Bob Chleboun has no stomach for breakfast. Not even for his favorite sweet roll. He is too nervous and excited. It is the first day of school.
But this time, when the class files in, Chleboun`s isn`t among the scrubbed faces settling into the freshly waxed desks. He is the one at the front of the room, the man everyone else is nervously eyeing. He is the one taking attendance, handing out the books, laying down the rules: no gum, no pushing, no talking out of turn.
At age 23, Bob Chleboun has finally made the transition from student to teacher. For the first time, he is solely in charge of a class-in this case, 18 very expectant North Shore 3rd graders in oversized T-shirts, wrinkled shorts and untied sneakers.
He has put his Michael Jordan poster on the door, the Chicago Bears helmet on the bookshelf, the hand-made paper palm trees around the reading corner (to make that space more relaxing) and the displays on the bulletin boards.
Of all the classrooms at the 350-student Indian Trail elementary school in Highland Park, this is clearly Bob Chleboun`s. He knows, once his young charges take their seats, there will be no one in the sunny, second-floor room to whom he can turn for help.
”It was a good feeling to see my name on the door,” says Chleboun, a recent education graduate of Northeastern Illinois University. ”But then I realized these guys were waiting for me to tell them what we were going to do. It was scary.”
Across the country this fall, according to the American Federation of Teachers, 75,000 other young men and women are feeling the same butterflies as they face students for the first time.
”We haven`t acknowledged how hard it is to start teaching-just getting the sense of how things are supposed to go, how you can pay attention to one child and be on top of the whole group,” says Vivian Paley, a veteran teacher at the University of Chicago Lab School who won a MacArthur Foundation grant for her work with young children. ”You`re overwhelmed at first.”
”Children today come to school with many more problems and greater needs: substance abuse, poverty, broken families, non-English speaking,” adds Betty Sayler of the National Education Association. ”They`re a lot harder to teach.”
That doesn`t seem to be deterring many from entering the profession. In fact, the number of students enrolled in education programs across the country has grown 60 percent since the mid-1980s.
In the same period, reports the American Federation of Teachers, the number of college freshmen who say they plan careers in teaching has almost doubled. An estimated 100,000 to 120,000 are completing teaching training each year.
Like Bob Chleboun, these new teachers are a well-trained lot. They are joining the field with the prestige of their new profession rising and the nation`s attention focused on the need to improve the schools if America is to remain competitive on the world stage.
”They are very, very enthusiastic,” says Jan Dews, a professor at National-Louis University in Evanston, which until recently was called National College of Education. ”Their expectations are realistic. They`re just worried about giving the children what they need. Most talk about how they love their kids.”
Learning with the kids
Chleboun spends a lot of his spare time brainstorming, trying to figure out ways to keep his 3rd graders interested and motivated-whether it`s doing a hands-on science project or writing stories or relating math to their daily lives. ”I`m learning along with the kids,” he says. ”I`m having a good time.”
The job outlook for newcomers to the field is increasingly bright as forecasters predict the need for hundreds of thousands of new teachers through the `90s to replace many who are retiring and to teach the growing numbers of children reaching school age-the Baby Boomers` offspring.
”When I tell people I`m a teacher, they say they admire me for what I`m doing,” says Chleboun, who beat out as many as 100 other applicants for his $25,000-a-year job.
”People used to think teaching was easy, that it was wimpy. That`s changed a lot,” adds Luanna Palandri, another new teacher and a colleague of Chleboun`s who teaches English to Hispanic children.
Indeed, teachers now present an increasingly professional image, those in the field say, keeping up with the latest techniques, pursuing advanced degrees. ”It`s all self-motivated,” observes Veronica Patt, principal of the Indian Trail School. ”When I started in 1967, we didn`t see much of that.”
Back to idealism
Even more significant, an increasing number of people are choosing teaching after sampling more lucrative careers. ”We see a lot of people who worked in business and are disillusioned and making a career change. They see teaching as a return to idealism,” says Wendy Holland, director of graduate admissions at National-Louis University, where enrollment in the graduate teaching program has almost doubled in the past four years.
Take Vito DiPinto. An organic chemist, he says he reached the point in the lab where he sorely missed ”people contact.”
”You can only interact with molecules so far,” he says.
After several years working at a Montessori school-and acquisition of an advanced degree-he is happily esconced teaching science at National-Louis`
Baker Demonstration School in Evanston. He also teaches graduate students.
”Being with the kids,” he says, ”all that wonderment and curiosity around me . . . I love teaching.”
Now even a number of those who don`t have education credentials are turning to teaching. A new program called Teach for America recruits graduates of the nation`s top colleges for teaching posts. After eight weeks of intensive training, they are sent to work for two years in short-staffed urban and rural schools.
The program attracted five times as many applicants as it could accommodate this fall. Seven hundred men and women already have applied for next year, says Dan Buton, a spokesman for the non-profit organization.
”A lot of people say they want to give something back to the system,”
Buton says.
But it`s unclear how many of the new arrivals will remain in the field. Nationally, as many as a fourth of those who start teaching this month won`t be back in their classrooms next year, according to the National Education Association.
”It`s not as satisfying as they expect it to be,” explains Betty Sayler of the association. ”Some say they want to make a difference, but then they get there and find they can`t make the difference they hoped. It`s a lonely job. And we don`t have support teams in place to help.”
`You`ve actually helped`
At the moment, burnout is not on Bob Chleboun`s mind. He says he`s feeling too good about having stumbled into teaching. The son of an engineer, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin planning to become an architect. But on too many Saturday nights he`d see lights burning at the architecture school at 2 a.m. ”That wasn`t how I wanted to live my life,” he says.
Chleboun, who grew up in Evanston, decided to take some time off to think about his future. He came home from Wisconsin and, after a couple of months, enrolled at Northeastern Illinois. His girlfriend, an education major, kept telling him he`d make a great teacher. He decided to take a few courses to see for himself.
”Once I got into it, I never had a second thought,” he recalls.
”Architecture was just school. In education, I had a goal to shoot for.
”The best feeling in teaching is when you work with a child and you try and try and suddenly, a light goes on and you`ve actually helped,” he adds.
”Because of you, he knows how to do something like add and subtract.”
Chleboun says he`s more concerned with job satisfaction than with making a lot of money. But in teaching, he adds, it`s possible to do well financially with advanced degrees and many years of experience.
Indeed, the National Education Association notes that in some communities teachers can earn as much as $70,000 a year, though they are rare.
Chleboun isn`t thinking that far ahead. He`s frequently the last teacher to leave Indian Trail, spending after-school hours working on his lesson plans. ”You always have to have things in reserve,” he says.
Relaxed by day 2
By the second day of school, if Chleboun is still nervous, it isn`t showing. He seems comfortable on his feet, walking around the classroom explaining how to read a map, prompting some youngsters, encouraging others as if he`s been doing it for years.
”We all want homework,” says Kitty Hess as Chleboun`s eyes widen in surprise. ”It keeps us busy.”
Chleboun is one of only two men on the staff at the Highland Park school, but that doesn`t seem to faze him. Nor do the children seem at all surprised to have a male teacher. ”As long as the teacher`s not mean, that`s all that matters,” explains Jamie Riegelhaupt.
”It`s important to understand what the teacher is talking about,” adds Jeronimo Gaytan.
”We have to do more work now,” complains Noah Frank. ”We can`t get drinks like we used to.”
”Teachers tell you school`s fun, but it`s not really,” declares Benjy Rooney.
In command
Chleboun says he is determined to make his 3rd graders think of his class as fun. He`s no pushover, though. Students, he explains, won`t respect you if you let them get away with too much.
He manages to keep them engaged, from the science lesson in which they all use a car jack to lift up the teacher`s desk (demonstrating the power of a simple machine) to the writing exercise in which they are invited to make up their own ”tall tale” and the occasional reading of Shel Silverstein poems. The children are alert and attentive. Chleboun obviously is in command of his material.
That`s not to say everything goes smoothly. The class doesn`t seem to be picking up on the map lesson. And many of the youngsters take a lot longer getting started on their ”tall tales” than Chleboun expects; many are unfinished by the end of the allotted time.
No problem, he decides. They will finish them the next day.
”Everything went OK,” Chleboun says as he shepherds his class to the right school buses. ”I`m happy to be here.”
Only one problem: ”My feet are a little tired.”
