Dere Desk I Luv You

By Judy Schulman-Goldstein

Dere Desk I Luv You is a book about children. It is the true story of a young
teacher starti ng out in the world of the elementary school classroom. Her
experiences span over thirty years with very diff erent surroundings, assorted
educati onal problems, good administrators and poor ones. But the central
theme of the book, the lynchpin around which all else revolves, is the children
who fi ll the pages. They imbue the book with humor, pathos, love, and hope.
The narrati ve opens for us a conversati on about what happens in classrooms all
across America today and in the past. The universality of life in a classroom
is present at all ti mes, while other more unique moments fi led along with
chalk and lesson plans, with laughter and tears, are stored in the memories
of this teacher and her students and shared now with the reader. If you
have ever att ended an American elementary school, or if you have children
or grandchildren there now, this book is a MUST read. It will make you smile
while breaking your heart at the same ti me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479782970

Judy Schulman-Goldstein

Judy Schulman-Goldstein taught elementary school in the North Rockland School District for over 30 years. Much of that time was spent helping children to become better writers. Mrs. Goldstein has two sons, three grandchildren, and lives in NY half the year and Florida the other half. She would love to have any and all of her former students write to her with stories they remember about being in her classroom. You can find her at [e-mail].

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Copyright © 2013 by Judy Schulman-Goldstein.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/25/2013

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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Contents

Chapter One: A Near Miss

Chapter Two: Where Do I Go From Here?

Chapter Three: A Room of Another Color

Chapter Four: The Early Grades

Chapter Five: Observation Day

Chapter Six: Open School Night

Chapter Seven: The First Year Continues

Chapter Eight: Time Keeps on Going

Chapter Nine: Reflections

Chapter Ten: Going Back

Chapter Eleven: Back to Home Base

Chapter Twelve: The Good Old Days

Chapter Thirteen: Regrets, I Have a Few

Chapter Fourteen: The Red Closet

Chapter Fifteen: Enter the Computer And Other Memorable Moments

Chapter Sixteen: Helicopter Parents and Other Strange Entities

Chapter Seventeen: Parent-Teacher Conferences

Chapter Eighteen: Other Indelible moments

Chapter Nineteen: A Home Away from Home

Chapter Twenty: Student Teachers I Have Known (And Some I Wish I Hadn’t)

Chapter Twenty-One: Where Has Field Day Gone?

Chapter Twenty-Two: Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls…

Chapter Twenty-Three: Through the Years

Chapter Twenty-Four: Whose Self-esteem is it, Anyway?

Chapter Twenty-Five: Sandy Koufax and Me???

Chapter Twenty-Six: Other Memorable Moments

Chapter Twenty-Seven: If I Were in Charge

Chapter Twenty-Eight: In Memoriam

That’s All She Wrote

Our Fifth Grade Song on Types of Sentences

Rumors that Seem to Annually Fly Around the District

Tribute to a Young Teacher

The Finale

Chapter One

A Near Miss

The truth of the matter is I was a hair’s breadth away from never becoming a teacher at all. I have to admit that my first experience with a classroom full of children was pretty much disastrous. Teaching differs from many professions in that one must perform the tasks of a full-fledged teacher before being permitted to become a full-fledged teacher. This rite of passage is known as student teaching. It’s somewhat like playing in the Minor Leagues before you can move up to the Majors.

You are watched by ‘scouts’ and your performance is evaluated, and if at the end of the whole term-long project, you prove yourself to have ‘the stuff’ it takes to be a teacher, you are offered a contract and you breathe in a sigh of relief as you envision yourself standing in front of the blackboard in your own classroom, at last. Your stats have been compiled, and you’re on your way to the Majors. Of course, once there, you might strike out often, you might commit errors now and again, or if you consider yourself to be like a pitcher, kind of in charge of everything, you might throw a no-hitter once every ten years, or you might have to leave the mound before the game is over. Who knows? At least no agents are involved, and neither is a big fat paycheck. And as far as I know, no one is on steroids. (Have I carried the metaphor a bit too far?)

The big difference in the world of teaching is that you must have a really good mentor in the form of the cooperating classroom teacher in order to be successful in your chosen profession. Most classroom teachers take on a student teacher for altruistic reasons. They want to help the student teacher learn all she needs to know before stepping into a room of her own.

Others take on student teachers so that someone else can grade some papers and handle recess confrontations. And I think there might be a third category, the one I stumbled into that warm autumn morning. I think my very first cooperating teacher needed someone to torture and humiliate, and to her, I looked as perfect for being burned at the stake as anyone. We weren’t in Salem, but we weren’t all that far away either.

It is, of course, possible for a student teacher to learn what not to do in a classroom and hope that she can survive student teaching without too many scars.

This near mishap in my personal career occurred when I was in my senior year at the old Ed School Building located on the campus of Boston University. All of us were sent off with a pep talk from someone or other, and all of us probably thought that there would never be a finer teacher than ourselves. And all of us were wrong in varying degrees.

The plan was that we would teach an upper grade in one elementary school and a lower grade in the other. I would be starting with the fifth grade. I was to observe, to learn, and finally to teach. That was the plan.

Ms. Lavinia Moore (not her real name in case people can come back from the dead and sue you for defamation) sat behind a perfectly ordered desk. She stared at me as I entered the room over glasses attached to a strap that fit around her neck. Her hair, mostly shot with gray, sat in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Her dress was a dark color which didn’t do much for her sallow complexion. She had those thin pursed lips—the kind you knew never kissed a man. She wore on her pinched face, a well-practiced expression of intimidation aimed in my direction.

Ms. Lavinia Moore was used to ruling the roost wherever that took her and woe to any gentleman that might have ever thought of attempting to assault that battlefield!

The children in the room seemed somehow defeated as I looked them over with care. The air hung forlornly about them, and I felt a wave of happy anticipation directed toward me.

School had just begun, but dejection was everywhere. My spirits sagged with the children’s as Ms. Moore peered at me over the dangling glasses, choosing not to return my tentative smile. This patrician old bat was not going to be the sort of teacher who would show me what it meant to run a successful classroom—one filled with respect for the teacher, and in turn, respect for the children. This classroom wasn’t going to be any fun at all. The students knew it, and so did I.

And yet, they turned eager faces toward me. I didn’t want to let them down. I felt at that point, had Bella Lugosi made a spectacularly frightening entrance, they still would have looked toward him eagerly. Anyone had to be better than Ms. Lavinia Moore. Perhaps these children had experienced this sort of teacher before. I most certainly had. When I attended elementary school, the building was filled with ‘unmarried genteel’ women who basically disliked anyone under the age of sixty, and that went double for anyone under the age of ten.

Ms. Moore had not bothered to rise and greet my advisor, who was unable to look me in the face at the moment. I tried to implore him with my eyes to get me out of this nightmare, but (a) he couldn’t and (b) the children deserved a break from this woman even though school had just begun.

My advisor, we’ll just call him Mr. Smith (It wasn’t his fault.) patted me weakly on the shoulder and beat a hasty retreat. He obviously knew when it was time to call it a day.

It seemed to me that Ms. Moore found teaching anything to anyone was beneath her dignity. It wasn’t obviously what a true lady did. But here she was, a spinster, with nowhere to go, and unable to find a suitable position for herself in Boston society. It was also painfully obvious that it had not been her wish to be saddled with a young smart-mouthed teaching hopeful upstart—from New York, no less, and ‘Oh my dear have your heard: Jewish on top of all that?’

The children on the other hand, appeared to me to have straightened up a bit, to have peeked out from behind their books and were viewing me with what I was pretty certain was hope. My imagination was now working overtime. Save us! Save us! I felt I could hear them thinking.

Ms. Moore had now come out from behind her desk and was looking me over thoroughly. Her look told me many things: My skirt was too short, my face had too much lipstick on it, my hair was not in a bun, and basically, I would never ‘do’ as a proper schoolteacher. Never at all.

Now that I could fully see her, I took note of the ankle length dress, the thick stockings and the sturdy shoes. Now there was what a proper school teacher looked like. What on earth was wrong with me? Had I left my black witches’ outfit back at the apartment my roommate and I shared? Why hadn’t I come in with the ‘early Prairie’ look expected of a schoolmarm?

Ms. Moore and I looked as though we had been sent from Central Casting—she to play the old maid angry, frigid, frozen schoolteacher, and I, well, the young upstart from New York, that entire state with absolutely no morals whatsoever, or so believed Ms. Lavinia Moore. New York, thankfully, existed for her only on a map. The Mayflower never pulled into New York harbor, thank the Lord. (Ladies of the D.A.R., unite!)

The children in that room would have to remind me each day with their presence as to why I had chosen this particular career track. (There was also the additional input into this noble career from my mother who kept saying, "At least you’ll have the same hours as your own children have, in case, somehow you should ever find someone to marry.")

This incidentally was the same woman who imparted a gem of wisdom to me when she and my father drove up to Boston to see their only daughter receive her college diploma. My mother said, "I didn’t send you to college to get a BS. I sent you to college to get an MRS. (Was she kidding, you ask. No, absolutely not.)

I have digressed. I tend do that at times. We shall journey back to Ms. Moore’s Universe. This first assignment was in a suburb of Boston proper, Brookline, Mass, at that time a stalwart of all that was proper and Bostonian. It appealed to me because the MTA trolley went practically from our apartment door to the school. Why an apartment and not a dorm, you might wonder.

My roommate Ruthy and I had transferred together from Penn State which was then, and I imagine now as well, a beautiful school with a wide, green campus and lots of impressive buildings. But there were cows on that campus in the Ag school, and we found it a bit too bucolic. The fraternity parties were wearing thin, and my roommate wasn’t very happy with sorority in general and ours in particular. We wanted to be in a city that wasn’t New York, so we headed for Boston.

We ended up living across the alleyway from a woman who was murdered by the Boston Strangler, who decided to begin his life as a serial killer just as we landed in the city of his choice. If you think this made my always-worried-anyway Jewish mother happy, well… .

She had us tying tin cans and pots and pans together and lining them along the window sills—a homemade burglar alarm if you will. And though we doubted its efficacy, we did it. But we weren’t really afraid. Not at that age. The only thing that scared me that semester at all was none other than Lavinia Moore. Oh, yes. And now we’re back on topic.

I still can feel that surge of emotion I felt that morning being filled with joyous hope as I walked into that fifth grade classroom. I was going to get a chance to teach children at last! All those theory courses that had bored us all to death were now over with and only children remained, waiting for us to come to them. The building looked like so many other schools do, constructed of brick and mortar. Of course, I knew that the outside didn’t mean anything. It was the children inside that counted. That’s why I was there—to teach, to be taught, to re-visit the wonders of an elementary school.

But when I entered Ms. Moore’s classroom, I felt as though I had taken a step back in time. The children were sitting in straight rows, their hands folded on the desks, feet planted firmly on the floor. Several eyed the clock just as I came in. Hey, wait a minute! Wasn’t it that way when I went to school? Hadn’t we changed all that? Weren’t the kids supposed to sit in little groups and actually be allowed to talk to one another as long as it was softly and didn’t interfere with what the teacher may have been saying to a different reading group?

At best, the room in which I was to learn my craft was a disappointment even before I spotted Lavinia Moore, straight out of her former life as a judge in the Salem Witch Trials. I wanted to turn and run, but that was totally impossible at this stage of the game.

The walls of the room were pretty much barren except for the names of the poor unfortunates who were already in trouble with Her Royal Highness. I made a mental note to get some children’s work up there on display. Anything would be better than a board entitled In Need of Disciplining

At last Ms. Moore summoned the custodian in her imperious manner, and ordered a desk for me—"a’ children’ desk," she told him. That was done just so, that I could be made to feel smaller and thus inferior to her. To say that as the days passed, I didn’t like the woman would be pretty much of a gross understatement. Try as I would, I couldn’t muster up an ounce of respect for her. I did my best to hide my feelings of disdain, but I doubt I was successful.

She was unkind to the children and her displeasure with me was evident from the start. There we were, locked in mortal combat. No sooner was I seated in my little desk and chair, than she told me that I would be lunching (if you will) with the children in the cafeteria and my presence in the teacher’s room would not be welcome. She seemed triumphant there for a moment. She had put me in my place, and punished me as well.

But, oh no, no, that would not be the case at all. Those lunchtimes with the children were my fondest memories of that whole dreadful experience. These really decent ten-year olds, spoke with me seriously and humorously, with curiosity and with a sense of decorum of their own inventing. They saved the ‘best’ seat for me, and offered me homemade cookies and other little tidbits that their mothers had so carefully packed into brown bags and tin lunchboxes. I wouldn’t have traded those lunches away for anything.

That first week in her room was meant for me to observe and learn. And so I did. I observed that Ms. Moore had no connection with her students whatsoever, and I learned what not to do when I became a classroom teacher. One can learn from negativity, I suppose, although it isn’t ideally what we want. Nonetheless, it was a good place for me to begin to form my idea of how I would run my own room, if I survived the eight weeks I had to spend with the warden of this Brookline prison.

On the second week, I prepared to teach my first full-class lesson. Ms. Moore had assigned me the task of teaching some current events. Well, we couldn’t talk about the Boston Strangler—that was for certain. Not being a native Bostonian was certainly a disadvantage for this particular assignment. What was a good newspaper for a lesson and what wasn’t? The most prestigious paper had an eighth grade vocabulary level and I didn’t think these students were up to reading that yet. That left another paper which seemed fine to me. At least there were no two-headed aliens on the White House lawn for starters, and the headlines did not include who was divorcing whom in Hollywood.

Carefully counting out my change and few dollar bills, I bought enough copies for every two children to share, and carried them with me on the MTA. I thought I’d been resourceful and had even chosen several articles about politics and the like that we could read and discuss. I had written up the plans. Only the newspapers were now necessary to reach the finish line. Everything was predicated on the articles I had chosen. Oh, how foolish, how terribly young and naïve I was.

Ms. Moore pounced upon me like a feral cat upon a field mouse. The newspapers I had selected would not be permitted in her classroom. They are pulp and rag, she told me, looking down her snooty nose. We do not read that sort of trash in my classroom.

Even though the subject matter was current and completely innocuous, Ms. Moore vetoed the entire project, but told me to teach anyway. I ended up winging it, and praying to the gods of student teaching that I could survive this experience. What did I teach about? I might have discussed crewing on the Charles River, for all I can remember. That’s really not a very good way for a student teacher to begin her future career. I couldn’t shake the feeling of doom and gloom. What was I doing here anyway? Was I condemned to do things while teaching that would make some other grown-up angry? After the lesson, Ms. Moore had a little talk with me.

I wish to remind you that we do not allow drivel such as appears in the newspapers you chose into this building, she told me primly.

I was tempted to ask if she’d ever read the paper at all, or to simply say, "Whatever it is you do read up here, it’s not in the same category as the New York Times. It simply lacks the prestige."

But I was in trouble enough at this point. Mentioning the sinful New York wasn’t going to help me at all.

I expected her to take my carefully written lesson plans for this lesson and throw them out, but she said nothing, and slid them into her desk drawer.

As the days went by, I began to learn on my own how to handle those children who were troubled, and how to encourage them all to attempt to enjoy learning. (Who was I kidding? If I were a student in this class I’d be home every day begging my mother to write a note get me out of there! I would beg the doctor to say that I had a contagious disease that would last through all of fifth grade, and that it was imperative for me to learn at home.) I wondered how many upset tummies and imagined other illnesses were being ‘treated’ by puzzled mothers of children in this classroom.

Lunchtime continued to be my favorite part of the day. The children not only wanted to share their lunches with me, but they wanted to share their lives as well. That was something I learned over the years. It was not simply peculiar to this very first class I taught. Children often come to school to get away from problems that might be plaguing them at home. You can’t pry, but you can listen. It’s probably best to be empathetic, but to offer no solutions. Parents don’t want your nose stuck in their business.

There are children who come to us each day, living in homes of abuse, both physical and verbal. There are children who have inebriated parents living with them. There are stepparents who might or might not be easy to live with. There are children hoping each and every day that his parents will get back together again, and end this silly divorce. That is why we must make an elementary