Crossroads Redux

On April 9th, several Crossroads Alumni and I will be doing a presentation at Bryn Mawr College in Jody Cohen's Critical Issues in Education Class in which we will discuss the impact of Crossroads on our lives 18 years after it was founded in 1991.
The alumni have all been educators for many years and are all currently working as teachers or professors. In this era of No Child Left Behind with the emphasis on accountability solely based on students' scores on standardized tests, what passes for teaching in urban classrooms is merely a decontextualized drilling of the skills measured on these tests. The lessons are devoid of meaningful content and they do not take the students' experiences, prior knowledge nor their humanity into consideration. Students are bored, alienated and often angry, because they keep hearing over and over again how poorly they perform on these tests, and how it's their fault because they don't work hard enough on these drills. Crossroads was a program that was founded in 1991 at Simon Gratz High School that was inquiry-based, multi-disciplinary; the teachers put the students and their needs and questions at the center of the curriculum. It is important for people today to hear about the ways in which this kind of rigorous but progressive approach to education had a positive impact on the students who were part of it. The presentation at Bryn Mawr is the first step towards making public the stories of the Crossroads alumni. In this blog entry, I am including a chapter from Jody Cohen's dissertation based on her study of Crossroads from 1990-1992. I hope that other alumni will find this entry, read Dr. Cohen's chapter then share their memories, experiences, thoughts and questions.

On tracks and things in high school

When I was a teen-ager, school was my salvation. It provided a structure and predictability that the rest of my life lacked. While some people hated the monotony of the routine, I reveled in the sameness of it all…. The same locker, the same classes, the same teachers, the same friends. Plus, I was good in school. It was something I could do – Get A’s that is… I couldn’t do much else – couldn’t keep my parents from divorcing, couldn’t stop the war in Viet Nam, couldn’t make my boyfriend stop doing drugs – but I could write a damned good paper on the stoicism of the Hemingway hero. And that felt good.

Anyway, I went to this huge high school where there were almost 1000 people in my graduating class. And what they did to control us was to divide us into tracks based on how smart they thought we were… there was the academic track, the commercial track and the vocational track. And if that weren’t enough, there were levels within the tracks…Academic A, B, and C, Commercial A, B, and C and so on.. you get the picture.

Well, I was in Academic A, but all of my friends including Randy and June were in Academic B. That meant I had AP classes along with all of the other “smart” kids. My friends were still college prep – they took algebra and foreign language (unlike the kids in commercial who took typing or bookkeeping or the ones in vocational who took shop) only they weren’t considered “smart” by some of the teachers. Never mind that Randy and June were two of the funniest and most clever people I had ever met and they were always exciting to be around.

My 11th grade French teacher, Madamoiselle Gitlin taught in all of the tracks. She of course preferred to teach in the A track and was always complaining to us about how much she hated teaching the kids in the B and C track.. One day she asked me to come to see her after school. I remember going to her office and feeling really strange… wondering what she could possibly want to talk to me about. She asked me to sit down and looked at me with this really earnest look on her face… like she really cared about me or something… Then she got all serious and moved in close to me and told me that I should stop hanging around with Randy and June. That they were bad influences on me and that I was being brought down by them and I should separate myself from them before it was too late.

At the time, I just stared at her dumbfounded. I was shocked and angry, but I didn’t say a word. I sat there in stony silence until she told me I could go.

Years later, when I became I teacher, I vowed that I would never talk to any student about any other student – and I would never question someone’s choice of a friend.
See what really bothers me about this story today is – why wasn’t she concerned about Randy and June? If she thought they were headed in the wrong direction, why didn’t she try to help them? Just because they weren’t good in French, they weren’t worth the trouble?

Duane and Me...Eleven Years Later .. With Love

Eleven years ago, I had an encounter with a student that stayed with me for years. In 2001 at a writing retreat for teachers, I wrote about that encounter. The essay entitled "The Stories They Tell" talks about a young man named Duane who has given up trying to complete a senior project he needs for graduation. I write about how I am afraid to confront Duane, afraid to reach out to him - he seems so angry. But, I do. It's a hard thing for me to do. And I almost lose courage. What happens next is what the story is about. The miracle of connection - the healing balm of stories -- the presence of hope and possibility. Ten years later, I get an email from Duane. He is in Afghanistan, serving in the military. While in the desert, he remembers that moment when he didn't give up and sends me an email from across the world to thank me. I tell him how important that moment was to me too, and I send him the essay I wrote. He reads it on a computer in the desert.

Today, Duane is back in the country. He found me on Facebook and we've chatted from time to time. Today, we were chatting and he told me about some poems he'd written. They were posted on his page. I read them and thought they were pretty good --- smart, informed and passionate. A few hours later, Duane chatted me up again. He said, I have one more poem for you to read tonight. Go to my profile. I did. And this is what I found there.

MRS. PINCUS

IT SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY
I USE TO CONSIDER MYSELF 1 OF MRS. URBAN KIDS.
FELT HELPLESS, CORNERED, AND TRAPPED LIKE KIDS IN THE URBAN DID.
THEY SAY "ALL THUGZ AND STREET RATZ WENT TO SIMON GRATZ"
AND ME BEING NAIVE I BELIEVED THAT WAS A DEFINITE FACT.
I LOOKED DOWN SHE LOOKED UP AND LOOKED ME SQUARE IN MY EYES
SHE ASKED GINGERLY " HOW HIGH ARE YOU WILLING TO FLY?"
SHE WAS EITHER BRAVE AND STUBBORN OR CRAZY AND HIGH.
SEE I WAS A BAD BOY AND BAD BOYS BECOME BAD ASS GUYS,
WE SLIDE THROUGH LIFE FAST AND DIE YOUNG HELL WE DON'T FLY.
SHE STOOD THERE STRONG AND FIRM THE EMOTION IN HER EYES
BANDAGE MY SORES AND HER STILLNESS ALLOWED HER TO TAKE A WALK WITH ME
THROUGH THE JOURNEY OF MY LIFE AS A YOUTH
SHE HELD MY HAND WHEN WE WALKED THROUGH MY PAIN
WE RAN THROUGH MY RAGE THAT RAN THROUGH MY BRAIN.
SHE LISTENED LIKE SHE WAS THE STUDENT AND I WAS THE TEACHER
I WAS THE RABBI I WAS INSTRUCTOR I WAS THE PREACHER.
HER SON WAS THE SAME AGE AS ME BUT SHE WAS BLIND
FROM THE VISION OF MY KIND
WHEN SHE OPEN HER EYES SHE RAN
AND REACHED OUT FOR ME LIKE I WAS LOSING GRIP
ON A CLIFF OF A BOTTOMLESS PITT.
LOL LITTLE WHITE LADY LIFT ME UP
THE PURITY IN HER SPIRIT GAVE HER THAT BOOST.
SHE PICKED ME UP VOICE SHAKING TEARS IN HER EYES
SHE ASKED "ONCE AGAIN HOW HIGH ARE YOU WILLING TO FLY?"
SHE DID WHAT MOST PEOPLE WOULDN'T DARE......SHE CARED.
AND FOR THAT I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU MRS. PINCUS!!!



The Stories They Tell

I remember my students by the stories they tell. For the past 33 years, I have been challenged, moved, and most of all transformed by the young people I have encountered in my inner city classroom.

There was Steve Woods whose angry outburst of “That’s whiteman’s bullshit!” during my introductory lesson on Cry the Beloved Country sent me on a decades-long journey to re-educate myself. Or Carlissa Russell who during a discussion of feminism and African American literature, screamed at me –“Mrs. Pincus – to you this is just political. To me it’s my life!” Or Terrance Jenkins whose nearly twenty revisions of his play Taking Control taught me that it is often their very lives my students are trying to control and revise.

Then there was Duane.

It is April 1998. Duane is not doing the senior project that he needs to complete in order to graduate. Duane has been struggling. He has taken to avoiding me, the mentor he has chosen to marshal him through this complicated research process. And even though I know it won’t be easy, I find the strength to confront him.

At first, he will not look at me. His head is bowed and his chin is dug deep inside his chest. I talk in what I hope are soothing tones, trying to encourage and convince him to do the work. Suddenly he jumps up from his seat. What’s the fucking use anyway? Bull’s out there crazy! They gonna kill you. I have no future. What’s the fucking use? What’s the point in doing this? What’s the point of graduating? I’m gonna fucking die!!!!!

When he finishes, he sits back down, assumes the same tucked position while his words echo in the silence.

Slowly, he begins to tell his story. It is one of violence and anger. He lifts his shirt to show me his scars and the terrible injury he has received.

I take a deep breath and try to gather the pieces of myself that have been shattered by his story. What can I, a white woman, a mother whose son is the same exact age as Duane say to him. In telling his story to me, his teacher, in school, Duane has transgressed a boundary and ripped through the silence that separates students from their teachers. He has made the call. I must make the response.

Duane, I say, touching his arm. Are you positive you’re gonna die? Are you so sure that you’re willing to bet your future on it? At least consider the possibility that you could be wrong here. You’re not always right, you know.

There is a long silence because I have run out of things to say. I am overcome by a desire to get up and run away and never see Duane again. Then through the silence, his response. Thrusting his notebook towards me, he says, Show me how to do this. Step by step. I’m confused.

As I reach across to Duane, I suddenly remember another story – one from nearly thirty years ago. It was the first day of school of my senior year in AP English and Mrs. Laskin asked us to write an essay –something like how I spent my summer vacation. My friend Steve had died from a heroin overdose one month to the day after his 18^th birthday on August 9, 1969 – one week before Woodstock, one month after men had landed on the moon as I watched the small black and white tv with a group of scagged out boys. I began the essay with the silent ride home from the cemetery, with his best friend Dock ripping the funeral sticker off the windshield. I wrote about my confusion and guilt – how I had spoken to him the night he died and he said he was just going to stay home and watch tv and how he must have changed his mind and how I should have known and been there for him.

Mrs. Laskin gave me a B-minus on that essay – a grade I now know teachers give when they don’t know what to say about a paper. It’s a safe grade. It will raise no eyebrows and cause no complaints.

Looking back, I wonder. What did Mrs. Laskin think of the young woman sitting before her who was in so much pain? How might my life have been different if she or anyone in that school had responded to what I was saying – the story of my life I was trying so desperately to tell her?

Teachers have a responsibility to listen to our students. We must make sure that we never give into despair. We must gain strength from our students’ stories of struggle, courage, hope and possibility. In urban classrooms today, the stories are all we have and they are what will save us.

Beyond Wiggle Room: Creating Spaces for Authentic Learning in a Senior English Class

Beyond ‘Wiggle Room’:
Creating Spaces for Authentic Learning in a Senior English Class

Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus

I would like to see a curriculum that is not so structured and restricting, with some wiggle room. I’d like to have a variation of different teaching methods and materials: a class that isn’t so predictable. I’d like to read books that make sense and have actual meanings. I’d also like to do different types of writing instead of just essays.
Bob

It is possible that my previous English classes restricted me from my constitutional pursuit of happiness and that my subconscious saw this as a violation of my inalienable rights. As you have not prohibited enjoyment in the class, I think you’ve already made English matter more than it has in the past.
Tiffany


The class would be more interesting to the students if we really had a say in the class. For example, most English teachers will force students to analyze every minor detail in a book because they feel that there are so many metaphors, symbols and motifs beneath the text. However, when this happens, students leave simply knowing those metaphors and motifs without really understanding the deeper concepts in the text. Thus, if we could really share our opinions on different books that we read in class without being confined to finding the symbols, the class would be much more meaningful.
Shelly

Prologue: The Last Act
As the summer of 2007 was winding down, I was preparing myself for what was to be my 34th and final year of teaching in the School District of Philadelphia and my 10th year at J.R. Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School. I was all set to teach the same courses I had been teaching for the past five years – two sections of an Honors English III class with an emphasis on American Literature and two sections of a popular senior elective entitled Drama and Inquiry. I was looking forward to a pleasant but uneventful school year to cap off an interesting and rewarding career when during the last week of August, I was shaken from my complacency by an email from my principal. In addition to my other courses, I was told, I would be teaching a section of English IV. This was not good news.
The comments above represent a sampling of student responses to the syllabus for the English 4 class that I taught at Masterman High School in 2007-2008. Masterman, a magnet high school for academically talented and mentally gifted students from every neighborhood in Philadelphia, is considered one of the most successful high schools in the country. By most accounts it is a desirable place to teach.
That is, of course, unless you teach seniors, who are notoriously difficult to engage. Under huge amounts of pressure and understandably worried about their finances and their futures, they spend the first half of the year preoccupied with the college application process. During the second half of the year, once their mid-year reports have been sent to the colleges and their acceptances start to come in, they turn their eyes toward prom and graduation.
As a successful and experienced teacher, it is hard for me to admit that I was cowed by this assignment. The last time I had taught the class was in 1998, my first year at Masterman, and I remember what a struggle it had been. Nearly half of the students in the 12th grade took Advanced Placement English. That meant that the students in the “regular” English 4 class either didn’t have the scores or the inclination to take AP English. It was either a subject they disliked or one in which they weren’t particularly skilled– or both. In addition, it is a gateway class – required by the state for high school graduation, making the stakes high for the students, who in turn, put pressure on the teachers to make the class relatively easy to pass. Knowing all of this, I spent the days prior to the opening of school obsessively writing and re-writing the syllabus and the nights having the kind of teaching dreams I hadn’t had in years.

Why I was so terrified of this class and what I learned in my attempt to create a meaningful and engaging course for these students in my final year of teaching is the subject of this inquiry.

Inquiry Across the Lifespan: “I Used to Be an English Teacher”

I used to be an English teacher. I taught vocabulary on Monday, grammar on Tuesday, literature on Wednesday and Thursday and composition on Friday. I taught well-planned lessons with behavioral objectives and specific learning outcomes. My students completed worksheets selecting proper tenses and placing commas in appropriate places. After reading a story, poem or novel, they would answer my meticulously developed literal, interpretive and evaluative questions. And my principal saw my work and said that it was good. (from my teaching journal, 1988)


When I was a beginning teacher, this conception of the teaching of English was the only one available to me. It was how I had been taught in middle and high school and it was how I was taught to teach in college. Every now and again, I would deviate from this schedule, prompted by boredom and a desire to try something new. In my first year of teaching, 1974, I invested ten dollars and bought a class set of S.E. Hinton’s brand new novel The Outsiders for twenty five cents a piece. Together, my eighth graders and I read this book, rewriting chapters from different characters’ points of view, converting parts of the novel into a stage play, drawing portraits of Ponyboy and his brothers, and writing personal narratives about family, friendship and violence. One day during this unit, my principal came to my door, announcing that he was here for my formal observation. He looked around the room and he saw 35 adolescents sitting in groups, some of them on the floor. Some were acting out their original scripts. Others were creating a giant collage. All were talking. All were engaged. My principal paused, and I watched him look disapprovingly around the room as he peered down at his clipboard one last time before saying with disdain, “I’ll come back when you’re teaching.”
The following day, 4th period, he did indeed return and I dutifully taught a lesson about parts of speech, complete with examples on the board, followed by a question-and-answer session with a skill sheet for reinforcement. My 35 rambunctious adolescents sat quietly in rows and politely completed the lesson. My principal sat in the back row taking notes and checking items off on the checklist and with a few minutes left in the period handed me a copy of his evaluation with my high scores.
For many years, I was troubled by that incident. While I didn’t abandon the kinds of activities that we did in response to The Outsiders, I did them less frequently and with more trepidation, despite the fact that I knew through my observations of my students’ written and oral responses that this kind of teaching was more engaging and effective. Additionally, I felt more engaged and alive when I was teaching in this manner, eager to see and hear the multiple ways in which my students were making sense of the novel, relating it to their own lives and raising questions about gangs and loyalty, violence and social class. Their responses sparked in me a genuine interest and as I learned more about them and how they saw themselves and the world, I was better able to understand what they needed from me individually and collectively as their teacher.
Unfortunately, during this period of my life and career, I lacked the confidence to value my own knowledge. I was grateful for my superior rating, and it never would have occurred to me to ask for an appointment to speak with my principal to discuss the evaluation let alone to explain and defend what I was doing in my class the day he’d announced that I wasn’t “teaching.” And it certainly didn’t occur to me to examine the items on the evaluation checklist to critique the conception of teaching embedded within. I lacked the experience and sophistication to understand that the evaluation tool was constructed by those in power and it perpetuated a particular teacher-centered, authoritative, skills-based approached to teaching.

Before a teacher can engage her students to live life consciously, she must find the courage to question and live consciously herself – face her own fears, analyze and understand her own desires and see herself as a living human being capable of doing meaningful work in the world. A teacher who has not be awakened to her own possibilities for growth cannot inspire such growth in her students. ( from my teaching journal 2002)

Interestingly, it was my time away from teaching that sparked my transformation. When my children were born, I took a two-year maternity leave. During those years, I would spend my days with my infant and toddler, watching them closely and figuring out how they were making sense of the world. I can still remember the satisfaction and pride I felt as a mother when I finally understood that the sounds of “bruh bruh bruh bruh” that my nine month old daughter was making as she toddled after her brother were not random. They represented her first word – “Brother.” When I took my two-year-old son to the zoo, I listened as he pointed to every animal excitedly calling each one a “Dog!” When we got to the elephant, he shouted, “Dog! Dog!” Another time, he pointed to the moon and uttered with surprise and wonder, “Egg in the sky!” This little two year old was using language to make connections based on size, shape and space and as his mother/teacher, it was my job to lead him gently to new words for concepts he already understood. Before I could engage my children in naming the world, I first needed to understand the ways in which they were doing it and see the patterns and logic of their systems.
Becoming a mother gave me the confidence in myself that I lacked as a teacher. I came to value my abilities to interpret my children’s needs and questions and respond to them in ways that would enable my children to grow. When I returned to the classroom in 1985 after my maternity leave, I was not the same young woman who had left two and a half years earlier.
Unfortunately, I encountered the same expectations for “good” teaching that I had left behind. Only this time, I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with my role as the purveyor of the standardized curriculum and the literary canon. Upon returning to teaching, I was transferred to Simon Gratz High School, a large comprehensive neighborhood high school in the heart of the African American community. All of my students were African American and I, a young Jewish woman, often found myself questioning why I was surrounding the classroom with pictures of “great” American authors like Melville, Poe and Emerson and teaching books by Twain, Hawthorne and Fitzgerald.
During this period in my career, I experienced a great deal of dissonance between what I was doing in the classroom and what I wanted to do. I was still standing in front of the class lecturing about books I had assigned from the book list, writing study guides with comprehension questions and developing tests asking the students to identify literary devices. Yet, I was also listening to my students, asking them to speak and write about their lives and their dreams, trying to understand who they were and who they were hoping to become, much in the same manner in which I had learned to engage with my children. This gap between who my students and I were as human beings and what I was teaching them continued to widen in the months following my return and made me feel increasingly uncomfortable in my role.
I honestly don’t know how long I would have remained a teacher if I had not become a participant in the inaugural Summer Institute of the Philadelphia Writing Project (PhilWP) in 1986. A site of the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional development network dedicated to the teaching of writing, PhilWP was founded by Barbara Lytle, a literacy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and several teachers in the School District of Philadelphia. The NWP was founded on the belief that teachers are the best teachers of other teachers and that the teaching of writing was a complex process involving issues of language, power, culture, and identity. It was during the Summer Institute that I read the work of Paulo Freire for the first time and learned of his approach to literacy teaching and learning in Brazil. In the very first reading assigned during the Summer Institute, his autobiographical essay, “The Importance of the Act of Reading, (Freire,1987), I encountered for the first time the idea that language and reality were dynamically interconnected (29). One sentence in particular caught my attention and caused me to question my fundamental beliefs about teaching English:
In a way we can say… reading the word is not merely preceded by reading the world but by a certain form of writing it or rewriting it, that is transforming it by means of conscious practical work (35).


Maxine Greene (1973) writes that a teacher willing to undertake inquiry into her practice is “no longer content to be a mere cipher, a functionary, a clerk” (7). In this Summer Institute, I learned about teacher research for the very first time and how it was possible for teachers through “systematic and intentional” (Lytle Cochran-Smith, 23). inquiry into our own practice as a way of “reclaiming the classroom” (Goswami and Stillman, iii) from bureaucrats and policy makers thereby generating a body of knowledge that would enable us to learn from each other, improve our teaching, reform our schools and ultimately transform the lives of our students. This vision of an empowered teacher, intellectually engaged in the world, learning with and from her colleagues and her students to effect positive change, energized me and made me particularly excited about returning to my classroom in the fall.
At first I struggled. While PhilWP had given me the vision and the theoretical underpinnings, I still lacked the classroom practices to engage my students in meaningful ways that would honor what they brought to the classroom. Once again, I was incredibly fortunate. In 1987, I became a participant in the very first year of the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival (PYPF) a non-profit, arts in education organization whose mission is to “tap the potential of youth through playwriting,” The program pairs professional theater artists with classroom teachers in a year-long partnership designed to teach students to write, revise and stage their own original plays. From the moment J. Rufus Caleb, an award winning playwright and Philadelphia Community College professor, entered my classroom and introduced my high school students to playwriting, I knew that something special was happening.

In the playwriting workshops, students were able to tell stories that were important to them. They were able to create worlds and people those worlds with characters and give those characters dialogue to speak made up of the words and sounds and rhythms of their lives. I was struck by the way this enlivened students who had been previously unengaged – those students who sat quietly in the back of the room, doing just enough school work to earn a “D.” These students had been awakened by the playwriting process and through my observations of and conversations with them, I was able to have access for the very first time to their thinking about themselves as writers and the ways in which they could use literacy to impact their lives and the lives of those around them.
Terrance Jenkins, one of my Simon Gratz students in the early years of the playwriting program and winner of the National Young Playwrights competition in 1992 for his play Taking Control, initially wrote the first draft of his play because it was an assignment and he wanted to earn a good grade. As he continued to write and revise his play about a teen-aged girl from a shattered family trying to “take control” of the situation when her younger sister becomes pregnant, he shared emerging drafts with different audiences. From that experience, he developed a sense of himself as a writer and saw the possibilities for using writing as a way of bring about positive change. In an interview, for a documentary (Strosser and Patterson) about the playwriting program, he said, “I had a message to get across, I had a story to tell. I wanted people to see this [play] and I wanted them to make a change.” It was through this playwriting program that I learned the powerful impact that adults could have on young people simply by listening to their stories, voices, issues, concerns and questions and responding to them in thoughtful and respectful ways.
In the years that followed, I learned how to adapt the lessons I had learned about student choice, voice and agency in the playwriting program to other aspects of the English curriculum. I became more adept at designing projects that engaged students in the process of inquiry, structuring their interaction with texts and each other in ways that honored their perspectives and questions.
This kind of teaching contributed to substantive reform in some Philadelphia High School in the 1990’s. At Simon Gratz, I co-founded a school-within-a-school called Crossroads which joined 300 students from grades 9 through 12 with 16 teachers from all of the major disciples together into an academic community who stayed together for all four years of high school. Our program was interdisciplinary, writing intensive and inquiry-based. Each year, our curriculum was centered around an “essential question,” a curricular organizer we adapted from the Coalition of Essential Schools. Teachers worked together to make sure that our individual curricula addressed that question in ways that would allow the students to make connections across disciplines.
The first year of Crossroads, we, the teachers decided on the essential question “How does learning connect to your world?” This question worked in two very important ways: 1) it pushed the students to see how what they were learning could have an impact on their lives and 2) even more importantly, it forced the teachers to think hard about the sense our students would be making of the material we were presenting to them. After the first year of the program, students and teachers gathered together in June to evaluate the effectiveness of that year’s essential question and to engage in a collaborative process to select the question for the following year. Some of the questions we explored in the 8 years I was part of Crossroads included:
• How do people events and conditions influence change?
• What are the roads to the future?
• What is the relationship between power and inquiry?

Each question presented its own unique challenges; however, discussing and addressing those challenges throughout the year, became part of the inquiry process for teachers and students alike.
Students maintained portfolios of their papers and projects and were taught how to engage in self-reflective processes, evaluating their strengths, weaknesses and progress as writers and learners. As seniors, they presented samples from these portfolios to a panel of teachers, parents, community members and juniors as part of their senior exit project, which also included the writing of a substantive research paper relating to an aspect of the year’s essential question.
This reform effort has been documented in many places, most notably Michelle’s Fine’s 1994 book, Chartering Urban Reform: Reflections on Public High School Reform in the Midst of Change. The essays in the book illustrate the inextricable relationships between and among school reform, teacher inquiry and student agency. In order for meaningful, positive change to occur, teachers have to be willing to engage their students in a dialogue about issues that impact teaching and learning. At Simon Gratz, I learned how to interact with my high school students in the same ways I had interacted with my small children while on maternity leave. I learned to put their questions, concerns and desires at the center of the learning, accessing their prior knowledge then creating learning experiences in which they could pursue those questions in meaningful ways.
I transferred to Masterman in 1998, just as the new structures implemented by the reform movement of the 1990’s were being slowly dismantled by a new local administration and shifting national trend towards reliance on high-stakes testing as the primary measure of a school’s progress.
While the students at Masterman scored well on these tests, (after all – high scores were required in 5th and 6th grade for admission and again in 9th grade for re-admission to the smaller and more select high school), I immediately sensed an undercurrent of dissatisfaction among the students. I soon learned that Masterman students would often begrudgingly comply with teachers’ assignments; they would less frequently actually engage.
My first year at Masterman, I tried to include the playwriting program in my English classes. I soon discovered that it was not a good fit; the academic requirements and the pressure for students to perform well on standardized tests did not allow for this kind of curricular “deviation.” I became dismayed by the implications of this kind of content-centered, grade-oriented competitive approach to teaching. My new students often told me that it wouldn’t take long for me to be “Mastermanized,” and succumb to the pressures of delivering a traditional curriculum with a teacher-centered pedagogy.
With the support of The Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL) I began to explore alternative approaches to what I was doing in my classes at Masterman. Using the terms “main stage” and “second stage” as they are enacted in the theatre as a metaphor for school reform, I developed a theory of “second stage reform” that I thought might be possible at a school like Masterman. Many theatres have two performance areas: a main stage upon which works are performed with a wide audience appeal and a second stage, sometimes called a black box, where new plays and experimental works can be developed. The second stage often serves as an incubator for main stage productions. In rethinking my approach to my teaching at Masterman, I developed an elective class called Drama and Inquiry that grew out of my decade long association with Philadelphia Young Playwrights and was consistent with my critical pedagogy approach to teaching and learning. While my English classes remained “main stage” productions, my elective became the alternative, experimental space: my “second stage” on which I could enact a different kind of pedagogy that might eventually have an impact on the pedagogy of the main stage.
The chart below illustrates the differences between the main stage practices I saw occurring in the major subject classes and the second stage practices I tired to enact in my Drama and Inquiry elective.
Main Stage Second Stage
Emphasis on answers Emphasis on questions
Individual achievement Group accomplishments
Lecture and Debate Dialogue
Argumentative Reflective
Competitive Collaborative
Knowledge Transmission Knowledge Construction
Certainty Uncertainty
Test Driven Process Driven
Anesthetic Aesthetic
Preserves Tradition Transforms Tradition

For three years of their high school experience, Masterman students follow a very rigid, prescribed academic program with little choice in their course selection. In their senior year, they are able to select from among a small number of electives that take the place of some of the more selective AP courses. The purpose of the Drama and Inquiry course as I stated to the students in the syllabus was to use drama to "explore questions about multiple perspectives, shifting identities and our co-existence in a diverse, complex and ever-changing world." It was my hope that we could "become a true intellectual community filled with members who raise heartfelt and complex questions and explore answers together in an engaged ethical dialogue."
In this course, we read plays by contemporary American playwrights that dealt with issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity and identity. Students wrote their own monologues and dialogues and eventually wrote and acted in their own one-act plays. They participated in alternative types of classroom discourse, including Socratic Seminars, collaborative inquiry, reflective conversations, and journal groups. In the early years of teaching the course, I was still required to create written mid-term and final exams, to be given by proctors during times designated by the administration. In more recent years, I was able to get permission for alternative assessments that were more compatible with the nature of the class. I was able to count the text of their original plays as a final exam and institute a series of in-class performances instead of written mid-terms. At the end of each year, we produced a “Drama Showcase” which consisted of original scenes, written, acted and directed by the students, performed for a small audience in an intimate space we created in our basement classroom or on the stage of a local theatre.
In “Learning from Laramie: Urban High School Students Read, Respond and Re-enact The Laramie Project,” ( Pincus, 2005) I document one class’s involvement with the course and discuss what happened when we read, researched and performed The Laramie Project by Moises Kauffman and the Tectonic Theater Company. After seeing the work performed in my classroom, the director of the high school play decided to do the The Laramie Project as the high school play on stage in the main auditorium.. The performances were followed up with the Peer Educators leading workshops about homosexuality and homophobia. The play had literally made the journey from second to main stage
I would spend the rest of my teaching career at Masterman trying to infuse second stage practices into my main stage English classrooms.

Creating “Wiggle” Room – Designing the Course

In designing my English IV course, I had a little more leeway than I had in developing my English III courses because 12th grade is not a “tested” grade for either the state of Pennsylvania or the School District. And while I did have to adhere to English Department guidelines that had been approved by the District (we all agreed, for example, that every student would write a literary research paper in 12th grade), choose texts of literary merit from World Literature, and assign a range of writing, I was relatively free to design the course and select texts that I thought would interest and engage my students.
All of the students had read Orwell’s 1984 over the summer, so I selected novels, films, plays and non-fiction that I thought would enable us to continue to explore issues about language, power, identity and storytelling that 1984 was sure to evoke. I named the class “21st Century English Studies: Literature, Language and Lives in the Age of Globalization” and wrote the syllabus in the form of a letter to the students explaining my goals and rationale and soliciting their feedback. I included these questions as my guiding principles:

• How can we co-construct an English 4 class in an academic high school that engages the students in meaningful ways? How can we make English matter?

• What are the ways in which we can co-construct the curriculum of this course so it can better reflect the realities of human interaction in a global environment?

For their first homework assignment, I asked the students to respond to the syllabus, to tell me what they thought, raise questions, share suggestions and recount their past experiences in English classes.
The three responses that open this chapter are representative of the ones I received from all thirty-two of the students. Like Bob, Tiffany and Shelly, many expressed their disdain for the restrictiveness and predictability of some of their former English classes.
Mariah echoing the desire for relevance and variety explained, “I am really looking for a class that avoids the basic pitfalls of most English classes: tedium and boredom. A lot of English classes just have you read a story then write and essay on it. The simple response to this is to create a large array of techniques to tackle an objective. It can be research papers, skits, discussions, or whatever the students can think of…If the class reflects our wishes, we’ll be more willing to interact and get involved.”
Malik suggested a way to make the literature more meaningful to the students, writing, “My final suggestion is to sometimes move the ‘lens.’ When reading books, we don’t always have to focus on the book with blinders on. We can talk about what’s going on in the world and in our lives.”
Mariah added, “Even if you think that there are certain ideas the student must have about a book, you have to be willing to accept the view of those students who don’t see things your way or the way of the scholars. If you don’t accept those with opposing views, all respect will be lost and you’ll be forced to grade papers that just say what you said to your students. Never suggest that a student try and change his/her views, though it is acceptable to ask them to take a different viewpoint for a moment. It’s one thing to look through someone else’s eyes. It’s another to have your eyes replaced.”
Using metaphors of sight, Mariah and Malik offer powerful critiques of main stage teaching practices and echo Greene’s warning about teacher’s becoming functionaries and clerks in a bureaucratic system.
In going forward from here, there were three things that I did in response to the students’ letters:

• Organized the material into loosely structured inquiries into dystopias, language and storytelling;

• Varied the types of texts and writing assignments that I assigned to the whole class;

• Offered several opportunities for the students to select their own texts and/or the ways they responded to those texts.

In addition, I began our reading and discussion of every text by assigning a personal response. This way I was able to have access to and understand the sense the students were making of each text while they were reading.

Some Common Major Texts: Read or viewed by all
Orwell, George, 1984
PBS Video, American Tongues
Sophocles, Antigone
Fugard, Athol, The Island
Wiesel, Eli Night
Erdrich, Louise Love Medicine
Cruz, Nilo Anna in the Tropics
Eggers, Dave and Deng, Valentino What is the What?
Saptri, Marjane Perepolis


Some Common Papers and Projects – Completed by All

Film Scenario and Screenplay – Modernization of Antigone
Missing Scene from a Play – In response to Anna in the Tropics
Literary Research Paper - Formal research paper, student selected text
Collaborative Response and Research Journals – Love Medicine
Intellectual Autobiography – Long, complex personal narrative project
Final Exam – (in class essay with student-generated personalized questions)

Sample of Student Choice in Text Selection

Several times throughout the year, students were able to follow their own interests and select texts within the context of the organized inquiry units. The chart below shows the range and variety of texts read or viewed by several students. During these times, students often shared books or movies with each other and engaged in informal conversations about what they were discovering.

Chris Bob Kathleen Ryan
Dystopia Inquiry Republic of Plato A Clockwork Orange Wicked Escape from LA
Native American Storytelling Inquiry Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee Yellow Raft in Blue Water Doe Boy Genocide of the Mind
Literary Research Project On the Road Maus I The Secret Life of Bees Like Water for Chocolate


Moving Beyond “Wiggle Room:” The Intellectual Autobiography

Midway through the course, I sensed a trend towards disengagement among many of the students. The spaces I had opened in the syllabus for student choice of texts and student voice in response to those texts were losing their novelty and many students seemed to be going through the motions, not much differently from the way they would have had the curriculum and assignments been more traditional. I was very anxious to re-engage them to create assignments that would be personally meaningful to all. I thought back to my own educational experiences and recalled an assignment I was given in graduate school that really made a significant difference in my life: an intellectual autobiography in which we expressed our current philosophy of education, tracing our intellectual journeys and laying out the roadmaps for our future research and studies. This assignment prompted me to think long and hard about how my life experiences influenced my choices and how they connected to the books I had read and the questions I had explored in my academic work. I remembered how I had been galvanized the first time I read Paulo Freire, and how I found deeper meaning and purpose in my teaching life after reading Maxine Greene. More importantly, this assignment allowed me to discern the themes and patterns in my life thus far and gave me a sense of agency and purpose for my future, a way of integrating who I am with the kind of work I wanted to do in the world.
I began to modify this assignment for high school seniors. The students would each write a proposal for an intellectual autobiography of their lives so far, including a title, book abstract, annotated table of contexts in which they describe the contents of at least six chapters, one sample chapter and a book cover. Later, at the students’ request, I added an artistic component; these included paintings, poetry books, CD’s with representative songs, photography or web-sites.
The project was introduced slowly and was worked on over a period of three months. The first phase of the project was personal reflective writing in response to prompts I would give the class. The students would write their responses in their notebooks and would only share with others if they elected to do so. The prompts related to their literacy and educational histories. They wrote about learning how to read and write, their favorite childhood books, teachers who had made a difference in their lives, powerful learning experiences in and out of school and images they had of themselves as students.
Because the students had been together since 5th grade, they had shared memories of books and teachers. The conversations in class on the days we would work on these prompts were lively and engaging. Many of these reflections and discussions became personal as students talked about the impact on their lives of losing family members or surviving serious illness. It is important to note that this assignment in which the students were writing their about their own lives was done within the context of a year-long inquiry into language and story telling through the literature we were reading. While I deliberately did not make this connection explicit, many of the students began to comment on how their own writing was similar or different from Eggers’ or Wiesel’s or Erdrich’s. Still others addressed issues of language, culture, power and identity in their own reflections.
The final in-class activity we did before the students were assigned to write the autobiography at home was to look at a portfolio of their writing since 8th grade. Each year, their English teachers would have them select two of their best pieces of writing and write about how they had grown as writers that year. By 12th grade, they had 10 pieces of writing in their portfolios. Examining their writing portfolios in the context of the intellectual autobiography gave more meaning and purpose to what could have been a perfunctory activity.
For the first and only time during the school year, every single student handed in his or her intellectual autobiography on the day it was due. Kurt, who entitled his book Rounded, wrote about his experiences living in two very different contexts – a rural university town and a large urban city. He explored issues of language, race and identity in his own life. After the project Kurt wrote, “It was as though you let us go with all of the knowledge you taught us all year. The project basically wrote itself as we knew nothing else but to make the inevitable connections.”
In her chapter, Jasmine described surviving cancer as a child and how that experience inspired her to become a nurse. In an email to me after the school year had ended, Jasmine wrote, “I started forgetting about you as the grader and I started to really focus on me and my accomplishments, my hard times, the lesson I learned and the person I still wanted to improve on….. After completing this project, I felt a bit changed, relieved. Writing it was healthy for me.”
Another student, Kathleen, was inspired to write the entire book. Each chapter told of a significant event in her development. But what was remarkable about this work is that each chapter was told in a different way; Kathleen had experimented with her writing. She emulated the different storytelling techniques used by the authors we had been studying, writing one chapter as a play, another as a story within a story, another as a graphic novel, still another as a poem. Upon completion, Kathleen wrote, “The intellectual autobiography ... helped me create a place for myself in the world, or rather, helped me see the place I’ve simply been overlooking.”
As for Bob, the student who had asked for “wiggle room,” he too wrote a compelling narrative about his early years in school. In his chapter, he described an elementary school teacher who rewarded his students with money for answering questions correctly. Young Bob was very good at that game and continued to “play the game” right through middle school where he won academic awards at 8th grade graduation. By high school, he had decided to opt out, no longer motivated by extrinsic rewards. I am somewhat sad to say that I was not successful in motivating Bob to make his learning in my class more intrinsic; for most of the texts we read and essays we wrote, he continued to “wiggle” his way through them, relying on Sparknotes, in-class discussions, his native intelligence and excellent writing skills to fake his way through essays and other writing assignments. However, he did engage in the process of writing his intellectual autobiography and by reading it, I was able to come to a better understanding of who he was and what he needed (or didn’t need) from my class.

A Fitting Final – Student Generated Exam Questions

This past year, you gave us options, and different strategies to go about looking for the "right" answers to questions... and there was no one answer, it was whatever we thought the answer was, so long as we backed it up. Also, the fact that we could create our own essay topics that were used on tests and such kind of blew me out of the water. The fact that you had faith that we were smart enough to think of intelligent, well rounded, involved questions really made me think I wasn't as low on the "Masterman Scale" as I thought.
Barbara


At Masterman, all teachers are required to create final exams that are given to seniors during the first or second week of May. After having taught the class in a way that solicited their input into the texts and interpretations of those texts, it seemed inconsistent for me to create a “one-size-fits-all” final exam. Instead, I proposed that each student create his or her own essay exam question. The only criteria for the question were that it had to relate to one of the issues we had explored in class this year and that they had to include content from at least four texts ( whole class or self-selected) in their response. For those students who chose not to write their own question, I created three questions from which they could choose. Twenty of the thirty-two students chose to write their own questions. *
Barbara’s comments, shared above, address the way in which, just being asked to create her own exam question changed her image of herself as a learner. No longer was she “low on the Masterman scale,” one which ranks students by their grades and test scores, she was “smart” and “intelligent” and capable of completing this complex task. Because, I, the teacher had faith in her and classmates, they could reconstruct their images of themselves as valued learners, echoing Greene ( 1973) when she wrote, “The teacher who believes in stimulating and developing potential will be challenging – at least implicitly – the inhumanity of credentialing systems which sort and rank people according to market demand” (92 ).
And in a fitting outcome for me, the teacher, I was spared the fate that Mariah warned me about in the beginning of the year. The essays I read and responded to for their final exam were varied, interesting and enlightening, reflecting and refracting the course I had designed for them through their diverse lenses and perspectives.

Conclusion: Student Voice and Teacher Integrity,

Alison Cook-Sather (2006) has written that when students have the opportunity to develop a meta- cognitive awareness of their learning both in order to engage and as a result of engaging in serious dialogue with adults, they not only construct their understanding of subject matter content; they also constructs themselves anew. This reconstruction of self is evident in my students’ responses shared above. But what is the impact on the adult who so engages with her students? Greene finds the seeds of the answer in Martin Buber, whom she quotes: “In learning from time to time what this human being needs and does not need at the moment, the educator is led to an ever deeper recognition of what all human beings need in order to grow” (94). Including herself. A teacher who seeks this kind of dialogic relationship with her students will not need to move out of the classroom to grow professionally and personally. She will be able to find the work meaningful and challenging over the course of a lifespan.
Back in 1973, Greene railed against the bureaucracy that was paralyzing schools and forcing teachers into the role of bureaucratic functionaries. Thirty-five years later in the wake of NCLB, her words echo with pointed urgency as teachers once again are called upon to abandon their own goals, desires, beliefs and expertise, ignore their own knowledge about their students and what they need to learn in order to implement restrictive and often meaningless curricula designed solely to raise scores on standardized tests.
In a talk at the Carnegie Foundation, Director Lee Shulman (2008) discusses integrity in teaching. Teachers, he says, need to align their knowledge, purpose, design and action. I believe that it is impossible for a teacher to separate her true self, her values, her beliefs, her background, her experiences and her questions from her work as a teacher and remain in the classroom for any length of time. There have been times in my past where I have been forced to "teach against myself" -- that is, to present to young people ideas, texts, positions that I did not believe in. I've been forced to present material to them in ways that I know neither connected to nor engaged them. I have been forced to give them assessments that measured skills that are neither relevant nor necessary for real learning. When I have done these things, my actions have not been aligned with my beliefs.
I have struggled over the years to bring the two more in line. Of course, there has been no easy resolution -- only the tension that comes from trying to reconcile disparate ideas, perspectives, and approaches. I have tried to listen to my students and respond to their questions and needs in meaningful ways. The constant investigation into my own teaching and a serious attempt to listen and respond to my students’ voices, questions, and desires are the threads that can have held me together and allowed me to teach with integrity.

* To see the student generated exam questions and other materials related to this chapter, visit www.marshapincus.com/beyondwiggleroom


REFERENCES

Cochran-Smith, M.& Lytle, S. (1993) Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Cook Sather, Alison
Fine, M. (Ed.) (1994) Chartering Urban Reform: Reflections on Public High Schools in the Midst of Change. New York, NY: Teachers College Press
Freire P. (1987) “The Importance of the Act of Reading” in Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Freire, P & Macedo, D. (Eds.) Westport, CT: Bergen & Garvey.
Goswami, D.& Stillman, P. R. (Eds.) (1987) Reclaiming the Classroom: Teacher Research as an Agency for Change. Upper Montclair NJ: Boynton/Cook.
Greene, M.(1973) Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy for the Modern Age. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company Inc.
Pincus, M. ( 2005) Learning from Laramie: “Urban High School Students Read, Research and Reenact The Laramie Project.” in Going Public With Our Teaching: An Anthology of Practice. Hatch, T. et al (Eds.) New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Shulman, Lee S. (2008) Talk on Teacher Integrity. Carnegie Foundation web-site. http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/files/elibrary/integrativelearning/assets/ilp_lsc lips.mov
Strosser, M. & Patterson, N. Videomakers (1993) I Used to Teach English. Philadelphia, PA: Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation. Executive Producers.

Stories: The Cure for "Hardening of the Ideologies"

Discover the steps in the complex dance
Listen closely to what they're not saying
Then lead them gently back to themselves.




Over twenty years ago, I had the unique opportunity to participate in a program that was to change the course of my life and the lives of my students. That program, Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival was founded by the late Adele Magner who believed that every person has a story to tell and that as teachers, we needed to help our students tell their stories and open up our hearts to listen.

In today's blog, I am sharing a speech that I delivered to a group of 500 new Philadelphia teachers at their induction ceremony in 1992. That day, my former student and dear friend Terrance Jenkins was my co-presenter and in his speech, he talked about how he became empowered to change his life through the process of writing a play.

Those of us who view teaching as a human endeavor have become increasing discouraged and frightened by the current policies that are crippling the imagination and potential of young people, particularly young people in "failing" urban schools.

Stories, real stories that are rooted in our shared humanity -- they are what is needed to combat the "drill and kill" approach to "achievement" that is alienating and crippling young people and driving them away from schools.

Teachers need to reclaim our humanity in the classroom and connect to our students best selves -- their potential to lead creative, generative, healthy and productive lives.

Marsha Pincus' Speech: New Teachers Induction Ceremony, School District of Philadelphia, June 8, 1992

Student Voices in Dialogue With Teachers - Part I

I have been extremely fortunate to have been able to stay in contact with many of my former students, some of them already in their forties, others whom I taught last year, still in high school. This blog entry was originally posted as a response to my essay, "The stories they tell" in which I discuss the importance of teachers learning how to listen to their students' stories. My former student John reveals his thoughts about good teaching and reminds teachers that students are always watching, listening and sizing us up. Just imagine how much we could learn if we consistently asked them what they thought of us.



When I noticed your title the show 'Kids Say The Darndest Things' came into my head for some reason.

Anyway, I think the most important thing you're showing here is that there isn't a physical barrier between teacher and student, only the one that is conceived by both. This is evident because Duane was avoiding you because he felt as if he couldn't talk to you, and you, I assume, felt surprised when he finally opened up to you.

Basically, I'm getting a sense of Teaching 101. I noticed that, supporting what you said last year, the teachers that don't demand respect seem to gain the most of it. Most of my teachers this year, luckily, are ones that know respect is mutual and that teachers aren't an overbearing force with absolute power. Also, the anecdote about your past teacher just shows that teachers have to make many decisions when dealing with their students. "Do I respond to her writing? Do I probe and ask her about her life? Do I just grade her and continue our teacher/student relationship?" are questions that I assume were going through her mind. Your decision proved to be beneficial to the student and to you, so choosing to probe was a good choice in that case.

To be honest, in my ealier years I've always thought of teaching as passing out predetermined textbooks/novels/worksheets and coaching students through them. However, as my years of being a student progress I'm learning that many teachers enjoy going off on a tangent and talking about life - teaching us through their experience. Those are the discussions I look forward to because the information gained is much more valuable than knowing the value of y at x=4 or why Romeo and Juliet couldn't be together. They're also what you're known for - we still talk about your stories and discussions (most notably the one about if you were forced to choose between your kids and your coffee, you'd have to think it through).

So, your title works both ways. Though teachers remember their students, students will remember their teachers and the stories they tell, too.

To Mr. Rose, with Love and Gratitude

Dear Mr. Rose,

I am writing to you today because I haven't been able to stop thinking about you since yesterday when my friend Mimi posted our 6th grade graduation picture from Bustleton Elementary School in Philadelphia in 1964. As I viewed the picture, scanning the images for the faces of friends, trying to remember first names ( only the initials and last names fit beneath the thumbnail images) my eyes came to a stop. There in the center of the picture along with the 7 middle aged women who look like the were hired by central casting to be mid 20th century school teachers is you - a kind faced handsome man with dark brill creamed hair and the kind of glasses worn by Malcolm X. You're smiling in the picture, just as I remember you smiling in room B-1 in the basement of the newly built George Washington Junior-Senior High School -- a building where I spent seven years of my life -- the turbulent years of the 1960's.

My cohort and I came to George Washington Junior-Senior High School for 6th grade because the neighborhood of the far Northeast section of Philadelphia was growing rapidly; schools were not being built as fast as the houses which sprung up along the former dirt roads and farmlands on the edges of the city. My group of students went to 4 different schools between 3rd and 6th grades as the district struggled to find classrooms for the growing number of children of WW II veterans who were moving with their families northward up Roosevelt Blvd during the late 1950's and 1960s.

It was a semi-terrifying experience to go to a high school as a 6th grader. All of our classrooms were located in basement in the same quadrant of the building, extending from Room B-1 to Room B-29. And in a pattern that only sadists or 1960's educators could think up, we were placed in these classrooms based on our academic achievement, with the "smartest" kids in Room B-1 and the "dumbest" in Room B-29.

I was in B-1 and you were my teacher. You were the first male teacher I ever had during what was to be one of the most difficult years of my life. You became a life saver for me. My father who had been having an affair for a number of years decided to leave my mother in the beginning of November, 1963. One day he was there, the next day he was gone. He never offered me or my siblings and explanation and my mother reacted to his departure by retreating to her bedroom and crying for months on end. It was a very frightening time for me. To make matters worse, my mother told us children not to tell a soul that our father had left. She was very ashamed of what was happening and did not want anyone to know.

I was under a great deal of pressure during that time. I had to get up every day, go to school, do my homework, worry about my mother and still act as if everything was fine. School became my refuge and the only time I ever felt comfortable and at peace with the world was when I was in your class. Your gentle nature and good will served as an antidote to my father's anger and betrayal. Your consistent presence in my life and your words of attention and praise for me became a balm for my troubled spirit. In your class, Mr. Rose I was smart, I was special and I was happy.

I have another memory of you that I will never forget. I was in your class on November 22, 1963 when the principal came over the loud speaker at 2:00 at announced that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. We children, of course were very frightened and we all looked to you. You were shaken, and I watched you remove your glasses and put your hands over your eyes. I had never seen you without glasses and it was disconcerting. You stepped out into the hallway for a few minutes and when you returned, you looked very grim.

"Boys and girls," you said, your voice shaking. "President Kennedy has been shot." Your voice broke slightly, then you pulled yourself together. You stood up straight and looked out at us, calmly.

"You're going to be dismissed now. When you get home, you will see that your parents are going to be very upset. Don't be scared if you see them cry. Everything is going to be all right. It just might take some time."

It was Ellsworth the bus driver who told us Kennedy had died.  When we children got off the bus at the corner, there to greet us were our mothers and just as you had said, they were crying. Even my mother, who hadn't left the house since my father had left weeks ago, was standing among the other women holding onto one of our neighbors for support. It seemed as if the entire world was falling apart.

To this day, I cannot think about the assassination of JFK without also remembering my parents' divorce. My personal world was disintegrating at the precise moment the country was shattering. Nothing in my life or in our country's history was ever the same after that November.

I don't remember much else specifically about 6th grade. I do remember that it was the year of the British Invasion and my girlfriends and I would sneak Beatles magazines into class. If you saw us read them, you never let on. I know I never wanted to miss a day of school and I always looked forward to coming to your class, the only place where I was truly happy.

Thirty-eight years later in another classroom in Philadelphia, I thought of you once again as I stood before 33 adolescents as their teacher, having to tell them that two airplanes had just crashed into the World Trade Towers. As I stood in front of them as we watched the buildings crumble before our eyes on TV in shock and disbelief, I remembered what you had said to us that day. I remembered that you prepared us for our parents' fear and grief but that you also told us that things would once again be okay.

I turned to the students and I told them, "Something terrible has happened today. And we're not even sure exactly what it is. But the one thing I know for sure is that people are going to come together. They are going to help each other. They are going to do heroic things. When you're home tonight with your families. Remember that. Look for it. It will be there."

If it weren't for you, Mr. Rose, and the way you spoke to your students on November 22, 1963, I don't know if I would have had the faith and courage to know what to say to mine on September 11, 2001.

I never knew your first name. Today, I do not even know if you're still alive. But your words and gentle spirit inspired me and you live on in me and all of the young people I have had the privilege of teaching.

Sincerely Yours,


Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus

Have you had a teacher who had an impact on your life? Is there someone you wish you could thank for what that teacher did for you when you were a student? Is there a teacher who has influenced that kind of person you are today? Share your stories here or take some time to try to find that teacher and tell him/her.