How have connections with other professionals improved your practice? Today's entry is from Don Hollins, ISOL teacher at Torrey Pines High School:
While this question seem trite or banal, the truth is the connections with other professionals not only changed my teaching practice, those connections changed my life.
I still remember my very first day in our district at the August 1996 New Teacher In-Service where I watched Terry Hendlin share a brief presentation on Sunset, the alternative high school for the district. Instead of talking to us with overheads full of charts and statistics (this is before classroom PowerPoints and Proximas), she welcomed all of us warmly and then asked some of us to blow up balloons. It seemed a strange activity first thing in the morning but we new teachers, eager to please, blew up and passed her the balloons. She then asked us to name issues facing middle and high school students and as we responded she wrote the responses on the balloons, “Drugs” “Family Separation” “Learning Disabilities” “Stress.” Soon she was trying to carry all of these troubled balloons across the room with tremendous difficulty. In a matter of a few minutes she had engagingly conveyed the challenges so many of our district’s students deal with every day in a way I’ll never forget.
Within weeks I had established a circle of colleagues at Earl Warren that I taught with and laughed with. We shared lesson plans, friendly class competitions and stories at lunch followed every Friday by high-spirited games of Spades at The Roadhouse’s Happy Hour. But two years later I attended the four-day Ready to Learn District training where I got to work with Terry Hendlin again. Only this time, we spent days learning about how to develop listening and about strategies to support and address the real issues that confront some our highest-performing students and derail some of our brightest ones. It was after this spring training when Terry asked Doctor Risner to call me to talk about a position at Sunset.
Working with Terry and the Sunset staff over the next 11 years was the greatest gift I could have ever received as a teacher. Through weekly thump-and-dump staff meetings and the daily, rushed 20 minutes in our tiny break room we developed a deep respect and a deep concern for students, for our school, for our programs and for each other. We saw the importance of everybody pulling together and stepping up to support not just the many frustrated, troubled and difficult student and family situations, but the importance of taking care of each other. Terry was central in this support through organizing staff birthday celebrations, retirement parties and of course, our week-long Holiday celebrations. (And there ain’t no party like a Sunset party - just ask Mustang Sally.) She is always quick with a kindness and right on time with an exquisitely-written card to celebrate a special occasion.
In a word, Terry and the Sunset staff humanized teaching for me. It was something I was incapable of doing myself because the idea of my teaching needing humanizing was beyond my comprehension. The concept never entered my mind.
I was in the advanced third grade and stayed on the advanced-placement track my entire life mostly due to having two parents who placed a primary importance on education and advocated for me. All of my siblings and I attended elite schools on full scholarships.
My ideas for better teaching were, "try harder" "study more" and "use a tutor." They aren't bad ideas, but they also aren't always sufficient.
Terry helped me see the kid as well as the student. She helped me understand that kids who don't feel safe at school or at home attend less and drop out more. She helped me see that even exceptionally-talented students who are blocked up with feelings of resentment, frustration, and fear (whether at themselves, their parents or the system) don't perform to their potential, and sometimes can't perform at all. More importantly, she and Doc believed, and helped me believe, that it's our job as teachers to meet these needs as much as it's my job to teach them the quadratic formula. And in comparison, I look back and wonder how I couldn't see the greater importance and value of those lessons before, but then I remember the paradigm that I had grown up in, succeed in and had been taught to propagate. I'm so grateful I meet Terry because she showed me an aspect of teaching students that not only shows up on tests scores, but shines in all the other aspects of their lives.
I have been able to co-facilitate support groups with Terry for 15 years now, and I never cease to be amazed at her concern, her compassion and her ability to help. I even learned how to write a better letter of recommendation for students from reading how personal, real and heart-felt each of hers always are despite having written literally a thousand of them for probably every college-bound senior who has ever attended Sunset over the past 27 years. But this is the magic of Terry, she does her utmost with whatever, and especially, whoever is in front of her.
Terry always addresses the need and focuses on what’s important. She confronts the delusion or excuses students use to quit or lie to themselves. She comforts and supports students who have lost family and friends. She helps students get in touch with the feelings that undermine their success and block them from believing or trusting in who they are. She arranges suits and shoes for students to be able to do interviews. She harasses students into applying for scholarship money to go to college. She arranges rides for students to get to school, to work or to home. She feeds them, laughs with them and cries with them. Most of all, Terry listens. And listens. And listens.
And while listening, Terry gives every student she talks with the respect and dignity they deserve simply for showing up. And the kids respond; thousands of students have experienced a transformation for the better. Sometimes students change so much as to be nearly unrecognizable from their former selves, literally working at the White House rather than being in the Big House. These transformations happen because of the loving space she has created for students for more than 30 years as a teacher and counselor in our district. And I feel lucky to have been able to watch and learn from her for nearly 20 of them.
So, working with Terry hasn’t helped my practice as a teacher, but rather like so many of her students, she has transformed it.
