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Albion College

6, Prof. Broccoli, 2013

Karen W. ©
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My Picture of a Good Teacher


Mrs. Linde was the most beloved fourth grade teacher at Summer Oaks Elementary School. On Friday, two weeks before school was to start at exactly 4 p.m., Mr. Brown, principal of Summer Oaks Elementary School would post the class lists for the school before leaving. It was a well-known fact that Mr. Brown, then, left via the backdoor of the school for a two-week vacation to avoid the barrage of angry parental phone calls that inevitably followed.


Another well-known fact in Plymouth was that the most influential parents had already requested that their child be placed with the favored teacher, a practice left little surprise as to where the most popular children in school would be place and which in retrospect seems to go against the elementary principle of equality. My parents were neither particularly influential nor in the habit of catering to the wishes of their nine-year old, imagine my surprise of being placed in Mrs.

Linde’ class.


I can with absolute certainty say that this was the best year of my elementary school career. Why, then, my readers might ask themselves, is my dear fourth grade teacher than not included in this essay beyond these introductory remarks? The answer is quite simple: Memory is a fickled friend. After much wrestling with my memories of elementary school and failing to pin down particularly illustrative recollections of formative learning experiences from this time that Leonardd themselves to be formulated into elegant and concise statements, I gave up, resorting to the not-so-distant past as the main source of material for this essay


This does not mean that my elementary school teachers did not have a hand in shaping me or my understanding of a good teacher. It simply means after near 20 years, I can no longer recall the precise details and circumstances to accurately elaborate on these learning experiences. As it was not realistic for me to arrange a visit to Mrs. Linde classroom, my memories of that remain just that and I have chosen to focus on influential teachers from more recent period of my life.

While the learning experiences described are more closely related to secondary and tertiary education, the recognitions derived from these are applicable across all levels of education.


Mrs. Linde

Building communities within the classroom and beyond


On Friday, two weeks before school was to start at exactly 4 p.m., Mr. Brown, principal of Summer Oaks Elementary School would post the class lists for the school before leaving. Rumor had it that Mr. Brown, then, left via the backdoor of the school for a two-week vacation to avoid the barrage of angry parental phone calls that inevitably followed. The crowd of parents and anxious students waiting for the class lists to be posted began to gather already around 3:30 p.m.


It was also well-known fact in Plymouth that the most influential parents had already requested that their child be placed with the favored teacher, a practice left little surprise as to where the most popular children in school would be place and which in retrospect seems to go against the elementary principle of equality.


In the first grade, everyone wanted Mrs. Smith. In the second grade, Mrs. Meyer was the favorite teacher, and in third grade, it was Mrs. Crawcraft. In fourth grade, Mrs. Linde was known as the best. My parents were neither influential nor in the habit of catering to the wishes of their nine-year old, so by the time that fourth grade rolled around, I had absolutely no expectations that I would be in Mrs. Linde' class.


It was, therefore, much to my surprise and delight that my name was on the list for Mrs. Linde' fourth grade class. Looking back, I am not quite sure what the reason was that Mrs. Linde was so beloved. Sure, she was sweet and her lessons were fun and interactive, but when I think back to that school, what sticks out most in my mind in how much we, as a class, interacted with others.

We had reading buddies, swimming lessons, book reports and pen pals. We put on an exhibition about 19th century American pioneer life for our parents and had a science/art fair.


Reading buddies are probably the first thing that comes to mind when I am asked to recall the fourth grade. Mrs. Linde paired about with a first grade teacher and every week on Friday afternoon, our fourth grade class would make the trek down to the first grade wing of the school and spend an hour reading with the first graders. It's funny to think now how mature and important this made us fourth graders feel.

The first graders were so small, practically still in Kindergarden, and we were nearly fifth graders. We took our duties as reading buddies very seriously, carefully selecting out books at the library that we would read with little reading buddies and practicing at home on younger siblings. By putting us in the role of the teacher, being reading buddies filled us with a sense of pride and responsibility.


They were even in a different time zone! My penpal, Amiela, and I discovered that we had the same favorite color (green) and like reading the same books (The American Girl series). Amiela wrote me about her family, her mean older brother, and the city of St. Louis. Imagine my excitement the following Summer when my grandparents took me to San Franscisco and we had a short layover in St.

Louis, the city that Amiela had told me all about. Flying into the city, I saw the Arch from my window seat on the plane. "The Gateway to the West" Amiela had written me.


Good teachers build connections in the classroom, within the community and beyond. Like Mrs. Linde, they connect their students with others in the school and community as well as with the world at large. By building these bridges, good teachers help their students to find their place in the society and see themselves as playing an important role. This feeling of connectedness with others gives students a sense civic responsibility and helps them to develop an interest in the world around them.


The project was a huge success with everyone learned something new and feeling as though they played an important role in the project. Afterwards, Mrs. Linde came up to me, "You as I remember you in the fourth grade, - as creative as can be" she told me. And Mrs. Linde was just as I had remember her, working to build bridges and relationships between her students and the wider world.


Leonard Bernard


The town of Silver City epitomises post-industrial decay in Michigan and the Midwest as a whole. More than one in three residents lives below the poverty line. Silver City College, by contrast, is a small, private liberal art college with a fairly privileged, homogeneous student body. It is difficult to capture the magnitude of the disparity between the town and the college, but it is perhaps most easily understood with a simple comparison of two numbers: the most recent U.S. census data reports that the median household income in Silver City, Michigan is US$26,428 while Silver City College reports that the annual tuition, room and board, and supplies for the current school year run US$47,010. For me, studying sociology was a consequence of being confronted with the glaring inequality between the two and a chance encounter with Dr.


Having grown up in a typical Midwestern suburb during the relatively prosperous 1990’s and early 2000’s, my childhood and teenage years were blissfully sheltered. My college years might have been spent in a similar manner had I not met Leonard. I first met Leonard working on an article for the college newspaper about college-town relationship. I scheduled a 20-minute with Leonard, who was starting up a mentoring-research program pairing disadvantaged students from the local schools with Sociology students from the college.

When I arrived for the interview, I was greeted by a jolly old man who rather resembled Santa Claus. An hour and a half later, I had signed up for the class myself and changed my major to Sociology.


He forced us to, requiring that each of his students keep a journal of field notes and observations, which were then used to stimulate discussions in the seminar class and evaluate the validity of various sociological theories. We recorded conversations, interviewed a diverse group of people, studied the historical and political background of issues of race, gender and economic inequality.

The more I experienced and different people, the more engaged I become, the more important these issued became to me, but also the more difficult I found it to understand the seeming apathy of most of my fellow students.


By my second year of college, I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the indifference of many at Silver City. “Go abroad,” was Leonard’s simple solution. After I had decided on a program in Kenya, my parents were less than enthusiastic, but Leonard encouraged me to push forward with my plan. “Don’t worry” he wrote me, “God takes care of the fools, babies and yours of the world.” In Africa, I was introduced to the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Freire.


A good teacher is one who encourages his students to engage with the world around them, to interact with people who are different from themselves and seek out new perspectives. He offers his students new ways of seeing things, not only through the transfer of theoretical knowledge, but also by creating spaces in which experiences for framing those theories can be gained.

It is only through the coupling of theory and practice that one can begin to truly build a solid understanding of the world around them. For me, Leonard Bernard was such a teacher.


Closing remarks


From the first grade through college, I have had dozens and dozens of teachers, many of whom were certain good and competent educators, but what is it then that separates those teachers who have been forgotten (in Vergessenheit geraten) from those three with have been mentioned here. Time is certainly an unfortunate factor, but there are certainly more important other ones.

As a future teacher, my goal is to occupy this intersection…blah, blah, blah…



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