At Salem Intermediate School in Salem, Virginia, I began teaching the music segment fo the Humanities Exploratory program for grades seven and eight and developed a middle school choir. I was SO green!! Nobody told me that most of your college education was about theory, methodology and philosophy and that you really didn’t know how to teach until you had taught for a while. I guess that is why they call it a “practice”. The actual three months of formal “practice teaching” was designed to prepare a person to teach music to grades K-12 as well as vocal or instrumental music. Grades seven and eight were the only grades in which I did not teach during that instructional quarter. I was not very good to put it mildly. I was adequate for choir, but scrambling for middle school general music.
All musicality aside, practice teaching does little or nothing to prepare a person for the discipline of middle school students or for interaction with administrators who are prejudiced and/or perhaps, senile. SIS served two children’s homes. A number of students from these homes were black and all of them were underprivileged and I would say, damaged in ways we can hardly comprehend. I had NO experience with either. I mistakenly assumed that if any child stood up and cursed you in the classroom because she did not like what you asked the students to do, you would send her to the office. This was not a good experience for either of us. When we sat down across from this principal, he asked three questions: What did you do? Where do you live? What does your daddy do? When this young black girl replied that she lived at the Lutheran Children’s Home and she didn’t know what her daddy did, the principal suspended her for three days. I was sick to my stomach. Three weeks later, a young white boy pulled a Bowie knife out of his locker when- I was monitoring the hall. I could not avoid taking this situation to the office. He asked the same three questions. When the student answered with a high-end neighborhood and that his daddy was a lawyer, the boy was sent home for the rest of the day and returned to school the following day. I learned not to send anyone to the office. I learned to call parents which became one of my best decisions ever.
This was 1972. Schools were obeying the letter of the law, but many established educators accepted no regulation of their personal prejudices. The next principal was not much better. “You can’t regulate kindness (or fairness) is much like today’s quip: “You can’t fix stupid.” At the end of five years of teaching, I had gotten a lot better because I learned to love children where they were and give them something to feel good about. My little choir was awesome. I also had given birth to two children and decided it was time to stay home and never teach again because I could not trust administration.
More later… Part III coming Monday.
Mother Factors 