Mary Weatherspoon is standing in the open space between two rows of three tables in her kindergarten/first grade classroom, putting the finishing touches on an animated reading - which included two boys acting out the star animal parts - of the storybook "The Fox and the Bear."
"How did these friends help each other?" she asks, glasses down on her nose.
Hands shoot up.
Next she walks around the room with a huge brown teddy bear named Coco cradled in her arms, stopping to ask each of her 22 students to make up a different ending to the story. Many answers involve the pair winding up at a Chunk E Cheese's restaurant to play games and eat ice cream and pizza together.
After handing out pieces of white paper, she asks the five- and six-year-olds to draw the fox and bear with their crayons. "I want to see how Mr. Fox and Mr. Bear look in your imagination," she says. Her tone is steady but never boring, nor condescending.
Walking over to a table, she says, "Oh, your fox has got a nose like Pinocchio." After a moment, she glances around the room and asks, "Why did Pinocchio's nose keep growing?"
"He lied!" comes back almost in unison.
"Maybe his fox is lying, too?" the teacher muses with a straight face.
Teacher of the month
Weatherspoon - recently named teacher of the month by the Los Angeles Lakers - has been teaching first-graders, and this year also kindergarteners, for 20 years in this very same classroom at Holy Name of Jesus School in the West Adams district of Los Angeles, some 10 blocks south of the Santa Monica Freeway. "The only thing new here are the tables and chairs that replaced the wood desks we got when the Shea Foundation renovated the school a couple of years ago," she tells a classroom visitor.
The 56-year-old Canton, Mississippi, native didn't start out to be a teacher. Her intention was to be a lawyer, but at the time few African Americans got accepted to law schools in the deep south. And being the baby of the family, her mother didn't want her to go to school far away. "So that kind of threw a little hitch in my plans for going to law school," she notes with just the hint of a what-could-have-been expression.
After her mother died, she followed an older brother to L.A. and was hired to teach first grade at Holy Name of Jesus in December 1988. Over the next two decades, year after year in the same bright, colorful classroom - painstakingly decorated with alphabets and numbers; eye-catching posters on classroom conduct, writing and national flags; plus maps and cut-out portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln - she's given boys and girls the bedrock skills they need to develop and succeed in upper grades and, eventually, life. Along the way, she's adjusted, adapted and developed with her students.
"I have seen the changes from the time that I've been here in the children and the way they listen and respond to teachers," Weatherspoon reports. "When I first started, I had 40 kids in the classroom, and it was not even as challenging as it is now with only 22. I've seen a big, big difference.
"Their attention span is much shorter; the focusing is much shorter," she explains. "So keeping them focused and paying attention is a challenge. You have to speak more and ask them to stop doing things more often now. Sometimes you have to interact. Sometimes you have to be a comedian. Sometimes you have to be a clown just to hold their attention.
"Whatever it takes," she adds with a knowing shake of her head. "Because I think with the technology and the video games, the standard traditional way of teaching doesn't work as well as it used to. One time I even cut out a box and I was on television to do the lesson, because that's what they're used to."
Surrounded by violence
Moreover, teaching in an inner-city elementary school like Holy Name of Jesus has its own going-the-extra-mile challenges, according to Weatherspoon.
"The children have different needs, and they're not exposed to a whole lot," she points out. "They're surrounded by so much going on in the community - the drugs, the violence. I think that's the big difference. And you have to be a little more compassionate and extra understanding with these kids 'cause you realize when they come to school, they come with their own set of baggage.
"When they come with these different attitudes and stuff, you have to try to talk to them and find out exactly what's going on without dealing too much into their personal lives: 'Why aren't you focused?' But you don't know if that kid has spent the whole night up at home or hasn't eaten."
The primary educator says this disordered interplay between an urban student's home life and his or her performance in school makes it doubly hard for today's teachers, even seasoned ones like herself. But she stresses that working in a Catholic school - with its close sense of community, quality academic instruction and, most of all, emphasis on faith and values - can often tip the scale in favor of a student's success.
"I think these children are just as capable as any other kids living anywhere," she says. "They just have to be given the opportunity. And they have to be pushed a little harder and encouraged a lot more to let them know that 'You can do it, and you have the ability to do it. The only thing you need to do is just put forth the effort.'
"I let them know, 'You can be anything that you want to be, but you can't do anything without God.' And I let them know that with God all things are possible. I make that a big part of my lessons. Because self-esteem is a problem with these kids. So you have to keep pushing. You have to keep pushing."
That's exactly what Mary Weatherspoon has been doing at Holy Name of Jesus School for two decades. One of the things that keeps her going is when students she's taught come back on their college breaks or days off work to say, "Thanks for starting me off right."
But right now she's just happy that most of the eighth-graders she taught have been accepted at local Catholic high schools, including two who earned full scholarships at Loyola High School and Notre Dame Academy.
"That makes me feel good because I was instrumental in getting them to do a good job all the way up," the parochial school teacher says. "That's the joy that I really relish. It makes me feel good. I feel like I was an influence - a good influence on them. And that's what I want to be. A good influence." "I know she's very good at teaching our class. What I like about her is she's nice, and how she helps others and puts things on the board that we did do."
- Fidelis Okereke, kindergarten
"Miss Weatherspoon told me she's been teaching here for 20 years. She just gets mad at us a little bit. She likes us."
- Shirley Cardenas, 1st grade
"She make us happy. She lets us color and write whatever we want to."
- David (DJ) Colefield, kindergarten |