Emergency Teacher Read online

  New teachers come into the profession having invested years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars with the vision of making a difference in the lives of young people. It is a crime when they are just thrown into a classroom with no training or support.

  Managing a Classroom

  The second important lesson to be learned from The Emergency Teacher is the importance of classroom management as opposed to discipline. Whether emergency certified teachers or graduates from the college of education, too few teachers grasp the critical difference. Therein lies the key to their success.

  In the beginning of her school year, Christina was typical of the millions of devoted and committed teachers who fret about their next day’s lessons. Each evening, she asked herself, “What am I going to teach tomorrow?” So, she planned what she would cover or what activity she would do in class the next day. She thought this was teaching because most teachers cover or do activities first, then they discipline when things go wrong—and when things did go wrong, Christina spent the next evening again fretting and wondering what she could do to get the students to pay attention to their lessons, and thereby have fewer behavior problems in the classroom. She asked that perennial but incorrect question: “What can I do to motivate my students?”— thinking that motivated students will be more attentive and better behaved. The next day, however, the cycle repeated itself, and Christina continued to cover and discipline.

  The problem, Christina later realized, was that she was not spending any time managing her classrooms. She was reacting to problems as they arose. So many teachers fall into this trap. If classroom management procedures were taught, almost all class discipline problems would disappear, and more time in the classroom could be spent on learning. The problem lies with teachers not knowing the difference between classroom management and classroom discipline.

  When you go shopping, you expect the store to be well managed. If it is not, you’re likely to say, “Does anyone around here know what they are doing? I could run this place better.” Shopping in a well-run store means you expect the place to have a pleasant ambiance conducive to shopping. The temperature is perfect, the aisles are clean, the merchandise is well organized, and the personnel are inviting.

  An effective shopkeeper does not manage the store by posting a sign outside the front door with the store’s policy telling you how you are to behave inside the store, then running around the store taking away privileges from customers who do not behave and giving perks to those who follow the rules. No restaurant, office, cruise ship, or church is managed in this manner; yet this is how some teachers “manage” their classrooms—with consequences and rewards.

  In the late fall, Christina read The First Days of School and began to understand the importance of managing a classroom, using the many techniques in the book to instill order. Until that point, Christina had been waiting until a problem arose and then condemning the infraction. For example, each time certain students wanted to throw away paper, they stood up, took a dramatic basketball shot, and bowed as the rest of the class cheered. Christina either admonished the student or pretended she didn’t see the infraction. However, after reading The First Days of School, she learned that the better solution was to have a procedure in place for throwing away garbage—and to teach that procedure and practice it. This strategy can apply to all areas of the classroom. Christina describes how her class turned around once she started implementing procedures and classroom management strategies:

  For a week I continued to devote all my energies to classroom management. Each morning we reviewed the class procedures and did exercises on them. We practiced lining up to leave for lunch. We practiced throwing away garbage. We ran drills on pencil sharpening and what to do if you had a question. One morning I devoted an hour to practicing passing back papers. My class didn’t turn around all of a sudden and completely, as in that movie Dangerous Minds when Michelle Pfeiffer teaches her students a karate kick and then suddenly they’re her angels. Nor was there one big meaningful moment when my students and I finally “got it,” as in Lean on Me . The spitballs returned the following day, in fact. But once I was consistent with teaching the procedures, the Rodolfos and the Ronnys left the dark side and joined my team.

  Such a dramatic turnaround in Christina’s class illustrates that with the right teaching strategies, and good support and training from the school administration, all teachers can succeed in any classroom.

  Conclusion

  Christina entered teaching not for the money, but for the dream—the dream of making a difference in the life of a child.

  Even though you don’t know the outcome of her story, we’ve given you enough hints to know that Christina experienced many feelings of frustration and despair. These emotions were not for herself, but for her students. She had failed them miserably—she felt. But Christina turned that experience into a book for other teachers to benefit from, and there is so much to learn from her experience.

  To the many teachers who relate to Christina’s journey, I have this advice:

  Stay steadfast in your dreams. Give each student your all, for you may never know if you’ve succeeded with that child. It may be years, even decades, later that one of your students will think back to you and recognize what you meant in his or her life. Eyes will wistfully close and silent thank-yous will be etched in the mind as that former student transforms into the better person you so diligently wanted all of your students to be.

  You have the capacity to touch the life of every child who sits in your classroom waiting for the bell to ring. Never lose that dream. It’s the reality all children deserve.

  1

  Julia de Burgos: A Short History

  It is a free school system, it knows no distinction of rich and poor . . . it throws open its doors and spreads the table of its bounty for all the children of the state. Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the equalizer of the conditions of men, the great balance wheel of the social machinery.

  —Horace Mann, Secretary of Education, Massachusetts, 1837—1848

  On a blustery November afternoon in 1905, in a working-class Philadelphia neighborhood, dignitaries rode trains into Broad Street Station to witness the opening of one of the first public high schools in the nation. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, then head of Princeton University, led a procession of bigwigs including Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker and the CEOs of railroad companies, transatlantic steamship concerns, and carpet mills—business luminaries of the great Iron Age—to the corner of Eighth and Lehigh avenues.

  Inside the auditorium of the new school, called the Northeast, distinguished guests took the podium in top hats and canes and declared the school a symbol of democracy, freedom, and equal opportunity, all distinctively American virtues. The major newspaper of the day splayed the event across the front page: A FREE HIGH SCHOOL FOR WORKING CLASS BOYS? This high school was headline news.

  “We want men of capacity who are able to turn their hands to anything. This capacity is one characteristic of real Americanism,” Woodrow Wilson said at the opening ceremony. “Benjamin Franklin was such a man as this, who would invent such practical things as an improved pump on the one hand and establish the Philadelphia Philosophical Society on the other. The distinct note of Americanism is fitness for anything—adaptability to the age, to its thought, its action and its utterance.”

  Designed by famed architect Lloyd Titus, the brand-new Northeast stood a full city block in length, a towering school of limestone and silver granite, with a black iron gate ringing the grounds and a battlemented center turret flanked by projecting gable ends that reached one hundred feet from the ground into the sky. The three-story structure had transom panels and gargoyles leaping from the cornices. Two stone lions guarded the front four steps leading up to the entranceway. The $400,000 construction cost was unprecedented at a time when most grammar schools were housed in churches, homes, and abandoned farmhouses. The school’s focus was vocational training. It had a large manual training department, with a forge room in the basement and a wood-turning room on the third floor. The principal, Dr. Andrew J. Morrison, made it known that each boy would have his own forge and anvil. Powering electricity through the building were two Corliss engines the design of which the boys were to study. The building dominated Lehigh Avenue like a medieval castle built in the imposing style of a traditional English boarding school.

  The idea of taxpayer-funded public schooling for the masses was largely unheard of. At the time, education—and the idea that all children ought to attend school—was a progressive, controversial concept, though its popularity was spreading. Among the earliest education proponents were Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann and former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. They argued that democracy would never succeed—and equal opportunity would never be realized—without free schools for all. However, throughout the 1800s their arguments fell on deaf ears. Even parents disagreed. They wanted children at home doing manual labor. In the 1800s, primary schooling, if it happened at all, had traditionally fallen to churches and parents. Informally organized groups of parents contributed to a teacher’s compensation, either by paying what amounted to a pittance or offering a gift, say, of food, like a bushel of wheat. Older and younger children were taught together. Most boys left to work on the farm or in factories by thirteen years of age. Only upper-class children benefited from trained tutors or religious leaders, and these students were then funneled into Ivy League universities.

  The industrial revolution would change that attitude. The Pennsylvania Assembly was one of the first states to create a Free-School Law, in 1834 and 1836, which became the basis of a statewide system of tax-supported grammar schools for young children. Throughout
the 1800s, other states followed, and eventually government-funded grammar schools became common.

  High schools, however, were still rare in 1905. Some of the first high schools were Boston English Classical School, started in 1821, and Philadelphia’s Central High School, which opened to a distinguished pool of male students in 1838.

  Nineteenth-century boys would need preparation to do more high-tech industrial jobs, and high schools made for perfect training centers. Philadelphia, a city that had been a “center of politics, religion, intellect, arts, and letters,” according to historians Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, was transforming itself into the “Workshop of the World,” or so said the city’s chamber of commerce. Philadelphia had become an industrial giant, dominant in steam locomotives, textiles, the railroad, and all things iron, steel, and coal. Transatlantic steamers charged down the Delaware River from Liverpool and Antwerp, only two miles from the Northeast school.

  Northeast Philadelphia was packed with so much industry that local neighborhoods took their nicknames accordingly: There was Brewery Town, a German section of Northeast Philadelphia packed with factories like the Schaefer Brewing Company, along with Gasoline Alley, a burgeoning transportation industry hub near Broad and Lehigh that began with carriages and wagons and moved on to Packards, Cadillacs, Fords, and Studebakers. Northeast Philadelphia was home to the largest textile industry in the world. Philadelphia produced more textiles than any other American city, employing 35 percent of the city’s workforce, with 7,100 separate companies, most of which were clustered within a few miles surrounding the Northeast Manual Training Center. Carpet manufacture was were another homegrown Philadelphia industry.

  Also headquartered within a mile of the soon-to-be neighborhood high school, Northeast Manual Training Center, were prominent companies such as Baldwin Works, which built one of the first American-made locomotives in the 1830s, and by 1884 had thirty-eight buildings and nineteen thousand employees; the Quaker Lace Company, with eighty looms spinning tablecloths and lace curtains; John Bromley and Sons, the oldest and largest carpet manufacturer in the country; and the Stetson Hat Company, which produced three million hats by the 1920s. With more than twenty buildings (including its own hospital), thirty acres of floor space, and thirty-five hundred employees, Stetson was the size of a small town.

  Immigrants, who doubled Philadelphia’s population from 500,000 in 1870 to 1,000,000 in 1920, lacked mechanical skills in a day when demand for such labor was surging. As the Philadelphia economy surged forward, the interests of educational proponents entwined with those of capitalists, and that made high school an appealing idea.

  From its first year, the Northeast Manual Training Center would enjoy decades of success as one of the nation’s most prestigious public high schools. Graduates like Herbert Max Abramson and Edgar E. Bailey grinned from yearbook photos, wearing ties and meticulously slicked-back hair. They listed their aspirations to be “A Harvard Man,” and to “Own a Railroad.” The school would host a number of dignitaries, including two U.S. presidents, Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth, Herbert Hoover, Amelia Earhart, and movie actress and World War II pinup Ann Sheridan. It would win scores of awards. Even as the concept of public high schools caught on in the 1930s and 1940s and enrollment became commonplace in America for both boys and girls, Northeast was still one of the most well-regarded high schools in the nation.

  Social change drastically affected Northeast and many urban high schools like it. The Northeast school was now required to serve all boys, rather than handpick the most talented. In the past, boys with limited ability went straight into the job market. Now they were going into the schools. Students ranged dramatically in ability and motivation. At the time, many thought this widening access to education was a horrible idea that would dilute the pool of the most talented. To handle the growing rolls, IQ tests were given, and boys were divided into low-IQ sections, called 9-A, and honors-type classes, in which they were pushed forward. Truancy accounted for 75 percent of the school’s troubles, and was attributed to the fact that boys who lacked interest in education, or were needed to work, were being forced into the schools, along with the sons and daughters of blacks who had migrated North from Alabama and the Carolinas.

  By 1950, it was readily apparent that Philadelphia’s heyday had come and was going. The Northeast alumni, a giant and tightly knit group of city businessmen with strong affection for their alma mater, felt their school, like most urban schools, was in decline. They began to meet, at first furtively, then publicly. Ironically, in 1951 the Northeast received the Francis Bellamy Award for school of the year. It would be the last year that the school received any national awards.

  In the fall of 1956, a rumor ran through the hallways of the Northeast: the school was moving. Northeast student Don Hackney, class of 1957, remembers a sinking feeling in his stomach as news bounced off the lockers. Principal Charles A. Young called all the boys to the auditorium.

  “Word was flying around that they were moving the school,” recalled Hackney almost forty years later. “We went to the auditorium, and the principal addressed us. We were respectful gentleman—the Men of the Northeast—so we wouldn’t have created any really volatile situation. We listened to the principal, but we were very upset. How could they do this? We didn’t want to move. They were going to take our trophies and all the things we’d worked so hard to win and put them in a new place?”

  It was true. The school’s powerful alumni had been meeting since 1952 to plan the school’s move. They had lobbied city officials and the board of education members, many of whom were Northeast alumni themselves. They gave two reasons for the move.

  First, they complained that the school at Eighth and Lehigh was old and deteriorating, and that a new building was needed. Second, they deemed the building overcrowded, with enrollment bursting and projected to increase. Students needed the space offered only in the suburbs, they said. They found a plot of land ten miles north. They used their powerful connections to make their voices heard.

  In truth, records show the school’s population was actually declining. What they didn’t mention in the public record was that the neighborhood was changing rapidly, and in the eyes of the Northeast alumni, for the worse. Old yearbooks show a steady increase in African American enrollment starting in the late 1940s. By the 1950s nearly half of the student body was black. They replaced students from white families who were moving to the suburbs.

  Records show the plan for a new building was hatched officially on March 11, 1953, when Frederick C. Fiechter, president of the Northeast Alumni Association, submitted a proposal to the school board. In May 1953, the new site was purchased for $500,000. One year later, the school board authorized $6 million for the new forty-three-acre Northeast school. At the time, $6 million was considered an extravagant amount of money for a new building. Construction began at Cottman and Algon.

  The alumni had cited the school’s deteriorating condition in arguing for a new building. However, after the alumni secured the new building, the city voted to keep the old Northeast School open anyway. The school left behind would not close; it would be renamed Thomas Edison High School, and it would serve the mostly black neighborhood. It was a fifty-year-old structure in desperate need of repair, but almost all the money would go to the new school.

  William H. Loesche, chair of the school board’s business committee, was a lone voice at a 1954 school board meeting when he called the new building a “luxury.” “We should possibly be spending this money on replacing and repairing some of our older buildings in the city,” Loesche noted in the Bulletin. The article went on to say: “But other members overrode his objections.”

  The physical moving of a school is, in fact, not that unusual. Northeast traces its history back to a Girard Street location, in the 1880s, when it was an annex to Central High School, a school that had also moved several times as late as 1938. However, when a school moves, it usually brings its students with it. Under school district policy, students from the Eighth and Lehigh neighborhood were too far away to be allowed to attend the new Northeast building. The new school was sectioned off for its new neighbors—white residents who had fled the inner city for the suburbs.