CYPRESS : Prize Teacher Puts It All Together

To most teachers it would be a discipline problem if a student deliberately smashed artwork during class. To Marty Gonzalez, it’s a teaching method.

Her sixth-grade students at Morris Elementary School learn archeology, geography and anthropology by breaking decorated clay pots and then reassembling them.

Her unusual approach has earned Gonzalez two major awards: one last year from the National Council for Geographic Education and one this month from the National Good Neighbor Teacher program.

Gonzalez said she came up with the pottery method literally by accident.

“For a long time I had wanted to find a way to teach cultural interpretation,” she said. “I dropped a terra-cotta pot one day, and it occurred to me that students could learn by reassembling the pot, just as archeologists do.”

In a typical session, her students decorate clay pots with animals, plants and landscapes that portray a particular culture. They then break the pots, and other students reassemble them, trying to decipher which culture is involved.

“They learn how archeology and geography are important in learning the history of a land and the people who lived there,” Gonzalez said.

Learning about various cultures also teaches children to be more tolerant, Gonzalez said. “Students learn that things are not often what they seem,” she said. “They learn that often you really need to look at a situation in quite a few directions.”

State Farm Insurance, which sponsors the Good Neighbor Award, presented Gonzalez with a $5,000 check for her school. The money, presented at the Cypress School District’s board meeting last week, will be used by Morris Elementary “for professional development and to update our geography material,” Gonzalez said.

State Farm advertisements in national publications this month feature Gonzalez and some of her students. The ads are in the current editions of Time, Atlantic Monthly, Money, National Geographic, Natural History and Scientific American magazines, as well as one daily edition of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.

The ads show Gonzalez, hammer in hand, preparing to smash a clay pot with students around her. The headline reads: “Ms. Gonzalez’s Geography Class Has Gone to Pieces.”

Her students, Gonzalez said, are enjoying their celebrity. “They were pretty impressed.”

Gonzalez, a native of Los Angeles who now lives in Long Beach, has been a teacher for 23 years, all of them in the Cypress School District.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1967 and her master’s degree in cultural anthropology in 1984, both from Cal State Long Beach.