In a comment responding to the entry before this, Paula asked where I learned how to teach the way I did.

Paula, I don’t know. it just was there. It seems I had a talent for uniting with the children. I certainly had joy. In a way, teaching was somewhat like the process of Godwriting™, where you set an intention, and inspiration comes. Of course, I knew nothing about Godwriting when I was teaching school.

As a student, I tended to be creative. I remember when I was in seventh grade, we were given some ordinary dull punctuation homework assignment. I went home, got out a newspaper and some old magazines and scissors and cut and pasted to my heart’s content and made an illustrated punctuation notebook with a front and back cover in color. In terms of things like that, I knew how to have a good time. It’s not surprising that this expressiveness would carry over to teaching. I think the key was to enjoy. God in Heavenletters certainly tells us that a lot.

When I was in high school, the counselor said I should be a kindergarten teacher. I don’t know how the counselor knew this. She sent me to observe a kindergarten, and I must have liked it. So, when I went to college, I had every intention of majoring in elementary education, but my love affair with literature intervened, and I became an English teacher. In many ways, I was an elementary school teacher who taught in junior high school.

I don’t think the way I spent time with 30 children in a class can be taught. It can be encouraged. I am quite sure it can’t be learned from a textbook. And, of course, I don’t exactly know where I got it from.

Interestingly, I didn’t really have practice teaching. The school I was sent to practice-teach in assigned me to the very teacher that the college supervisor of practice teaching, Miss Durgin, had specifically said no one was to be assigned to. That teacher was a Mr. Brown whose name I’ve blocked out from my mind. The last straw was when we were reading Shakespeare, and I asked the class who would like to read the part of Julius Caesar etc. and the teacher, whose classroom it was, couldn’t restrain himself and interrupted me in front of the class saying sneeringly: “You don’t ask the students what they want. You tell ‘em.”

After that, Miss Durgin didn’t make me go back. Instead of giving me an incomplete and requiring me to start over the next semester, Miss Durgin gave me an A- for practice-teaching and made me promise to never tell anyone, and I haven’t until this day.

No matter how much instruction someone might have had, your first year of teaching is your first year of teaching, and you have to learn as you go along.

I was lucky my first year, I was in a small school system in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. There were about 500 children in Birchland Park Junior High and one principal, Mr. Laughton. There was no assistant principal. There were no curriculum supervisors. I don’t even remember that there were counselors. What this meant was that Mr. Laughton didn’t have time to interfere, and the teachers were on their own which, for me, was a gift. Later, for instance, when I taught in San Francisco, there were more supervisors than there were teachers, and they didn’t leave you alone, and I don’t do well with people telling me what to do.

In some ways, my first year of teaching was my best, though there were ways in which every year of teaching was the best.

I’m sure you realize that it is much more than teaching methods that make a teacher. It is a view of the world.

As for influences, in college, at the time anyway, John Dewey was big. He was the one who said, “Learn by doing.”

There were other educators and writers that influenced me, though I came across them when I had already been teaching for a while. One was A.S. Neill. Did you ever read Summerhill School? His school gave the children lots of freedom. Neill said, “Love is being on the side of the other person.”

I also loved Teacher by Sylvia Ashton Warner. She was a teacher of my own heart who worked with the Maori children. She wrote, “The truth is that I am enslaved . . . in one vast love affair with 70 children.”

But, of course, I think it was who they were (their Being) that made them great teachers.

After I had taught school for about three years, I studied to become a Waldorf School teacher in Sacramento, California. It’s a most wonderful way of teaching, child-centered and creative. Dr. Von Baronvela, the instructor, wrote in his evaluation that I was “born to it.” It’s true.

However, I never taught in a Waldorf School, more fool me. There were two openings in the Sacramento Waldorf School at the time, one for a sixth grade teacher and one for a kindergarten teacher. I wanted the kindergarten position and the kindergarten position ONLY. In those days I made a fuss when I didn’t get my way. They wouldn’t give me the kindergarten job (probably because I was so adamant) and I wouldn’t accept the sixth grade. And that was that. Of course, I’ve often wondered how the rest of my life would have turned out if I had not been such a dodo.

Of course, that was only one of many crossroads where I went one way instead of another. I wonder, how many crossroads do we come to in a lifetime?