Elementary School ‘Emergency’ Teachers--A Report From the Trenches : Initial Optimism About Program Has Been Tempered by Experience

Imagine a world where disease rips through the population like lightning, the natives’ teeth regularly fall out and the simplest concepts--such as adding two and two--are baffling.

Imagine, also, that you are suddenly put in charge of this world. You are directed to make the mysteries clear, to impose order on the residents’ tendency toward anarchy and to spend six hours a day on your feet, walking and talking. Or shouting. For good measure, imagine that you devote a night or two a week to role reversal, during which you watch somebody else do what you did all day.

Welcome to the elementary schools of Los Angeles. And to the sometimes startling reality faced by new “emergency” teachers who have spent the past couple of months in the front lines of education. It’s a place where chicken pox may run riot, baby teeth may rattle on the floor and adult ways of thinking and speaking are often the worst way to make a point.

Follow-Up Talks

These are among the impressions that emerged in follow-up interviews with five new teachers--none of whom have a regular California education credential--about their experiences since September, when The Times reported on the beginning of their journey to the classroom.

Then the five, as well as one who failed to pass a required test, were in various stages of completing a crash three-week training program designed to meet the shortfall in teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. This year the district hired about 2,500 new teachers. Of those, about 1,200 did not have credentials.

At the same time, the five were inadvertent participants in a controversy. Education groups such as the National Education Assn., the country’s biggest teacher union, were charging that hiring uncertified teachers was a dangerous practice, one that undermined the quality of education.

In September, the new teachers declared their commitment to teaching as a career, saying that education promised rewards that had eluded them in other jobs and/or that teaching had been a longtime consideration. All said they believed they could succeed as teachers and prove the critics wrong.

More of a Challenge

Today the optimism has been tempered by experience. While all plan to continue teaching, they have had enough days in the classroom to realize that teaching is even harder than they thought it would be. Sometimes the work is complicated by culture shock, both the clash between child and adult realms and between different cultures at the hard-to-staff inner-city or lower-income schools where they have been assigned. The five will be interviewed a final time next spring, to see if they indeed will continue teaching the next school year.

“The challenge is more than I expected,” said John McVay, a 32-year-old former property manager who is teaching fifth-graders in East Los Angeles at Utah Street Elementary School. “I’ve had to change the way I think. Working in the adult world, I tended to think more in the abstract. I could explain something once and generally most adults would understand what I meant. At this level, everything has to be much more concrete . . . A simple thing like using a ruler is a big step. I have to explain what the measurements are, what a ruler’s for, how it works, what you do with it. It’s not something where I can say, ‘This is a ruler, now measure out eight inches.’ ”

The distance between his middle-class background and that of his students is often stellar, said McVay, who grew up in Newport Beach. “I had a lot of advantages that these kids never had,” he said. “Now I’m beginning to see what happens when you don’t have those kind of advantages, what it takes to get somebody to a point where they can make progress academically.”

One way or another, the other new teachers say they’ve experienced the same difficulties.

Beans to Teach Arithmetic

Patricia Saragosa, who teaches at Euclid Street Elementary School in Boyle Heights and has been through bouts of chicken pox and episodic spates of loose teeth with her first-graders, has found that everyday items can help in teaching arithmetic.

“We are famous because we use beans (to teach arithmetic),” joked Saragosa, 24, a 1983 graduate of UC Berkeley. “Because they can count beans at home. Everybody has beans, they can subtract beans at home. It’s true. Hey, I’ve got my bag (of beans) under the desk. We use a lot of things like this. We use broken arrows to represent subtraction. We use an arrow crashing into a house--it’s going to bang down on those people--to represent addition--guests are coming for dinner, you know.”

And Howard Barnett, a 34-year-old former insurance company employee who substituted at two schools before being assigned a sixth-grade class at Stonehurst Avenue Elementary in Sun Valley, summed it up this way: “The meat of the whole thing is the teaching itself--relating to the kids, trying to figure out how to get through to some of the kids. Teaching is not just coming in and, because you know a math problem, saying it’s going to be a snap. It’s not that easy.”

In their first weeks of teaching, the newcomers agreed that discipline was their biggest challenge. Unruliness erupted continually and sometimes their voices were hoarse and weak by the end of the day.

Fred Mitchell, 32, a graduate of Harvard who also has a law degree from Columbia University, said that his second- and third-graders at Miramonte School in South Central Los Angeles sometimes seem untameable.

“I get frustrated,” he admitted. “I tell the kids I want you all to get in line right now and they don’t do it right now and I guess I’m probably a little too quick to lose my cool and let it show. It seems like they enjoy it, they get a kick out of it. It’s obvious what their purpose is--to watch Mr. Mitchell go off.”

Quieting his class is sometimes like stamping out fires, Mitchell added. “By the time I’ve gotten the ones who are difficult listening, the ones who were listening in the first place have lost it because they only have a 20-minute attention span.”

McVay’s recollection of his first days summoned up images of a drill instructor facing new recruits.

‘They’re Very Likable’

“At one point I had to teach them how to stand behind their chairs properly, to get them to come into the classroom in an orderly fashion so that they would be able to sit down calmly and listen to a brief lesson,” he said. “I had to spend an hour one morning showing them how to stand behind their chairs,” he repeated, explaining it in detail. “You put your hands down at your sides, you don’t lie across the desk, you don’t turn around and push somebody.”

But McVay doesn’t believe that his students are hopeless delinquents. Some, he said, come from difficult home situations, including a few who live in Skid Row hotels.

“I really haven’t found a kid I didn’t like,” he said. “They’re all very likable. Some are very hard to deal with because they have emotional problems. You don’t know what’s causing them at home and they come to school to act them out. I had a girl roll on the floor, kick and scream one day . . . You run into that but you learn right away that when a kid calls you an SOB and a few other choice names, they don’t mean it personally, really . . . they’re frustrated because you’re giving them a structure they’re not used to. Next day, it’s like they’ve wiped the slate clean.”

Overall, the new teachers said their jobs are a drain on their energies. Each day is a race, they said, with no rest periods.

Jacqueline Chanda, 35, taught in Zambia and earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Southern California last year. She is teaching fourth grade at Miramonte School. She described her day as one long blur.

“It’s the fact that from 10 minutes to 8 until 2:45, you are moving, you are going, you are on your feet, you are up and down the stairs,” she said. “Even the times when we have what we call ‘psychomotor release,’ which is PE (physical education) time for the children, during that time they (school administrators) call meetings. You have to go gather your materials, down to the meeting, you finish the meeting, out to pick up the children, back up the stairs, time for another subject. That’s the demanding part.”

Said McVay: “Most jobs you can take a break, but here there is no break until recess or lunch and then it’s questionable whether you get a break because the kids want to come back and do something. So you find yourself in a situation of performing for six hours--straight.”

To one degree or another, the teachers said the daily grind is a minor annoyance compared with the hopeless feelings they have when dealing with students who don’t seem to be able to learn, or learn slowly.

“There’s one little girl I’m fearful about because she doesn’t work,” Mitchell said. “I’ll give them an assignment . . . there are others who have finished or half-finished and she’s got her name on the paper and nothing else. I don’t know what she does instead of doing her work.”

“I really get concerned if I see a student having a hard time,” Barnett said. “That’s the only time I think, ‘Maybe if I had a little more experience, I could literally open up his head and pour the information in.’ ”

Barnett’s attitude about lacking a credential was typical. He and his colleagues acknowledged that in some instances a teaching credential might be useful. But classroom experience is the best teacher, they maintained, adding that they are taking, or will soon begin taking, college classes that eventually will lead to a credential.

Unable to Get Jobs

When an article describing the new teachers and the controversy about credentialing was published last September, many former out-of-state teachers now living in the area sent letters to The Times, saying that they had been unable to get jobs with the Los Angeles district. Most of these teachers had degrees in education, a major that is not recognized in California where prospective teachers are required to major in a subject such as math, biology or English and then take a fifth year of training in education.

Daniel Lara, a district staff development adviser, said that out-of-state teachers should apply to teach under an emergency credential.

But even possession of a regular California credential doesn’t guarantee a job, he said. “We’re not looking for people who are breathing,” he said. “We’re not taking anybody off the street.” He added, “That’s harsh, but just because they have a credential doesn’t mean they’re qualified to teach.”

Lara backed up the new teachers statements that they had seen no backlash towards emergency teachers, despite publicity about the National Education Assn.’s charges.

Charges Exaggerated

“On the whole, the teachers have been very well received,” he said, explaining that protest had not materialized “because I don’t think the accusations were founded.”

Chanda also believes that charges of untrained teachers being sent into the classroom cold are exaggerated. She herself taught for 10 years in Africa, she said, and she has met many others who have taught elsewhere in the United States.

“We have a lot of people who have come from out of state, Massachusetts, Chicago,” she said, “and they come here and their credentials are not valid and they have to go to educational courses just like myself.”

‘I Like It When They Get It’

Balancing the frustrations, potential controversy and heavy workload, however, is the satisfaction of seeing the efforts at discipline and instruction pay off, the teachers said.

“Oh, I like it when they get it,” Saragosa said. “I like it when you teach them something and they say, ‘Oh, teacher, it’s like this, and they show you, they show you how to add and they show you how to subtract. I like it when some of them don’t have to add on their fingers anymore. I like it when they can read me something, or when they’re looking at books and they say, ‘Teacher, I’m tired of looking at the pictures, what does this mean, what are these words and what do these letters mean?’ . . . I can’t tell you how much I really like it.”

McVay also says he feels that the rewards are worth the hassles. “For all the problems and troubles and for all the days when I feel like, ‘Geeze, why did I put myself in this position, there’s a reward to it . . . it’s kind of hard to verbalize . . . I’ve got students beginning to want to come in at lunch, they want to come in at recess, they want to come in after school and do stuff. That tells me something. I may not be the best teacher they’ve ever had but at least I’m enough of a teacher that they’re willing to come back and try some more, keep working at it.”

Even though they were interviewed separately, Mitchell almost exactly echoed McVay. “I’m always aware of how many hassles there are, how much there is to deal with and still I’m not willing to give it up . . . I still enjoy it and I still want to stick it out.”

And Chanda said, “I like seeing them progress. I like knowing that I’ve had something to do with motivating them. It’s not that easy to motivate some of the kids. Some of them come from homes that are very, very difficult . . . My class is beginning to be what I want it to be. They’re not quite there yet, but we’re beginning to be able to do things together and enjoy learning . . . I think I’m at the point now where I’m beginning to reach the joy (of teaching).”