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I Remember When Teaching Was Still Fun

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By Sandy Lankford / The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 15, 2008

Believe me, teaching usually is no picnic. It can be just a job many days and like any other career, it can be tough to make yourself get up and go to work. Some days you just want to get through the day and go home. But, I can remember when, for me, it was fun.

When I first started teaching, I was an elementary general music teacher and a junior/senior high school choir director. I came in the middle of the year to a very complicated position in which the former teacher had quit. It took a lot of time to get to know the students, obtain my fellow teachers' support and figure out how to apply what I had learned from textbooks and lectures to the classroom.

But, on days when everything was going as planned, I had fun.

I usually ended each elementary class with some type of game that incorporated whatever skill we had learned, and discipline was pretty easy. Play by the rules and you could be in the game. Music is so creative that a smart teacher can do so many things to keep her students' interest in this subject. The choir wasn't so easy, but the students generally were in there because they wanted to sing. I had the privilege of opening up their world to the musical geniuses of the past and present with a little bit of rock and/or contemporary thrown in.

After teaching music for over a decade, I went back to school and to be certified in elementary education. Third grade was my favorite. To watch a child learn how to read or discover a new fact - to see that light come on in their eyes - is a wonderful thing.

Of course, teaching always has been about testing. It's one way we make sure a child has learned a new skill. And some things can't be learned except through rote teaching and a great deal of repetition.

What is a noun? Say or write your "four times tables" again and again until it is internalized. This is to be expected. But, there are ways of making learning enjoyable.

I was privileged to teach in Florida at a time when we could try different methods of teaching.

For a few years, I used the unit method. I would immerse the students in a lesson about a rain forest, for example, as a way to teach all subjects. We would learn about rain forests and pepper our spelling lists with new words from that lesson. The children worked math problems by adding and subtracting monkeys and snakes.

Students could look up and see stuffed animals hanging from the rafters, vines woven around the bulletin boards and the underside of a tent. You cannot imagine what a child can learn when his imagination is sparked.

Schools have always had to have tests in the spring to show what students learned that year. When you were a child, you did them every year. Remember?

But did you have this frantic push all year to learn each skill - also known as benchmarks - as if your life depended on it? No, the test was meant to only reflect what you had learned that year.

The big difference back then was the tests were nationalized and standardized. When a child moved from one school district to another, teachers could chart the student's progress.

How do we do that now when each state has developed its instrument to measure only its students?

There are a number of good national tests such as the Stanford Achievement Test. But, I suggest it has become big business for textbook companies to write books specifically for Florida's curriculum standards and only for Florida's students.

And of course, Florida can only compare itself to itself, and therein lies the problem.

Sandy Lankford is a wife, mother and former educator who lives in Sebring.

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