Some people may think that teachers lead a life of leisure in the summers, and that during the school year they`re scot-free once the afternoon bell rings.
But that stereotype is far from the truth. When teachers aren`t teaching, they often become students again themselves.
”I don`t think that the general public realizes how much time teachers put into finding new approaches to teaching and learning new ideas,” said Marilyn Fox, who teaches English literature at Morgan Park High School in Chicago.
While working as a teacher, Fox attended classes and received a master`s degree in the teaching of reading from Chicago State University in 1981. ”It was difficult,” Fox said. ”It took me three years to get my master`s degree going to classes around the year in evenings and during the summer.” (She received a bachelor`s degree in education from Chicago State in 1970.)
Teachers are encouraged to become perpetual students by financial incentives. When they accumulate a certain number of credit hours, they move from one salary ”lane” to the next. Each lane has a maximum salary, and each move into the next lane brings a higher maximum.
The top salary for a teacher with a bachelor`s degree and 15 years of service is about $33,500, said Morton Elenbogen, vice chairman of the Board of Examiners for the Chicago public schools. With the same number of years of service and a master`s degree, that salary is about $35,000; credit of 36 hours beyond a master`s brings it to $36,500; and a doctorate raises it to $37,500.
This system is common to most high schools, though the details and the salaries may vary. For example, Deerfield-Highland Park High School District 113 has seven salary lanes plus a doctoral level at which the teacher receives a stipend that may vary from year to year, said Highland Park High School personnel supervisor Yvonne Faggi.
Chicago teachers must select courses that fit within certain guidelines. Courses for the 36 more hours, for example, must be related to their teaching field and are screened by the Board of Examiners. ”If a math teacher wanted to take an art course, no matter how good it was, we`d say `no,` ” Elenbogen said.
Faggi said district teachers have more flexibility than in the city. After they have 15 credit hours beyond their bachelor`s degree, credits can be accumulated through workshops, educational travel, publications, research or work experience not related to their field in addition to courses, Faggi said. ”When a science teacher works at Fermilab for the summer or a music teacher plays with a symphony orchestra, that`s just as valuable as sitting in a classroom getting semester hours.”
District 113 teachers are required to continue their education beyond the bachelor`s degree and are reimbursed for schooling expenses. A teacher taking four semester hours, for example, would receive $800 toward tuition; a teacher taking an educational trip outside the U.S. could receive up to $1,300.
Teachers in Chicago are not reimbursed for educational expenses and are not required to take more courses beyond their bachelor`s degree, but Elenbogen said many of them choose to do so. He receives requests to approve about 1,000 courses a year, and at least 65 percent of the high school teachers in the Chicago public school system have master`s degrees.
The financial incentive is not the only factor motivating teachers to become students again. ”They do it for the money, but also because they think it`s going to make them better teachers,” Elenbogen said. ”And for security reasons many, many teachers get additional certificates that allow them to teach other subjects or acquire skills in areas like learning disabilities or counseling or administration.”
Many teachers said being perpetual students is a joy as well as a necessity. Fox called it a ”shot in the arm. It refreshes and rejuvenates us.”
Teachers pursue their studies in varied ways and integrate those learning experiences into their teaching for their students` benefit.
One such teacher is Richard Boyum, 40, a biology teacher at Highland Park High School since 1970. He said he likes to combine travel with the pursuit of his studies. He received a bachelor`s degree in biology from Winona State College in Minnesota in 1970 and a master`s in teaching from Duke University, Durham, N.C., in 1975.
He said he decided on Duke because he has always lived in the Midwest and wanted to go somewhere new. He studied marine biology there for two summers and a semester, working with a professor who was researching the blood protein of the toadfish found off the North Carolina coast.
Boyum`s participation in the study took him to Venezuela, where he caught toadfish, studied their blood protein and found it to be different from that of the North Carolina toadfish. He said the experience helped him bring a fresh perspective to his students: While most teachers use the example of the giraffe when discussing evolution, Boyum uses the example of the toadfish and focuses on the evolution of molecules.
”Molecules modify from generation to generation because the DNA changes, and as a result the organism changes,” Boyum said. ”It`s an additional way of looking at evolution.”
Four years ago Boyum took a summer undergraduate expository writing class because Highland Park emphasizes the importance of good writing for its students, he said. Once again he chose a place he had never been to before
–the University of Hawaii.
The course helped him clean up his writing and look for clean writing from his students, he said. ”I came up with the brilliant idea–not my idea
–that when people write fuzzily and indistinctly it`s because they really don`t know what`s going on,” he said.
Boyum has also taken conversational Spanish at a language institute where students were not allowed to speak any English. He said the experience helped him relate to students in a biology class he teaches for Spanish-speaking students where only English is spoken.
”It`s a philosophy of teaching,” he said. ”I never correct grammatical mistakes. They`ll figure them out on their own.” His own experience in the same situation ”made me very open and accepting,” he said.
Judith Ditkowsky, 47, who teaches chemistry at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, went back to school to learn how to teach a whole new subject matter. She received a bachelor`s degree in biology from the University of Chicago in 1959 and a master`s in science education from the same school in 1960.
After taking some time off from teaching, she returned to her profession 12 years ago only to discover that there were plenty of biology teachers with more seniority than her, but a scarcity of chemistry teachers. She decided to take courses so she could teach chemistry and eventually worked toward her master`s degree, which she will receive from Northeastern University in August.
When she first went back to school, she said, she had to overcome her dislike of chemistry. ”I thought it was the most boring, unimaginative and uncreative subject available in the world,” she said.
But studying it changed her mind and brought a new enthusiasm to her teaching. ”My students didn`t see how chemistry was relevant to their lives, so I had to find out,” she said. ”The more I looked, the more I found–and the more I found, the more excited I got.”
Being a student and rediscovering the difficulties and frustrations of learning has allowed her to understand the problems her own students have, Ditkowsky said. Because some material appeared simple to her, she said, she used to think it would be simple for her students and that if they didn`t learn it, they simply weren`t trying.
”I can be a lot more tolerant now of the fact that it may take students a lot more time than I anticipated to come to the understanding of an idea,” she said.
Ditkowsky also took drama classes at the Discovery Center in Chicago, which she said improved her teaching style. ”I learned how I might be perceived by other people and am now able to take myself a little less seriously,” she said. ”I even learned how to tell jokes.”
She said that by being a student she has also learned ”how people can be brought to flower by giving them a lot of encouragement and positive feedback.”
Summing up her experience as a student, Ditkowsky said: ”It`s been a period of a great deal of growth and a lot of excitement. I`m far from feeling I`ve exhausted the possibilities, and I think it`s my business to keep on learning.”
Morgan Park`s Fox, 51, said that in her years as a student, she has gained a better knowledge of her subject and new ways of approaching it.
Fox said the courses she took for her master`s degree helped her to better use diagnostic tests to determine students` strengths and weaknesses and taught her various teaching methods. ”It gave me a way of introducing a wider variety of materials and adjusting the materials to the individual so all students have a chance at success,” she said.
Fox also learned how to help her students understand their reading material better by showing them how to adjust to the text`s sequence.
”When you`re reading literature you`re primarily reading narrative, and most narratives run in a chronological pattern, whereas material in social studies concentrates more on a cause-and-effect pattern,” she said. ”I think I always knew this, but I didn`t realize it until a professor pointed it out. It`s like having a light go on in your mind.”
In the 1986-87 school year Fox attended a Great Books seminar offered by the Chicago Board of Education. In it she rediscovered the Declaration of Independence as a great piece of romantic writing, because it views man as inherently good, and used it in her classroom. ”Because it`s short and concise, every word can be discussed,” she said.
The Great Books classes emphasized the importance of the seminar approach, in which the teacher raises questions and stimulates discussion rather than lecturing. ”It works not only for gifted students but at all levels,” Fox said.
This summer Fox attended a seminar at the University of Chicago that focused on new approaches to teaching literature. Students read texts from contemporary literary criticism and applied them to classic fiction works from the 19th and 20th Centuries.
”In any field you have to be exposed to new ideas,” Fox said. ”You expect that in medicine and computer science, but it`s also true of teaching. There are new things in my field like writing on computers and then there are certain old ideas which must be taught, but that doesn`t mean you have to teach them the same way all the time.”
James Izzo`s experience as a student has broadened and enriched the knowledge he brings to the classroom, he said. Izzo, 34, teaches social studies at Montini High School, a Catholic school in Lombard. He received a bachelor`s degree in history and political science from St. Mary`s College in Winona, Minn., in 1975.
When he returned to school, Izzo pursued a different interest. His master`s degree, which he received in 1982 from Pacific Western University in Encino, Calif., is in public administration. He had become interested in the subject after working summer jobs for Waste Water Management in Villa Park and was interested in environmental laws and local political movements.
”It`s given me a better knowledge of the lawmaking process and bureaucracy,” Izzo said. ”I taught an American government class, and I could give concrete examples that I think students can identify with more than hypothetical ones.”
In 1982 Izzo took a two-week summer seminar called the Business Workshop for Secondary Educators at Loyola University. Participants visited the Mercantile Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank and large and small wholesale and retail businesses. ”Seeing the theory of supply and demand in action gives you a better handle on it, and I brought back to my classroom more examples, more resources, more books, more ideas,” Izzo said.
To expand his knowledge of American politics, Izzo attended the Taft Institute for Two-Party Government Seminar for Teachers at Loyola University in the summer of 1986. Speakers at the seminar, who included local precinct captains, state legislators and representatives from the national Republican and Democratic organizations, gave him insights into the philosophical bases of the two parties, he said.
Izzo said one of the questions he always gets from his students is,
”What`s the difference between the Republicans and the Democrats?”
”They want an answer in five words,” he said. ”The seminar made it easier for me, not just to understand the difference but to understand why there is a difference, and therefore it`s easier for me to explain it to my students.”
Izzo said the classes he has attended have been valuable for what he has learned from other students as well as the professors. ”Most summer classes are very generous with information about what you can use in the classroom,” he said. ”But aside from what you learn in the classroom, other teachers share a lot of good ideas with you.”
Working in the classroom as both a teacher and a student seems to be a combination of rewards and drawbacks, particularly when a master`s degree is the goal. ”If you`re going to be a serious student, it means that a lot of other things in your life are going to have to take a back seat,” Ditkowsky said. ”But it`s a valuable experience, and I certainly would recommend it.” Izzo advised a reasonable approach. ”Don`t try to do it all in a year and a half, even if you could financially,” he said. ”For your mental health`s sake, once you have a commitment to a family, you don`t want to burn yourself out.”
Teachers` mail contains many brochures offering courses designed for them, but to find the best ones, Fox advised, ”talk to your colleagues
–that`s where I get my best ideas.”
Boyum urged fellow teachers: ”Don`t be afraid to be adventuresome. Do something exciting, go someplace exciting where there are new people who may not even be fellow teachers.” He added: ”What does your school system care if you get a C? If nothing else, it will be one tremendous experience for you.”
Fox said she simply can`t envision not being a student. ”My definition of a successful person is someone with an open mind who is learning something new every year of his life,” she said. ”These are people who love life because everything is new and fresh and they never lose that childlike exuberance for living.”
