Lazy Days of Summer Not So Idle : Teachers Polish Skills on Own Time

Jeff Kover teaches band at Granite Hills High School in El Cajon, a school with few minority students.

Yet the second-year teacher handed over $206 of his own money last week for a summer workshop on the cultural background of Pacific Rim students, the fastest-growing ethnic segment of California’s school population.

Most students from Asian countries, Kover said during a break in the San Diego State University program, “have a tradition of knowing only percussion instruments and not very much about wind-based instruments, which are seen as more Western. I’d like to get more of these students interested in band.”

“Also, I want to find musical pieces, folk melodies and the like, from Eastern countries that I can incorporate into my band’s routines. It would be nice to have kids knowing more than just Brahms and marches.”

Polishing Teaching Tools

The 20 other teachers in the workshop from San Diego County, Tijuana and Canada are finishing up individual projects designed to give them more tools for teaching in multiethnic classrooms when school resumes in September.

They are among hundreds of teachers throughout the area for whom summer means not a three-month vacation--the common perception among the public--but a time to bone up on new topics, learn new teaching techniques or prepare materials for the fall.

“As teachers for nine months of the year, we must keep learning as well,” Kover said. The summer months are the best time to do so, she said. “Sure, we receive academic credits, but basically we are looking to be better in the classroom.”

For example, three of Kover’s colleagues from the Granite Hills math department are among almost 50 teachers spending six weeks at UC San Diego learning new ways to motivate students.

In another program, biology and zoology teacher Jerry Hooper of Mt. Carmel High is one of 13 teachers selected by the San Diego County Office of Education this summer for paid, eight-week fellowships in high-technology companies throughout the county. Hooper’s position at Hybritech, a North County biotechnology firm, will allow him to introduce new ideas and lab programs to his Rancho Penasquitos students later this year.

Working on Own Time

And, on any given weekday, many teachers can be found preparing materials on their own in the Kearny Mesa media instructional center, run by the San Diego Unified School District--copying math and reading programs onto their own computer discs for students to use next term, or browsing through library books for supplemental reading.

Last week, Marilyn Kuckuck was at a computer terminal in the media center reviewing enrichment programs, even though she is a substitute elementary teacher for the San Diego district, not a full-time job. Joining her despite the sunny weather were friends Barbara Scott and Lori Hughes from Cubberly Elementary in Serra Mesa, all making copies of math and reading discs to enrich the basic skills of their many Indochinese students.

“I want to have lesson plans, the ordering of materials, all my visuals, ready to go in case I get a call telling me they want me to substitute,” Kuckuck said. “We are here on our own time and we even have to pay our own money for the discs” to be used in the classroom.

“You should see my bedroom, where I have stacks of games that I’ve made for kids, where I keep all the books and lesson plans that other teachers have shared with me.”

Scott, a veteran kindergarten/first-grade teacher, said the summer break is the only large block of time to plan curriculum changes for the coming year. Despite the fact that she often has to take her two daughters along with her during the summer, Scott said, she would “rather do this now than try to do it before or after school during the year.

“Only other teachers know how hard we work so that the kids will want to come to school because of the stimulation and motivation we give them.”

Scott and Kuckuck were loaned a computer this summer to improve their own skills, to enable them to move more quickly on computer-assisted lesson plans with students. Hughes said that she and other teachers spent $2,000 of their own money last year decorating their classrooms and buying extra materials, such as computer programs.

“My class wrote a ‘book’ using the computer last year,” Hughes said, “using the students’ journals from creative writing.”

The quest for new ideas and strategies motivated the students at San Diego State’s Pacific Rim workshop, which will be followed next month by seminars on teaching geography and Mexican issues.

“I teach art at Escondido High and I really would like to incorporate some of the arts of American Indians and of Asians . . .,” teacher Pat Portis said. “We heard a speaker talk about how remarks can lower students’ self-esteem and a good art experience can certainly help build up self-esteem.”

Genie Brown, a special resource teacher in basic skills for San Diego city schools, is researching better methods to explain idioms to students learning English as a second language. Bob Mihalik, a science teacher at Mann Middle School in East San Diego, hopes to combine his previous experience in working at Sea World with material from the workshop to increase classroom participation in his science class for limited-English speakers.

“Sea World will dress up students to be a scientist, for example, and I’d like to have them dress up as a geologist to feel what it is like to be in the field doing research and also take me away from being the center of attention” by lecturing all the time, Mihalik said.

The teachers at UCSD’s monthlong Mathematics Teacher Institute have one advantage over their colleagues at San Diego State: they received a $1,500 stipend for the four weeks.

“I couldn’t have afforded to do this for four weeks otherwise,” said Robert Rynearson of Granite Hills. “I would have taught summer school instead every day.”

Colleague John McAdams agreed. “There’s the expense just of getting here every day and arranging for child care, parking, etc.”

Learning New Material

Both Rynearson and McAdams are crossover teachers, instructors who originally did not teach math but have switched over as more math courses become required under new state education guidelines. The UCSD program centers on making these teachers more comfortable with their subject.

“We’ve already learned different ways of presenting materials, using concrete models for hands-on use by students, such as red-and-blue chips to represent positive and negative numbers and little tiled squares to represent algebraic equations,” Rynearson said.

“Every afternoon we approach problems in group sessions, talking with each other about cooperative learning, about ways to get concepts across to students . . . we become the students and learn from other teachers,” McAdams said.

From one teacher, Rynearson picked up the idea that an answer given in class by a student should make sense, not only to the teacher but to the other students.

“The student should be able to explain his or her thinking to the other students, and not just to me,” he said. “But in the crush of time when you’re teaching during the year, you wouldn’t necessarily think of that by yourself.”

Added McAdams: “I understand now that even when a student comes up with a wrong answer, the class can learn from understanding what led to that answer and understand that good thinking doesn’t always lead to the right answer, and that there is not just one way to solve an answer. . . . I’ve also learned that kids equate being good in math with being fast, (even though) some of the best mathematicians have taken years to solve problems.”

The UCSD program brings teachers from individual schools in teams of three: two crossover teachers and one more experienced instructor.

Dolores Franzini from Granite Hills has taught math for a quarter century but has found the UCSD classes useful in improving her knowledge of higher-level math concepts. “The (morning) class I’m taking here is hard, and I think I now appreciate more the difficulty that my students sometimes have with higher-level math.

“Also, I really enjoy the networking that is going on here. I am out in (East County) and I never really get to see people from North County schools. I had a great talk this morning with a teacher from San Dieguito about strategies they use for testing, for example.”

The Granite Hills teachers will hold informal sessions for other math teachers in their department next fall to share much of the summer institute’s information.

“A lot more teachers would have liked to attend but could not” because of limited space, Franzini said. “So we will go back and hopefully have a rippling effect through the department.”

Mt. Carmel’s Hooper also expects to share the information he is learning at Hybritech this summer. Without the program, Hooper would have worked a construction job for extra money.

“Now I’m going to be able to give my students the latest research information, to bring people from Hybritech into the classroom to demonstrate equipment and diagnostic techniques, and to design new lab exercises and demonstrations,” Hooper said.

“It’s difficult for teachers oftentimes to find information beyond the textbook that we are always hoping to use with students.”

Hooper and the other teachers placed with high-tech companies will develop a list of ideas and contacts from the fellowships that also will be given to other teachers.

“I’m always trying to show my students that I am still learning as well, telling them about when I take classes at Palomar (Community College) or when I took a wildlife field class at Glacier National Park one summer” to demonstrate that learning is a lifelong process, Hooper said.