A. Occasionally you see parent pressure. Sometimes we have
parents that are pretty pushy with their kids and sometimes we
have parents who are, we're dealing with some parents who are,
you know, where both the parents are professional people and
very busy and they, essentially think that once they pay their
tuition that you're going to take over dealing entirely with
the student's education. So, once in a while -- haven't had
that problem this year at all. Last year I had one student
like that. I called the parent to talk about the student not
doing his work and the parent, the mother said, "Well, what
are you going to do about that?" And I said "Well, I'm
calling you because I'd like you to do something about it.
The student needs some support and checking up on at home."
And essentially said, "Well, I'm too busy to do that. What
can you do about this?" You know, they don't want to take the
responsibility, they expect you to do it all. Sometimes you
get that, sometimes you get parents who have unreasonable
expectations for their kids, you know, they want to send the
kid to Harvard and want him to be a National Merit finalist
and their kids an average kid. Sometime they'll pressure the
student and the teacher both. Occasionally that happens and
we get that, but its not the norm.
Q. Influenced by professional organization?
A. Well, when we did the research on teaching composition we used
the National Council of Teachers of English. They compile a
book of recent research on composition and we read the English
Journal, and have gotten some ideas from that, also, and we
also order books from the, professional books from their book
list.
Q. Influenced by in-service or own continued education?
A. Well, a lot of them actually. I've had some grants from the
national endowment for the humanities that have been really
stimulating and helpful. Had an independent grant two years
ago to study Henry Davis Thoreau.
Q. Is that a matter of applying? I don't know how this is done.
A. Yes, you have to fill out a, you design your own study
program, send in an application describing the program and
justifying why you want to do it.
Q. And they finance--
A. They give you $3000 of which $200 goes to the library to buy
books in the area that you specialize in and then the rest of
it is to pay you to do six weeks of full-time study.
Q. And you would do that in the summer?
A. Uh-Huh. I went to Concord, Mass. where Thoreau lived and
studied there for a couple of weeks and then the rest of it
here, but you pretty much do whatever, well you design your
own program so you can do whatever you want as long as they're
willing to fund it.
Q. And at the end of this time, they've given you the money,
you've done your study, what do you have to show that?
A. You have to submit a report on what you do.
Q. And do you have to show them that $200 for the book fee --?
A. Yeah, you have to send in a list of the books that you've
purchased from the library.
Q. They don't need to approve those books do they?
A. No, I don't think they did.
Q. Influenced by students?
A. Oh yeah, a lot of them. Well, this one happened a while ago,
a number of years ago at a different school I had a class of,
at a boarding school, bright but lazy kids who, did you want
just about this school? Because I can think of something more
recent if you want. This is more dramatic, but I can think of
something else.
Q. We can take both.
A. O.k. A girl in the class said "Well, you know, I don't like
this class because nobody's really doing very much. They're
going through the motions", this was like the third week of
the semester "and you need to do something about it." And I
said, "Well, I would really love it if you'd get off your
butts and do something, if you'd be interested then, you know,
I don't know why but you just seem like a bunch of deadheads."
And she essentially said to me, "Well, you are the one who
needs to figure that out." And so, I went home and thought
about it and I went in the next day and I said, "Well, one of
the problems is", I had them writing a, we were reading a book
every week and writing a paper every week and I said that "One
of the problems is that we're discussing reading these books
and you're regurgitating what we discussed on your papers and
I think you're not thinking for yourselves, so from now on,
we're going to read the book, you're going to write your paper
the next week, while reading the next book and we're not going
to discuss it at all until you turn your paper in and then
you'll read your papers and most of what we discuss will come
from your papers, hopefully." There were other things that I
would bring up too, that pretty much covered everything. So
I basically redesigned the way I was teaching the course and
it worked very well. They about died of panic the first two
weeks but--, so that basically changed my whole approach to
that group of kids.
Q. Was there another one?
A. Well, there are a lot of, you know our class size, our average
class size here is 14 or 15 so there's a lot of interaction
between the students and the teachers and one of the things
that that changes is you know the students really well. You
know the way they think, so you know what kinds of questions
you can ask which kid and you know with certain kids, for
instance, that if you ask a fact based question to start with,
that then you can push the kid with the next question to go a
step further and draw an inference, so actually I would say
that happens all the time because you modify your approach to
the individual students in your class because of what you know
about them, you know, what kinds of questions you can ask
them; which kids you can ask the really difficult abstract
question, you know, what kind of topics to suggest for essays,
which kids are really going to like which books and authors.
So in a sense, its a constant interaction rather than, so they
have an influence constantly on what you're doing because you
know them as individuals really well.
Q. Do you think if you had a class of 30-35 of the same students,
same kind of students could do that?
A. No way. When I taught at South Point, that's the Catholic
school here in town that's where I started teaching and I had
30 and 35 students, 180 kids a day and probably the only thing
I knew about half of them was what their names were. And you
can't read those many papers. You can't have 180 kids writing
essays every week.
Q. You had about 180?
A. That was a class load, 30, the average of 30 to a class, five-
six classes, 35 to a class, 5 classes whatever it was. But
you just can't do that, I mean, you just don't know enough
about the kids to interact with them that way. There are some
kids of course that you do, you know, the kids who are
attracted to your personality, are active in class. It's a
whole different ball game basically.
Q. In your experience at the Catholic high school, were there any
limits to numbers of students that they would accept or did
they accept all students who applied?
A. You mean in terms of ability _________ or numbers?
Q. Numbers.
A. Yeah, there were some limits. They tried to keep the English
classes down to thirty and usually they were a little lower,
33, something like that.
Q. So a math class might be more?
A. I'm not sure I could answer that accurately any more. I think
so. My impression is yeah they were a larger class. That may
not be fair to them, I mean, I may not remembering accurately.
Q. And are they also generally students with ability?
A. They are all range. I had a kid in freshmen English who
tested 2.1 grade level in reading.
Q. So it's not the kind of student you'd have here?
A. No. We have a lot of average students here but we don't have
that many that are below average. Once in a while maybe a kid
who works really hard and has, you know, has real
difficulties, but there are quite a few bright kids and a lot
of average kids from the bottom of the spectrum, not generally
here. Those kinds of kids, if they are here, have to work
like slaves to make it through. We design our, our homework
is 45 minutes per class per night and that's geared to the
average kid so if you are slow, I mean you're getting 30 pages
the ________________ to read for English homework, plus math
plus biology plus, you know, foreign language. I think most
kids spend between 2 and 3 hours every night on homework and
then there are kids who spend a lot more than that. They have
at least one free period a day where they can do homework too.
Q. Here? A study hall?
A. Yeah, well they're only assign to a supervised study hall if
they're grade point average is below a certain level,
otherwise they're on their own.
Q. There are places for them to go to study?
A. Yeah.
Q. Influenced by colleagues?
A. Constantly. We are always having discussions in the English
department about teaching methods, books, writing assignments,
all that kind of stuff plus philosophical discussions that may
have nothing to do with teaching or English and there's a lot
of that that goes on in the faculty lounge, too. People
talking about books they've read or political things that are
happening. That happens here much more than in any other
school I've ever taught at. But its a small faculty, I think
27, so everyone knows everyone pretty well.
Q. Describe a creative attempt that was thwarted?
A. Well, let's see. Last year Cheryl Pickrell, are you talking
with her?:
Q. Yes.
A,. She was new to the school last year, although she had taught
at other schools a couple places and as department head I had
to supervise her very closely, observed her twice a month I
had conferences with her twice a month and submitted a written
evaluation once a month and one of the things she felt was a
weakness to her was teaching writing and so and that's one of
my strengths so I met with her a number of times and discussed
that and she decided she was going to do a creative writing
_______ and that she was going to poetry and so I said,
"Well,let's see _______________ let's see what you can come up
with." What she ended up doing was having a coffee house in
which the kids spent a couple weeks writing poetry and then
they had a coffee house and, you know, read the poetry. It
turned out to be a really incredibly creative and successful
unit and generally you have the freedom to do that, whatever
you want to if you have the time and the energy.
Q. Instance where creativity was soft peddled, altered someway?
A. Not that I can think of. I don't think anybody would ever say
don't be creative. The only thing that might ever be said is
"make sure that you're teaching the basic things we need to
cover while you're being creative." And actually I don't even
know about that.
Q. Failed attempt to influence you that you've resisted?
A. A number of years ago the administration asked us to look at
doing a complete overhaul of the English curriculum and they
said to us, "Don't consider money at all. Money is no factor"
which, of course, at a private school there always is.
"Assume that money is no factor and give us what would be the
ideal curriculum for the English department." Well, we spent
most of the semester working on it. What we came up with was
a English curriculum that actually involved two classes at the
freshmen level, one of which would be teaching literature and
the other that would be teaching writing and mechanics and
vocabulary and once they got it they said, "Well, we can't do
this because we can't afford it." And we said, "Wait a
minute. You said design it as though money were no object."
And they said, "Yeah, but we still can't afford it." We had
gotten really excited about it in the meantime all the weeks
we'd been working on it and so we were pretty frustrated with
that and so what we've done to try to get around that is
actually, you know, that was kind of the first step really in
redesigning the writing curriculum, which happened a couple of
years later, I mentioned before. So we still talk about that
that would be the ideal situation. To have two classes for
kids at the freshmen level but financially its not feasible
so--- Staffing, of course is the most expensive item in the
budget because if you have 12 to 15 kids in a class, you know,
your expenses are double what it would be if a school of 30
kids, and so you're talking about teaching two English
classes, you're talking about a whole new position, so --
Q. Have there ever been any rules or regulations that have come
your way that you resisted?
A. No, I don't think so. What generally happens, well happens at
the school is those things are discussed ahead of time. I
mean its not like you get an edict one day that says "From now
on you're going to do such and such" and what the current head
master has done the last couple of years is he meets once a
week with all of the department heads and that group discusses
all those sorts of policy changes and what happens that he
will bring it up one week and we'll discuss it and then we
meet with our, we're required to have department meetings
every other week, so we meet with our department and discuss
the issues and then we give, bring the feedback to the meeting
the next time we discuss it so that by the time something gets
implemented, a lot of people have already been involved in the
process, so it's not the kind of situation where you'd get hit
with something that you, you know, resented suddenly. I
really don't think that happens. Not everybody, of course,
agrees with everything that happens, but --
Q. Bureaucratic constraints on teachers?
A. Interference, inappropriate interference in the classroom,
censoring of books, caving in to inappropriate parent pressure
and ordering the teacher to change the curriculum because some
parent is unhappy with some things, somebody who--an
administrator who is not an expert in a subject area trying to
dictate to the people who are teaching it what should be
taught, that kind of thing.
Q. Do you feel any of that happens here?
A. No, not at all.
Q. Do you have any idea if that happens to public school teachers
or public school _____________
A. I've heard some teachers say that that does happen especially
that administrators, the complaint that I tend to hear the
most is that administrators are total cowards in dealing with
unhappy parents and that they would sooner take a book out of
the curriculum completely than deal with even one parent who
is complaining about it, or that they'll say, you know, the
student doesn't have to read this book, you'll have to find
something else to do with--
Q. What would happen here if a parent complained about a book?
A. The administration would deal with the parent and their policy
is, the assumption they make to start with is that they're
supporting the teacher and if there was, if it were a big
enough problem, I think generally what the next step would be
would be the assistant head master meeting with the parent and
the teacher and discussing the book. For instance, a few
years ago we had a parent who, got a new student who
transferred her from Mississippi and the mother is teaching at
the university, I think, so she called up the head master
because her son was soon to be taking biology and said, "You
don't force your students to study fiction of evolution in
your science classes do you?" and the head master said, "Well
yeah, we of course study evolution in biology because that's
the way the whole course is organized, the classification in
the animal and plant kingdoms", so forth and so on and talked
to her for a while and she was unhappy, she was a
fundamentalist Christian and she was unhappy with that, so he
said "I will be glad to have our biology teacher call you if
you want to discuss it with him" and so she talked with the
biology teacher and then she called up the head master again
and said she was really unhappy with it and he said, "Well,
that's our curriculum and if you really don't like it, then
you should send you kid somewhere else."
Q. So she did?