Introduction - Parenting ideas through the lens of a teacher

I was born and raised in Southern California growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s. During my kindergarten to twelfth grade education, I attended both public and private schools. My experience in private school for the most part was not good, and I think those early experiences influenced my desire to become a teacher. When one has a bad experience,often the reaction is to prevent others from being in the same situation. My earliest experiences working with children was for my Boy Scout Eagle project in which I organized a summer day camp for special needs students during the summer of my freshman year of high school. My physical education class during my sophomore year had a group of eight special needs students. The coach didn’t seem to know what to do with this group of students so they spent the P.E. period chasing each other.

I told the coach about my experience with special needs students during the past summer. I told him that I could work with these students. He immediately replied, “That would be wonderful. You can begin tomorrow.” I worked with this group of students on whatever sport or activity the coach was teaching in P.E. From that point forward, I worked with special needs students in P.E., and by my senior year of high school, I was actually scheduled as a P.E. teacher for one period. Also during my senior year, I was selected to be a cabin counselor for an elementary school’s week long sixth grade outdoor education program in the local mountains. This experience showed me how well students learn outdoors.

I started out as a business major in college, and during my freshman year I had several business classes. I soon came to the revelation that business was nothing more than selling a product, and I hated selling things. I also took an after-school part-time job. At that time, the elementary schools around my college employed an after-school coach from the time school got out until 5:00 p.m. I worked with fourth, fifth, and sixth grade boys coaching them and a female colleague coached the girls. We practiced the seasonal sports and had school versus school games on Saturday mornings. Little League Baseball was in its infancy, and youth sports for the most part did not exist. Elementary aged kids interested in sports played on their elementary school’s team.

It was these experiences that guided me to seriously think about becoming an elementary school teacher. By my sophomore year in college, I changed my major to Child Development which is what elementary school teachers majored in at the time.

During the five plus decades I have been working with children I have observed a lot of change in the way society views children and the approach to parenting. It’s my experience in the classroom, and the changes I’ve observed that are the motivation for writing this blog Parenting is Tough.

In regards to my elementary school coaching experience, elementary schools now all have an identity, mascot, and school colors but no sports teams. In the 1970’s schools didn’t have a mascot, colors, or identity, but they did have sports teams. Parents did not attend their child’s games during this time period which seems so unusual by today’s youth sports standards. Students walked or rode their bikes to the field for their games on Saturday mornings. In addition, they shared jerseys. I had a box of jerseys, and the boys would take their shirts off, pick a jersey with their favorite number, wear it, and put it back for a player in the next game to wear. It was my job to launder those jerseys, and only sometimes I got around to it. Imagine children sharing clothing without it being washed between wearings!

During my college summers I worked as a recreation leader at a city park and as a YMCA summer camp cabin counselor, naturalist, and archery instructor. In the 1970’s most cities in Southern California staffed their parks with recreation leaders. Recreation leaders would work in the afternoon in parks leading crafts, games, and checking out sports equipment to children on a drop-in basis. Some older readers may remember going to a park during the summer to buy the material to make a lanyard keychain for a dime. As recreation leaders, we were given a lot of latitude on what we planned as activities. During my tenure as a recreation leader, I had kids build a BMX dirt bike trail as well as a giant slip and slide we made by covering the side of a hill with visqueen plastic that we wet with several hoses. On one occasion, I attached a prize to the top of a steel light pole that I covered with Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. Kids spent all day trying to climb that pole until they’d rubbed enough of the Vaseline off in order to get to the top. We took long bike rides and took the Orange County bus to the beach to play in the surf.

I had a variety of experiences with the YMCA that included polar bear swims, Indian days, foraging for edible plants, and hikes into the wilderness to spend the night under the stars.

I graduated college in the spring of 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a California Teaching Credential. In September I got my first teaching job teaching seventh and eighth grade science in a junior high school in Los Angeles County. By the fall of 1979, I transferred to a district in Orange County where I taught sixth grade. Sixth grade in this school district is in the elementary school, and the sixth grade teacher teaches all subjects. I retired teaching sixth grade in the same school district after a 39 year teaching career, and I loved every minute of it. Along the way, I earned a Master of Arts degree in Education.

Since teachers are paid for only ten months, many need to find summer work to help bridge that two-month pay gap. In the late 1970’s, I directed the summer baseball program for a city recreation department, I directed the summer sailing program for a yacht club in Newport Beach, and I taught enrichment summer school science courses for a variety of agencies. In retirement I still teach a summer school enrichment class called Oceans. It is a course both on and in the ocean. It covers ocean recreation, marine biology, oceanography, and beach safety. The course includes a lot of field trips to the ocean where students have the opportunity to do everything from stand-up paddleboarding, snorkeling, fishing, surfing, wave riding, and whale watching.

It was my first experiences working with children that influenced my teaching and philosophy especially when I moved to a self-contained classroom. I’ve always believed that my classroom is about guiding students to make connections and take risks.

Connecting with my students increased their learning in my classroom. John Hattie, author of Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses On Achievement, found that the teacher-student relationship had the highest effect on student learning. Connecting students to nature and the natural environment was another important connection I fostered with my students. Connecting students to each other as well as connecting across the curriculum were important connections. In math, for example, the bounce of a dropped ball in which the results were recorded on a table, graphed, and then the graph’s function determined was connected to what we were studying in science.

In sixth grade, students attend outdoor education, and my students spent a week on Catalina Island at the Catalina Island Marine Institute every year. Here, students studied science as a scientist does, and they all took a number of risks. Living away from home for a week is a risk for many students in addition to donning a thick wetsuit and snorkeling in a kelp forest, climbing a rock wall, and even snorkeling at night. In the spring, my sixth grade team mates and I planned a bicycle unit for physical education. The culminating activity was a bicycle ride to the Fun Zone in Balboa. Our Drug Abuse and Resistance Education (DARE) police officers helped us with this unit to ensure that it was safe for all students. The ride was just under 30 miles round-trip. Students were so proud of themselves when they completed this ride that many of them did not think they could do. Risks in the classroom can be much simpler than the ones I’ve mentioned such as when a student takes the risk to work with someone new or when a student self-disciplines himself/herself to study for a test.

In my first year of teaching, I was put in charge of our school’s Honor Society. The Honor Society was made up of students who earned all A’s and B’s, and students got to choose something they’d like to learn about. The group chose government, and they wanted to learn how government worked in the state of California. To study that, I found a student travel company that would take us to Sacramento for the day. I soon began to travel with students to Sacramento and Washington, D.C. The travel company that my students traveled with was growing rapidly, and they asked me if I wanted to become a trip leader when I wasn’t teaching. That evolved into becoming the person at the company who hired and trained trip leaders. Attempting to balance this job as well as teach full time became overwhelming. When the company offered me a full-time position as a trip leader trainer, I decided I wasn’t ready to leave the classroom, and I didn’t want to travel with two young sons at home. I resigned from the company.

The year I taught a fifth/sixth grade combination class I put what I learned in the travel industry to work for my students. A fifth/sixth combination class is not a popular one especially for sixth graders, so at the beginning of the school year, I assigned students a project in math where students teams had to plan a field trip from our campus to another part of California without using an automobile. The field trip was over-night, and students had to create a budget for this. In all, they planned eight different field trips which they presented to their parents who then, along with student input, chose a field trip we would actually take. We ended up flying to San Jose and going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on one day and then visiting The Tech Museum of Innovation, Winchester Mystery House, and Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose the next day. Students planned and organized every aspect of the field trip including presenting to the board of education and superintendent for approval.

Five years into my teaching career, my wife and I had our first son, and five years later my second son was born. Having children changed the way I viewed my students as I started to see some of my sons’ traits in each of my students. Marriage and children has been greatly satisfying to me, and I could write a great deal about my sons as well as my wife. As my sons grew, I became involved in their activities. I coached youth soccer for 13 years in a row as well as four years of basketball. I was in the YMCA Indian Guides (now called Adventure Guides) with both sons. During their high school years, I volunteered in youth ministry at our church. My oldest son in now married, and he and his wife recently had their first child, a daughter. My wife and I enjoy being daycare providers for our granddaughter three afternoons a week.

In the early 1990’s I became a volunteer at Doheny State Beach because Doheny had a newly renovated visitor center and aquarium. During my 24 years volunteering at Doheny, I involved my own students in educational activities at Doheny. Doheny’s annual Grunion Run was one of those events. Grunion are small fish that lay their eggs on the beach during a high tide in the middle of the night. Students and their families enjoyed staying on the beach often past the midnight hour to watch these fish spawn. I also applied coordinate geometry to draw and paint life-sized whales on Doheny’s ocean front sidewalk. On many occasions, my sixth graders would come to Doheny to help paint a whale on Doheny’s whale walk. This also led to painting life-sized whales and sharks on our school’s parking lot and playground.

Since I began my career as a science teacher, I was tasked with teaching sex education to eighth grade boys when I taught junior high school. When I moved to sixth grade, I assisted our school’s nurse with the sixth grade version of the birds and the bees. The nurse talked to the female sixth graders while I talked to the males. As the amount of time nurses spent on an elementary campus was reduced, I worked with several of our district’s nurses developing a program called Guy Stuff for sixth grade boys and an adult guest. I taught Guy Stuff in the evenings for 18 years. This program focused on the changes a boy experiences in puberty as well as helping boys and their adult guest (usually their father) develop a healthy dialogue about human sexually. I’m not sure who was more nervous during these classes the boys or their fathers.

Throughout my long career, I have received many honors and awards. I think teachers are only second to Hollywood in the awards we receive. I have been named California’s DARE Teacher of the Year in 2009. I’ve received my school’s Teacher of the Year honor twice. I was honored to have been selected as a Family Favorite Top Educator in Parenting OC Magazine. My teams of sixth grade students have won the middle school division of both the Edison Challenge and Quikscience Challenge several times. The Irvine Prevention Coalition honored me with an Outstanding Supporter of Prevention Award. Our school’s Green Team won first place in the Keep California Beautiful K-12 Recycling Challenge in the foam lunch tray division. I also received a WHO Award from the California Teachers’ Association.

In retirement, I work in the education department of a university. I’m observing and coaching student teachers. In this role, I’m able to help a new teacher develop his or her craft as he/she earns a teaching credential.

These experiences shaped me as a teacher. This blog is about parenting through the lenses of my experiences as a teacher in order to help parents make decisions on how to best parent their children. Children do not come with user manuals, and there is no license or training required to be a parent. A lot of parenting is both opinion as well as making a decision with one’s “gut”. It is my hope that I can offer another perspective on parenting as well as to give you something additional to think about.