Teacher says success is an investment in time

Longtime Glendale Unified teacher Jana Wells knew she wanted to become a teacher as a girl growing up in Burbank, but it wasn’t until several years after graduating from Burbank High School did she pursue a degree in the profession.

This January marks her 19th year of teaching Glendale students. She started at Thomas Jefferson Elementary, where she taught for 10 years, and she’s been at Dunsmore Elementary the past nine years.

With experience teaching kids in kindergarten through the fifth grade, Wells said she often tells parents of her students: “I know elementary. I know what they should have gotten last year and what they need for next year.”

In her current fifth-grade class at Dunsmore, her students started the academic year learning about Native Americans and will end the year with the start of the Civil War.

“It’s about 3,000 years in a year,” Wells said.

How old were you when you knew you wanted to become a teacher?

When I was a kid, when I wanted to be a teacher, elementary’s all you know. I had planned to teach art. I was 10 years out of high school before I went to college. My family was in restaurants. I started working in restaurants when I was 14, so I stayed in that field. It was OK, it just wasn’t great.

I had a friend who had just gotten a teaching job. He said, ‘You could probably be a substitute.’ I knew a couple waitresses who were also substitutes. At the time, I was waitressing. My husband and I had just gotten married. I was trying to figure out whether to go back to restaurant management. My first semester [in college] was when class-size reduction happened [for elementary schools]. L.A. Unified started to infiltrate colleges [to hire more teachers]. I went to [California State University, Northridge]. I never picked a perfect time to get into a profession. It made sense to go into elementary, right then.

How did you decide to work for Glendale Unified?

One of my regular customers was a [teacher] specialist at my restaurant [the Tallyrand Restaurant]. I swear she told the principal to hire me.

When do you know you’ve had a great day on the job?

There’s a standard now in fifth grade — subtracting mixed numbers. It’s always a hard concept for kids. This year, I tried something new. I could tell they were all getting it. I know I’ve had a great day when you can see they’ve figured it out, they know why they’re doing it. Sometimes, you don’t know you’ve had a good day until weeks later when they’re still doing it.

What is the hardest part about being a teacher?

It’s having 36 personalities at 36 different points in their education and you try to hit everyone’s needs. You can just teach the standards, or you can teach the kids where they are. It’s so much easier to teach standards, but that doesn’t do the kids any good.

Compared to the year you began teaching to the current academic year, what has changed in education, and what has stayed the same?

Everything’s changed except the kids. They still come in with the same needs. When I started teaching, we didn’t have official standards. We didn’t have a state test that was tied to them. Now, of course, the state test counts for everything. The school is judged, the teacher is judged, the kids are judged, the district is judged. Teaching is teaching. Good teaching never changes. Just what we teach has changed a lot.

Which lessons, academic or otherwise, do you hope your students leave with after they’ve had you as their teacher,?

I hope they learn perseverance and acceptance. To keep trying, don’t give up. That they can do anything they really want to. I hope they know how to write an essay in fifth grade, add, subtract, multiply, divide any numbers… When they get into middle school, I hope that they understand how our country became a country.

Do you have any advice for anyone who wants to become a teacher?

You have to be willing to work beyond the work day. If you’re not willing to put in the time... you’re not going to be successful.