On Becoming a Teacher
Quite by accident, I became a private tutor in 1980—and I wrote this book because I want to be put out of business. Throughout 39 years of teaching from my home in Ventura, California, the same learning issues have repeatedly crossed my threshold, issues that are so easily addressed that I can no longer keep the remedies to myself.
Although born and raised in California, I wished to attend a college that specialized in elementary education, a desire that led me to the east coast and to the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. There I had the good fortune to learn the trade, methods, and secrets of the School Sisters of Notre Dame—an order of nuns that had been educating children of all backgrounds, ages, and abilities for nearly 150 years. For these Sisters, education was more than just a profession; it was a charism, a calling. The Sisters dedicated their lives with joy and gratitude to what they considered a great gift—the privilege to teach children. So successful were they that Education became the college’s largest major, turning the tiny institution into the second highest producer of teachers in Maryland. At this time the School of Education offers degrees from the Undergraduate to the Doctorate level, and as the college has reached university status, it has adopted a new name, Notre Dame of Maryland University, to reflect this accomplishment.
Over the course of the decades, the Sisters refined their skills, passing on their wisdom, their successes, and their insights from one generation to the next. It was an inspiration and a delight for me to study at their sides, and later, to stand on their shoulders as I became a teacher myself. At the college, I benefited from an education immersed in children’s literature, child psychology, intensive methods of teaching, and finally, a senior year of hands-on student teaching in both urban and suburban schools of greater Baltimore. In effect, the School Sisters of Notre Dame maintained their goal of teaching young women who would transform the world with their plea to “Grab onto excellence and never let go!”
Girded with a degree and new skills, I returned to California, zealous to practice my trade, and found a third-grade position in the Simi Valley Unified School District of Ventura County. Although I was new and not quite twenty-two years old, my students thrived because of the incredibly practical, appropriate, gimmick-free, and time-tested approaches the Sisters had taught me.
Just one year later, when the Berylwood Elementary School PTA named this surprised young educator its Teacher of the Year, the good methods and grooming of the School Sisters of Notre Dame received the praise.
Starting at the Kitchen Table
Very simple methods worked best with my students, and when I became a mother, these methods helped my own two children, Mary Kate and Bob, prosper, too. But here is the secret—it was all so easy, natural, and painless! And so I include these pathways to learning in this book.
When Mary Kate entered first grade in 1980, I was blessed with time to volunteer in her classroom since Bobby was in nursery school. Within weeks my phone began to ring with tutoring requests from her classmates’ parents, as some children had told of their one-on-one time with me. Thus, I gathered some materials at our kitchen table and began helping a few children with reading, math, and memory training. Little did I realize what lay in the future.
My family of students grew as time permitted while Mary Kate and Bob thrived, first in parochial school, and then in public middle and high school, before each headed off to Princeton University in the 1990s. While I happily and tearfully lost them temporarily to the Northeast, my tutoring business filled with more cherished youngsters. And the rest is history.
Today I teach some 35 students a week, from kindergarten through high school and beyond, in most every subject save foreign languages. My waiting list grows, as does my roster of “alumni”—students who have resolved whatever need that first brought them to me and have gone on to prosper in their studies.
First, I credit the School Sisters of Notre Dame for this success and the methods they imparted to me 50 years ago. But I also must credit my students and their parents. Seeing literally hundreds of young people over the years and helping them work through their studies have stretched the breadth of my skills as a teacher. This has also allowed me to refine the skills the Sisters first passed on to me as well as to develop new tools of my own.
Methods for Everyone
In my business I have taught children attending traditional public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, parochial schools, expensive private schools, and home schools. I have taught children with various learning diagnoses, handicaps, and chronic illnesses. Amazingly, the needs of students are so very similar from child to child. Children are children, and schools are schools. Most young people have the same basic needs which, for whatever reason, often are not adequately met in many schools today.
Simple Pictures are Best!
Trust me. It is not difficult to teach children, but we must keep the instruction plain, clear, logical, concrete, constant, positive, and simple. That is the purpose of this book—to take the tried-and-tested methods that I learned in college and have adapted and expanded for decades—and somehow communicate them to the world so that countless others can benefit from them. Parents have constantly asked me to write a handbook in order that they may take my lessons home with them. So here it is—with one great addition.
That little girl of mine who went to school in 1980 and then off to Princeton in the 1990s is now a mother of seven children and an accomplished educator in her own right. After graduating from college, Mary Kate earned a master’s degree in Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. From there she taught for four years in an urban part Los Angeles, followed by two years in a rural school district north of the city. Having watched me tutor since she was a young girl, she also spent three years tutoring, and has since “retired” from the business to become a full-time teacher yet again—this time to her own children, whom she has home-schooled with great success. Now Mary Kate has brought to this book her insights based upon her own training, professional teaching, and mothering experiences. Parenting and teaching have come full circle.
In an age when educational standards are set and then measured in myriad ways across the nation, the pressure is on to produce students who do not merely achieve, but excel. Yet, many children are left flailing in the quest to attain standards on an even more rigid schedule. As the clock ticks, savvy parents are finding it necessary to make changes. Some can seek expensive outside help. Others are struggling to help their children on their own. My goal has been to equip all parents themselves to make adjustments in their children’s learning by enabling them to prevent academic problems before they appear. You will work wonders. As Notre Dame of Maryland University challenges, “Whose life will you change?”