Attachments to Those Who Can

By John R. Henderson

The year is 1956. As the tires on the familys ancient GMC pickup bang out a rhythm on the dirt road to his northeast Missouri farm, fifteen-year-old John Henderson surprises his father by telling him he wants to be a teachera decision that eventually leads him from a small farming community in Missouri to Arizona, where he begins his lifes calling.

Through an engaging format of attachments and emails, Henderson traces the evolution of his thirty-eight-year teaching career from its beginnings at Arizona State University as a graduate teaching assistant. Henderson chronicles his journey from an elite private boarding school in Scottsdale, Arizona, to a small religious-based collegeand concludes with his thirty-four year stint with the Maricopa Community College District in Phoenix.

By observing the joys, turmoil, agonies, and even the mundane day-to-day moments of a teacher, Henderson offers a personal yet practical sociological exploration of classroom culture that provides both contemporary students and novice educators with a real-life glimpse into the challenging and rewarding world of classroom teaching.

Essential reading for prospective teachers.
Eugene Munger, author of Momma, Dont Ya Want Me to Learn Nothin'?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450237628

John R. Henderson

John Henderson was born and raised in Monroe City, Missouri. After serving thirty-eight years as a sociology professor in Arizona, he retired to Flagstaff, Arizona, where he lives with his wife, Cheryl. He actively enjoys music, outdoor photography, and spending time with his six grandchildren, whom he hopes are considering careers in education.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

First, I wish to thank all the authors of the books, articles, and commentary that are cited in the following pages. Their thoughtful insight about the teaching profession has continued to motivate me in my writing endeavors and to give me hope about an improved future for the classroom experiences of students and teachers everywhere.

Second, my gratitude to my teaching colleagues—those retired and those still engaged in the classroom battle. In particular, my thoughts are with those who shared their professional expertise with me in the classrooms, the committee and faculty meetings, even the pubs, where we debriefed our weekly labors. To Ron, Bill, Freddie, Michael, Mary, Roz, Gary, Charles, Jeff, Bernie, Ava, Ruth, Tom, Francine, and the others: thank you for your contributions.

A special thanks to Karen Bittmann for her assistance in developing this work, both in its content and its format. She was an invaluable guide and resource as a former teacher of English and a former editor. Her toleration of my foibles and encouragement of my efforts was incredible. I am indeed fortunate to have a friend like her.

To my wife, Cheryl, who amazingly tolerated my monomaniacal moments while I was engrossed in the writing process: my love and appreciation. Your prodding was an essential catalyst for seeing this project through to its conclusion.

To my former mentors, my teachers and professors, who gave me the motivation to learn and to teach: we need so many more just like you. To Ethel, Goldie, Rice, Chester, Thomas, Billie, Herschel, and the others: you are remembered.

To my new mentors at iUniverse, particularly Kathi Wittkamper, editorial consultant, Jade Council, my publishing service associate, and Jane Lusaka, my content editor: thank you for helping to make my education an ongoing experience, even after sixty-nine years. Jane, your diligence must have been matched by a huge amount of frustration as you revised my punctuation, word placement, and other assorted errors.

Finally, and most important, I cannot give enough thanks to my students. While I have mentioned several of you in these pages, the contributions of so many others (you know who you are) were incalculable. Without you, the profession of teaching would not exist. Without you, in the trenches with teachers, the learning experience called schooling simply would not happen.

Preface

The tires on the ancient GMC pickup bang out their staccato rhythm as he speeds down the six miles of dirt corduroy road to our northeast Missouri farm. He turns to me and asks the question I suppose most fathers have been asking their sons for decades: So, what do you plan to do with your life?

I am fifteen. The year is 1956. My stammer is not due to the road; rather, it’s my anxiety about telling him something I don’t think he wants to hear. I’m not sure, Dad, but I think I want to be a teacher.

He blanches underneath his tan, his jaw goes a bit slack; he recovers and says, Oh, uh, that’s interesting. Whatever made you decide that, Bub? I’m thinking, Oh, damn! Now you’ve done it. You know he wants you to be a farmer like him. You’ve really upset him. I stammer some more and mumble something about how I’d thought seriously about becoming a farmer but really like the atmosphere of school, the excitement of the place, my teachers, and blah, blah, blah.

He asks, Whaddya going to teach? I’m on firmer ground here. With no hesitation, I tell him that mathematics is my favorite subject and that I want to teach math. (Of course, later on, while attending summer school prior to my junior year in college, I discover that my fascination with people and their cultures conforms perfectly to the field of sociology. So I switch majors, at which point both parents are disturbed. They imagine I have become a bleeding heart left-winger whose mind has been infiltrated by some sort of radical professor. They go to their local minister for advice. He tells them to let me determine my own direction. I still can’t believe my good fortune in having him aid my flight from the family nest. Back then, not too many folks in his position would have supported my effort to make an independent career decision at that stage in my life.)

I know I’m hurting my dad. I also know I don’t like farming because I can’t stand the fact that forces beyond my control can dictate my success or failure—the rains, the droughts, the winds, the early frosts, the insects. In addition, I am too flawed for a farming career. During major crop seasons, I have severe hay fever to the point where I can’t see, breathe, or function. I am sure he is focusing on his own flaws as a father, how he has failed to produce another farmer in the family’s history. I feel that I’ve let him down.

Today, fifty years later, when other retirees ask me what I did with my life, I often get the same reaction. A teacher, huh? Oh that’s nice. Whaddya teach? When I tell them sociology and education, a glaze drifts over their eyes. They glance behind me, searching for an escape route. I think, Oh, damn! Now you’ve done it again. They think you’re some kind of radical left-winger who didn’t have the talent or competence to do anything worthwhile in the business world, so you elected to waste their kids’ minds with all kinds of worthless crap. Oh that’s interesting [read: boring]. How nice. End of conversation. No one has ever said what makes my occupational choice so interesting.

Teaching is interesting. It is fascinating, agonizing, stimulating, boring, exciting, heartbreaking, frustrating. It creates feelings of power and powerlessness, anger and joy, even hostility and love. And still today, I would not trade it for any other occupation. I wish I could be having this conversation with my dad at this moment.

* * *

During my early years of teaching, I often entered my classrooms to be greeted by chalkboard walls covered with the previous teacher’s notes. Initially, I found myself frowning and grumbling at their lack of courtesy when they left their pearls of wisdom for me to erase. I quickly reduced those pearls (their pieces of legacy) to so much dust in the chalk/eraser trays. Ashes to chalk dust.

Soon, however, I started doing the same thing. I was proud of the tangible results of my hour of work and thought the teacher and students in the classes after mine could learn a lot from what I left behind. Of course, there were complaints, so I stopped leaving my pieces of legacy. Soon they, too, were reduced to a few gallons of chalk dust over the years. The tangible sum of my life as a teacher was lost in the mounds of janitorial debris collected by Waste Management and taken to the dump, a long way from the rural roads of Missouri where I was born and raised. And so now I am attempting to reconstitute all that dust into a tangible image of my life as a teacher.

From the moment I took the risk to go beyond the bounds of my parents’ plans for my life, my career choice became an ongoing series of episodes in which I disturbed people—my students, my colleagues, and most certainly my administrators and school management in general. The first person I dismayed was my dad, probably unwittingly. Then I discovered I really treasured such moments, particularly in the classroom. Right or wrong, I began to believe that when people were disturbed, they were ripe for learning something (well, maybe not most administrators). Calm folks only appeared to have all the answers. They needed to be shaken up a bit to get their thought processes moving.

A few other teachers had made the same discovery. Many were often in trouble with their students, colleagues, and masters. They seemed to thrive on being fired or nearly fired. Complacency was not a part of their vocabularies or their lifestyles. They took risks for their students and their profession.

At one point in my classroom experience, I borrowed a line from somewhere and began writing it on my chalkboards on the first days of my classes. I told my students I believed my job as a teacher was to calm the disturbed and disturb the calm. My survival in the teaching profession probably occurred from straddling the very fine line between these two extremes.

This book is a reflection on my classroom journey and what I believe is required of both teachers and students in contemporary classrooms.

Attachments

Attachment #1

Thinking about the Legacy of a Life in the Classroom

The difference between a beginning teacher and an experienced one is that the beginning teacher asks, ‘How am I doing?’ and the experienced teacher asks, ‘How are the children doing?’ Everything they become, I also become. And everything about me, they helped to create.

Esmé Raji Codell, Educating Esmé (1999)

Several years ago, at the beginning of a long-forgotten semester, I wrote an introductory statement to my Survey of Education students:

I suspect we are at a crossroads. You are students, apparently thinking about the possibility of someday shifting roles and becoming professional teachers. I am a teacher, nearing retirement and just now beginning to fully appreciate the value of the learning experience. In both instances, we may at times forget that we are both teachers and learners throughout our lives, no matter what our chosen profession might be. At the same time, choosing teaching as a career is quite another matter, a choice that requires a bit of idealism at the outset and a lot of craziness to remain committed throughout one’s occupational life.

Currently, I have two primary concerns about professional teaching and teachers in the American school system. One involves the motivations and competency levels of people who select teaching as a career. I have a nagging fear that many of the finest students in America do not see teaching as a highly significant and desirable line of work.

Second, I am concerned about how teachers perceive their role within the entire education system, symbolized by the oft-heard comment, "I am just a teacher. Another example of this perception is the way-too-common view that a more worthy life goal is to move up" the education success ladder from the position of teacher to that of school administrator. Of course, I recognize that salary structures help perpetuate this image of promotion and downgrade the status of the teacher in America.

Of one thing I am certain: schools, teachers, and the public perception of the teaching role constantly require scrutiny and intentional change. In particular, teachers and the general public must look upon teaching with the pride and, indeed, the reverence that the profession deserves if we ever hope to advance the literacy of our population significantly. More of our finest students must select teaching as a career if the standards of educating and learning are to improve. How can such changes occur? This course is dedicated to the exploration of the possibilities, probabilities, and the how of educational reform as it directly affects students in the classroom.

My two-fold goal for all of you, whether or not you ultimately select teaching as a career, is: First, to leave this course as educational leaders. Second, to recognize that teachers no longer can be effective participants in a system that simply repeats itself year after year, generation after generation, without significant self-evaluation.

What is needed are people who are prepared and willing to go into schools, not just to teach but to enhance the art of teaching, reform the schools, and thereby vitalize the process of learning. To do so we must all become, and continue to be, students of the teaching and learning experience. Most important, I believe that to enjoy teaching and become an effective teacher, one must enjoy learning. Liking children (students) may be necessary, but it is not a sufficient reason to go into teaching as a career. Loving the content one teaches is equally valuable.

* * *

From: [e-mail]

To: [e-mail]

Subject: Attachment #1

Now that you’ve read this first attachment, which sentences stood out? Which ones do you remember? Did you highlight or underline any phrases? Were there any statements or ideas suggested that made you wince? What meaning did you attach to each phrase? In general, what did you learn from what you just read?

While you are pondering these questions, I will summarize my thoughts about what I hope you learned.

1. Some of the sharpest young people in this country, perhaps people like you, are not seriously considering teaching as a career; our future as a society will depend on our ability to change that attitude.

2. It is important to ignore others (even your parents!) who suggest that you should only consider other kinds of careers in the business world and ignore the possibility of spending your life in a classroom, teaching people just like you.

3. Learning throughout your life is the most important activity in which you can ever engage yourself, regardless of your career orientation.

To help you understand how and why I became a teacher, and why I want you to keep the teaching option open, I am going to send you some more attachments and e-mails.

But first, one more question: when you were a kid, did you ever catch a fish?

A simple question, and right now many of you probably are saying to yourselves: Stupid question. Sure, I caught fish, and it was great fun, watching the bobber dip below the water’s surface, feeling the tug on the line, the wiggling and squirming around at the end of the hook, and then the joy when I reeled it in—the pride when I examined my catch.

If that’s your answer, I must correct you (an occupational hazard in the world of teaching). No one ever truly catches a fish unless he hooks it by accident. All a person can do is throw out the lure and try to entice the fish to hook itself. The fish is always involved in getting itself caught, whether it wants to or not.

As William Ayers noted in his book To Teach