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Friday, April 27, 2001
Great teachers are society's unacknowledged heroes. I'd believe that even if I hadn't fallen hopelessly in love with Mrs. Wein as she stood at the blackboard diagramming sentences for my fifth-grade class. The power of some teachers to enflame the mind has been obvious to me ever since.
Mrs. Wein made no secret of her affection for her best students. In those relatively innocent days before teachers were branded predators if they supplemented classroom praise with hugs, I was a prime recipient of her warm embraces. For elevating the cult of the teacher's pet to its highest level of obsequiousness, I received enough calumny and petty threats from my classmates to last a lifetime.
My fondest memories of that era revolve as much around the smell of Mrs. Wein's freshly shampooed hair as they do around the books she often read to us during the last hour of the school day. Story time always made the march to three o'clock speed along nicely.
By the time the bell rang, our heads were filled with classic and popular literature. If the bell caught her reading mid-sentence, Mrs. Wein's girlish laughter confirmed that she'd run out of time. Still, we were grateful even as we bolted out the door for yellow buses that would take us home to a full slate of late-afternoon cartoons.
I thought about my elementary school teachers while visiting two Pittsburgh schools this week.
On Wednesday, I visited two fifth-grade classes at the Shady Side Academy Junior School in Park Place. To say those kids were more advanced than I was at their age would be putting it mildly. Until a few days ago, I never imagined that 10-year-olds could discuss the Fugitive Slave Act and the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution without heavy coaching. But I saw it with my own eyes at racially diverse Shady Side. Every child's hand was in the air as the teacher threw out questions that I was grateful I wasn't being called on to answer.
During the lunch break, I asked several teachers whether what they were doing at an expensive private school could be replicated en masse. They all said: "Yes." Given enough parental enthusiasm, economic and moral support for teachers, smaller classes and a process for reassigning the 10 percent who regularly disrupt classrooms, public schools could "catch up" relatively quickly, they insisted.
I don't know about that, but the thought of such indiscriminate achievement is both scary and beautiful. Given how kids already think they know everything, how are we, their parents, going to fare once they actually do?
Yesterday morning, I read "The Brave Little Tailor" to fifth-graders at Woolslair School in Bloomfield. Those students fit a more traditional model of 10- and 11-year olds. Bright and attentive, they were eager to discuss the book's "hero," a sneaky commoner who cheated everyone he met.
The brave little tailor acquired his princess bride and half her father's kingdom through duplicity and lies. After manipulating ogres, bamboozling giants and exaggerating his credentials as a killer, the tailor traded his humble profession for a life of royalty. The kids appreciated the story, but they were appalled by its moral relativism. Their ambivalence led to a lively and thoughtful class discussion that was as impressive as the one at Shady Side.
Last month, I spent an afternoon at the Evergreen Elementary School in Monroeville. Recently, Evergreen was awarded a $250,000 Disney Learning Partnership grant, one of 18 schools in the country and the only school in Pennsylvania to have that honor.
Evergreen's "W2K: Writing for the Millennium" is a three-year project that places advanced writing at the heart of the elementary school curriculum. With 27 highly motivated teachers, Evergreen is a public school that feels like a private school the moment you walk through the door.
What struck me most about these three schools, and several others I've visited in recent months, is the devotion to education that the teachers displayed. Over the past year, I've worked with the University of Pittsburgh's National Writing Project, a group that collaborates with schools such as Evergreen by training teachers to be more effective ambassadors of learning in general and writing, in particular. So far, it's been one of the proudest associations of my life.
When I'm talking to these teachers, most of them younger than me, I think of Mrs. Wein and how she excited a class of often rowdy kids. By encouraging these teachers in my own small way, I hope I've honored Mrs. Wein a little bit.