Unfolding and Becoming at The Newman Junior High School

So already, as my teacher days wind down, I find myself thinking a lot about my student days.  While I've always understood the critical role high school played in my development as a person and educator, only recently have I understood that my junior high school experiences may have been even more pivotal. I owe this realization to a number of long conversations with my very good junior-high-school-then-high-school friend Betsy Hoffman (now Betsy Sugameli). Sometimes Betsy's and my memories and interpretations align perfectly; other times, her recollections and perspectives fill in gaps and challenge my ideas about what we all were thinking and feeling back then.

In the late 1960's, Needham had two junior high schools, the Newman and the Pollard.  Since then, the Pollard Junior High School has become Needham's only middle school, the Pollard Middle School, while the Newman Junior High School has become an elementary school called simply the Newman School. I attended the Newman Junior High School for grades seven through nine, from September 1967 to June 1970.

The Newman School, pictured here, looks much like our junior high school did, except our school lacked the decorative murals you can discern on the right-hand side of this photograph.  What you can also see here is the front courtyard part of the school where we hung out after our school buses deposited us in front of the school each morning.  It was here where we processed the news that Martin Luther King had been killed, where two months later we processed the news that Bobby Kennedy had been killed -- and wondered who would die next, and where two years later we tried to understand why the National Guard had shot to kill at Kent State. This we did against the backdrop of the steady stream of images from the Vietnam War -- gruesome deaths and hollow-eyed, exhausted soldiers -- provided to us by the evening news and Life magazine. 

Still, most of the time, despite these moments of consciousness and confusion, we were just busy being early-adolescent kids with activities to participate in, homework to do, and subjects and teachers to study. 

So first for the subjects and then for the teachers. There were definitely some important learning firsts for me at the Newman that shaped me as a learner and teacher both.

The "new curriculum" that threatened to ruin my eighth-grade sanity was IPS, or Introductory Physical Science. I remember the turquoise book with its grid-lined cover -- the seventh edition, which I found online, still features  that graph-paper motif that warns students to expect that graphed experimental data will be central to their daily learning endeavors. And that was the problem:  an excellent memorizer, I had powered my way through school up to that point by my ability to swallow and regurgitate minutiae.  And now I was confronted by inquiry:  each chapter consisted of roughly six pages of reading followed by many more pages of problems; who had ever heard of a textbook with more problems than pages of facts that I could memorize?  Disoriented and displeased by this shift in the learning world order, I fretted over every lab.  But Mr. Soucy was always patient, always quietly excited about the science itself, and always there after school when I or anybody else wanted to stay late for extra help -- which was often.  I admit that to this day, I still become anxious when I walk by a science lab and recognize the familiar smell of the "Distillation of Wood" experiment, but I learned from that experience that I could learn in a new way.

Gym class was another place where I gained some learning confidence -- probably because my natural non-athleticism was a complete non-issue.* In seventh grade, our teachers wanted us to have positive, safe experiences of the gymnastics equipment that we were encountering for the first time and that called for new skills and new strengths.  I wasn't good at gymnastics, but I loved it -- how it felt to do it and what it looked like when it was done right.  Most importantly, I didn't fear it.  In fact, I was willing to try to do almost anything we were learning because I was always flanked by at least two "spotters" whom I trusted to guide me or break my fall if necessary. Junior high gym class taught me the importance of spotters no matter what one is trying to learn.  Consequently, as a teacher, I've always tried to create classrooms in which students grapple with new and intimidating learning experiences in the supportive company of spotters, peers stationed very nearby to help them take learning risks without fear of serious academic injury.

While I can't recall if the choral group I was in was part of the Newman's music curricular program or an extra-curricular activity, I can remember being electrified by Vincent Persichetti's choral setting of e.e. cummings' "Sam Was a Man."** It was my first experience of both hearing and singing anything that seemed to defy in the most haunting, arresting way every expectation my fourteen-year-old self had of what and how people could sing together beautifully and movingly.  I was so taken by the way the different parts combined, divided, and moved that I learned to play them on the piano at home*** just so I could figure out how the piece worked rhythmically and harmonically as parts and a whole.  So began my romance with twentieth-century (and now twenty-first-century) choral music. 

Meanwhile, math served up new computer-science-related learning experiences. As junior high school students, we were supposed to master flowcharting in preparation for learning FOCAL and BASIC, two computer languages, once we got to Needham High. So one of my math classmates and I became pretty proficient at creating flowcharts that potentially solved problems -- though not as proficient as we had hoped.  As the co-founders of the Female League of Nostril-Flairers (FLONF), we created a flowchart (not the one you're seeing here) to help the flair-challenged learn how to flair their nostrils so, as members of the organization, they could participate successfully in flairathons.  Unfortunately, those who couldn't flair got caught in an inescapable loop that relegated them, like Tantalos or Sisyphos, to an eternity of futile effort.

Our math teacher, and our other teachers, were aware of FLONF -- just as they were aware, we came to find out, that another one of my classmates had created a religion around herself, and even a temple to herself called "The Marthenon." When my classmates and I had our teachers sign our ninth-grade yearbooks -- I wish I could find Zodiaction! -- I realized how much they had been paying attention. Though I don't remember it verbatim, I still remember the gist of the comment written by Mrs. Helen Rees, my Western Civilization teacher:  You've started an organization; now go start a school.  It was the first time any adult had invited me to envision myself as an adult capable of doing something creative and important.

It seems important also to talk about the one harmful teacher we had amidst the numerous caring and competent ones, lest you think the Newman Junior High School was an educational utopia. Steve Seidel often talks about the "apprenticeship of observation" -- the kind of learning that people do simply by watching, analyzing, and reflecting; Howard Gardner talks about "tormentors" -- the people whose contribution to our development is their capacity to model and embody everything we don't want to be, and that we commit to not being. We learned important lessons from our "bad" teacher, too.

One of my English teachers, who will remain nameless, was that "tormentor." I was one of her favorites whom she "let" do certain tasks for her. For example, after arriving late to class, coffee cup in hand, Mrs. Tormentor routinely had me administer quizzes after saying to me in front of the class, "You give the quiz, since you'd probably get a 100 on it anyway." Whenever I whispered, my aforementioned friend Betsy was accused of disrupting the class.  But there were more even more strange and dangerous things going on. During our study of To Kill a Mockingbird, Mrs. Tormentor forbade the use of the word "rape" during class discussion, and regularly pronounced "Negro" as niggero. Luckily, Mrs. Tormentor was so consistently lazy, mean, and prejudiced (African-Americans were not the only group about whom she generalized while teaching literature) that our class was united in despising her. Years later when I ran into her in a lecture hall at Harvard, she quipped, "Well it's good to see that at least one of you amounted to something," confirming what we'd all always known:  that she had had nothing but contempt for us. 

But while Mrs. Tormentor had little interest in teaching us English and no interest in us, Mrs. Ruth Winters, our math teacher, loved math and loved us.  As a matter of fact, this blog post primarily exists because she has been much on my mind over the months -- probably because I recently realized that I must be about the same age she was when she was our teacher.  I now recognize that hers was the first class that I hoped my own classes might feel and be like. 

Though she was my math teacher in both eighth and ninth grades, I first became aware of Mrs. Winters when I was a seventh grader. She was tall and formidable as she monitored the first-floor hallway in between classes. Her loosely styled hair and white frilled blouses gave her an old-fashioned look that intimidated me. It wouldn't have occurred to me back then to describe a woman as handsome, but Mrs. Winters was.  At some later point when I was reading or rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I realized that some the language Huck uses to describe Charlotte Grangerford**** seemed just right for Mrs. Winters: "Then there was Miss Charlotte, she was twenty-five, and tall and proud and grand, but as good as she could be when she warn't stirred up; but when she was, she had a look that would make you wilt in your tracks, like her father."

But that was the great thing about Mrs. Winters, we quickly learned as her students:  she took no pleasure in making anybody wilt.  That hallway mask that silently commanded "Don't you dare run down this hall or even think about poking anybody" was replaced in the classroom by an easy, welcoming smile and a deep, ready laugh. Her eyes sparkled whether she was reporting on her progress making her daughter's wedding gown or explaining to us how the quadratic equation was derived and what it could be used for. Always the message about math was that it was hard, interesting, worthwhile, and do-able.  And born and raised in Kentucky, Mrs. Winters had memorable regionalisms to assure us that we could master the math at hand:  some techniques were "as easy as falling off a log backwards," while others were "like going around Kelly's barn -- and I knew Mr. Kelly."

There were two other things that happened during math class that had nothing to do with the learning of math content associated with Algebra I and Algebra II.   

The first involved two boys in our class who were regularly truant from school -- and who routinely got the highest marks on math tests. When B.B. and W.D. arrived on test days, they could easily prove while they were taking the test the theorems that the rest of us had been laboring over for the last two weeks, and they could also readily apply them. Mrs. Winters refused to fail them, despite what I now recognize must have been some administrative pressure: her job was to assess whether they had learned the math, she explained, and they had. It was important to her that we understand her thinking -- her belief that different students learned in different ways and that those ways needed to be acknowledged and respected.  Did she think there should be no consequences for the boys' truancy? No. But was a failing grade in math the right consequence? No.

The second involved several days in mid-June 1970.  At one point, Mrs. Winters announced that we had learned all the math we needed to learn for the school year, so we were going to play softball for the last few days of class.  Though I'm terrible at most sports, softball was by far my worst sport:  in sixth grade during our Presidential Fitness Tests, the legacy of JFK, I had thrown the softball the shortest distance of anybody in my class. But none of this mattered in June 1970:  we were going to spend an hour together for each of the next few days at the softball field that abutted the grounds of the high school with our real focus on simply being a group that had learned enough together and enjoyed being together.  Our softball skills didn't matter; our connections to one another did.

The spring of 1970 was an intense time.  On April 22, two weeks before the Kent State shootings, we celebrated the first Earth Day at the Newman by planting trees on the barren stretch of land between the softball field where my math class played in June and the grounds of the school. I like to go over to the Newman School every April during school vacation to check on those woods that we planted -- which you see here to the left. One year, I brought my mother with me, and she asked if I knew which tree was mine.  I told her I didn't know whether my little tree had survived to be among those standing and reaching toward the sky, but I still knew that I had helped to create those woods.

This year, I went over to check on the woods the day after the Boston Marathon bombings. It comforted me to be there. Things are different at the Newman School -- a daycare center abuts the area we forested, and several daycare teachers eyed me suspiciously because I seemed to be hanging around for no reason. Meanwhile, a series of nature trails have been added to the school grounds. So on that mild Tuesday morning, every sun-warmed pool was bursting with new green life.  In particular, skunk cabbage was blatantly and beautifully unfurling its leaves wherever I looked, reminding me how at this very same spot many years ago, I had been allowed and encouraged to unfold and bloom.  As a student at the Newman Junior High School, I overcame fears, developed new skills and knowledge, learned new ways to learn, was encouraged to imagine and act, and felt cared about.  It's so interesting to me that only recently have I realized how much my own values and commitments as an educator have been a direct reflection of my student experiences at the Newman Junior High School.

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* Gymnastic URL:  <http://www.123rf.com/photo_7596910_human-showing-postures-of-gymnastics.html>.

** The Cummings poem from Kennedy, Richard. Ed. E.E. Cummings Selected Poems. New York: Liveright, 1994. 58-59. Print.

rain or hail                                  heart was big
sam done                                   as the world aint square
the best he kin                           with room for the devil
till they digged his hole              and his angels too

:sam was a man                        yes,sir

stout as a bridge                       what may be better
rugged as a bear                      or what may be worse
slickern a weazel                      and what may be clover
how be you                               clover clover

(sun or snow)                           (nobody’ll know)

gone into what                          sam was a man
like all them kings                     grinned his grin
you read about                         done his chores
and on him sings                      laid him down.

a whippoorwill;                         Sleep well

*** "Sam Was a Man" music URL:  <http://thoughtfulgestures.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/sam-1.jpg> 
**** One of the original E.W. Kemble illustrations of the Shepherdson-Grangerford section of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.