In this series of posts on teachers drawn from my 14 years of experience teaching history in three urban high schools between the mid-1950s and early 1970s and my experiences as a district superintendent, I write about teachers who I came to respect and admire. The first post was about an elementary school teacher whose classroom I visited many times while serving as superintendent of the Arlington (VA) public schools. The second post was about music teacher William Appling, a colleague of mine at Glenville High School in Cleveland (OH) in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. This post recovers an incident that occurred at Roosevelt High School in Washington, D.C. where I taught history in the early 1970s.
At Roosevelt High School in 1971, I taught five history classes a day—50-minute periods. While I had learned to pace myself much better than when I was taught at Glenville a decade earlier, I still found that teaching five classes with three preparations (sociology, government, and U.S. history) forced me to make compromises in both the what and how of teaching. I had wanted to prepare new materials for at least a few of my classes but the work was too much for me if I wanted a life outside of school–I was married and had two daughters at the time. Nor could I assign essays twice a week in each class, once a week was all I could manage. I could see only a fraction of my 150 students before and after school and during my one preparation period. I saw only those who needed the most help; I practiced educational triage.
What drove me to do more, however, was the students’ response to the history labs (learning centers or teaching stations, as some called them) that I set up CONTINUE READING: Teachers I Respect and Admire–Myrtle Davis | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice