Q & A : A Teaching Legend at Pali High, ‘Mama G’ Is in a Class by Herself

Rose Gilbert, 74, legendary English teacher at Palisades High School.

Claim to fame: Known as “Mama G” to generations of Westside students, the zany and inspired Gilbert does whatever it takes to turn her young bubelehs, as she calls them, into critical readers and thinkers. She coaches Pali’s renowned academic decathlon team, teaches advanced placement, honors English, and enrichment classes, and shows no sign of slowing down.

Background: Born in Los Angeles and educated in its public schools, she has devoted her life to teaching. The widow of multimillionaire builder and sports figure Sam Gilbert, she has three grown children and six grandchildren.

Interviewer: Times staff writer Lois Timnick.

Question: How did you become a teacher?

Answer: I started teaching when I graduated college during the dinosaur days. I was so young the kids at Uni (University High) thought I was a kid and I couldn’t get respect. So I quit and became a contract agent at MGM, handling contracts, salaries, personal problems for the stars. In the ‘50s I became a social worker--my file was unwed mothers. I couldn’t handle the attitude then toward unwed mothers; it still hasn’t changed too much. I got too emotionally involved, and I went back to teaching.

I was still practice teaching when the teacher in the next classroom died, and the principal at Uni gave me her courses. I told him I hadn’t finished my practice teaching, but he had seen me in action and he said, “You don’t need any practice, you’re made for teaching.” My husband used to say that I was born to teach.

Q: When your children were little did you work?

A: No, I took some time out. I was what I call a professional mommy--PTA and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts--but I found that wasn’t stimulating enough. I had to go back and teach.

Q: How do you keep from burning out?

A: I don’t burn out because all the kids are different. There aren’t two kids alike, not even kids from the same family. They could all be from the same pod, but they’re different peas and each one brings something new to me. We have to gear our classes for those individual differences.

Pali has changed. In 1961 when I was here first, it was all white, a neighborhood school, very clean, no graffiti, green lawns. Everybody was into participation--Girls League, Boys League, clubs. The kids weren’t jaded. Then during the ‘60s, we went through a hippie phase; you did nothing for the school--they even did away with the Student Council. They marched, of course--they were anti-Vietnam, which I was too. The kids, the boys particularly at 17 or 18, just wanted to learn. Many felt that if they went into the service they’d never come back. So they read heavy books like “War and Peace,” “The Iliad,” “Crime and Punishment,” “Anna Karenina.” The more you gave them, the more they gobbled up.

It never bothered me that they were revolutionists; it never bothered me that they didn’t bathe or had beards and long hair or were scruffy, because I looked at them as kids who were really facing a dilemma in their lives. Should they go in the service, should they protest, should they run away, should they go to Canada?

Now many of them are businessmen in suits and BMWs, with little children. They come back to visit. I recently reminded one of where he used to sit and how he had misnumbered his SAT and had to start all over, and he said, “My God, how could you remember that?” I even remembered everything about his “Big Mama.”

Q: His Big Mama?

A: The Big Mama is a major comparison of three books, which they do in the 11th grade and they remember that the rest of their lives. It’s a lot of work and each student does a different subject and different books. In that class we cover about 75 books.

Right now we’re doing “Lord of the Flies” and we blow the conch; the kids love it. We have a piggy up there, a conch, the stick pointed at both ends (props for re-enacting scenes from the book). All that is in the book, so it makes it really graphic; that’s what they love; that is very dramatic. Then the kids dramatize their papers. So, it’s not just writing, writing, writing. I believe in oral discussion a great deal, kids giving their own ideas.

Q: Many people say you had them read more than they had ever read before or will probably ever read again. How do you spark their interest?

A: I love literature and they see it.

Q: They don’t think you’re just some wacky old broad?

A: Yeah, when they first walk in here. They say, “God, she’s dancing around the room, she’s poking this stick at me, we’re blowing a conch. It gets them so interested that they love it.

We’re doing “Oedipus Rex” and we talk about the Freudian interpretation; they love it. Because I get real excited about it, I give them questions that they will be able to answer in class. When we do “The Iliad,” I just don’t read it for war, I read it for different kinds of love--homosexual love, bisexual love, heterosexual love, family love, father love, mother love, brotherly love. Kids can relate to that more than to a list of warships.

Q: Has the caliber of students dropped since you started teaching?

A: I think that the desire to just learn and read for learning and reading’s sake has diminished a great deal, not completely because of the emphasis upon grades. It isn’t their fault--it starts in kindergarten.

Q: How do you get students to produce for you when they don’t for many other teachers?

A: The kids know I love it. They tell me, “You love us.” I say, “Yeah, but I can also be a witch.” I work with them; I keep after them. I give up lunch. I’m never out of my room; they should build a bathroom in here.

Q: But how do you transform kids who’ve been playing Nintendo and reading Sports Illustrated for Kids into voracious readers? There isn’t much literature in the early grades, and unless parents supply it, they haven’t read much of anything.

A: I always tell them in advance they’re going to read 20 books a year-- whole books. We’re reading “Oedipus” aloud because it’s so great as a play, and it’s written in pretty good verse. Even poetry I get them excited about. One kid told me, “God, I love Shakespeare’s sonnets.” I try to make it exciting so they will remember--I mean not for vocab or even writing, but “she got me hooked on books.”

I call the kids to see how they’re doing, and I have their parents call me. I don’t believe in being aloof. I have a very personal relationship with them. It doesn’t end at 3 o’clock.

Q: Is Salinger still big? He was in my day.

A: I think it’s great for 11th-graders. They love him. It’s not passe because this is what it’s like, a bunch of phonies in our society. He talks their language.

Q: What’s The Book today?

A: My kids love “A Separate Peace.” But they love all the books they can relate to. Sometimes they say the books are too big. One girl said she couldn’t read “Anna Karenina,” and when she gave it back she said, “It’s the greatest book I ever read in my life,” and she cried and cried. I have all these thousands of books and the kids come to me and they say, “Can I read it, can I read it?” and I say, “Of course.” I love it when they take a book.

When they’re all through, I always ask my seniors to tell me, of the 20 books we’ve read this year, what is your favorite? Most of them write on “The Dead” by James Joyce, which is about adolescence and the hypocrisy of a marriage which lasted for 17 years. When the woman is making love she’s really making love to her dead lover when he was 17. I’ve been to Ireland and I make a map of Ireland and I just love it and they know I love it. I cry. I tell them if they don’t, they’re insensitive, a bunch of rocks. One girl gave me some rocks and wrote the cutest poem about the “rocks” in our class.

Q: What is the Gilbert approach to writing, this thing all your students have to go through?

A: It all relates to literature. When I get through lecturing I always ask, “What themes did the author cover?” We have a lot of discussion on that. Once they get the theme and know what the author was saying, then they have to back it up with quotes. So, they go back through the book because I always believe in evidence, not their own. I always say, “What did the author say?”

Next I tell them to write a good thesis sentence covering the different themes and then I say, “Now develop your generalizations, your topic sentences based upon your themes.” Everybody’s will be a lot different, but they have the evidence. And then I say, “Discuss your evidence, back it up, use more evidence.” I give them key words they can take to college, good key words, leading words, like “furthermore,” “on the other hand,” “also.”

Then I ask them to write a good conclusion, which always relates to what the author concludes and what they got out of it. It’s a logical format they can use in any college course. And they do--I have hundreds of letters thanking me.

My 10th-graders are going to have to analyze a magazine and a newspaper critically. They’re going to have to be aware of the editorials, the ads, the cover, the price, the table of contents; they’re going to tell me whether or not that magazine or newspaper fulfilled their expectations. And they’re going to be surprised at how much junk they’re getting.

I want these 15-year-olds to become critical readers.

Q: Aren’t you tempted to take what you’ve built here and teach others how to do it? You have to be here in this class to get the Rose Gilbert experience.

A: A lot of it is in my brain, in my personality. I don’t follow the format. I organize, like I put on the board what we’re going to do. I believe in planning. And I’m never absent, unless I’m dead.

Q: What do the schools need to do?

A: They need to get funding. I think it goes all the way to Sacramento. If they don’t get funding, they’re not going to get great teachers. Why should a teacher work here when she could go to a private school and have some security? Here she doesn’t know when they’re going to go on strike or when they’re going to get a salary cut. The emphasis in the United States as a whole has not been on education. We haven’t had any education presidents, not really.

Q: Is that going to happen?

A: Well, I guess I’m a Pollyanna. I’m optimistic. I wouldn’t be teaching at this age if I weren’t.

Kids want to learn. During the strike two years ago, kids came to my house and we talked. They all came, even kids from other classes. They want to be educated. They don’t want to waste their time watching cartoons.

Q: Why have you chosen to stay in the public system?

A: Because I believe very firmly in public education. I went through the public schools. I went to Eastside schools--I lived in Boyle Heights--Malabar, Belvedere, Roosevelt, then UCLA, with some graduate work at Berkeley. So did all my children.

I believe public education is the basis of education, not private schools which are too snobbish, not multicultural, not diversified. I go to my grandchildren’s private schools and I’m appalled at an all-white school.

Our society is multicultural. Kids from Marlborough (a private school) are in for a shocker when they get to Berkeley! Pali is more what the real world is like.

As for quality, Pali has a marvelous record in advanced placement (classes that enable high school students to earn college credits), better than any private school, and our honors program is better than that of any private school. Many students who come here from private schools, or who I have taught in summer school workshops, may have better study skills than our students, but when it came to creativity and understanding and explaining quotes, they hadn’t done that. That learning to think on your feet, that isn’t always there.

Q: What advice do you have for parents who want the best education for their children?

A: Get involved. Be sure that your kid is educated. That he doesn’t come to a classroom just to watch the teacher read, where the teacher is not prepared, bored and spends half the time just calling role.

Q: Does Mama G have an outside life?

A: Yeah. I love the theater; I love UCLA basketball; I love UCLA football; I take my grandchildren to all the basketball games and all the football games. I’m taking them all to see “Cats.” I love movies if they’re good. The grandchildren come over to swim on weekends. But I always need one (weekend) day for correcting papers. I believe in giving them back right away with comments. Sometimes I don’t even put grades on them. Anyhow, I drop low grades. I grade on improvement. What I want to see is, have they learned to think at the end? That’s what counts. Q: There are some who say you are a prima donna. Not everybody is a fan.

A: Yeah, some people ask why I always get the good classes. I always think, “Well, I give a lot of myself.” People are not indifferent to me. But you know what? I don’t care if they don’t love me as long as they learn. Are they going to learn the love of learning? Because to me love of work is love of life--Freud said that.

It’s true for me. I don’t have to do this. I could be going to UCLA, join the Plato Society, go to the gym half the day, go to museums, be a docent. There’s a lot of things you can do for the community--volunteer, tutor. I would never just lie back and die; it’s not my personality.

When I can’t be peppy and enthusiastic anymore, I’ll give it up, hang up the boots. But I’m not old yet. I’m healthy. I work out every day. I’ve always had a zest for life. I don’t hide my age. I tell all the kids I’m 90!

And it’s so much fun. One of my classes “kidnaped” me recently to take me out to breakfast. It was 6 in the morning. I could have killed them!

It all comes down to this: I want to start the fire going--the flame, the desire, the eagerness for learning and reading. “Cultivate your garden,” I say that all the time. “The mind is like a parachute; it does not function unless it’s open.”