We Can’t Measure What We Treasure about Our Best Teachers
My husband grew up here in Ohio near the town where we now live, and last Sunday afternoon he told me he had noticed in the newspaper that his elementary school was celebrating its hundredth anniversary with an open house. He wondered if I’d like to go with him just for a little while to walk through the school to see what had changed in the years since his time there—from from 1951 until 1958—kindergarten through sixth grade.
We had a lovely time strolling through classrooms and old-fashioned cloak rooms. My husband, a not-particularly-sentimental person, took me to the classroom where he had attended each of the grades and remembered each teacher—his favorite teacher and others who challenged him. The halls were filled with the children who attend the school today along with their families, but we had the chance to talk with some of today’s teachers and to look at the work posted on classroom walls and in hallways. The teachers have been thinking with children about the passage of time. The word “centennial” seemed to be a prominent vocabulary word for all the grades, and there were news stories posted here and there about major events in each of the school’s ten decades.
I was delighted to realize that we were not seeing anything about the massive testing that has invaded this public school and all the other elementary schools across the country. Instead, there was evidence of thinking and writing and a conceptual approach to reading and