My Mother Ate My Homework and Other Tales

When Bell Junior High School teacher Hale Maher asked his eighth-grade English student where his homework was, out came the clever reply: “My mother ate it.”

Pardon me, Maher said, trying hard not to laugh. But then where is your textbook?

“She polished that off, too.”

Forgoing the temptation to dress down the student or pull out a referral to the vice principal, Maher kept his own sense of humor--the answers were so outrageous as to be genuinely funny--and, with a broad smile, he credited the teen-ager with a certain amount of chutzpah.

And in that brief, unspoken eye contact between the two, the student learned both that he had self-esteem and that his teacher cared about him. Since that episode, the student hasn’t missed a single assignment.

Maher recently shared the little anecdote with three of his colleagues from the highly respected Paradise Hills school at their weekly “breakfast club” in booth 12 at the Sweetwater Carl’s Jr. restaurant.

Despite the pre-sunrise hour of 6 a.m. at which they normally meet, the group is anything but glum. They gather not to grumble but to trade the funny lines of the week from individual classrooms, talk about ways to infuse their outside interests into the curriculum and, in general, brainstorm in an informal, breezy manner about how to do things better.

No Complaining

One thing they never do, of course, is bad-mouth a student or complain about how bad school administrators are, or how crowded their 2,200-student campus is or how underpaid they are.

In their small but still significant way, these teachers represent what the public is always crying for in their opinions on public schools: teachers who work hard at their craft, continue to learn about themselves and try new techniques year after year, and who care about producing students who enjoy what they learn.

“It’s a kind of therapy for us,” said Jan Scherer, a social studies teacher. “We validate each other through our stories, by sharing things about a career we enjoy doing.

“We like to excel and we want to excel. . . . We like to think of our kids as kids, not as IQ numbers.”

The group came together gradually over the last year, initially with Maher and fellow English teacher Cliff Roberts musing about the fact that teachers so often seemed to accentuate the negative when they meet. Then Jane Slater joined the early-morning get-togethers when she started car-pooling with Maher after moving to Bell from Loma Portal Elementary.

“It was either that or walk to work,” said Slater, an English teacher in her first year at Bell who has successfully surmounted the often-rocky transition from elementary school instruction. “I’ve learned a lot about each other, what we do outside of class and how we apply that inside of class.”

The group has planned a major joint project for their classes this year: to put out a special magazine on the South Bay community surrounding the school.

“It’s a way to talk about the environment, the elderly, the history of our area using our English and history classes,” Maher said. “We’ll have articles on small, locally owned restaurants, on the kelp beds, written by the kids.”

Each article will involve four to five students doing as much of the complete process as possible. Already, Maher has turned around his curriculum unit on interviews and, instead of reading about interviews, called in school administrators to be interviewed by the students. And, instead of practicing letter writing in another English unit, he had the students write actual letters to neighborhood businesses asking for contributions to the magazine.

“Like so many of our ideas, this is still evolving, although we hope to have the first issue in May and maybe a magazine class as an elective course next year,” Roberts said.

Slater said the value of their informal sessions cannot be overestimated.

“You can’t be a good teacher without consistent interaction with other teachers,” Slater said. And the humor that they all share plays a major role within their richness of communication.

“If there isn’t humor in the classroom, there isn’t much learning going on,” Roberts said. “It helps me look at education as a whole, to get across to the kids that literature, writing, grammar is all connected and that there are values and ethics that shouldn’t be ignored either.”

Providing Opportunities

One of Roberts’ English classes wrote and produced a Halloween story in October that they then presented to area elementary schools. Last spring, Maher’s class produced a play for parents, and this fall it sold a Halloween magazine to fellow Bell students.

“These are things that the so-called regular students aren’t given opportunities for, to be creative,” Roberts said.

Scherer carries out projects with both her gifted and non-gifted social studies classes, although she modulates the pace depending on the students. At present, the students are learning about artifacts of modern cultures by making a facsimile of something that would be found in a “pretend” culture and then posing a series of questions about its use.

“If you teach to the lowest common denominator, that is the level that students will stay in,” Scherer said, “but I like to encourage the students to struggle at a higher level and get them the help they need to succeed.

“I think we all try different methods every year. I do something different all the time. I couldn’t stand to teach the same way year after year.”