To the Editor:
I read the Review & Opinion regarding public schools in this county. My long experience tells me that something really stinks!
I’m a retired educator. I taught elementary school for 38 years.
My job was to teach the so-called ‘unteachable elementary school children’ math skills. I was enormously successful. Almost all of my students, and there were hundreds of them, were from one-parent families, which were getting public assistance while living in high-rise public housing. Almost all were of minority background. For some, English was a second language that many hadn’t yet mastered.
When faced with the above, I’ve watched new teachers right out of college simply walk out of school before lunch and never return on their first day of teaching. These people wanted the job but didn’t have the knowledge or the slightest idea regarding how to do the job. What’s wrong with this picture?
I’ve found that children, without any regard whatsoever to their race or background, want to learn and are super excited when they first realize that they can do it… whatever it is!
In the early 1970s there wasn’t any computer assisted instruction in most schools. This was because teachers didn’t know how to use a computer to help a child learn. I convinced the school administration to allow three computer terminals to be placed in my math lab. Soon after this, we were allowed to purchase several Apple IIe computer terminals. As soon as the word spread in the school, I had a line of children and parents asking for computer time to learn how to use a computer and also learn via a computer program.
I found the Millikan Math Computer Series is an incredible teaching tool for learning basic math skills in all four processes. I literally had to pry children off the computer terminal to allow others to get an opportunity to learn!
I also taught reading skills through the use of a very simple word-processing computer program: ’The Bank Street Writer’ produced by the Bank Street College of Education. This program had a spelling correction component that pointed out and corrected misspelled words and the children soon learned how to check their own work! If you write a sentence, you can read it! That’s the beginning of successfully learning to read… through writing.
Most of my students were from an African American background, so it made sense to bring an amazing African American and internationally successful children’s author into this picture. Walter Dean Myers had written and published over 100 stories for children and he lived in Jersey City where I taught. I invited him to my lab to see the kids at work. He volunteered to come once a month to show the kids what he was working on and also to read and comment on their work. This alone made the lab a place that everyone wanted to be.
The result is that we encouraged the children to write their stories using the ‘Bank Street Writer’ and we sent the printed copy out to children’s magazines for possible publication. Lightning struck and one of our fourth graders’ stories was published in a national children’s magazine.
Now the line outside my lab waiting for terminal time got longer!
Never underestimate the new ideas of teachers and their students! At that time, whoever heard of third and fourth graders writing their thoughts/stories on a computer terminal and becoming authors who might one day write for a newspaper or magazine?
As to the result of standardized testing, my school principal received a letter from the state Department of Education complaining that our test scores on the Metropolitan Achievement Test were so high that there was no other explanation that they could come up with except that somehow we cheated!
Her comment, which she sent back to the state, was simply, “Bull—-! I watched every step of this training/teaching operation and I approved it, and I also know how these scores were achieved… the kids learned! What a surprise! Come visit and we’ll show you how we did this!”
We never heard from them again!
JAMES AUMACK
Cape May
