This Teacher’s Work Is a Mixed Blessing
After spending 19 years of her life with fifth- and sixth-graders, Washington Middle School teacher Teri Uyemura sometimes feels burned out.
Uyemura says she’s tired of plowing more than $500 of her own money each year into buying storybooks for reading classes and Venus flytraps for science, because the school doesn’t provide for such extras.
And some days, the Northwest Pasadena teacher has to summon the energy to discipline rowdy students who won’t settle down. How, she wonders, can you teach children who haven’t had breakfast, stayed up half the night, live with a grandparent because their mother doesn’t want them or watched their best friend get shot in a gang fight?
“There’s certain things you can’t control,” Uyemura says, “like what happens with their friends and when they go home. You just hope that in some way you’ve made an impression, and hopefully a positive impression.”
Uyemura’s day starts at 4:45 a.m., when the alarm slogs her awake in Northridge, where she lives with her husband, Al, a former high school math teacher who now runs his own business.
She is at school by 6:30 to draw up lesson plans, correct homework, speak with students and do all those extracurricular activities that surround teaching.
Lunchtime, which runs from 11:10 to 11:45, is usually spent with a Diet Pepsi trading stories in the classroom with Jim Robinett, who teaches next door. If she’s really hungry, Robinett will go out and bring back burritos or pastrami sandwiches.
Although the school day ends around 3:30 or 3:45 p.m., Uyemura usually takes two stacks of papers home to correct, which can eat up 1 1/2 hours of her evening. It makes for 12-hour days.
“The first five years, I’d fall dead asleep on the couch after school, wake up to help with dinner and then be up till 12 grading papers,” she says.
In some ways, Uyemura, 43, fits the profile of the average teacher in California. According to the State Department of Education, 68.3% of teachers are women and their average age is 43. The average statewide salary in 1988 was $33,159; but in the Pasadena Unified School District, the top scale for experienced teachers is $45,680. With a master’s degree and seniority, Uyemura earns Pasadena’s top scale.
Although Uyemura tries to leave her students behind after school, their images pop up unexpectedly like pint-sized ghosts to hover over her evenings.
Uyemura has fond words for her students. But when the talk turns to teaching, the word “frustration” surfaces time and again. She would like classes with fewer students than the 36 she now teaches.
She also wishes the school would provide more instructional materials so she wouldn’t feel compelled to buy storybooks, markers and many of the other learning tools that students take for granted. And she grouses that the pencil sharpener in Room 115 hasn’t worked for three months.
And she’d like the district to pay her medical insurance.
“Right now we’re kind of upset, we have to pay more than $90 per month to cover benefits,” she says. “Next year it will go up.”
But Uyemura, like many other teachers, says she’s not in it for the money, but for the intangible rewards.
“It could be a thank-you after school when you help them with a problem or when you feel you are important to them in some way and they can seek you out,” she says.
Uyemura has received Christmas cards from former students and invitations to their high school graduations. Some have invited her to their weddings; others have written to announce acceptance into college.
And last year, a former student invited Uyemura to her quinceanera, the celebration that, at age 15 in the Latin culture, marks a girl’s entry into womanhood.
Teaching hasn’t always produced such rewards for Uyemura.
About 10 years ago, she says, her morale took a nose-dive and she began dreading work in the morning. The idea of 36 students tugging at her jacket and yelling “Miz Uyemura” put her in a foul mood. So she took a year’s sabbatical from Altadena Elementary, where she was then teaching.
Once free, she enrolled in tennis lessons. She played racquetball. She and her husband started training and eventually ran a marathon.
Nine months into her sabbatical, the school called and asked if she wanted to come back early. A teacher had left and they needed a replacement.
Uyemura was ready. “Yeah, I’ll come back,” she told the principal.
This is her fourth year at Washington Middle School and, although she sometimes doubts herself, others hold this sixth-grade teacher in the highest respect.
“She’s an outstanding and experienced teacher who works very well with her diverse student population,” says Washington Middle School Principal Willis Charles.
Uyemura loves the rambling, old Spanish-style building that commands a king’s view from its perch atop a green hill in Northwest Pasadena. She attended Washington as a child, although the students were a different ethnic mix then and school was considered a much safer place.
Today, Washington--in a mixed neighborhood where graciously aging California bungalows with languorous front porches sit next to graffiti-scrawled, cinder-block housing projects--has security guards posted on campus full time.
Uyemura marvels at the difference between her childhood and that of the students she teaches today. She grew up in an environment where her parents taught her she could achieve any goal if she worked hard.
But obstacles are greater now. Several years ago, Uyemura says Washington teachers were warned not to go into the projects alone on parent visits because it was dangerous.
And teachers report that parents in some parts of Northwest Pasadena make their children sleep on the floor at night because of stray bullets from gun battles that rage outside.
Sometimes, Uyemura reflects that the future seems bleak.
“When they’re sixth-graders and they’re having difficulty reading and writing, it’s really depressing, because you wonder, maybe some teachers worked really hard with them and yet they’re still not able to learn.”
But Uyemura tries not to let such thoughts engulf her.
“I always like to feel there’s something positive that can happen. I know that sounds like fantasy land, but if I allow myself to feel hopeless, then it affects the way you approach a child and I don’t ever want them to feel that their efforts are useless or totally wasted.”
So she fights to sustain her hope, in an island classroom where teacher and students feed off each others’ moods in isolation from the rest of the world. Likewise, the class senses Uyemura’s emotions acutely and knows just how far it can push her on any given day.
“You’re always being tested, to see how far your limit is and what they can get away with,” Uyemura says.
“There was a period this year right after Christmas when the kids were reacting real negatively,” she continues.
“It was a daily battle getting them to listen and do the assignment, even in the morning, their best time. You almost had to do a dance to get them to listen.”
She also worries about showering too much attention on the troublemakers while the well-behaved students who do their work quietly get shunted off to the side.
“It’s really unfair because it’s the kids who aren’t creating problems who can really blossom with a little attention from a teacher,” she says.
“Sometimes I really have to force myself to turn and smile at kids who are showing such positive effort.”
But things have perked up since the New Year, and Uyemura says the class is now on an upswing.
Perhaps the mood changed on Valentine’s Day, when Uyemura says proudly that she received flowers, corsages, two boxes of candy and tons of cards.
“I thought it was really sweet that they would even bother to do that. They really think of you, even when you don’t think they do,” she says.
Uyemura admits to being most touched by Valentine’s Day cards from several of her biggest troublemakers.
“Here’s a kid and you’ve really been on their case, and they come around and give you a card and you know they’re thinking of you . . . That’s what’s really rewarding. That’s what keeps you going.”
