Back In California

by Donna Swagerty Shreve

John and I had a big decision to make at the end of his four year enlistment in the Coast Guard. Do we stay in Connecticut or return to California and have John finish his education? He had no choice but to enlist one semester short of a college graduation. To have a complete picture of our choices, John first checked into finishing his college education at University of Connecticut. Unfortunately UConn did not give credit for all of his former classes at the University of the Pacific. It would now take two additional years to receive his degree. University of the Pacific would only require one year for completion.

My family lived in California and John’s parents lived in Texas. Stockton would keep us closer to both. We were ready to start a family and decided it was best to raise a family near to relatives. So, off to Stockton we traveled. I flew ahead with our two cats and John followed later in our camper bus. Some friends of ours drove our VW bug across country with their infant daughter in tow. Fortunately for us the Coast Guard provided a professional moving company for our household goods.

I had two weeks to find a job and a rental house for the contents of the moving van. I contacted my parents’ friend who was a local realtor. She found me a rental home near the university. It was a 1200 square foot, two-bedroom, one-bathroom with a partial basement. It had been built in the 1920s and had charm if you are into a house built 50 years ago. We eventually bought the house and upgraded to central air and heat and modernized the kitchen.

Now I had to find a teaching job. Lincoln Unified District was eliminated because Lincoln had a policy against nepotism. My father was still working and was the district’s Assistant Superintendent. I tried Stockton Unified first. I was told by the head of personnel that I had a good resume and great recommendations but I was white. Stockton had pressure to hire minorities so I had to try somewhere else. I heard of an opening in Escalon and was interviewed there by the principal of Dent Elementary School. I had attended Dent as a student, kindergarten through third grade. I was offered the second grade position and I accepted it.

Escalon was a half-hour drive on a good day. There was many a scary drive through the fog. I ended up in the same classroom I had attended as a third grader. As I cleaned out the various cupboards, I found artifacts with my former third grade teacher’s name on them. I had, as one of my students, a child of a guy who used to babysit me. I had come full circle back to my beginnings of education.

The best way to describe the community of Escalon was like traveling going back into time. The long road from Stockton to Escalon served as a time tunnel back to the 1950s. I wore my hair very long at the time with a part down the middle. Someone even compared me to Cher, which I did not find amusing. I arranged the children’s desks in groups of four. The desks were the old universal model of desk and chair attached. There was a good possibility there was a desk in that classroom I had used all those years ago. Understand that grouping desks was not the usual at this school. Every other classroom had the traditional configuration of long rows of desks.

The next strange thing in my classroom was a large area rug at the rear of the classroom. On the rug were two truck inner tubes. The rule was no one could sit in the tire tubes unless they were reading. There were still second graders who needed a lot of help learning to read. I wanted to provide as many incentives as I could. I also had a dark room set up in my basement at home. I took many classroom pictures of the children doing something positive. I would then post the pictures with captions underneath. Several students were quite motivated to read those captions. If I noticed a child cleaning their desk, I took a picture to point out the good deed. A simple picture such as that would motivate a rash of desk cleaning.

Another activity on the back rug was group singing. I had a baritone uke and I had learned a variety of children’s songs. Singing provided a way to show them the written words to the songs and gather and enjoy another activity on the rug. Just before our lunch break, I would have them gather on the rug and we would recall our activities for that morning and the previous afternoon. This I wrote up during the lunch break and ran off a copy for each student. It was designed to give each student a daily newsletter from class complete with an illustration to go with the class summary for the day. This gave some struggling students the chance to listen carefully and give the illusion of reading better than they were yet able to. However, success can be a great motivator.

After lunch, the children gathered on the rug and I would read them a story. We also would gather there for songs and other group activities. This caused quite a stir among the faculty. What a hippie I was! During recess breaks, teachers would hurry to the faculty room for a potty break or another cup of coffee. Instead of going around, many walked right through my classroom to check out what new weird thing was going on in my room. If I did not have duty I turned on the classroom television and played  the PBS series that came on right after Sesame Street, The Electric Company. It came on the air in 1971 so it was not well known in 1972 when we watched it. My favorite character was a young Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader. I left it on after recess and everyone could catch the last 15 minutes.

Kay Sweet had been my master teacher for student teaching and she showed me many good techniques for teaching. I did not use a whistle, unlike every other teacher on the staff. When it was time to come in from recess, I would go to our class’s spot for line up on the playground and simply raise my hand. The children then lined up and after a quick count I brought them inside the room. There was many a time when other teachers were still blowing their whistles trying to coax stragglers. If a child was tardy, I dealt with it depending on the cause. No need to punish everyone. If the classroom was too noisy, I again raised my hand and waited. The atmosphere was so much calmer that way.

One of our projects that year was to make mini terrariums or bottle gardens. I needed enough wine bottles for the whole class. Several students were able to supply them but certainly not all. I had to ask neighbors and relatives, and not everyone was a fan of jug wine. We then went through the step-by-step instructions for properly setting up the planet bottle gardens with the appropriate plants and soil. Fortunately there was a long counter under the bank of windows alongside of the classroom. Students’ names were on the bottom of the jugs, so to a casual observer, I had quite a collection of wine bottles along side my seven year olds. It is important to point out that the principal at this time was an avid teetotaler. He even refused to cook with wine and was Italian at that. During this project, there seemed to be more of a parade of observers during recess.

To aid the incentive for learning to read, I created a series of puppet plays. Each student made a puppet head out of paper mache. The developing heads were left to dry on another set of bottles along that same counter. I was observed once by the principal that year and his big comment was that my room was messy because of the drying paper cache heads. Small groups of  children put on plays for each other and were able to take their wonderful puppets home. 

The atmosphere at our school was toxic due to an incompetent principal. The only students who ever made it into his office for discipline were from one of the few minorities attending the school. There was an intercom that he rarely used for announcements. It was the same system I had heard when I was a student. Just before an announcement was given, one could hear a click letting you know the system was activated. Therefore after school I could tell when he would listen in on any teacher-talk in my room. I am afraid I do not do well under such circumstances and was known to perform when I knew he was listening. 

I decided I wanted to meet the parents of each student. I set up after school teacher conferences but I was missing quite a few who did not come in. So I sent home a note that said if they did not come to me, I would go to them. A few more dribbled in but I had now committed to many home visits. On several occasions I took the student home with me in my car so they could not only give me directions but also be my translator. One student Luis was the son of a Portuguese dairy milker. The man milked 7 days a week but got Sunday morning off for church. When I arrived at his home, the entire family had gathered for the event. Fortunately I had good things to say about Luis who became embarrassed to translate. Using a lot of body language I was able to convey that they had a good son and student and that I cared. 

When I took Maria home I encountered an amazing family. Maria was in a family of seven that resided in a converted chicken coup. The bare bones structure was divided into two rooms. One was for all to sleep in and was a mass of beds. The other side had a donated refrigerator, wood stove, table with not enough chairs,  single sink with only cold water, and a single light bulb in each room. It had a wooden floor that was spotless as were all of the children. Maria entered school in the middle of first grade and only spoke English when she was at school. They had come up from Mexico and the father worked in the fields. By the end of her second grade year Maria was one of the class’s best readers. 

I solved my teaching placement by becoming pregnant and knowing I would not be able to return the next school school year. My first born was due in November. I hid my pregnancy almost up to the end of the school year. However, I pulled the “pregnancy card” when I was so tired of one of the teachers insisting on smoking his cigar in the lunch room as we tried to

eat lunch. I finally told him, so all could hear, that I was pregnant and his cigar nauseated me. If he did not stop smoking it among us, I would make sure that when I vomited, I would aim for him. He stopped and my secret was out. I officially resigned to the Superintendent and informed him that he had a real problem with his principal at Dent. I said I was taking the easy way out by becoming pregnant and leaving but something needed to be done. Looking back I am amazed at my gall.

1999 words

9/23/2020

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