I just read Lyra's newest page (and am frustrated that I 1., don't know how to put in a link to it, 2., don't have time to learn just now, and 3., at this moment am not interested in doing that. But I will; stay tuned.) and it brought up happy and sad thoughts. She is at the beginning of her career and still has the opportunity to do what I always dreamed of. Her dream of "looping" and a multiaged classroom was the reason I went to college to get a teaching degree. This was the late 60's and early 70's (I was an old broad even then!), and Sylvia Ashton Warner was the teaching guru, and the British Infant Schools were all the rage. I had gone to a one-room schoolhouse, and I was convinced that multiaged classes that "looped" were the way to go. Even though I attended a tiny school in a very rural, and backward, area, I still feel, these many, many years later, that my education was superior to that of most of my peers. In this school, where 16 of us ranged in age from first grade to eighth, each child was given the opportunity to move through the curriculum at his or her own rate. I don't know what the "curriculum" was, but I do know that our studies often were extended by what was happening around us in the potato fields, the apple orchards (our school was in the middle of an apple orchard), the church, the town, the state. Our teacher, Mrs. Thompson, would be woefully out-of-date and old-fashioned to today's way of thinking (her favorite punishment was to shake the living daylights out of a child who didn't do his work, or who broke one of the rules), but she was a paragon in her time. In fact, I'm sure, if she were a teacher today, she would have all her kids on-line, too. One day in particular sticks out in my mind. We had been studying the Israel situation (this was 1948), and she brought in her radio so that we could listen to the historic UN voting. I'm getting goosepimples just thinking about all of us country bumpkins huddled around her radio to hear the different countries voice vote. I, at least, ran home after school to hear the rest of the voting and cried when Israel was made a country of its own. This was soon after the war and the terrible pictures in Life magazine of the concentration camps. Anyway, I went to college with great hopes. I wanted to be the "new" Mrs. Thompson in a multiaged classroom. I had also read "A Country School Diary", and just knew in my bones that I would be a wonderful teacher of a class of littles ones that could stay with me until they went into third grade. Reality hit me quite quickly. When I was free to apply for schools, there were over 400 applicants for each opening. I was nearly 40 years old; I had to get a job and I had no experience in public school; only Head Start, and everyone told me that didn't count. I was put on the sub lists of two school districts, but even then was never called because those lists were so long. Finally, a superintendent took pity on me and told me that no one would hire me because I had been in "Administration" and they didn't want an independent thinker with her own ideas! My experience as a trainer hurt me more than my experience teaching in Head Start didn't help me. Now the pendulum has swung again and all those subs who got hired in the next ten years are beginning to retire from their careers. I have stayed in "administration", trying to help other teachers do what I wanted to do so desperately (and did with varying degrees of success in day care), and will retire in two years. So, Lyra, seize the moment, carpe diem, and don't give up your dream. It is STILL a good idea, and, I still think it is the best for children. And I will be proud of your success, with only a tiny bit of envy that it isn't me! And I look forward to a new day of traveling around the country with my DB and our "dollhouse", being campground hosts, learning how to do fancy pages and links on my computer, writing and writing and writing, and quilting. Oh, and maybe I can "consult" here and there, just to stay in touch with the profession I was born to be in.
I agree with Lyra that this new Angelfire stuff can be darn irritating. She has done something clever with her page so that the advertising garbarge doesn't interfere. I'm not that clever, so I'll have to put up with it.
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