Chapter 3

Marva moved up and down the rows of desks. "I could just cry that you have no sounds," she said, "for sounds make up words, and words are thoughts. Ideas. And the thoughts and ideas in your heads make up what you are.

"Well, you will have the sounds. You will never have to guess at them. Sounds are like keys, opening the door to words. If you don't have the right key, you can't open the door to your house, can you? If you don't have the right sounds, you can't pronounce a word."

Marva twirled around to the board and wrote The catamaran sailed around the ait. "What dose the mean?" she asked. The class looked lost. "All right, let's see what we have. Let's syllabicate catamaran. The first vowel sound is a short a, as in cat. The next two vowel sounds are uh, which we mark with this sign, called a German schwa. It looks like an upside-down e, but I don't ever want to hear any of you calling it an upside-down e sound. It is called a German schwa. All right, the last a also has a short vowel sound, ran. Catamaran. A catamaran is a kind of sailboat.

"The catamaran sailed around the ait. The vowels a and i make one sound, the sound of a long a. The rule is: when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking; it says its name. Ait. An ait is a small island in the middle of river or lake.

"So now you know that the sailboat sailed around the small island. See how you were lost in words? That will never happen to you again. You will learn all the rules so that words will no longer be a mystery you will be able to talk to anyone, no matter how smart, no matter how rich, no matter how pretty. You are all clever bright children, and there's nothing you can't do."

I learned to read before I was old enough to go to school. My grandmother used to read aloud to me from her Bible, sounding out words by syllables. She had learned to read and spell by syllables when she was in school. By listening to her and imitating what she said, I learned the letter sounds and how to blend them together to read printed words. Once I discovered how to sound out words, I tried reading everything I could get my hands on: labels on cans and boxes, the farmers almanac, newspapers, books of fairy tales and fables, and especially Grandma Annie Knight's huge black-leather Bible. My favorite was the story about Joseph and his brothers. I read it over and over until my grandmother - "Mama-Dear," as I called her - would shake her head and say, "Baby, you read so much I'm afraid you're gonna lose your mind." The old people in the South had a superstition that a child who was to studious - prissy was their words for it - was headed for trouble.

My introduction to literature began with the Bible stories I heard from my grandmother. Mama-Dear read her Bible every day. Down South everyone was religious. I grew up during the time of the big revival meetings when going to church was serious business. If you didn't go, you were an outcast. But Mama-Dear was the most pious, prayerful person I ever saw. Every morning and every night she got down on her knees beside her high, four-poster bed and said her prayers. When Mama-Dear wasn't praying or reading her Bible, she was walking around the house singing "Precious Lord Take My hand" and "What A Friend We have in Jesus." She was forever reciting proverbs. Time and tide wait for no man. Good that comes too late is good for nothing. "Baby," she would say to me, "a good name will go farther than you will." I got so tired of hearing those proverbs when I was a child. Now I use them all the time. Sometimes they are the best way of saying what needs to be said. I teach them to my students. I have a collection of proverbs for class discussions and writing assignments.

I spent a lot of time with Mama-Dear and Grandpa Daddy Henry. Some nights the three of us sat in front of the fireplace as the flames cast shadows that danced on the walls. The scent of burning pinecones floated lightly through the living room while Mama-Dear recited poems like "Hiawatha" or "Paul Revers's Ride." She had memorized them as a schoolgirl and was still proud of knowing them by heart.

I was smitten with poetry and literature. But there were no libraries for black children in Alabama. The only books I could get were the ones I bought, borrowed, or received as gifts. When my parents took me visiting to someone's house, I would disappear, rummaging through cabinets and shelves in search of books. A book was a treasure, and I lost myself in every one I found - a basic reader brought home from school, a True Confessions magazine, or even a dictionary. I read Nancy Drew mysteries, gothic romances, Richard Wright's Black boy and Native Son, and Booker T. Washington, Who I thought was the second greatest man next to my father. And I loved Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre, though my mother didn't approve of my reading such books. I bought half a dozen copies of God's Little Acre with money I earned helping in the store. I hid them in different places as insurance. Every time my mother found the book and threw it away, I would take out another copy and continue reading.

It was Aunt Ruby Jones, my mother's sister, who introduced me to William Shakespeare. Aunt Ruby had gone back to high school after marrying and having two children. When I was at her house playing with my cousins, I would see her studying and reading from her schoolbooks. One night I overheard Aunt Ruby talking to Uncle Robert about someone named Lady Macbeth. Then she opened an old gray book and began reading:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day....

I was only nine at the time, but I was enthralled by the lines. For days after that I walked around with "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" spinning in my head. The next visit to Aunt Ruby's, I asked if I could borrow that gray book. I read through Macbeth, and while I was not able to grasp its full meaning. I was fascinated by the action and the characters of the play. I thought it was such fun to say "Double, double, toil and trouble." My interest in Shakespeare wasn't encouraged until I reached high school. We never read Shakespeare in the lower grades. Most students still don't.

Along with the other black children in Monroeville I spent the primary grades at Bethlehem Academy, a clapboard building with unpainted walls and a woodburning stove in each room. There were two grades to a classroom. Books were in short supply, and most of our teachers had only a tenth grade education themselves.

Out of all the teachers at Bethlehem two left a strong impression. I got off to a bad start with my first teacher, a heavyset woman who often wore a blue dress patterned with red, green, and yellow alphabet letters. In the first week of school when we were learning Arabic numerals, I kept making the numeral 2 backwards. Each time I drew it wrong the teacher rapped my fingers with a ruler. I never understood why she kept hitting me. If I had known how to do it right, I would have. She acted as though I had made the mistake deliberately.

I never forgot that experience. It has influenced the teaching methods I use with my students. To me an error means a child needs help, not a reprimand or ridicule for doing it wrong. No child should ever be told "That's stupid" or "You can't do it" or "You don't know what you're doing." Adults should take a positive approach with children. The most important thing we can do as parents and teachers is build a child's self-confidence. Any child can learn if he or she has not already been taught too thoroughly that learning is impossible. Children need reassurance and encouragement. They have to be told that it is all right to make mistakes because mistakes are part of learning. I tell my students: "If you knew everything there is to know, then you wouldn't have to be in school."

Praise is essential in developing the right attitude toward learning and toward school. We all know this in theory. In practice we often forget the importance of praise in dealing with children. We forget how sensitive children can be and how fragile their egos are. It is painful for a child to be told "This is wrong." Rather than punishing, teachers and parents should encourage continued effort: "This is good. It's wonderful try, but it is not quite right. Let's try correcting this together."

I praise every child's effort. I put every child's paper up on the wall or the bulletin board, not just the perfect ones. And I never put a failing grade or red marks all over a paper. That is a sure way to turn a child off of learning. Put yourself in the place of a child who is handed back a paper with a low grade while the other child have received high marks. Imagine how that child feels when everyone asks each other, as children always do, "What did you get on your paper?" That child wants to crumple the paper and throw it away. That child wants to get away from school. I write "very good" or "wonderful work" or make a smiling face on every paper. Then I handle errors by working individually with each child. We correct errors on a separate piece of paper, on an individual work sheet, or at the blackboard. I learned the value of blackboard practice from my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. McGants.

Mrs. McGants was a patient, good teacher. She had her students work at the blackboard so she could correct mistakes as quickly as they were made. Children need immediate feedback, especially in math and language where they need to master one skill before they can go on to the next. I do not wait days before returning papers. Errors will mean nothing to a child several days later when the class has moved on to something new. Delay in correcting errors only makes the child fall behind.

I find that children often understand a concept better when you take them to the blackboard rather than trying to show them at their seat. This practice helps the rest of the class at the same time, especially the shy child who will never come out and say that he or she does not understand. I draw a large part of my curriculum from these errors, not from the teaching guides. One child's errors become a lesson for the whole class. If one child is having trouble with something, it is likely that others are also, and all can benefit from a review.

My teaching methods evolved, in part, from my own experience as a student. My first grade teacher was a model for what not to do. My fourth grade teacher showed me what to do. Miss Rolle, my tenth grade teacher at Escambia County Training School, was my favorite. She was probably not as beautiful as I then thought, but the way she walked and moved make her seem very sophisticated. I wanted to be just like her. Though Miss Rolle was from Alabama, she did not have a thick southern accent. I was so impressed by how articulate she was and how she enunciate her words that I practiced imitating her. I studied vocabulary from the dictionary all the time. Townsfolk used to tell my father, "The way that girl puts words together is like something out of the pages of a book." The white salesmen who came from Mobile to take purchasing orders for cans of beans and boxes of chickens would come into my dad's grocery store and ask, "Henry, where's your girl? I sure do like listening to the way she talks."

I suppose it is because of Miss Rolle that I stress proper speech and pronunciation with my own students. I try to get them in the habit of using correct grammar when they speak, and I have them read aloud every day so I can check pronunciation as comprehension. Having children read silently in class only allows their mistakes to go unnoticed. I have heard children read capa-city for capacity, denny instead of deny, or doze instead of does, treating the final s as though it pluralized the word doe. Children frequently reverse letters when they read. For example, they confuse sacred and scared, diary and dairy, angel and angle. If children read silently, they continue to make those mistakes.

Another reason for reading aloud is to build vocabulary. A child reading silently skips over big words he doesn't know. When I am there listening to a child read, I can interrupt to ask the meaning. The whole class benefits as we can look up the definition, the base word within the larger word, and the part of speech. I also have my students read aloud for tone, inflection and punctuation. Reading aloud helps a child realize the difference between a comma, a period, a question mark, and an exclamation point. Children who are just learning to read tend to read individual words, not groups of words or phrases. That limits comprehension. I encourage my students to become idea readers, not word readers. By reading aloud children learn to understand words withing the context of a sentence, and they see how words connect with each other to express an idea. This practice promotes not only good reading but good writing.

My students read everything orally - literature, science, social studies, and history. I even have them read their compositions aloud every day. It makes children more conscious of sentence structure, allows them to proofread for punctuation errors and word omissions, and helps them develop a certain presence and authority in front of an audience. Miss Rolle used to make us stand and read out papers to the class.

Except for Miss Rolle's and Mrs McGants' classes, my schooling was typical of the separate and unequal education black children received in Alabama during the forties and fifties. Yet I found my own way around the inequities.

At Escambla County Training School - all high schools for black students were called training schools - girls did not graduate without taking home economics. I suppose it was the whitefolks way of saying all black women would never be anything more than homemakers or domestics. I refused to take it and sighed up for a typing course instead. Shortly before graduation the principal called me into his office to say that unless I took the required course, I would not receive my diploma. I told him that I already knew enough about housekeeping. I didn't know what I was going to do when I went out into the world, but typing was going to be of more help than home economics, I never knew what made the principal change his mind. I was the only female student who ever graduated from Escambia County Training School without taking home economics.

From the day I became aware of what college was, I make up my mind I was going. My parents never stressed college degrees, not having had a high school education themselves, but they stressed learning.

I chose Clark College in Atlanta, an exclusive, all-black liberal arts school for girls. My father had no objection. He was proud of my being the first one in the family to go to college, and he believed it was his duty as a parent to make sure his child had the best. From the way the neighbors carried on, my father might have committed a cardinal sin. "What are you sending that girl to college for?" they asked him. "You'll never get your money back, 'cause that girl's never gonna do a thing for you."

Everything at Clark was very southern and very proper with a certain finishing-school mentality. How a student dressed was just as important as what she learned. My house-mother made certain I wore hats and white gloves, and she once sent me back to my room to change because I had made the "mistake" of wearing suede shoes with a leather jacket. To this day I very conscious of clothes and appearance.

I don't believe I learned very much at college. It was my own fault. I went to college not really knowing what I wanted to do. At the last minute I decided to major in secretarial science. It seemed the practical thing to do. With a business sense picked up from my father and a knowledge of typing and book-keeping. I expected to get an office job upon graduating from Clark. I also took some education courses because they interested me, though I had no intention of becoming a teacher.

In June of 1957 I returned to Alabama with my degree and discovered that the only office positions available to blacks were civil service jobs. None of the private companies wanted to hire a black secretary. I filled out a civil service application. I turned down the one available job because it was in Montgomery and I wasn't ready to leave home again. Still, finding some kind of job was a matter of pride. After the way people had chided my father about paying my way to Clark, I was not about to let that degree collect dust.

I finally found a job teaching typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and business law at Monroe County Training School, and considered myself fortunate. In those days teaching jobs were hard to come by in Alabama. Teachers seemed to live and die in their jobs. More than a proper occupation for a woman, teaching was one of the only occupations at the time for an educated black woman. For all my attempts to be different, I finally had to settle for that. I had to accommodate myself to the realities of life in Alabama.

Some things are meant to be.

From the very first day, I felt comfortable teaching. With some experience conducting Sunday school classes at church. I was used to standing up and speaking before a group. I liked being around people, working with them and helping them understand things. I had always been fascinated with learning, with the process of discovering something new, and it was exciting to share in the discoveries made by my tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade students at Monroe County Training School.

I didn't know anything about educational theory, and I have often thought that worked in my favor. Without preconceived ideas and not bound by rules. I was forced to deal with my students as individuals, to talk to them, listen to them, find out their needs. I wasn't trying to see how they fit into any learning patterns or educational models.

I followed my instincts and taught according to what felt right. I bought my own experiences to the classroom, trying to figure out how I had learned as a student. I remembered what had bored me and what had interested me, which teachers I had liked and which ones I had disliked, and applied it all to my teaching.

Not having any formal theory or textbook methodology to follow made me receptive to new ideas. I was constantly learning along with my students, always looking for new ways to make a lesson more exciting. My colleagues were very helpful offering suggestions and sharing their methods. They all seemed to care so much about their students. I may have been naive or too idealistic, but at the time the whole teaching profession seemed inspiring.

The principal at Monroe really taught me how to teach. He was especially hard on new teachers. He sat in my classroom every day for two months observing, shaking or nodding his head and taking notes. After class he would sit me down and lecture me as though I were one of the children. He told me to go to the point of a lesson more directly. He would say, "Well, you lost the boy in the third seat of the last row." He trained me to watch the students' face, to see by their eyes if they understand. I learned that a good teacher knows the students, not just the subject.

After two years at Monroe I liked teaching but wasn't ready to commit myself. I was immature. Staying with my father on weekends and with my grandparents during the week, I was still too unsettled to dedicate myself fully to anything.

As a teacher I now try to teach children how to deal with life. More than reading, writing, and arithmetic, I want to give them a philosophy for living. But at twenty-one I was too sheltered and too protected to know how to deal with life myself. Though I earned a salary, my father continued to give me spending money - which I continued to accept - and he bought me expensive clothes, did everything for me. He even warmed up my car in the morning and filled the gas tank at the pump behind his store.

At some point my dependence on my father began to bother me. I felt constricted by small-town lift. After four years in Atlanta I found Monroeville too confining. It was time to grow up and be on my own.