A Lesson That Can’t Be Graded

The air is thick these days with talk of education reform, of adding exit exams and raising standards and providing tougher discipline.

It’s good to hear, as far as it goes. But there’s one thing missing, one element more likely to come from Mister Rogers than from Bill Clinton or Gray Davis.

Caring.

“It’s not talked about, not by teachers, parents, not by politicians,” says Bruce Dickson, who in four years as a substitute teacher has been through 300 classrooms in more than 100 schools.

“It’s going to make the difference whether we produce decent citizens. But it’s not going to make headlines, not going to get votes. Can’t you just imagine some politician saying ‘Elect me; we’re going to have caring in the classroom.’ ”

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When Debby Collins came to Monrovia’s Plymouth Elementary as a new principal 11 years ago, she inherited a struggling public school with a dispirited staff and dismal test scores.

She convened a meeting and asked her teachers: “What’s keeping you from teaching these kids?”

Their answer: the kids’ behavior.

Collins had spent 11 years in the classroom and knew what they meant. It’s hard for even the most diligent teacher when a class is constantly interrupted by squabbles, students flouting the rules.

“We tried every kind of punishment you could imagine,” Collins recalls. But anger only begat anger.

Now, each day at Plymouth begins with classroom meetings, where students shake hands, greet one another, sing songs, tell stories, share. The teacher offers praise and encouragement and explains the day ahead. It only takes about 20 minutes, but its influence ripples through the rest of the day.

“We’ve found it creates such a community of shared learners,” says Collins, “that you don’t have the fights, the arguments that used to take up so much class time.”

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Lessons in caring. You can’t tack them onto a lesson plan.

“What you’re really teaching is empathy,” explains teacher Marty Kirschen, “and you have to model that for your students. You have to teach yourself to be patient, to really listen.”

Kirschen spent eight years moving through dozens of schools as a substitute teacher--his second career, after 20 years as a finance manager in the entertainment industry. In every school, he says, he found “a handful of teachers who are naturally nurturing and giving. And there’s another group that wishes they could be that way.”

That’s the group Kirschen and Dickson are trying to reach with a series of Saturday morning workshops called “Teaching From Our Hearts.”

So far, attendance has been disappointing--only about eight to 10 teachers at each session. But Kirschen thinks that reflects not teacher apathy, but his and Dickson’s difficulty spreading the word.

They pitched the concept to the school board and the teachers’ union but, Kirschen says, neither was interested. “So we decided to start where we are--teacher to teacher--and let it grow.”

Kirschen began his first full-time teaching job in the fall. “It’s difficult, and I don’t always like myself when I’m in front of that classroom,” he admits. “But I apologize, say to the children, ‘I don’t like the way my voice sounded just then, so let me try that again.’ ”

He’d like every teacher to have a chance to meet regularly with peers, to have a place “where you could say, ‘I yelled at Johnny today and I know there’s a better way to deal with him,’ and we could share ideas, help each other. . . .”

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It’s not clear that practicing caring will produce smarter, high-achieving kids. The test scores at Plymouth Elementary continue to hover around the 50th percentile--not good, but not shameful either, for a school with such low income and high transiency.

But Collins is not too concerned about test data. She’s betting instead on what she sees on the playground, and in the class where she teaches fourth-grade science.

“I believe you can have children who care for one another and who achieve. . . . The other day we were learning about simple machines, and I talked to the students about working cooperatively, about sharing. And I said, ‘Maybe sometimes you don’t want to share with somebody, because they’re not your friend or you don’t like them.’ And one child raised his hand and said ‘Miss Collins, we’re all friends in this classroom. You don’t have to worry about that.’

“Now I can’t write that on a data sheet and use it to say my school is succeeding. I can’t prove it, I can’t quantify it. But I wouldn’t trade it.”

* Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.