Touching Lives: A Teacher's Memoir

By Shirley A. Kitner-Mainello

This is a moving and personal story of teachers life told from her side of the desk. Teachers build a nation by touching the lives of the youth and you will be there, too, as the stories touch your life. Everyone knows what it is like to be a student; they don't know how it is to be the teacher!

The author began teaching in 1960 before the civil rights movement was in full swing. Through the eyes of the children and the teacher you will watch education change in the forty years that followed.

When you read Touching Lives you will share wonderful and surprising experiences with students of various ages whose lives have touched my own. As you read, you will cry for them, worry for them, and always you will love them as I did.

Laugh with me when Henry brings his snakes to school. Enjoy the adventure to the aquarium; and the trip to the woods through the eyes of the children who have never been out of the city.

Any person involved in education, at any level, will enjoy this story.

Shirley A. Kitner-Mainello

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781468555837

Shirley A. Kitner-Mainello

Shirley Kitner-Mainello spent many years in education as a classroom teacher, reading specialist, private tutor, and school administrator. As her career progressed, it took her to four different school districts, numerous buildings, and all levels of public education. She has now retired from education and from her tutoring. Writing, traveling, gardening, and genealogical research are among her pursuits. With Touching Lives she hopes to connect with other teachers; those preparing for the classroom, in the classroom, and retired from the classroom. Together teachers build the nation by touching the lives of young people. Shirley has also written several other books which can be found on Amazon by searching the author's name Kitner-Mainello. Barnes and Noble and some other sites may also have them available.

Book preview

1

Mr. Leo Johns, the new high school guidance counselor, hounded me every day of my high school senior year. Come and see me, he said. I want to talk to you about this. He pestered me until I gave in just to get rid of him. With his help and advice, I finally filled out the forms to take the scholarship exam. In that single act of determined caring, Mr. Johns touched my life and changed its direction forever.

My parents were good parents. They were hard-working, kind, intelligent people who never had an opportunity to get an education beyond the one-room schoolhouse. They both began to work full time jobs about age fourteen. They could not give me advice about my own education because they simply didn’t know what to tell me.

No one in my family had ever graduated from high school, let alone gone to college. The opportunity was not available for them to attend high school for it was a great distance away. They were children when people were still going about in horse and buggy. They both lived on farms far from town where the high school was located. Of course, there were no school buses, so they could not easily get to school in town.

My Dad thought the best and most practical job for a girl would be accountant or bank teller because the work was not physically difficult and you could pick up many jobs on the side, jobs that could be done at home or evenings or weekends. Alas, I was not a numbers person. It just never held the interest for me that reading and writing commanded.

People look back to the forties and fifties nostalgically and think that life was simple and easy then. In reality, these times were fraught with unbelievable prejudice, social turmoil, and unwritten rules.

Girls had limited career choices; they were locked into nursing, teaching, or office worker. If a girl wanted to be a scientist, mathematician, or veterinarian she had to plan for a very difficult entrance into the field and be ready to battle prejudicial judgments from every quarter. Girls who did not plan to marry were considered very strange. A boy could choose career over family, but a girl had no such choice.

My parents owned a small corner store and had I been a boy I would have probably followed in their footsteps. I knew the small business life. My friends took the business curriculum in high school so I took it, too.

I realized my mistake early. I hated nearly everything in that commercial curriculum. The accounting sets became my arch enemy; they never balanced. Typing was nerve wracking because this was the day of making copies with carbon paper and onion skin. My copies were rarely perfect.

I liked shorthand, which I thought was artistic; it seemed like learning and writing a new language. However, as one of the business teachers pointed out to me, shorthand was useless without typing.

I was great in English because I would read anything you put into my hands and I loved to write. I loved the classics and the poetry.

I went to the chemistry teacher and the foreign language teacher and begged them to see if I could somehow get into their classes, but the answer was always, No, you are in the wrong curriculum. It is too late now to change. This is for college prep students.

They behaved as though I would bring a blight on their precious courses – too dimwitted to succeed there. There was no way one could change a decision I had drifted into years before.

In those days, at the end of the seventh grade you made the first curriculum specific choices. You were locked into a curriculum before the eighth grade. Many schools are still like that today, and there are children just like myself who, unfortunately, do not have a Mr. Leo Johns to care about them.

Like a leaf in the wind, at age thirteen, I chose not to go to college. No one in my family had ever attended. What did I know of college? I had never been on a college campus, except when we took a shortcut as we walked to school in the mornings.

Those years between twelve to fifteen are difficult growing up years. At this age kids don’t know what they want out of tomorrow,

let alone, what they want out of life! I was just like that!

I chose the business curriculum because it was the only thing I knew. However, fortune smiled on me. Someone, somehow, cared enough to intervene and change what appeared to be my fate. There was a teacher who touched my life…

I, who yearned to be done with school, never dreamed it would be a part of my life forever!

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2

Sometimes people say … angels were watching over me… when something unexpectedly good happens to them. I have often thought that about my scholarship experience. It was such an unlikely chance that I would win this wonderful opportunity. Remember I had not had a college preparatory curriculum, but I competed successfully with those students for this scholarship.

My father had to retire early from his business because of severe crippling rheumatoid arthritis. He was only in his fifties. College expenses would have been out of the question for us.

Then came the letter announcing that I had won a scholarship that would pay for four years at a nearby college. For me that was a turn in the road I had never dared to dream.

I was fortunate, astounded, ecstatic, scared to death. I said, I can’t do this.

Mr. Johns replied, Of course, you can.

I don’t know anything about college.

Mr. Johns replied, You’ll learn.

With this letter my life took the road that I had peered down but never dreamed I could choose. I entered the educational world of reading, writing, mathematics, and learning that reached a thousand students, parents, and teachers who touched my life and I theirs.

3

As a student teacher, I not only went back to my hometown, I actually student taught in the first grade in the same school and in the same room in which I, myself, had been a first grader.

It was an old brown stone building, built in 1897, with beautiful woodwork and large sunny rooms. The wide stairways were beautifully polished dark wood which the janitor kept immaculate. Each classroom sat in a corner of the large square building and was well lighted by several large windows. Every room had a small cloak room with hooks for coats and floor-to-ceiling closets for extra supplies.

The years had gone by and once more, at age twenty, I walked up those front steps, through the door, and straight back the hall to that room. But wait! Did they lower the steps? They didn’t seem as high as they once were.

I distinctly remember the blackboards were so high I could not reach the top. Who moved them down to my knees? Then there were the coat hooks. Obviously, someone moved the coat hooks down about a foot.

The reading books no longer had my old friends Dick, Jane, and little sister, Sally. Where were the pets - the dog, Spot, and the kitten, Puff?

My old teachers were gone; in their places were different faces. But, then, I noticed the smile was the same; the warmth, the brightness of the room had not changed.

I felt a tug on my arm and a small tyke was by my side. Could you help me hang up my sweater? I can’t reach the hook.

I had a gentle and compassionate cooperating teacher, Mrs. Climenhaga. She was of the Mennonite religion and wore very little makeup and no jewelry. Her hair was styled in a bun at the back of her head. She and her husband were a part of the nearby Mennonite college. I had no idea how old she was; I knew her for years afterward and she always looked the same.

The children loved her. She was a wonderful example of gentle kindness and love and dedication.

This school had a diverse mixture of students, some with very difficult home backgrounds. All of them interesting as only first graders can be.

One in particular, Stone, seemed as though he had already learned he needed to be tough and fight everyone for everything. His home background appeared to encourage this. It could have been that a show of temper got you your own way at his house.

Mrs. Climenhaga understood him immediately and would talk privately with him, quietly and calmly. She would whisper in his ear in her gentle way, "Now, Stone, get hold of that grouchy man inside of you and make him do the