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Chapter 4

In June 1959, at the close of the school year, I left for Chicago to visit my grandmother's cousin, Annie Townsend, for a two month vacation. I did not plan on getting a job, finding a husband, starting a family, and settling down in Garfield Park.

After a few days in Chicago, I got tired of being a tourist. On an impulse I read through the want ads in the newspaper and applied for a job as a medical secretary at Mount Sinai Hospital. I was hired. I didn't know anything about medicine, but I began teaching myself Latin to understand the medical terms. The job was so exciting I decided to stay in Chicago. I took an apartment in a large, U-shaped courtyard building on Hamlin Avenue, overlooking Garfield Park. It was a small apartment with a Murphy bed and a sunny kitchen. It seemed elegant to me, but the best part was that this place was truly my own. My first apartment was close to the hospital, close to Cousin Annie, and close to Clarence Collins.

Clarence lived with his parents next door to Cousin Annie. I was first attracted to him by his devotion to his family. He was one of eleven children, eight boys and three girls, a close-knit family. When I met Clarence, he was working as a draftsman for the Sunbeam Appliance Company, a job he would keep for close to twenty years. While he did not have a college education and was not as well-read as I, he was just as determined. He was also more level-headed. And he was kind and gentle. All the neighborhood children gathered around him, and several went with us to Riverview Amusement Park on our first date. I knew that any man who could be so patient with someone else's children was bound to be a good father and a good husband. Within a year we married.

I continued to work as a secretary, but soon I missed teaching. I missed the classroom. I missed the excitement of helping students discover the solution to a problem, of seeing the pieces fit together.

I went downtown to the Board of Education and filled out a teaching application. All I had to do was send for my college transcripts and my Alabama teaching credentials. Since I had taken methodology courses, I was not eligible to take the certification exam. It didn't matter because teachers in the Chicago school system didn't have to be certified. There was a teacher shortage at that time, so as long as you had a college degree, you could teach. If you weren't certified, you worked as a full-time-basis substitute which meant you were assigned to a school but had no seniority and were not guaranteed permanent placement. Years later the Chicago Teachers' Union pressured the school board to grant automatic certification to those who had been in the school system for three years.

I received a letter telling me to report to Calhoun South Elementary School no Jackson Boulevard, where I was given a second grade class. I didn't have any experience teaching such young children, but I assumed the principles were the same as in teaching older students. I had to motivate the children, create a desire for learning. I had to make them understand why it was important to learn. And I had to make them fell worthwhile and confident.

I drew on my own childhood memories, recalling the things that had made me feel happy, sad, excited, hurt, or afraid, the things that made me want to laugh or cry. And I tried to be sensitive to those feelings in my students. I found that hugging and touching and saying " I love you" immediately made them feel secure and comfortable in the classroom, establishing a bond between us and also among the children.

Children are quick to mimic adults. If a teacher ridicules or picks on child, chances are the children will pick on each other. And of course the reverse is true.

At first I followed the Board of Education curriculum. Soon I thought the work was way below the children's ability. They could learn much more. So I expanded the curriculum. If a lesson called for the children to locate all the triangles on a page and color them in with crayons, I would tell the children to put a green capital D above the second triangle and to color the fourth triangle red and the seventh on blue. Then I would have them write the words red and blue above those triangles. The children were learning not only to recognize shapes but to follow directions, to think, to count, to distinguish colors, and to write. The group activity also kept them more attentive than they would have been if I had left them alone to work quietly by themselves.

After a few weeks my students were bored with the required second grade reader. I couldn't blame them. There were no real stories in those books, nothing to occupy a child's mind stimulate thought. The pages were filled with pictures of boys and girls playing, and below the pictures were sentences like "Run, Pepper, run" and "See Pepper run." There was no reason for the children to bother reading the words. All they had to do was look at the pictures.

Never having taught second grade before, I didn't know very much about how to teach reading. I didn't know about the debate between advocates of the phonics method, in which children learn to decode vowel and consonant sounds in a word, and the look-say method, in which they identify words with pictures and build a "sight vocabulary" by reading sentences that use the same words over and over. It seemed to me that the natural thing to do was teach the children to sound out words. That was how I had learned to read, so that was what I taught my second graders. I disregarded the teaching guide, which followed the look-say method.

It seemed to me that the children would be more anxious to read if they were interested in what they were reading. I didn't have any expert studies to go by. It was just common sense. Why would a child want to put out the effort just to read "See Pepper run"? I stopped using the required reader and brought in books from the library and from bookstores. My children read from Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen, La Fontaine's Fables, and Leo Tolstoy's Fables and Fairy tales. I chose those stories because they teach values and morals and lessons about life. Fairy tales and fables allow children to put things in perspective -- greed, trouble, happiness, meanness, and joy. After reading those stories you have something to think over and discuss. More than anything, I wanted my students to be excited about reading. I wanted them to understand that reading is not an excercise in memorizing words but a way to bring ideas to light.

I had my students draw their own pictures to illustrate the stories. Sometimes we acted out the fable, or we made up our own ending. We even composed our own fables. I would start and then each child would add a sentence. I felt my way along, trying out new ideas and experimenting with different methods and lessons. And I loved it. I loved watching my student's faces when they discovered the solution to a math problem or recognized on their own the parrallel between two stories. There was an effervescent quality to their excitment.

I taught at Calhoun for a year, leaving when I became pregnant with our first son, Eric. I knew I would go back to teaching.

While I was at Calhoun, Clarence and I bought a gray-stone twn-flat at 3819 West Adams Street. It Was down the street from Delano Elementary School and just around the corner from my apartment on Hamlin Avenue.

Garfield Park was a nice, respectable neighborhood of mostly Jewish, Italian, and Irish families. We were one of the first black families to move in. Looking back, I suppose I should have realized how fast the neighborhood was changing. The bank on Madison Street closed down. Steel grates appeared across some of the storefronts at night, and there were "For Rent" signs in many of the shop windows. At the time I didn't know anything about changing neighborhoods. I had grown up in a town where people mostly stayed in the same place all their lives.

In 1962, a year after we moved into the house, Eric was born. Three years later we had a second son, Patrick, and in 1968 our daughter Cynthia came along. By that time Garfield Park had turned into another Chicago ghetto. Prostitutes and street gangs stakes out the area. There were razed lots boarded-up windows, and vacant buildings. The worst destruction took place in April 1968 during the riots that followed Martin Luther King's death. People went crazy. They ran through the streets breaking windows, looting, and setting building on fire. It was terrifying. We locked ourselves in the house for days. When the rioting was over, there wasn't much of anything left in Garfield Park. All the stores were closed down. Clarence had to walk nearly a mile to get a gallon of milk.

To be continued.