Product

Nevertheless, I never intended to teach for a living. I majored in journalism at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications. I was going to be the next Woodward and Bernstein (I am susceptible to the influence of movies) or better yet, the first famous female sportscaster. When I graduated in 1982, the country was in the midst a bad recession, unemployment rates were high, and I was determined to not move back home. Disgusted with my liberal arts degree and wanting to get some technical training (perhaps inspired by Richard Gere's "An Officer and a Gentleman" (I told you, I am really susceptible to movies!), I joined the Navy.

In a strange way, the Navy is what led me back to teaching. I got my technical training and became an aviation maintenance officer, helping to supervise the talented people who kept our squadron's A-7E Corsair II jets flying. My boss asked me to work on developing a training program about maintenance safety. I came up with "the safety maze" which was a series of centers, each with a different topic and set of activities. The 400 members of the squadron rotated through these stations, learning and enjoying. Later, we played "safety Jeopardy" with the Chief Petty Officers as contestants. It was a big hit and I won a Navy Achievement medal for it. It was just an instinct that learning needed to be fun, that learners needed to move and do, not just sit and hear. I realized that teaching and the planning of teaching was something I could do well.

I left the Navy in 1987 and went straight into a seventh grade classroom 3 weeks later. California's teaching internship program allowed me to teach while working on my credential two nights a week at a local college. I was pregnant, a first year teacher, going to college, and doing Naval reserve drill weekends, I also had the class form hell.

I didn't know that they were the class from hell, but that's what they'd been since Kindergarten, everybody warned me. It seemed like every year, they'd been the class to have a first-year teacher and that year was no different. I can see their faces and list all of their 34 names, even today. They taught me a whole lot more than I taught them.  They were a funny, creative, angry, undisciplined, curious, mean to each other, push-your-buttons bunch. They drove me mad and I loved them. Mainly, I learned that teaching starts with relationship building and trust. There were days when they needed me way more as a caring person than as a purveyor of information.

I taught for ten years at that first school and I believe that I did my best teaching there. It was a unique situation. Island School was a small country school, 240 or so kids in grades K-8, sons and daughters of wealthy landowners and poor migrant land workers all mixed together. The principal could stand at the gate and call hello to each kid by name in the morning; he knew most of their parents and had probably taught a fair few of their parents as well. To get a job at Island, you practically had to wait for someone to die. Teachers came and stayed for years. After I'd taught there awhile, it was easy to understand why. Our principal trusted his wise and experienced staff and supported them completely. The school board threw teacher appreciation barbecues and looked for ways to give teachers more money, even in lean times. Creative thinking was rewarded, decision-making was shared, and opportunities for experimentation and leadership abounded. My teaching teammates were brilliant, inspiring, giving people (thank you Jennifer, Wendy, Bruce, etc.)

If you were trying to grow a teacher in an ideal environment, Island School would've been it. Since there was only one teacher per self-contained grade level classroom, I was the seventh grade department head by default! I went to county-level curriculum meetings, something a beginning teacher would normally never get to do. Our principal was committed to staff development so I went to a ton of workshops and conferences. One of them was about an interesting new piece of software called Hyperstudio. My eighth grade teaching neighbor and I were enthralled! Here was a reason to get excited about that balky, problematic machine in the back corner of our rooms.

Soon, the kids and I were crazy for multimedia and I began to get a dim vision of how computers tied into my beliefs about learning needing to be fun, engaging, and hands-on. I wrote a five-year technology plan to put five computers and other technology in every classroom. I presented a vision of what students could do. The school board like the idea so much they voted to do it all in one year. I had an ideal classroom with which to develop and test my ideas about technology integration.

My husband was promoted and transferred to Sacramento. Argh! Just when I'd achieved technology nirvana, I found myself in a completely new environment, teaching in a huge, departmentalized middle school with no classroom computers and one ancient MS-DOS lab for 2000 students. I began my campaign quickly, writing a proposal to get at least one computer per classroom. I proselytized, I evangelized, and eventually we got the computers. I also got a newly-created position as the district's Technology Resource Teacher. Our amazing assistant superintendent gave me free rein to design a staff development program and that's when I came up with "Technology Camp for Teachers" and "The Integration Academy". My action research project is based on the work I did with these two programs.

Another promotion for my husband brought us to north Texas, where I live and work today. I've been a technology integrator, a staff developer, a classroom teacher, a technology grant administrator, and am now a library media specialist. LMS is an ideal job for me; I get to work with students on cool projects, help teachers plan, and I live with the books. I'm blessed with wonderful teaching teammates. What could be finer?