Content and Pedagogy Preparation, 2008

Kyle was appreciative of both his content and pedagogical preparation at GVSU.  He received ‘real world’ advice and scenarios through his coursework in the College of Education and historical content directly applicable to the courses he was now teaching in South Carolina. He was teaching Global Studies, a combination of World Geography and World History. The two basic political science courses he took were of some help, but he hoped that someday he would have an opportunity to teach a government or civics course, where he might be able to apply more of what he learned. Kyle also thought that perhaps a political science class was that more directed at the history of international relations, rather than a “nuts and bolts” approach to how global politics are arranged currently would be a good course to add to the teacher preparation program.  Kyle’s immediate concern in terms of international relations was the impact of deployments upon his students.  There were many military families in the area and the students in those families wanted to know why parents, siblings or other relatives were being sent to places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

That being said, I think that some professors, whether in the History Department or any department, while attending to the syllabus of record, tailor their syllabi to their own particular area of study and that changes the nature of the content and concepts presented.  I remember my basic Ancient Civilizations course while studying at Cortland State. It was supposed to be a general seminar that would review all types of history dealing with that time period, but since the professor’s background was philosophical history, that is what we studied. As with others I interviewed, Kyle could not remember the names of the professors who taught the courses and was able to name only one course where he knew he gleaned information which was directly applicable to what he was now teaching.

Strategies and Methods, 2008

Kyle cited the two different placements in the two semesters of his teaching preparation as being the most help in learning how to teach. Having experiences in both large and small schools, including at least one diverse placement, really helped him deal with the challenges he faced now. Kyle cited students’ broken homes, drug problems, and medical issues as just a few of the problems he had to deal with in helping his students learn. The most important thing he said he learned was asking for help.  Kyle had good mentors at his school.  In fact, one of them was the preceding year’s “Teacher of the Year.”

One area of weakness in Kyle’s preparation for his career was teaching special needs students. Kyle had many students who were reading well below grade level and he wished he had more strategies for improving his students’ abilities in that area.  He also said he wished he had more background on Individual Education Plans and 504 plans.^[5]. While many students in his school were not in a regular classroom for math or science, most all of the special needs students were mainstreamed into Social Studies classes. Kyle said that approximately 12% of his students were classified as “special needs.”  He did say that the school district had made great strides in the last few years in improving instruction for those students, but he was afraid, now that the school was closing, that all the gains might be lost as the students were shifted to other schools in the county. While Kyle’s first concern was finding better ways in helping these student populations learn, he was also concerned about being brought to task legally for not providing the best possible help for this segment of the school population.

Another area where Kyle wished he had more preparation was teaching ESL students. While not a direct problem in Calhoun Falls, he knew that other areas in the state and around the country had classrooms that were little “United Nations” and he was concerned that teachers might not be effective in teaching in a classroom with a wide range of languages and cultures.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2008

Kyle’s first pearl was for future teachers to steal everything they could get their hands on before they started their careers, and by steal he meant borrow from professors and classroom teachers during teacher-assisting and student teaching placements. He cautioned future teachers to have a plan for where they wished to teach before graduation. Kyle said no one wanted to graduate, have college loans to repay and no job. He suggested doing research about the school, community and people in the district. Kyle also said it might be a good idea to do something to set yourself apart from other teachers from the start, whether it was kissing a pig, like one of the teachers did in a Houston area school, or in Kyle’s case, shaving his head. The head-shaving came about as a promise to the football team at Calhoun Falls. If the team won a big game, then Kyle would shave his head and have “Blue Flashes,” the school’s mascot, shaved into the sides of his head. In a small community, like Calhoun Falls, Kyle was immediately known as “the guy who shaved his head,” and that was a good thing.

Both Kyle and his wife found ways of getting involved in the community.  Kyle coached football and baseball. His wife was elected president of the Parent Teacher Organization and started working at the elementary school. Kyle said that sometimes small communities are very tight-knit and community members think of new people as outsiders.  Someone new to a community needs to find ways in becoming an integral part of the community.

Kyle defined what he thought makes for a teacher invested in his/her career. Good teachers do not beat the school buses out of the parking lot when school is over. Good teachers stay after school, volunteering their time for after school programs. Teachers do not plan on getting rich for what they are doing and many new teachers struggle just to pay their bills.  Most coaches coach for less than minimum wage.  Kyle was driving a morning and afternoon bus route in order to make ends meet, but it was also a way to get to know some of the students in his classroom.

Kyle’s last bit of advice was aimed more at middle and high school teachers.  He was glad he had at least two or three class preparations a year.  The thought of teaching the same class all day long seemed exhausting, boring and terribly repetitive.  Variety during the day made the day go faster and it was much easier to remember what you taught from period to period versus wondering if you had already said something, asked the right question or correctly followed your lesson plan when you had different preparations during the day.

2015

The next time I visited Kyle in 2015 he was in his third school in the county.  He had moved from Calhoun Falls, which closed and then reopened as a charter school, to Dixie High School and now he was at Abbeville High School in Abbeville, South Carolina.  Luckily his home was located in the middle of all three schools so his commuting time had not changed all that much.

Kyle’s first block class was U.S. History.  He told me that due to the state test his classes were almost scripted in following the state teaching standards, and, indeed, he had the state standard for today’s lesson written up on his board. His classroom walls were lined with posters and maps. There was a small model of the Trojan Horse on a back bookshelf and a big GVSU banner on his door. Kyle told me the district was emphasizing the importance of a college education to the students and I saw many college banners in the hallways while walking down the halls from the office to Kyle’s classroom at the beginning of the day.

As I sat down at a desk in the back corner of his classroom for the day, I noticed a large piece of ventilation equipment on a desk near me.  Kyle explained that above the drop ceiling there was a huge amount of black mold and that this older section of the school needed to be bulldozed. I did not suffer any ill effects during the day, but I imagine that situation could not have been healthy for the students or the teachers. Kyle also told me that the plumbing had collapsed at his end of the building and so none of the water fountains in his end of the building worked.  It sounded like this older section of the building should have been condemned, but where would a district and community, in the throes of economic collapse, find the money for a bond issue in order to replace this section of the building?

Kyle was serving as department chair at this time. The regular chair was fighting cancer, and true to Kyle’s nature he volunteered to take over that teacher’s duties. Typically, he explained this added duty as something someone just did for the support of the teacher involved and for the good of the school. Kyle did not act like this added responsibility was a burden.

Kyle was working on doing cross-curricular work with other subjects. He started investigating this type of coordinated curriculum while he was teaching at Calhoun Falls, just before that school closed and then reopened as a charter school. He did not say whether the other teachers in his building were interested in helping him with this endeavor, but knowing Kyle, that did not prevent him from investing time and effort into this work.

As the lesson for the day began Kyle started asking questions about the content the class was studying, as well as the significance of the information.  He made constant comparisons between the financial situation in the 1920s and what was going on in the United States in 2015, especially in terms of consumer debt. The students were engaged in the discussion, as the information applied to their own lives. Kyle made sure to make connections to the local economy and how the information he was presenting directly applied to his students’ life experiences. The students were taking notes on Kyle’s lecture and he explained to me that he collected the notebooks from time to time, holding the students responsible for taking complete notes. Kyle took time in explaining the graphs presented on his slides and the importance of understanding graphs due to their appearance on the state test.  He said the district made a concerted effort in improving Social Studies scores and now the school was above the state average in that content area. Kyle continually used questions in checking his students’ background knowledge to discern if they were making the correct connections to the material he was presenting. He reinforced the idea that the students needed to apply what they were learning to their own lives.

Kyle told me that he was now certified as a “teacher evaluator.” He had the coursework and the training in order to evaluate his colleagues.  This certification was generated by the state of South Carolina^[6].

Economically, the situation had not changed in his county since 2008. The area was still financially depressed. The unemployment rate was in the double digits and the population was decreasing.  People were afraid of change, even though the old textile mills had been closed for a while and of the idea that outside investment, even if that investment might mean improving life, was frightening to the people. The “Good Old Boy” network and “let’s keep things like they have always been,” even if it meant a frozen or decreasing financial situation, was the rule. Kyle’s wife told me over supper at their house that her elementary school in Calhoun Falls had a 99% “free and reduced lunch” student population.