Interview with Lynn C. Cole

Karen Blair: Dr. Cole, thank you for sharing with us your thoughts about your own teacher preparation and your subsequent career in education. This will add greatly to our understanding of teacher education at Towson University. I think where we should begin probably is in the beginning. If you would, would you share with us your early social context? Where you grew up, what kinds of career thoughts you were having when you got to high school and what made you consider teaching? Lynn Cole: Yes. I had a very unconventional early childhood. I was born to a 17-year-old mother. My father was in prison at the time. My mother was illiterate. When my father got out of prison, we moved deep into the Navajo Indian Reservation, and he became employed for El Paso Natural Gas Company, which at that time ran across the reservation. K.B.: This was in Arizona? L.C.: Arizona and New Mexico. I grew up in Arizona and New Mexico on the Reservation. My earliest memory of school was one room with 12 rows. Bonnie Bogay sat in front of me, who was Navajo and spoke little to no English. We would play outside under Pinon trees. She lived in a hogan. I lived in company housing. Twelve rows over was a young man named Cecil Etsitty. He was the only young person in that row of seats. As I look back on it, I think they had 12 rows for the 12 grades? It was a very unusual school setting as I’m used to now, but that’s all I knew. Mr. Oliphant was our teacher. He spoke in English whether the children could understand him or not. Fortunately, I could. I was very blessed to have a telescope at home. My earliest memory is finally getting it at probably three-years old and realizing the moon was not broken and instead it was the light shining on it from a different direction. That was profound in my memory of understanding that concept. I was also fortunate enough to have a set of encyclopedias to read. We were 40 miles from the nearest trading post. We were literally very, very isolated. This encyclopedia set meant I could start reading. M was for Magellan. I remember being most fascinated about Geography and Magellan and how he circumnavigated the world. Near this trading post was a Mission where there was a woman who had a piano. Somehow I got to go there for piano lessons. I was probably four years old. I remember that for probably the first month or two of these weekly trips, I was kind of in a fog. One day, all of a sudden it was like a black curtain was pulled. I knew how to play. I played piano forever, just loved it. I became more advanced than she was, and I didn’t get to take piano lessons after that. Those were my earliest memories of learning. Somehow learning became very important to me and the idea of learning. I’m blessed, I think, to be able to reach back and have a firm memory of learning that young in my life. K.B.: Indeed. L.C.: My three siblings were separated from my mother when I was 12. So, my father was the primary parent. I’m sure he recognized that I was getting a substandard education and that I probably wouldn’t live the rest of my life on the Reservation. I think it was just the times, too. This was the early 60’s when I was in high school. He said, “ You should think about being a nurse or a secretary or a teacher.” The nurse idea wasn’t too cool. I went over to the tech part of the high school and learned how to type very fast. But, the other opportunity I got was being able to help with the elementary school that was attached to our high school. There weren’t many children. We were all kind of in one building. I worked with those boys and girls who were primarily Navajo who had been taken out of their hogans and forced to get on a bus to go to school. The way they taught them English was by literally slapping their knuckles with a ruler any time they spoke Navajo. Even then, as unenlightened as I was, that seemed very cruel and unusual. A little side note to you. The sons and daughters of Code Talkers were my classmates. The World War II Code Talkers. They were extremely influential in the U.S. winning World War II in the South Pacific. Had that Navajo language not been preserved in some way, that would’ve impacted you and me very much and the rest of our country. It gave me a keen interest in language and how language held who we are. I developed a fairly sophisticated vocabulary. I find myself, even today, being careful to downplay the words I use to fit in with our undergrads and some friends or associates I have that aren’t university professors, because I’ve been in a pretty elite group all of my professional life. Words mean a lot to me. Our language means a lot to me and other peoples’ language means a lot to me. It was just by eliminating the other two choices that I became a teacher. My father married a Public Health Service Nurse when I was 16. She was young and inherited four children. That was not a wonderful situation. As soon as I could, I left Fort Defiance, AZ, where we were living there, and went to Arizona State University for the summer and worked for my tuition. I made two A’s and two B’s. I thought, “ Wow maybe I could go to a university after all.” We were all very unsure about that, but it was a good experience. Educational Philosophy was one of my first courses and I loved it. I knew I could be a teacher and wanted to be a teacher at a very deep level. K.B.: Where is your Bachelor’s degree from? L.C.: I stayed there for one summer. Then I had to go to a college, a small college in the Yuma Desert, which was the only place I was allowed to apply for the regular academic year. In that year, my father was transferred to Washington, DC at the Indian Affairs because he was now employed by them, not the El Paso Natural Gas Company. This didn’t really matter. It still kept us on the Reservation. I couldn’t support myself and pay out of state tuition, so I went to College Park in Maryland. Talk about a culture shock! That was an amazing culture shock. I graduated from high school in 1966. We were so isolated that I really didn’t realize the Civil Rights Movement was going on. I knew the Vietnam War was going on, but I didn’t have a firm grip on what that was doing to the rest of the world. I just knew we were losing a lot of classmates. In College Park in my first year, I believe, or second year, there were riots. Students took over the Administration Building and all kinds of things. I saw Washington, DC on fire and realized the Watts Riots had occurred also; I spent a lot of time catching up on mainstream America. I had never seen a Beatles’ movie until I got into a graduate course in Media. I guess all of my adult life has been kind of catching up on what I would’ve had in mainstream, at least, White America, because that was a disconnect, too. I hold a lot of the belief systems and, certainly, social norms of the Navajo, because that’s who I grew up with. I wasn’t influenced very much at home. My siblings and I raised ourselves. I was the oldest of the four of us. There was an absence of traditional influences, like nursery rhymes. Those kinds of influences didn’t exist in my background. My passion for Children’s Lit. came from this void. That’s been a good way to acculturate myself to mainstream America. K.B.: Hopefully, you were also able to hold onto some of your Navajo background, too. L.C.: I can’t shake it. I don’t want to. I feel like I was very blessed, not disadvantaged, by that experience. It is quite unusual to be White and be able to grow up in a place where you’re the minority. A bit unusual. Everyone knew I wouldn’t live there all my life, but I was never rejected. I was always accepted. I have a great reverence for Native Americans. I was treated very well. K.B.: At College Park, you majored in Elementary Ed. L.C.: Yes, I did. K.B.: Do you remember anything about your course work to become a teacher? Was it mostly theoretical or practical? Did you have any hands-on experience? Did you get to go observe children or interact with them before you actually did that student teaching piece? L.C.: Yes, all of that. When I think back on it, it was very much like the structure of our schooling here at Towson University. I had Methods courses. Some observation experiences. We were not well prepared for being put in Washington DC schools for student teaching, which is where I was put. Again, it was a very useful experience. I guess I was in a cohort. I probably didn’t think of it at that time as a cohort. We went into Washington DC in one of the poorest areas. I don’t recall being very independent there. We probably did more observation than not. Then our next rotation was in the part of Washington DC where the Redskins lived and there were White maids and butlers. It was a very different experience there. I was able to function a little more there. I probably left there not feeling very prepared for teaching. I’m not sure any of us did. I think if we asked our own students they’d probably say the same thing. I didn’t end up teaching in a situation like either of those. K.B.: Interesting. L.C.: I went into a school very close to the campus of College Park. K.B.: Was this for student teaching or after you had graduated? L.C.: No, when I was hired. K.B.: Your student teaching experiences were in Washington? L.C.: Yes, Washington, DC, but when I was hired I went into a very small school setting for my first professional year in teaching with railroad tracks literally running down the middle of the neighborhood. Blacks lied on one side and White children lived on the other side. This was the Berwyn Heights area and Edmondson. It was a very old, small school. I had a very successful first two or three years. I think teaching was much more simple then. I needed to teach children. Paper work was not the huge issue that it is now. After one or two years in that school, I went in as faculty opening a school in Paint Branch, not Montgomery County, but Paint Branch Elementary in Prince George’s County. That was more in a White neighborhood. We had children being bused for 45 minutes from around the county before they got to my classroom for desegregation. I never had difficulty teaching. I was a good teacher. I remember always having visitors and feeling very confident about my teaching. The job was very different than what we’re preparing our teachers for now. It’s become much more complicated. K.B.: Indeed. Very quickly after you completed your degree, you decided to go on and get a Master’s degree in Reading. What led you to choose reading? L.C.: To me, reading was not just reading. Course work in reading is course work in how the brain is comprehending information and thinking. To me, it’s never been about reading. It’s been about learning. To this day I think that is the case. We use reading as the end product for students. Reading is one of the things that gives us information about how children process information, code break, and are able to make it a part of themselves. Reading fascinated me. College Park was very important at that point. We were one of the national centers for reading. There were incredibly bright and capable professors there like Linda Gambrell. I had the insight to realize that, so I just stayed there. I had always gone right through school. I graduated a semester early even with a couple of transfers. I never didn’t go to school. I worked and went to school through summers and everything. I was probably a little afraid to ever stop. I really always wanted to know more and more and more. I got my Master’s degree in reading and went on to get my Doctorate in reading. In the doctoral program is where I branched off into Gifted Education. K.B.: You changed your career a bit, just a little move to becoming a Reading Specialist. L.C.: I did. As soon as I got my Master’s, I was a Reading Specialist in Howard County. I left Prince George’s County and went to Howard County. K.B.: What kinds of things did you do in that position? L.C.: As an Elementary Reading Specialist, I had a caseload of children who had very clinical needs for reading improvement. It was diagnostic and remediation in nature. I loved it. At the end of my second year, got a bit bored and wondered what would happen if I did something like this in a middle school. That was a very different role. There I was teaching six classes a day. It wasn’t a good fit for me. I got called “ Fart Face” the first day of school. It didn’t go well. But it was a good experience for me none the less. I missed the technical nature of what I was able to do with children as a Reading Specialist. In that year, I became more and more involved in gifted children. I was recruited by parents to be a part of a program they were trying to start for children who were gifted and had great needs. That was a real paradigm shift from a deficit model in my mind to trying to accommodate children that were still very much at a disadvantage, but not because they had difficulty learning, but because they knew too much for the school system. That was a great departure for me, but I used the same information to be successful. K.B.: You actually did work with Gifted and Talented programs. It seems as though you almost generated those or created those or were on the ground floor when that began. L.C.: Absolutely. There was nothing in our schools at that time to accommodate gifted children. It was a Saturday program that I was asked to create and run. It was all triggered by my experiences as an Elementary Reading Specialist. One of the kindergarten teachers slipped off and whispered to me, “ I’ve got this kid that can read. He’s just turned five and I don’t know what to do with him. Will you help me?” And so I did. That little boy opened my eyes to a whole group of children who are probably hiding in our classrooms and are simply bored and following along. This child acted out. I would work with him every day. We would read. The challenge was finding really interesting information that he could read that was developmentally appropriate. I started thinking more and more about that population of children. I realized along the way that I had been misplaced in school. I remember during several transfers in my own schooling where I was simply put in the back of the room and told, “ Here is a book about Ralph Bunch. Read it.” I didn’t have the curriculum structure that allowed me to progress in light of skills that I already knew. If you could read well, teachers too often said, “ We don’t know what to do with you; just go continue to read.” That’s a dangerous thing to do. It leaves great holes in children’s array of knowledge and skills. I became very sympathetic to children who were gifted and started adding courses in the education of gifted students to my doctoral program through the Special Education Department at College Park. There were only two or three courses, but I took those. I did some independent studies with people who were on the ground floor of breaking into that field. Somewhere within the first three years of my teaching there was a position opened at the State Department of Education, Project Basic, during the decade Dave Hornbeck was the Superintendent of Schools. Maryland received a $10,000 grant. Maryland was one of three states in the country. I was part of that grant. I worked in three school systems across the state doing pilot projects for gifted children. I stayed there for ten years and we really fleshed out Gifted Programs in school systems and added our State Summer Centers. I slowly became in charge of in-service training developing credible gifted programs in our 24 school systems. I worked closely with Superintendents, which were often the slow group. Gifted education is still a very unfamiliar concept, and it was very risky. Our citizenry wants all children, unless they have gifted children, to be able to perform at a basic level. That has always been the model at our state level. K.B.: National level, probably. L.C.: We haven’t put that same effort on what happens to the children that are already at the top. We need to realize they have a right to learn something new every day. They have every right that all children have. We still have that quandary, but we’ve broken a lot of barriers in today’s world. I spent ten years there, at the Maryland State Department of Education, and never got State Legislation to mandate gifted programs. We still have enabling legislation in Maryland. I decided that I needed to move on and try something else. K.B.: Right. While you were there or even today is there any special certification or anything like that for Gifted and Talented in the state? L.C.: In the last three to five years, we’ve been able to get that. I have taught some of those classes for our in-service teachers. We have cohorts in Baltimore, Montgomery County, Anne Arundel County, Prince George’s, and yes, those teachers will now have a certification for Gifted Ed. But, will there be jobs for their certification? K.B.: Is that a K-12 cert? L.C.: No. No. It’s not. It’s at their original certification level. K.B.: I see. Okay. Interesting. As you said, you stayed at MSDE for a decade. That leaves us at about 1989 or so? L.C.: No, 1986. I was there from 1976 to 1986. K.B.: What happens next? L.C.: I was asked to come to Carroll County as a Supervisor of Gifted. They lost their supervisor. The school systems knew me because I was the one holding state conferences and training. I decided to see what I could do at a local level. I did that for three years and became disgruntled. I could not persuade them to really do the gifted program in a credible way. It was an IQ test based program. Children had to score in the top three to five percent. That simply eliminated the children who were very bright but weren’t going to show that on an IQ test. Carroll County is still a bit of a different county. They’re fairly isolated. They have a homogeneous population for the most part. At that time, we didn’t have progressive Board of Ed. members. They could’ve done what they were doing without me, so I decided to try to make another job change. My secretary at the time saw a flyer that went out to all the school systems by Irene Hanson. She was a retiring professor and Director of College for Kids at Towson University. I had done programs like that through Howard Community College with a fledgling parent group, and I was intrigued by that. My own children, I think, were three and five years old at that time and maybe it was time to fire the full-time nanny and do something part-time. When I applied, I was recruited to be a full-time professor, also. I had a Ph.D. and Towson was in need of professors. I had to put the nanny back in place. K.B.: Especially in that field. There probably wasn’t anybody or very few members of the faculty. L.C.: They didn’t want me for my expertise in Gifted Education, oddly enough. I’ve never worked in a fundamental role based on my expertise in Gifted Education. I taught methods courses in Language Arts, Social Studies, Foundations of Education and anything else. We have a gaping hole in our country in that we do not give our undergraduate pre-service teachers any information about gifted children who we know are going to be in their classrooms. That would still be a goal of mine to try to influence that. K.B.: Tell us a little bit about College for Kids. What was that program? What was the intent, the design? L.C.: It’s not past tense. Fortunately, since my retirement, we’ve been able to move that program over to the Fisher College of Science and Mathematics. It’ll be housed in the College of Science and Mathematics (CSM), probably in conjunction with the Hackerman Academy, which has programs that promote attendance of children that would be very similar to those that gravitate to College for Kids. College for Kids was a program I always did on the side. I used to do it in the Saturdays of February in the winter. I think my fiftieth birthday gift to me was to stop doing that. It was a tremendous overload. Bringing children on campus for any amount of time involves a huge commitment. It was never funded. It was always self-supporting and operating on a shoestring, as it is today. What we do for a week in the summer is help children realize they’re not alone. They look forward to it for a whole year. When they get to the campus, they are in course work that we create to be of interest to any child. The information we’re giving is deeper and requires more creative outlets for children. The humorous thing about the courses we’re going to have for the summer, is that the children have probably investigated the topic more than the teachers could ever do. Our challenge is to continue to challenge them when they come to campus. They already know how many times a hummingbird beats its wings in a minute, for example. K.B.: What type of courses? L.C.: We have primarily relied on animals or natural phenomenon. My partner, Gail Gasparich, who is now the Associate Dean of CSM, has been wonderful in giving the program access to labs and some of her students that are in Science Education. Our course work is primarily in science. We didn’t intend that to be the case. We start with four year olds, which is very unique for the program. You can teach them anything if you include animals. We design courses around science topics that we think all children would be interested in, but with these children we can go deeper and broader and make many connections with them. K.B.: It would seem then given that the curriculum emphasis that a move to the Fisher College is . . . L.C.: It’s a very good fit. K.B.: It is a good fit. L.C.: It’s a very good fit. They’ll be able to advertise for us along with all their other programs offered to children. The mission of the College for Kids is to provide children with age-appropriate activities that honor the kind of information they know and allow them to use it. It’s to give children enriched experiences that allow them to use knowledge, because they’re very knowledge oriented. They know things and they want to use that knowledge. They want people to know what they know. To just give them something creative is not enough, but to give them ways to express what they’ve learned in addition to what they came to us knowing is the creative part. It’s very hands-on and very developmentally appropriate. K.B.: Wonderful; and it’s still continuing. L.C.: It’s still continuing. I had a dear, dear undergraduate student who stayed in touch with me. She got her Master’s degree in Reading and continued to check in on me. She realized the College for Kids program was very labor intensive. She would volunteer for me any time she could. Slowly but surely we got a viable enough population that I could pay her something to help me two weeks or three weeks before the program opened. Then we got Liz Scarborough, who is here in the Academic Achievement Program. She put her son in the program and realized “ oh, my gosh!” you need my technical services, so she volunteered for us and got us computerized, which allowed us to grow our population even more. Now they are the Director and the Assistant Director and have been for two years. I was able to hand that off and it survived. Only because of great the allegiance of my two angels that were committed to me personally and to the program and gave me what I needed to keep going when I thought I couldn’t do it anymore. It has been very gratifying. K.B.: It should be. It’s deserved. L.C.: It’s a program I hope can expand. Our parent population plans their vacations around it, literally. We have people that travel from the Eastern Shore, from Virginia, and from Delaware. When grandmothers that have their grandchildren with them, they are scheduled to be in the College for Kids week. It’s a revered program. We have a high 60 to 70% return of the same children from the time they’re four. It’s very unique. K.B.: What ages does the program cover? L.C.: Four-years old through entering sixth grade. We find at sixth grade there are a lot more opportunities that open up for the children. Because we don’t have a very firm financial base, we have to know that we can fill the classes. At sixth grade, we lose our children to other fine things, so we stop at that point. K.B.: You were saying, in addition, this was almost an additional piece of your career here at Towson. L.C.: It was. It was my service component. K.B.: It certainly was a great service. As a member of the Elementary Education Department you were very much involved in various aspects of curriculum and taught a variety of courses. You also lived through several NCATE (National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education) visits. You have a sense of what accreditation is looking for in terms of Teacher Education Programs. Would you tell us a little bit about your experience in the department? This is really leading to a larger question of what do you think are the essential components in an effective Teacher Education program? L.C.: That’s a huge question and the one that I’m going to probably fumble with the most. K.B.: It certainly is! Tell us a little bit then about courses that you taught. Did you supervise student teachers ever? Were you in a PDS (Professional Development School) setting? L.C.: Let me start there. Bess Altwerger and I started the first PDS in Maryland in 1992. Our Dean, Dennis Hinkle, caught us in the hallway and said, “ I want both of you to experiment with a lot concepts. I want you to think about what a PDS is and do one for me.” We didn’t have any idea what a PDS was. Professional Development School was a totally new concept. We read all the information he had. He said, “ I have a school for you. Owings Mills Elementary.” Literally, Bess and I felt like we were married for two years. We both taught at that school. We had a cohort of students and we were their two major professors. We were really flying solo. I think we were one of the few in the country. It was the year we won the national award for PDS. Bess and I feel very good about that. K.B.: You should. L.C.: It was very experimental. We ended up teaching them like we would want them to teach in the classroom. I taught the Social Studies Methods in the group. We both taught Reading. We taught them like we would want them to teach children. We grouped them by skill and interest. All of their coursework took place in an elementary classroom at Owings Mills Elementary School. We had a lot of visitors. It became apparent, at the end of those two years, that ours was probably not a model that we could sustain. A lot of people might not have the versatility that Bess and I had between the two of us. I went into that experience having taught Foundations of Education, Social Studies Methods, Language Arts Methods, and almost everything in the Elementary Education Department. Bess was very grounded in Reading and was teaching graduate courses, in fact. Between the two of us, it worked. We were great buddies, so that made it work, but it wasn’t something you could depend on working. As it grew, the model changed to a more practical one. Ours was great. I think the students that went through it benefited greatly from it. We felt we were doing something very important to kick that off. K.B.: Absolutely. L.C.: To answer your question about the broader needs in a Teacher Ed. program. I think the balance is always giving them practical training, but a deep education. I think a flaw in any Teacher Preparation program is training them to do the job. Many times we’re tempted to train them to know and be able to do the job of teaching in the surrounding school systems in which they’re going to be hired. We know those school systems. What we can’t ever stop doing is teaching them how to think about learning and educating children at a more fundamental, basic theoretical level. We always have to balance the theory with the practical aspects. Sometimes we stray into the practical aspects of trying to make sure they’re ready. Being ready is also living through the different swings of the different programs that our population is trying, that our citizenry wants that get dictated by different presidents, NEA (National Education Association), all of those things. We need teachers that can also be a bit rebel and say, “ When I look at this new paradigm, these are my concerns.” And think about it from a very fundamental, theoretical basis, but also be able to apply the best of that into a particular program and the procedures of that program. None of our programs are going to fit the needs of all children. If you know how to tweak that program or those techniques, you’ll be able to meet the needs of our children at least better than if you simply had a rote program. I think many times we have fallen into “ dummy proofing” our schools and we lose our finest teachers. The teachers who come to us because they love learning and want to meet the needs of all children are very handicapped by that approach. As a system of educating our educators, we can’t be swayed by those trends. Yet, we have to prepare our teachers to move into those school systems, to work within the school systems to promote change. It’s a real balance. I think we’ve got to keep that at the forefront of our methods courses. K.B.: Thank you. L.C.: I don’t know if I answered that. K.B.: I think you did. L.C.: It’s very hard. If you ask that question at any one time, the job of actually teaching is very much influenced by politics, by what our researchers in education are telling us at the time, by our population shifts, our cultural shifts, all kinds of things. Good teachers have to ride through a lot of that and know what is temporary and can be changed and altered. Our school systems have to give them freedom to do that. I don’t know that we hit that mark very well. K.B.: Lynn is there anything that you wanted to tell us about in terms of your professional life, career, to date that we’ve missed? L.C.: No, I don’t think so. I have loved my tenure at Towson. I’ve been at Towson from 1989 to 2010. That’s the longest I ever stayed at any one place, which means I was growing and thriving. I’ve always cherished the colleagues I’ve had. I found them to be bright people, very little deadwood among them. People were really rolling in and doing a yeoman’s job at designing coursework and preparing our teachers. I will miss that part of it tremendously. K.B.: But you haven’t left entirely? L.C.: I have not left. As long as they offer me Children’s Literature, I will always come and teach. To me, that’s an incredible course. I get very offended when someone refers to it as “ kiddie lit.” I make it a very rigorous course, as I think my students would tell you. I think I’m somber about the future of Teacher Education, as I’m on my way out, in some respects. With as much history as I’ve had teaching, I can kind of look back and tell you what our students coming in have and don’t have. I fear that our students are coming to us less prepared in real basic skills: writing, thinking. As I look at the Core Curriculum, which is very controversial here among colleagues in our College of Education. I happen to love it. I think it is well overdo. I see it as a framework that will allow our brightest children to finally think critically and be able to show what they do best, which all children need. I think that it is very telling that when I try to use our Core Curriculum in my assignments. I do that routinely by asking a student to take a book and write about it, and find where it’s applicable to the Core Curriculum, and how to use that book to prove to a Principal or Supervisor that children could be assessed on the Core Curriculum by using the book. The next assignment coming up is our final exam based on reading Charlotte’s Web, which has a lot of meat to it. You can find many applications to our Core Curriculum; at a third grade level, to have children be able to demonstrate real critical thinking. The problem is that our undergraduate students are not good at that. They don’t think as well as I would hope they could think. They write at a level that is astoundingly poor. They’re not coming to us college ready. We’re going to have to do a lot to supplement their education to get them to be able to hit the ground running. Our Core Curriculum is in place in 2013, I keep reminding them. My rubrics require our undergraduates to critically think and write as I would hope pre-service teachers could teach children in first grade through sixth grade. I find they are really lacking in these skills. I think it’s very hard to catch up that fast when they are already in college. It makes me wonder what is happening downstream that causes that. I think in the past I got students who were better able to think their way through a question or an assignment I gave them that was clearly analytical, interpretive and at a very high level thinking. Now, they’re baffled by it. There is a lot of questioning and a lot of requests to show me another model of what is required. I don’t think they’ve had that experience themselves. I’m an advocate of our Core Curriculum effort. I hope it’s not a whim. I hope we finally really start assessing how well our children are being taught all the way through and that we embrace that at a university level. K.B.: One last question. L.C.: Yes. K.B.: What would you say to individuals who are considering teaching as a profession? What wisdom? What advice would you give them? L.C.: Don’t assume you want to be a teacher because you were always at the chalkboard in your basement when you were six years old. The job of teaching has changed tremendously since I was a teacher. It will continue to change. Really assess your disposition for teaching. I think that’s what makes or breaks teachers more than anything. A lot of our pre-service teachers want to be teachers because they were good in school skills. That doesn’t necessarily translate to being able to teach children that don’t learn easily. Sometimes you’re more handicapped. If it was very natural for you, you’re going to have to figure out how to bridge those barriers and really show children in a multitude of ways how to learn. Our children, in many respects, are coming to us with less and less engagement at home for all kinds of reasons. Our schools are homes. They’re our children’s second homes, sometimes their first homes. I would want them to be aware of all the demands on a teacher. The paperwork. The criticism that our public heaps on. If I were President of our country, I would have every citizen not only do their jury duty, but spend a week every year in a school that is not in their neighborhood just observing. They wouldn’t have to lift a finger, just observe. I think our citizenry is very out of touch with what our school classrooms are about, and where the bulk of our children are in their own development. I would tell them to make sure they have volunteered a lot in schools and not the school you went to. You’re probably not going to teach the children like you. You’re going to teach a very diverse population, I would hope. To be able to embrace that. Not just tolerate that diversity, but celebrate it. Really immerse yourself in things that are not like you: beliefs, places. Become worldly. I think a lot of our teachers think they want to be teachers because it’s fun. I love children. It takes a lot more than loving children. It takes the skill of being able to take concepts, complex concepts and make them clear for children whose intellectual development is maybe not ready and you have to do a lot of scaffolding. To be able to understand their emotional development and be nurturing. It’s just a big, big job. K.B.: It is. L.C.: I think we ought to get our pre-service teachers in classrooms immediately, early on, so we’re not at a student teaching level at the end of four years and staring across the table at a parent who says, “ How did my child make it this far? How did my adult child make A’s and is now failing student teaching?” I find myself being considered the rigorous instructor. I do achieve somewhat of a bell curve in my class even though they’re already screened in. I would want my colleagues to really be very critical of their students’ work and let them know where they have holes and be willing to help them develop. We do them no favor to pass them through without great rigor. I remember having big holes in my own education and working very hard at being up to par. I cherish that. It made me work hard, and it made me realize that I did not know it all. It humbled me. I think we do an injustice to our pre-service teachers to do anything other than that. I don’t know that we do that enough. Our tenure situation and our promotion situation relying on evaluations, so it’s very difficult to have students who have had a really rough time getting through a course and sending a professor emails saying, “ I worked hard on this and I don’t know why I don’t deserve an A.” And having to respond back that it’s not the amount of time you worked on it that I could ever assess. It’s the product that you gave me and it’s fair and let’s talk about it more. That’s hard to do. Some students will walk away with a very angry attitude about that. When you’re the only professors doing that, or one of the few doing that, it gives very mixed signals to our students and it’s very hard on the professors who are trying to hold a real high standard for us. K.B.: Yes, absolutely. L.C.: I have two granddaughters. My five-year old granddaughter just entered pre-school. Our son-in-law was the one that took her for her screening for pre-school. He came back shocked at what pre-schoolers need to know about school, to be screened in and be school ready. I often think of them when I think of the students that I’m teaching. Would I want this person to be Adelaide’s teacher? I think we all have to come at it with that degree of concern. A lot of good young people should not be teachers and a lot should. It can be based on disposition as well as their skill at manipulating instruction. Unless we really give them opportunity to test that, they won’t know until it’s too late and I would like to see them determine that earlier on in their college career here than at the end. K.B.: Is it a career that people should be pursuing? L.C.: Oh, yes! You mean teaching? K.B.: Yes! L.C.: Absolutely! Our finest and best should be. Absolutely. But, you can’t go in it without having nerves of steel. You have to be very committed to the public relations aspect of it. The variety of needs that children are going to come to you with. It’s not about teaching subject matter. I say this to every group I’ve ever had contact with. “ You’re not teaching them reading. You’re not teaching them math. You’re not teaching them Social Studies. You’re teaching children, period. You’re not teaching that subject matter. You’re teaching human beings in a variety of developmental stages. That’s your topic more than the content. The content is easy to teach. It’s teaching those children about that content that gets very difficult.” K.B.: Anything else? L.C.: I would hope that we give all pre-teachers exposure to gifted education. In their Special Education class, it’s typically Chapter 15 or 16 and it’s typically at the end and there is almost always one snow day or one water main break that causes a missed week, so I think frequently it’s missed. I think we need to raise that to a credible level and realize those children are always going to be in our classrooms across all socioeconomic groups and all cultural groups. They’re no less important to us than any other child. It’s those children who can really challenge a teacher in the hardest of ways. We do them a disservice not to have them go in looking for those children and feeling confident they can give them the same education as they can all other children. It needs to be a pre-service core, at the least, if not a course. K.B.: I knew you would close with something for Gifted and Talented. Thank you very much. L.C.: They’re very disadvantaged children. K.B.: Thank you. L.C.: Thank you for having me.