Life Lessons in Helping Schoolchildren Succeed : Education: A revered teacher is about to retire. ‘There isn’t a limit with children,’ she says. ‘They are like sponges. They just absorb what you feed.’

The group of kindergartners refused to go home until they had learned to read.

By the end of their first day at Eagle Rock Elementary School, Barbara Ishida had taught them how to count and not to hit or push each other--enough for a group of 5-year-olds, she thought. “Now, it’s time to go home,” she said.

“They said, ‘Oh, but we can’t go . . . we didn’t learn to read.’ And they just sat there,” recalled Ishida, still marveling at the memory nearly three decades old. Impressed, the young teacher quickly wrote a simple sentence on the chalkboard and the children learned to read it. Only then were they ready to go home.

“I guess their parents had told them that they were going to school to learn to read,” Ishida said. “After that, I taught that group to read. And even geometry . . . there isn’t a limit with children. They are like sponges. They just absorb what you feed.”

Ishida never forgot the group of children who taught her about their potential and her duty as a teacher. And for almost 30 years since, she has more than delivered on that lesson at the same school, working with children and parents on Saturdays, providing books, school supplies and gifts from her own pocket, and organizing schoolwide activities.

Ishida freely tells her young students in third and fourth grades that she loves them and wants the best for them. She also impresses upon them a sense of responsibility: that they are being educated so they will have choices as adults, that this is all preparation for the future so they can provide for their own children as their parents did for them.

But now, school cutbacks are prompting Ishida, 58, to retire this month after guiding a loving but firm hand over hundreds of children to be their best. She has never settled for less, they said.

“She is a tough-fisted disciplinarian. As a mother, I implicitly trusted her and knew that she really loved the children and had their best interest at heart,” said Elizabeth Pattengale, whose three sons all were taught by Ishida; the youngest is in her class now.

“You don’t easily replace a Barbara Ishida. . . . She knew how to get the parents involved in the child’s education process as much as (she did) a child,” said Pattengale, who is organizing a farewell reception for Ishida at the school June 28.

Pattengale and Principal Sheila Watson expect hundreds of families to attend.

“She considers teaching a creative and professional activity,” Watson said. “Twenty-eight years is a long time and she is continually thinking of new things to excite her kids.”

Ishida works on Saturdays, offering extra tutoring. Other students come to class on Saturdays with their parents to work on special projects.

She finds it important to offer herself on Saturdays so that mothers and fathers can get more involved in the classroom. And because working parents have less time to teach their children social skills, Ishida also drills her students in manners--quiet voices, saying please and thank you. The children find her so engaging that several of them usually can be found eating lunch in her room.

“She did this all by herself. I would never ask someone to do so much work,” Watson said. “And, I’m not supposed to know this, but she just donated $200 worth of books for the PTA’s book fair.”

Ishida’s generosity in rewarding her children with books, pencils, erasers, project kits, records, toys and other gifts out of her own pocket has been known for years, said Vonda Onsted, a first-grade teacher.

“Always for the benefit of the children,” Onsted said. “Always.”

But perhaps the defining act of selflessness for Ishida, a Japanese-American who was born in Hawaii and raised there during World War II, was denying herself the love of her life for the sake of two young children.

Growing up in rural Wailua on the island of Oahu, Ishida’s childhood was filled with idyllic days of running barefoot on the sandy beaches and plucking wild bananas, mangoes and guavas. Wailua was removed from the rest of the island and the war, and Ishida’s family was spared from the Japanese internment process.

While working as an elementary schoolteacher about 25 years ago, she fell in love with a divorced father of two who was white.

But when he asked her to marry him, Ishida decided an interracial marriage would pain his children too much.

Divorces were rare then, Ishida said, and she saw the pain and confusion divorces were causing some of her students at the time. She said she could not hurt the man’s children even further with an interracial marriage.

“As a teacher, I couldn’t do it. . . . Now, (interracial marriages are) OK, but I didn’t want to confuse the children,” said Ishida, who admits that she has privately regretted her decision at times. “At the time, it was the right thing to do.”

She never married. Instead, she threw herself further into her work, earning a reputation as a teacher that children yearned to have.

“I wanted to be in her class since (I was in) the first grade,” said Melissa McGillivray, 10, a fourth-grader. “I knew all the different fun things they did and I knew she was real nice.”

Melissa said misbehaving children are quick to shape up; their parents have warned them that if they don’t, Ishida will trade them for another student from another class. “This class is really fun because we do different projects.”

As part of their history lesson, Melissa and her classmates last week finished building a pteranodon, a prehistoric flying reptile standing about five feet tall with a six-foot wingspan. The papier-mache creation stands next to a 10-foot tyrannosaurus built a few years ago, also of papier-mache.

Big projects like these have been an annual tradition in Ishida’s class since 1976, when the students built a life-size model of Paul Revere’s horse while learning about the country’s bicentennial anniversary. Since then, projects have included robot R2D2 of “Star Wars” and Paul Bunyan’s Babe the Blue Ox.

Ishida said her decision to retire was spurred by her growing frustration with the Los Angeles Unified School District. Staffing and funding have been cut drastically in recent years, and teacher salaries reduced.

For Ishida, that means not being able to afford the tradition of gifts for her students and fear that her salary will be cut more, possibly affecting her retirement package.

“I feel so frustrated when I see something I want for the kids but I can’t afford it,” she said. “And it’s getting harder to pay the rent.”

After retirement, Ishida initially thought she would volunteer her services at the school library, which no longer has a librarian. But she decided to return to her octogenarian parents still living in Wailua.

“I feel that I should go home (to Hawaii) so I won’t regret it when it’s too late,” Ishida said. “After all, they gave me so much and I want to give them back.”

While willing to part with it now, Ishida knows what has sustained and excited her for the last three decades.

She has always been hooked by her students’ eagerness. “When you’re teaching something and they are catching on to it, their eyes sparkle--hey, they got it! All of a sudden, they learned. And that is precious to me.”