I pulled out of my driveway on Monday morning and drove down Acacia Drive to the stop sign at Maple Lane. I turned right on Maple, left at the traffic light onto Coventry Boulevard, and then left again at the second light onto the ramp for southbound Highway 117. After four years of traveling by bicycle and bus to classes at the University of Jeromeville campus, just a mile from my house, this year would introduce a new experience to my life as a recent university graduate: commuting.
Highway 117 passed through Jeromeville below ground level. I drove past the ramps for West Fifth Street and Davis Drive, crossing under those streets along with two pedestrian crossings and one street with no access ramps. The highway then ascended to ground level just south of Jeromeville and merged with Highway 100, the major east-west freeway of this region.
On my right, between the road and a fruit orchard, I saw a sign listing distances to upcoming cities to the west. Silvey 6 miles, Nueces 16, Bay City 70. Starting from my house, the commute would probably be around nineteen miles each way if Nueces was sixteen miles from this point. I could definitely handle a commute of nineteen miles one way every day, especially with good music on the radio. These days, it seemed like every time I turned on the radio, I kept hearing “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” by Aerosmith. It was a sappy power ballad composed by Diane Warren, who was best known for pop music, not rock. It was still a pretty good song, though, and it was admirable that a band that had been around for almost three decades could still make big hits. Maybe I should have this perspective on my life, instead of worrying about getting older now that I was twenty-two years old.
Jeromeville was in the middle of a very long valley that ran mostly north to south, a flat interruption of the mountains that made up most of the western United States. Nueces was on the western edge of this valley, just below the foothills of a ridge rising about two thousand feet, which I could see ahead of me now. The sun rises early in the morning this time of year, and the morning light coming from behind me in the east illuminated the ridge enough to see the dark green oaks and bushes growing among the tan dry grass.
On my left, the small city of Silvey interrupted the farms and orchards and cow pastures, but on my right, the agricultural land continued until I reached the Nueces city limits. The second Nueces exit was Highway 6 coming from the north. I weaved through the traffic coming from Highway 6 to get into the right lane, so I could take the next exit, Buena Vista Avenue. This street ran parallel to the freeway; I headed west toward the old part of Nueces.
Nueces was a city of eighty thousand, larger than Jeromeville, and much more populous than the rural area of Plumdale where I went to high school, but somewhat smaller than Gabilan, the city next to Plumdale where my grandparents lived. Nueces had few tall buildings, typical of cities of its size in the Valley. Its name, Spanish for “nuts,” referred to walnuts and almonds grown in the area. I wondered if teenage boys at Nueces High School ever made jokes about their school’s name meaning something that was a slang word for male gonads. Maybe not, though, since my understanding was that actual Spanish speakers called testicles “huevos,” literally “eggs,” instead of “nueces.”
Buena Vista Avenue narrowed to one lane in each direction just before I reached the school. The neighborhood looked several decades old, and when I arrived at the school, I noticed that the building looked around the same age as those around it. The school sprawled across a large campus of one-story buildings, with covered walkways but no proper hallways. NUECES HIGH SCHOOL, HOME OF THE BULLDOGS proclaimed a sign in the front.
I found the office near the front of the school. “May I help you?” the secretary asked. “Are you a new teacher?”
“I’m a student teacher from Jeromeville,” I explained. “Greg Dennison.”
“Here you go!” she said, grabbing a folder from her desk that had my name on it. Two others were next to mine, labeled “Ronald Pinkerton” and “Ryan Gaines.” I recognized those names; they were two other student teachers from my program at UJ who had also been assigned to Nueces High. “The meeting is right over here in the library,” she said, pointing out the door through which I had just come in.
I walked into the library, about fifteen minutes before school started, and by the time everyone arrived, the first thing I noticed was that I had worried about being underdressed for nothing. Back in Jeromeville, I usually wore a t-shirt and jeans to class, and a collared shirt and jeans to church. I dressed slightly nicer today, wearing a collared shirt and slacks, but I was not sure if that was enough. Looking around the room, though, I saw that many of the other male teachers were wearing t-shirts, jeans, shorts, sandals, things like that. Some wore baseball caps. I suspected that they were underdressed because today was a day with no students on campus, and that they would be dressed more nicely next week when the students arrived.
“Greg!” I heard a voice call from halfway across the library. I looked around at the tables in the middle of the library where everyone sat, and I spotted Josh McGraw waving at me.
“Hi!” I said, sitting at an empty seat next to Josh.
“What’s up, buddy?”
“You know. My first day. Just trying to figure all this out.”
“We’ve all been there. You’ll do fine. And technically it’s my first day too.”
The principal of Nueces High School, Martin Garrett, welcomed everyone back, then went around the room to introduce the new teachers and the student teachers. Ron Pinkerton, one of the other student teachers from Jeromeville, was sitting on the other side of Josh and me and noticed me clapping loudly when Mr. Garrett introduced Josh. “You two know each other?” Ron whispered to me.
“He was my roommate last year and the year before,” I replied. “He did the science education program at UJ last year and got hired here.”
“Oh, wow! You both just happened to end up at Nueces High?”
“Yeah!”
Most of that first day was kind of boring. Mr. Garrett discussed a lot of things which did not all pertain to me as a student teacher. He led the student teachers on a tour of the campus. Ron, Ryan, and I met with all of the math teachers. I would be in Basic Math B period 1 with Ms. Kate Matthews and Geometry period 3 with Mrs. Judy Tracy. The math education program at Jeromeville typically placed student teachers in one grade-level class and one class of students below grade level, so that student teachers would experience a wide range of ability levels. This was also why student teachers from UJ commuted to Nueces and other nearby cities: Jeromeville was a university town, and many of its students came from much more educated families, atypical of public schools in the rest of the state.
The three of us from UJ were excused from the teacher work day two hours early, because we had a class every Monday back in Jeromeville, Education 306, a seminar with Dr. Van Zandt, the supervisor of our program. The UJ academic year had not started yet, but this class followed the schedule of the schools where we did our student teaching.
The next day, I drove back to Nueces for more meetings at the school. After hearing presentations about areas of improvement for the upcoming year, and long-term plans to incorporate more technology into teaching, I went to go find the teachers I would be working with, so I could talk to them in more detail. I wanted to ask Kate Matthews about Basic Math B, since I was not entirely sure what the class was.
“The thing you have to remember,” she explained to me, “is that most of these students are never going to take another math class in their lives. This class doesn’t count toward college application requirements, it’s just enough math credits to graduate from high school.”
“What exactly is it that they’ll be learning?”
“We pretty much just go through the textbook. It’s a survey of math topics, but taught in a way to make it accessible for students who haven’t had algebra or geometry.”
“I see,” I said, flipping through Kate’s copy of the textbook. “Will I get my own copy of the textbook? Do I need it yet?”
“You will. The librarian is really busy right now, but check later this week.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Usually how it works, I’ll tell the students on the first day that you’ll be helping out in our class this year. Then gradually over the next few months, I’ll be turning the class over to you.”
“Are we avoiding the word ‘student teacher?’ Do we not want them to know that I’m brand new to teaching?”
“It doesn’t really matter. They’ll figure it out. Some of them have had student teachers before. You’ve probably been trained on how to use CRM?”
“I’ve heard the basics,” I explained. “I have a training for CRM tomorrow and Thursday.”
“We don’t use CRM for Basic B, obviously, so I don’t usually use those techniques in Basic B. My teaching style is much more straightforward. We go over the homework, then students take notes on the new material, then they try some problems, and whatever they don’t finish is homework.”
“Makes sense.”
“You’ll be in another class this year, right? A class that does use CRM?”
“Yes. Geometry with Judy Tracy.”
“Judy doesn’t use all of the CRM techniques. If your program is pushing you to use CRM techniques, is that going to be a problem?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I’ll have to ask my professor about that.”
“No big deal. Just something to keep in mind.”
Two years earlier, when my brother Mark began high school, my mother told me that the school was using a new math book, from a series called College Ready Mathematics, and that one of the authors of the CRM textbooks was Dr. George Samuels from the University of Jeromeville. I took a class from Dr. Samuels later that year, and it was he who first put the serious idea in my head to consider teaching as a career. My brother did not have a good experience with CRM, though; during phone calls with Mom that year, she often jokingly told me to tell my professor that his math book was terrible.
The CRM textbooks were popular in this region, not only because of their local origins, but also because they were paperbacks with no color photos inside, making them considerably less expensive than traditional hardcover textbooks. The curriculum also satisfied many of the buzzwords that were trendy in education at the time, being based around group work, manipulatives, and student-centered discovery-based learning. Last year, as part of my orientation to the mathematics education program, I heard Dr. Samuels give a presentation on CRM. Hearing the program presented from the perspective of an insider, these nontraditional methods made sense. But for such a program to succeed, students, teachers, and parents would all have to buy in, and there was much that could theoretically go wrong. I wondered what had gone wrong in Mark’s experience with CRM. I also wondered exactly which CRM techniques Judy was not using, as Kate said.
Kate’s classroom, Room 129, was a portable classroom. There were two main classroom buildings, a large one in the middle of campus with one- and two-digit room numbers, and a smaller one west of that with three-digit room numbers. The portables were even farther to the west, with higher three-digit numbers. The athletic facilities were east of the main building. I had two more classrooms to stop by that afternoon. The first one, Room 108 in the smaller classroom building, had nothing to do with my student teaching assignment. This smaller building, like the larger building, had outdoor walkways instead of proper hallways, with a row of high windows allowing natural light into the classrooms while blocking students walking by from view of the students inside the room. I would learn much later that there once was an elementary school located right next to Nueces High, and that when the high school expanded, the school district closed the elementary school and sent its students to other schools. The high school then absorbed the elementary school campus, and this building was originally the main classroom building of that now-defunct elementary school.
I opened the door to Room 108. Josh McGraw was inside, unpacking boxes and putting posters up on the wall. “Hey!” he said when he saw me. “What’s up?”
“I just wanted to see your classroom.”
“Here it is,” Josh said, extending his arm. A table was full of an assortment of rulers and balance scales. A microscope sat on a cabinet in the back. When I arrived, Josh had been putting up a poster with pictures of the planets of the Solar System. There were still considered to be nine in those days, including Pluto; it was not until 2006 that Pluto was reclassified into a new category of objects, along with Ceres, at the time considered an asteroid, and other objects not yet known in 1998. The back of the classroom did have actual windows; they looked out onto a narrow space between this row of classrooms and the adjoining row, a space that appeared to be used only by school maintenance professionals, and possibly trespassing students doing things they were not supposed to.
“What classes will you be teaching?” I asked.
“Two periods of general science, two of biology, and one of AP Physics.”
“Wow,” I said. “Giving the AP class to a brand new teacher. I’ve heard that’s rare.”
“It is. I guess no one else wanted it, and since my degree is actually in physics, it just made sense. Did you take the Physics 9 classes at Jeromeville? Did you use this textbook?” Josh gestured toward a stack of around twenty large and familiar physics textbooks on a shelf.
“Yeah,” I said. “I have that book at home.”
“Would you be willing to sell it to us? We’re a few short this year, and we won’t be able to get more for a few months. I said that there’s a class at Jeromeville that uses that book, so I can ask my friends if anyone has the book and is willing to sell it.”
“Sure.”
“Great! I’ll tell our department chair. Just bring it by later this week.”
“Sounds good!” I said. “I’ll let you get back to setting up. I need to go find Judy and talk about math stuff.”
“Is she your master teacher?”
“Yeah. One class with her and one with Kate Matthews. I’ve already talked to Kate.”
“Nice. I’ll see you around then.”
I walked back toward the larger building, looking for room 37. The larger building was very similar architecturally to the smaller one. I knocked on the door and heard a voice from inside say, “Come in!” When I opened the door and stuck my head inside, Judy smiled and said, “You’re my student teacher, right?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Greg Dennison.”
“Come on in! Did you have any questions for me?”
“First, I just wanted to make sure I could find the classroom. I did.” I looked around the room. On the wall facing the outdoor walkway was a chalkboard, the old-fashioned kind that used actual chalk, as opposed to the dry-erase board in Kate’s room. Above the chalkboard was a projector screen; not the pull-down kind, but a flat screen that made an angle up from the board so as not to cover any of the board as a pull-down projector screen would. This room looked pretty old, but it would be adequate.
“Have you had the training for CRM yet?” Judy asked. I could tell quickly that Judy was not originally from this state; she spoke with a noticeable Southern accent. I never did learn the story of when and why she moved out west. Judy was definitely older than Kate, probably in her fifties.
“Tomorrow and Thursday,” I said. “But I know a little bit about it just because of its connection to Jeromeville. I heard Dr. Samuels give a presentation on it.”
“Did you ever take a class from George Samuels?”
“Yes, I did. He was actually one of the ones who suggested that I go into teaching.”
“How nice!”
“Kate told me that you don’t follow all of CRM’s recommended techniques.”
“I don’t know if I’d put it that way, but I see why she would say that,” Judy explained. “I don’t have them sitting in groups, and I don’t do a lot of manipulatives. We don’t have a lot of the recommended manipulatives at this school; we’re working on that. But I do give them opportunities to discuss their work with neighbors.”
“I see.”
“You’ll end up finding something that works well for you. Every teacher is different.”
“That makes sense.”
“You’ll just be watching me for the first couple months, and walking around to help students when they need it. And you can start taking over the class as soon as you’re ready.”
“Sounds good.”
“So, tell me about yourself! Are you married? Do you have any kids?”
I paused, not expecting this question. “No,” I said. “I just graduated from UJ in June. I turned twenty-two a week ago.”
“Really! I would have guessed you were a few years older than that.”
“People have always assumed I was older than I really am. As a kid, I thought it was because I was tall, but that doesn’t make sense as an adult.”
“That could be it,” Judy said. “I was married when I was young and dumb, and that didn’t work out. I just got remarried a year ago.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Are you from this area?” she asked.
“I just moved to Jeromeville for school. I grew up in Plumdale, near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”
“I love Santa Lucia! It’s so nice there!”
“It is, but I knew I needed to get away and get on my own. And Jeromeville offered me a scholarship for my grades.”
“Good for you!”
By the end of that week, I felt much more ready for this new challenge of student teaching. My two days of training for College Ready Mathematics gave me a much clearer understanding of how the program was expected to work. I learned about classroom manipulatives like algebra tiles, geoboards, and creative uses of tracing paper to teach concepts like symmetry. I also got my own copy of the CRM Geometry teachers’ edition, so I could start looking over what my students would be learning.
I quickly came to realize that the teaching methods for CRM were not the kind of teaching that came naturally to me. I did not like working in groups as a student; the rest of the group would never concentrate on what they were supposed to do, and many of them did not know what to do in the first place. I did not like the idea of forcing students to work in groups, or of teaching them how to work in groups. I wanted to teach them math, not interpersonal skills that I myself did not possess. It seemed like this kind of curriculum assumed fully engaged students, and unlimited resources with which to purchase classroom manipulatives and make copies. For a curriculum developed by people who lived in Jeromeville, with its educated upper-middle-class families, these were reasonable assumptions, but they seemed much less reasonable in a working-class community like Nueces.
Hopefully, as Judy said, I would find a way to make the curriculum my own. And I would not need to do this overnight. I would spend the first couple months observing, gradually increasing my responsibilities in the classroom. I would have plenty of time to figure things out. It all seemed overwhelming right now, but I felt an excitement building that I did not usually feel at the start of a school year. I still needed more work-appropriate clothes, I did not want to be inappropriately underdressed when I met the students, but I had a shopping trip planned this weekend. I finally felt like real life beyond school had arrived. And, just like Steven Tyler’s voice kept saying on the radio over and over again, I did not want to miss a thing.
Readers: Have you ever had a commute to work or school? What was it like? Tell me about it, or about anything else, in the comments!
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