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January 19, 2025

FTV: It Was Fifty Years Ago . . .

 

     Listening to the opening lines of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it struck me that it has been fifty years since I began my semester long stint student teaching.  Okay, so it was ‘fifty years ago this month’ and not ‘today’, but it still got me thinking about what I took away from that four month experience.  Learning about teaching is one thing, but teaching in a classroom setting is not necessarily the same thing.  While I probably had a pretty good idea of what it would be like to teach Jr. High age students, my experiences at Bothwell Middle School threw me a few curves. 

     For starters, Bothwell was operated as an ‘open’ concept school.  Teacher’s were not assigned to their own classroom.  Each grouping of 100 to 130 students were assigned to a team of four teachers who handled the core areas while sharing a large open space (called a cluster).  My original assignment was in seventh grade Science, but the principal, Mr. Brady, moved me over to eighth grade Social Studies.  He was apparently mad at the excellent teacher I had been assigned to work with and did not want him to have a student teacher that spring.  Mr. B must have decided that ‘Geography/Earth Science’ (my major) was the same as ‘Social Studies’.  When I asked my college advisor if this was something that the principal could do, he replied, “Looks like he already did.  Look at it this way.  Some day the school where you get a job will be looking for someone to fill a Social Studies position.  You can say, ‘Why, I student taught in Social Studies’, and it may save your job.”  

     My new supervisor, Wayne, was a first year teacher when I was in eighth grade so he already had a decade of teaching under his belt.  I knew who he was and he knew me because he worked with my brother at the Red Owl grocery store in high school and  college.  The rest of the team consisted of Sue (English), Roger (Math) and Terry (Science).  New student teachers for the second semester were told to come in a week before we were supposed to start to meet with Mr. Brady (who also happened to be my old Jr High principal).  Upon the advice of my advisor, I did not broach the subject of my changed assignment.

     After we were given a ‘welcome to Bothwell’ speech by Mr. Brady, he sent us off to meet with our mentors.  Wayne said, “Well, I guess we both got a surprise this morning.  Hope you don’t mind that your assignment got switched.  We will see if we can find a way for you to work with Bill (Laurich, the science guy I was supposed to be assigned to) during one of your prep periods.”  It turns out my teaching team would spend half the day with their ‘cluster’ of students doing the core classes and one hour teaching an enrichment class.  This left two hours of the 7 period day for planning – one hour for team planning and one for my own work.

     Wayne explained the ‘team planning’ period usually went like this:  “We sit down and compare notes.  If one of us has a movie or a special presentation planned, we will do it for all four sections at once.  Whatever time is left will be divided equally into the four class periods.  Just make sure that if you are planning something special, run it by Terry (the cluster science teacher) first.  Our daily plan is usually done with him getting first dibs – it works out better that way.”  My second lesson here was all about group dynamics.  Terry wasn’t a bad guy but he was the most forceful personality on the team.  They kept things harmonious by letting him have his way and adjusting from there.  I learned quickly to speak up about ‘group time’ before the day’s plan was set in stone.

     Teaching in an open cluster was different from anything I had experienced in my school days.  Picture a room about the size of a typical cafeteria.  A partial wall separated the cluster from the open hallway that encircled this second floor of this octagonal shaped building.  There were two large openings on either side to enter the cluster and no way to keep out the noise from traffic in the hall going past.  The opposing walls each had a blackboard and there were movable partitions separating each of the four quadrants of the cluster.  The side walls only extended two cement blocks above the tiled ceiling so noise from the entire second floor seeped from cluster to cluster.

     If a movie was shown, all the partitions were moved and a big screen was rolled down on the science end of the room.  When done, things had to be moved back in place.  Each half day was about 200 minutes long so a thirty minute movie meant the remaining 170 minutes would be divided into the four class periods for that day.  If a shortened class period impacted what I had planned, it was up to me to figure out how to adjust.  The first time I had to introduce a movie to the whole group, the rest of the team stepped out of sight no doubt to see how I handled the whole group on my own.

     I spent a couple of weeks observing how Wayne conducted his classes and acted more or less like a teacher’s aide.  Wayne was doing a unit about World War II at the time and I was learning along with the kids.  The day he was reviewing historical figures from WWII, I knew a bit about maybe 70 percent of the photos he put up on the overhead projector.  It was a good thing I had been listening because when he finished three of the four class rotations, Wayne said, “Why don’t you do the last section?”  I did okay but it was obvious (to me anyway) that I would have floundered without having heard Wayne’s comments about each person.  “The next unit will be about other cultures,” I was told.  “Start working on that and you can use the chapters covering that in the book as an outline and go from there.”

     When I got into the routine of getting to school before the morning cluster of classes started, I got into the habit of putting on the coffee pot.  It was an older model percolating type so I made it the same way my folks did.  Three or four days later, I noticed I was the only one drinking it so I asked, “Is there something wrong with the coffee?”  Sue spoke up:  “Yeah, it is kind of strong but we didn’t want to tell you.”  This seemed kind of odd, but I had her show me how they made it  and that took care of that.  Sue was not shy about sharing her opinions about many subjects so why me making the coffee wrong wasn’t brought up sooner was a mystery.  Making bad coffee would never have flown without comment in the Geography Department coffee room.

     At mid-day, we gathered in the teacher’s lunchroom and I found lunch was secondary to their daily game of Hearts.  “Have you ever played Hearts?” Sue asked.  Along the way I noticed we were the only table playing cards.  Some teachers read books, others graded work, and a few simply sat, ate, and visited.  I never asked about the lunch room dynamics but one day, Roger mentioned it would probably not be a good idea for a new teacher to play cards until they get a feel for how the administration feels about it.  “We didn’t play every day until it was suggested that we ‘spend or break time more productively’.  That was all it took to get us into playing every day.” Sue usually had yogurt for lunch.  I asked her about it so she brought me one, thus beginning my life-long love affair with Dannon Yogurt. 

     On paydays (which took place on Friday every two weeks), we would go to either the Beef-a-Roo restaurant or Big Al’s Speakeasy for lunch.  The B-a-R was only about six blocks away while Big Al’s was a couple of miles away near the US 41 bypass intersection with Washington St.  There was a rotation set up as to who picked where we ate based on who was paying that week.  When it became obvious it was my turn, they hinted that I was the only one not getting paid so I wouldn’t have to pick up the tab.  “Baloney,” I told them, “I am living at home and playing band jobs just about every weekend.  Besides, I really was looking forward to a footlong Coney at Big Al’s and if it were up to Sue, we would be at the Beef-a-Roo again.”

     I was just about ready to start my lesson plan when my college advisor stopped by for a visit.

He dropped a bit of a bombshell on me as we sat in the library discussing how things were going:  “Some of the folks here think that you are too forward.  That is off putting to them.”  I immediately looked over Mr. Machowski’s shoulder at the librarian whose office was across the room from where we were sitting.  I put two and two together why we were meeting there and not in the cluster planning area where my work space was.  “Well,” I told him, “I figured that starting here in the second semester put me behind the curve right away.  Rather than blend in with the wallpaper, I thought it was best to reach out and get to know people.  I pass through this library every day on the way to our cluster (the hall ran right through the middle of the library) so I make it a point to say ‘Good Morning’ to the librarian every time I pass through.  If she has a problem with that, there is nothing I can do about it.”  The smile on Mr. M’s face told he I had passed his little shock test and the rest of our meeting went fine.

     Wayne didn’t exactly tell me how to organize my own lessons, but I noted he liked to give the kids a choice of projects they could work on for his units.  Hands-on options like posters, bulletin boards, presentations, and even skits were offered as opposed to having them just do a reasearch paper of some kind.  “Just make sure you approve what they want to do and their topic, otherwise you never know what they will turn in after six weeks of work, “ he advised.  Harkening back to my JH days, the things I remembered were the projects like the eight foot long color and paste map of North and South America we did back in seventh grade.  We still had them do a fair amount of worksheet – quiz – exam type work, but hands-on projects fit my comfort level for keeping them busy.

     One of Wayne’s favorite pre-exam review activities was a game he called ‘Jeopardy’.  With a score grid laid out on the bulletin board, he would divide the class in half and appoint a scorekeeper for each team.  A student would select a point value under a category like ‘Battles’.  Wayne would read a question and first hand in the air would get a shot at answering it (but without the traditional ‘What is D-Day, Alex?’ TV Jeopardy format).  As long as his class liked this review game, I used it with one minor change.  Many of the students were content to sit back and ‘win’ by having their one brainiac answer every question.  My rule was simple:  no one could answer two questions in a row.  It worked pretty well and when I used the game in my own classes later on, I also made it a point to split the ‘brainiacs’ evenly between sides.

     The first enrichment class I taught was chess.  Wayne was a better player than I was but it soon became apparent that it didn’t take a deep chess knowledge to win more than I lost.  The first time I performed a ‘castling’ maneuver, I had to dig out the rules to prove it wasn’t something I just made up.  We went to an empty cluster on the other side of the second floor to meet for chess.  The radio was always playing on the PA speakers and after a while, it got rather annoying.  The ‘Stereo 100’ format was big back then.  Groups of stations owned by one company would use the same playlist piped in from a far away center.  There wasn’t much local chatter and the song list changed very little during the six week chess course.  We always knew when class was over because You’re Having My Baby would come on just before we had to head to the next class period.

     A couple of the seventh grade teachers invited me to play basketball with them in the school gym on Saturdays.  It did not matter how many showed up, we still played full court.  At six foot, I was the shortest player and trying to keep stride for stride with a couple of six foot five players took its toll, especially two on two.  It was at one of these sessions that I was recruited to be one of the teacher / counselors at the annual Seventh Grade Camp held for Bothwell students at the Bay Cliff Health Camp in Big Bay.  

     My other social connection with my teaching team came via Wayne’s weekly sauna session.  He had built a nice recreation room in his basement with a fireplace that doubled as one wall of his wood fired sauna.  They would throw some meat on a grate over the fireplace and make a snack out of chips, seared meat, cheese, and beer.  The one time I was invited, I remember thinking, “Man, I haven’t taken enough saunas.  It is getting pretty hot.”  When squeezing out a washcloth of water over my head no longer kept me cool, I said, “Well, I think I better take a break.”  When I hit the rec room, they all piled out behind me.  Roger said, “Man, we thought you would never leave.”  Apparently they always tried to drive the new guy out with a blazing hot sauna and I must have been in better sauna shape than I thought.  Maybe that is why they didn’t invite me a second time.

     My extra hour coincided with Bill Laurich’s weekly science lab period.  I never got to see him teaching his class but I picked up a lot of pointers watching how he conducted lab classes.  Even though I taught for twenty years without actually being in a ‘lab’ type classroom setting, I was still able to use a lot of his tricks of the trade.  I reconnected with Bill in the 1990s when we started doing an annual magazine sale fundraiser in Ontonagon.  Bill had coordinated the same sale to raise funds for the Bothwell Seventh Grade Camp and continued to rep for the same company when he retired.  Each fall, he would visit Ontonagon to get our sale started and we would have a little mini-Bothwell reunion.

     One of my favorite introductions while at Bothwell was to science teacher, Fred Rydholm.  He was also involved in the Bay Cliff Camping experience and at one of the planning meetings, he looked at me and said, “I need an assistant track coach.  Would you like to help out?”  I had never had Fred as a teacher when I was in JH so this was my first meeting with him.  When he found out I had worked at the Huron Mountain Club, we became good friends.  His father used to deliver groceries to the club and Fred himself spent many years there working as a camping guide for the youth program.  We continued this friendship when we began bringing him to Ontonagon as a guest speaker at the Ontonagon County Historical Society meetings.  As a lover of Upper Peninsula history and copper mining, he came to enough of our meetings that we granted him an honorary membership in the OCHS.

     Ironically, before my third year in Ontonagon, principal Jim Ollila announced we would need someone to teach seventh grade History the next year.  I played my, “I student taught in Social Studies,” card and ended up teaching three sections of History that year.  When I first interviewed here, they were very interested in the fact I had worked at a seventh grade camp as they were looking to do something similar in Ontonagon.  Oddly enough, that little piece of my resume, unlike so many other things I picked up at Bothwell, went unused for the next 43 years.

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