A First-Grade, First-Class Fixture : 41 Years After Teacher Took a Job in Room 1, She’s Still There

It was a September morning in 1953 when a 22-year-old named Harriet A. Cadman walked into the little white schoolhouse on the hill and began her first teaching job. And 41 years later, she still hasn’t left.

That young woman fresh out of college, the one who came from a family full of teachers and swore she would never join their ranks, is now 63 years old and a beloved fixture in Room 1 of Loma Vista School in Whittier. Every year since 1953, she has taught first grade in that room and every year, she says, she loves it more.

“I have to keep doing this until I get it right,” the short, pink-cheeked Cadman says with a joking twinkle in her eye. “If I didn’t come here every morning, my car would come by itself.”

Raised in Indiana, Cadman headed for the University of New Mexico at age 16, determined to break ranks with her eight teacher-aunts and become a social worker. But her fieldwork in Albuquerque landed her in a first-grade classroom. Her knees went weak.

“The kids were so adorable, so loving,” she recalled. “I knew right then that I was history.”

A happenstance introduction in New Mexico to the superintendent of South Whittier School District landed her her first job. And so it was that Cadman arrived at Loma Vista in the fall of 1953 and moved into an $80-a-month apartment.

From her desk in Room 1, Cadman has been witness to four decades of change. The neighborhood, once grassy space dotted with a few homes, is now blanketed with shops and small stucco houses. Its inhabitants, once middle class, are now mostly lower income. The sea of little faces that greets her has changed from virtually all white to mostly Latino, with a sprinkling of white and black.

In the early years, teachers were expected to wear dresses. But today, Cadman’s attire reflects her down-to-earth style. On a recent day, she wore maroon knit pants, a flowered jersey and white sneakers. Her gray hair is no-nonsense short. She wears no jewelry.

Her manner with the children is more grandmother, with a dash of social worker, than schoolmarm. Cadman, who was named teacher of the year by her district this year, says she tries to see things from her students’ points of view. She sums up her approach: “a benefit of the doubt and a hug around the neck.”

As they bend over their papers, practicing writing passages from “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” she walks around supervising, touching a shoulder here, a back there, praising good work and encouraging better.

And she sees to the little details: One student wiggles loose a baby tooth, proudly displaying it to his classmates. Cadman carefully seals it in an envelope for him and tucks it into his notebook.

Cadman has been at Loma Vista long enough that she now teaches the children of some former students. Last year, she taught Jamie Cottrell, whose father, Shannon, was in Cadman’s class in 1966. The elder Cottrell, a 34-year-old machinist, recalled how patient Cadman was with him when he was in her class.

“I cried for 15 or 20 minutes every single day and she never got mad,” Cottrell recalled. “She just let me put my head down on my arms and she waited until I was done. She’s a real motherly type.”

Lupe Morrow, 29, remembers how Cadman tried hard to speak a little Spanish to her when she was a Spanish-speaking child named Lupe Garcia in 1972. Morrow’s daughter, Bessie, is now a student in Cadman’s class.

“She is real caring and patient, just like she was then,” Morrow says. “To see her, you wouldn’t think she’s been teaching so long. She’s so energetic.”

While many teachers complain that changing times have produced students who are rude, troubled and uninterested in learning, Cadman looks into her classroom and sees that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

“They’re pretty much the way they always were,” she says. “You’re going to have a couple gabby ones. Always have been, always will be. With kids, there’s really nothing new under the sun.”

The same with teaching techniques: “It all comes around again. First we taught phonics, then it was the whole-language method. Now it’s back to phonics again.”

She does think it’s a shame that kids don’t seem to read as much at home as they used to. And she thinks they watch too much TV. But basically, Cadman says, 6-year-olds are still 6-year-olds.

That isn’t to say there haven’t been some changes. So Cadman adapts. When she began to hear more and more Spanish around Loma Vista’s hallways about 10 years ago, she figured she’d better brush up her high school Spanish. So she took a few classes. Now she’s fairly fluent.

Her routine stays the same, though. She is installed in her room before 7 a.m., heading home in her cherry-red 1990 Plymouth at about 3 p.m. In the beige stucco home she shares with her widowed sister and a gray cat, Cadman puts her feet up, has some tea and grades homework.

Evenings are for watching television, reading the newspapers or savoring a good mystery novel. Weekend afternoons can bring a visit from her 1-year-old grandnephew.

Cadman doesn’t reflect that much on the old days. She likes things fine just the way they are. She figures she’ll go on teaching in Room 1 “until I don’t feel good anymore.”

“Every year they hand out a form asking if I want to switch grades or anything,” she says. “I just write down, ‘No! Never!’ ”

Year after year, through the passing of the decades, it’s the things that never change that keep Harriet Cadman coming back.

“The first time a student writes her name straight without any letters upside down or counts to 100 or they actually read and understand what they read, it’s unbelievable,” Cadman says.

“I’ve gotten very emotional about it. In class I’ve gotten choked up,” she says with a smile, sniffling to demonstrate. “Sometimes I just have to go outside and get a drink of water until I’m OK again.”