The Teaching Task: Elementary School

Rather than detail the long list of responsibilities of an elementary school teacher, I offer two stories.

I was very fortunate to have Alice Foley as my teacher in fourth grade and then again in tenth grade to which she had transferred to teach high school English. She went on to become a school administrator and held some important state offices. When I returned to teach in the school from which I had graduated – Brighton High School in a Rochester, New York suburb – I met her once again, then as a colleague. No longer my teacher, she was now my boss. Despite all those interactions with her, I recall little about Miss Foley. I would not even be able to identify her in a photo and I recall nothing about her classroom instruction. But I do remember one episode. It took place at a party that I believe celebrated one of her many achievements.

We were briefly paired off in conversation and I took advantage of that time together to say, "You know, Alice, you are the one teacher I know who has taught both elementary and secondary school classes. Which do you consider harder?" As a secondary school teacher I was confident what her answer would be, but I was fooled. She quickly replied, "That's easy. There is no comparison. Elementary school teaching is much harder work."

Needless to say, I was taken aback by her response and at the time I wondered if she was just teasing me. I was even irritated by this answer. That was so long ago – before union times – and elementary school teachers were paid less than secondary school teachers. And I had found that quite acceptable. It was not until many years later when I served as a school system supervisor that I came to understand Miss Foley's evaluation.

Now skip ahead eight years. I am that K-14 math coordinator in Norwalk, Connecticut and I am asked to organize a program for the school board about our mathematics teaching. I decide that the best way to do that will be to involve some of our classroom teachers. It is easy to pick senior high school and junior high school teachers, but I want to include elementary school teachers as well. The system reading consultant suggests a third grade teacher and a kindergarten teacher. I contact them and ask to visit their classes.

The third grade teacher's math lesson is well organized and quite creative. She clearly knows her students individually and draws from them the concepts she seeks to share. I am impressed. But I am still more impressed with the kindergarten teacher. When I talked to her before visiting, she warned me that she was not one of those who saw kindergarten as what she called "the first step in the road to the SATs." When I ask her to explain what she means, she tells me that she feels that it is more important to provide children at this age with experiences that relate to their own lives rather than push first grade down one year.

And when I visit her classroom, she shows me what she meant. I am there to see math-related activities so she manages her two dozen children like a ring-master, involving them in what I consider perfect math for that age. She has the students pair off to march around the room then regroup by threes, she has them assign one, two and three to the individual members of each group and she then has the groups change, the ones, twos and threes going to different parts of the room. She has them match the snack items to the number of students in the room – no counting involved; instead, she asks questions like Do we have enough? Too few? Too many? And these kinds of activities continue for over an hour. Terms like add and subtract are never mentioned but activities related to addition and subtraction with physical objects build readiness for those ideas to be formalized later.

All I could think of when I finally left that classroom was that our schools would be better served if this kind of activity could be continued up through at least the primary grades. (I was reminded of the experiment carried out in some New Hampshire elementary schools in the early 1900s. No teaching of specific arithmetic concepts and skills was allowed until sixth grade but a year later the students were doing just as well as those in the standard program. For a description of this experiment, see Freedom to Learn.)

But most important, I came away from each of those classes exhausted from simply watching the performances of teachers and students. What I had seen in each of them was carefully planned activity. In both classes those activities changed every few minutes so there were many of them with an equal number of transitions, those points in any lesson where it is so easy to lose the attention or even control of a class.

Those experiences provided chapter and verse for Alice Foley's response. Of course many elementary school teachers would have difficulty teaching advanced high school topics, but I would be hard put to last ten minutes on my own in one of their classrooms.