Neutralize Negative Teacher Stories; Substitute Stories about Chalkboard Champions!

Is this an experience you have had? You meet someone new, perhaps at a party or at the local watering hole, they find out you are a teacher, and they promptly launch into a half-hour diatribe of the worst teacher they ever had in their life. The teacher made them read aloud in class, the teacher lost their homework and made them do the assignment over, the teacher gave them an F and they couldn't graduate with their class. You politely listen to yet another tale of woe, mentally counting how many such depressing stories you have listened to throughout your career, while silently promising to yourself that you will never tell another person on this planet that you are an educator.

Here is a strategy I have developed to neutralize the demoralizing effects of such an encounter. First, I listen to everything the person has to say, making the appropriate sympathetic noises and facial expressions. Then, at the conclusion of their story, I ask them this question: "And who was the best teacher you ever had?" You can almost see the Rolodex-flip through their file of schoolhouse memories until they finally find at least one teacher they can speak about positively. Using this strategy shifts the feeling tone of the conversation, it neutralizes the negativity, and anyway it's only fair that if through social convention you're forced to listen to a troubling story, you should also get the opportunity to enjoy an uplifting one.

 

In my long career I have endured many a doleful worst-teacher story, and that is one reason why I wanted to write a book about great teachers. I love to tell stories about remarkable educators. There are so many fascinating and inspiring stories to tell! To read about twelve of the greatest and most moving teacher stories I have personally discovered, look on amazon.com for my book,  Chalkboard Champions. 

Tuesdays with Morrie: A Story About a Man and His College Professor

Tuesdays with Morrie is the true story of sports writer Mitch Albom and Morrie Schwartz, Albom's favorite professor from his college days at Brandeis University. During Albom's undergraduate years, he and Schwartz formed a warm friendship that went beyond the typical student-teacher relationship. After graduation, although Albom vowed to keep in touch with his favorite professor, he failed to do so.

Years later, while flipping channels on the television one evening, Albom stumbled across the introduction to Nightline and heard the name Morrie Schwartz. His long-forgotten professor was the subject of an interview, during which Albom learned that his former mentor was dying of ALA, Lou Gehrig's disease. Albom decided to get in touch with his former professor.

Albom began to visit Schwartz regularly, and Tuesdays with Morrie is a journal of the conversations the two men shared until Schwartz passed away 14 weeks later. The book, far from being morbid, details the lessons Schwartz provides in his last class:  How to die with dignity and without fear. Great stuff.

You can find this inspirational book at amazon at the following link: Tuesdays with Morrie.

Sports in Literature, Edited by Bruce Emra

A really great book for physical education teachers, coaches, and avid sports enthusiasts is a volume entitled Sports in Literature: Experiencing Literature Through Stories, Poems, and Nonfiction About Sports, edited by Bruce Emra. This collection of stories, essays, poems, and biograhical sketches presents athletic heroes and villains, the famous and the obscure, and their triumphs and defeats, as seen through the eyes of contemporary and classic writers. Each selection included in the volume explores both the dramatic and the personal aspects of sports, and the stories reveal sports as a metaphor for the human experience. Terrific as a read for yourself, and equally great to offer to students as leisure reading. Each selection is followed by several comprehension questions and a thought-provoking essay assignment, which makes this book perfect for classroom assignments, make-up work for absences, bad-weather work, or extra credit opportunities. This wonderful book can be ordered from amazon at this link: Sports in Literature.

Tundra Teacher: an Alaskan Teacher and Basketball Coach Tells His Story

Anyone intrigued by the wilderness of Alaska and the challenges teachers face there would find Tundra Teacher: A Memoir by John Foley a fascinating read. In the remote Eskimo village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, Foley becomes immersed in the local Yup'ik culture, helping to haul in a whale, keeping an eye out for polar bears on his way to school, and discovering how important it is to earn respect on the basketball court. Later, Foley transfers to the Athabascan Indian village of Tetlin on the Alaska Highway near the U.S. border with Canada, where he teaches and coaches basketball. The author writes candidly but with wry, mellow humor about village life, students, teachers, women, and relationships. You can find Tundra Teacher on amazon.com.

They'll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle

When President Lyndon B. Johnson launched his war on poverty in the 1960's, Huey Perry, a young local history teacher, was selected to be the director of the program in Mingo County in southern West Virginia.  Mingo County was known for its violent labor movements, corrupt government, and the infamous Hatfield-McCoy rivalry. Huey encouraged his poverty-stricken neighbors to challenge these conditions by promoting self-sufficiency, demanding improvements in school programs, establishing a grocery store to bypass inflated prices, and exposing election fraud. Local authority responded to Huey's revolution with a hostile backlash that eventually led to an investigation by the FBI. Huey's book, They’ll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle, tells a tale of the triumphs and failures of Johnson's war on poverty, describing in detail why and how a local government that is supposed to work for the public’s welfare cuts off a project intended to achieve social reform. You can find this fascinating read on amazon.com at the following link: They'll Cut Off Your Project.

Marzano's Classroom Instruction that Works

I usually write about biographical books about remarkable teachers, but I feel I just have to share this really great resource about pedagogy with everyone. This book, Classroom Instruction that Works by Robert Marzano, provides nine strategies for improving the quality of instruction in any classroom. Many of these strategies are probably ones that you are using already, but this volume explains in easy terms why the strategy works. The strategies that may be new to the reader would be easy to incorporate into any teacher's lesson plans. All of them are easy to justify to an administrator who may be observing your classroom. At my school, the staff as a whole made a concerted effort to incorporate these strategies as often as possible, and we saw our test scores skyrocket. You can find this very useful and very reasonably priced book at amazon through the following link: Classroom Instruction that Works.

 

Etta Schureman Jones: The Teacher who Became a Prisoner of War

Etta Schureman was over forty years old when she and her sister ventured into Alaska Territory to teach Native Eskimos in primitive rural schools. After one year, the sister returned to the Lower 48, but Etta, who had met the love of her life and married, settled permanently in Alaska. Eighteen years later, Etta and her husband, Foster Jones, were working together  in the remote Aleutian island of Attu when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Empire of Japan on December, 7, 1941, "a day that will live in infamy." They were slated to be evacuated by the U.S. Navy when the island was invaded by Japanese troops. Although the couple were in their sixties, they killed Foster and removed Etta to an internment camp in Japan, where she was incarcerated with a small group of Australian nurses who were also prisoners of war. The Attuan natives, about three dozen of them, were also taken to Japan, with the apparent intention of assimilating them into the Japanese population. Although the surviving Attuans were repatriated after the war, Etta never saw her students or their families again. Etta's intriguing tale of survival is told brilliantly by Mary Breu in her book Last Letters from Attu: The True Story of Etta Jones: Alaska Pioneer and Japanese POW. A fascinating read, to be sure. You can find this book at amazon at the following link: Last Letters from Attu. I have also included a chapter about this fascinating teacher in the book I am currenlty writing, Chalkboard Heroes.