to do homework with children—and my homework, at this point, is family involvement,” Washington says. “And when I don’t get the homework back, I have this insane habit of mentioning it to parents. Sometimes people want to face that reality, and sometimes they don’t. There is only so much I can do with your child, and if I don’t get the support at home, things don’t get done.”
Karen Beers, who teaches second grade at Anza Elementary School in El Cajon and entered the profession just last August, agrees. “I have a few parents who are very supportive, who come in and help, but there are also some who have very difficult schedules, single parents who work 10 hours a day,” Beers says. “Their children go to the YMCA before school and after school, and they don’t come home until 6:30 at night. They feed them dinner, and that’s it—they’re exhausted, their children are exhausted, and they don’t have the time or the energy to do things with their kids.”
Beers says she sympathizes with the stressed-out single parents but maintains that’s no excuse. “They need to make the time, somehow,” she says. “They have to know what their children are learning, even if they only ask them during dinner what they’ve learned that day, what was the hardest thing, and what they’ve mastered. I only have their children for six hours a day, and it’s important the parents are there, reinforcing what’s taught in the classroom.”
Ah, yes, the joys of teaching. The rewards are many and Rockwellian in nature—the apple on the desk, the hand-drawn birthday card, the phone call, years later, from a successful business leader who credits it all to Mrs. Dooley. But teaching can also be very frustrating, and in today’s environment of broken homes and dysfunctional family life, the heartbreaks can be daunting.
“When I first started teaching, I felt I could really reach the students,” says Cheri Dixon, a 31-year veteran who currently teaches sixth-grade language arts, social studies and drama at Jefferson Middle School in Oceanside. “Now, I feel like I’m a mother, a father, a counselor and a disciplinarian. There are so many students coming from broken homes, so many kids with so many more problems.
“Just the other day, a little boy came in and told me his mom and dad were in the middle of a divorce and were always fighting. He said he couldn’t wait to get away and come to school, where he could be in a calmer, quieter atmosphere.”
Lawrence Aiken, a bilingual education teacher who commands a third-grade class at King Elementary School in Logan Heights, says developing just the right approach to deal with a classroom of individuals is a formidable task. “You’re not going to change the neighborhood, nor change the fact that kids have challenges that can be really tough,” he says. “You have to go the extra mile on a daily—or even a minute-by-minute—basis, depending on the circumstance, and dig deep within yourself.
“There’s an African-American kid at our school, a first- or second-grader, and he has a lot of anger. He’s always lashing out at his friends, and the teacher just doesn’t know what to do with this kid. The other day, he was almost fighting, both arms going, ready to hit, really angry, and he gets like this a lot. You can make a big deal out of this and say this kid needs to be restrained, get his parents down here and take them all to the counseling center, but I tried something else.
“I went up to the kid and I just hugged him; I put my arms around him and said, ‘Everything is cool, everybody here really loves you, everybody you see around here is your friend, they care about you. There’s absolutely no problem right now. You just feel angry; you’ll get over it. And as soon as you do, you can get back to your class and be with your friends.’
“In this case, the kid calmed down. Now, I put myself in jeopardy in this situation, because we’ve got to be real careful about male teachers hugging kids, but I took the risk and it paid off. This kid could just as easily have ended up in the counseling center, pulled away from his friends and not able to work through his anger.”
Crumbling home lives and disinterested parents are only a few of the many frustrations and challenges San Diego teachers face each day as they attempt to educate our youth.
“It can almost be a 24-hour-a-day job,” says Norma Fox, a 30-year veteran who now teaches Spanish at University City High School. “When you go home at night, you have all your grading to do, and then you need to make your phone calls to parents and prepare for the next day. You don’t get a lot of free time to relax.”
“Most teachers are in their classrooms by 7 and even come in on Saturdays, and that doesn’t include the time they spend at home, grading papers and preparing for everything,” adds 30-year veteran Betty Bond, who teaches third grade at Hope Elementary School in Carlsbad.
The money crunch schools are facing makes things even tougher. Education budgets, already bare-bones in the eyes of teachers, are in for another round of drastic cuts. Governor Gray Davis, dealing with a record state budget shortfall, in January announced plans to slash $1.7 billion from education spending. Critics fear this will lead to even more overcrowding in classrooms, a problem compounded by growing cultural and ethnic diversity.
Nancy Adams, who teaches a fourth/fifth-grade combination class at Anza Elementary in East County, says her school is 40 percent Latino but also has a sizable Arabic population. (El Cajon is home to the country’s second-largest community of Chaldeans, who are Christian.)
“In the upper grades in California, we are up to 34 students in a classroom,” Adams says. “And when you are one teacher and you have 34 students and three or four languages and all different learning abilities, it’s difficult. I have kids who have been here two weeks and have never read, written or even spoken English before. Sometimes math is the universal language, and I try to grab onto that as a commonality, but then there are some students who have no school experience at all, so I don’t have that, either.”
Adams says it’s a delicate balance, reaching out to each student yet not reducing the level of instruction to the lowest common denominator. “If I have a Hispanic child who doesn’t speak any English, I want to spend as much one-on-one time as I can helping him, but I can’t do so at the expense of the other children,” she says. “So I do the best I can—maybe I’ll put him next to a student who speaks his language and can make him feel comfortable, and go from there.”
Jefferson Middle’s Cheri Dixon says overcrowded classrooms are just one manifestation of the growing money crunch. “When I first started teaching, we got to go on field trips, and we had many more hands-on experiences for kids,” she says. “For example, if I was teaching a unit on oceanography, we were able to hop on the bus and go to Scripps Aquarium or SeaWorld, and the kids could touch the animals in the tidepools and really learn about how they live. Now, field trips simply aren’t in the budget; we don’t have the money to go anywhere.”
There are other frustrations and challenges. The rash of school shootings around the country in recent years—two of them in San Diego County—has made security a prime concern.
“We have no tolerance for guns and threats,” says Anza Elementary’s Nancy Adams. “If a kid mentions he’s going to shoot somebody, he’s going to be suspended, and his parents will be brought in.”
Adams says Anza is one of a growing number of schools around the county with a fence around it padlocked after school hours, and while she welcomes the peace of mind the fence provides against vandalization, she adds, “I do feel bad about it, because in our area of town there’s no place for the kids to play. Most of our kids live in apartment buildings, so there are no yards, and there are no parks in downtown El Cajon, either. It’s a sad situation when kids can’t play at school anymore—the way they did when I was young—but that’s the reality.”
Teachers in the San Diego Unified School District say the political turmoil that has engulfed the district since Alan Bersin took over as superintendent four years ago also makes their jobs more difficult.
“The atmosphere affects everybody, and it just makes people feel less professional,” says University City High School’s Fox. “In our faculty meetings, we used to discuss what’s best for the students and what’s best for the school; now, we are bombarded with little lessons on teaching strategies and policies, often on videotape. Sometimes there are some good ideas, but most of it is really unrelated.”
Louise Washington agrees. “Last November, when we had a lot of teacher training, I don’t think we were in our classrooms for more than half of the normal 20 days,” she says. “The attitude is that we have to be trained, we don’t know anything. And when you go in and have to listen to all those things for other grades—and my focus, of course, is on kindergarten—it’s a waste of my time.”
Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »
