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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Teaching Academy Students Get A Chance To Experience The Joys, Frustrations And Responsibilities Of The Teaching Profession

Kara Briggs Staff Writer

Matt Meithe knelt beside a second-grader who was trying to figure out some basic arithmetic.

The Rogers High School senior used blocks of wood to show the child that two and three add up to five. When the second- grader worked the problem himself, Meithe congratulated him. “Wow, you’re doing it,” he said.

The second-grader looked into Meithe’s face and smiled.

“Matt said, ‘Isn’t this great, Mrs. MacQuinn,”’ Rogers teacher Sandra MacQuinn recalled. “I said, ‘Yeah, this is great.”’

Meithe and 23 other Rogers juniors and seniors are taking an experimental new class called teaching academy.

The teaching academy is unique to Spokane area schools and is one of only a dozen such courses in the nation.

It gives students who think they might want to become teachers a true-to-life taste of the profession.

The Rogers students will get to work in classrooms in elementary schools, where they will spend an hour each day for a semester.

Students will be assigned to specific classrooms, where they will work as cadet teachers tutoring kids individually. By the end of the semester the Rogers students will, with MacQuinn’s help, write a lesson plan and teach a class.

“We’re wasting a lot of kids because they don’t know about the teaching profession before they get to college,” MacQuinn said. “They may or may not ever get there.”

Spokane School District 81 administrators began looking at the teaching academy model more than a year ago. Rogers staffers volunteered to participate in a one-year pilot program.

“We wanted to start identifying students at an early age and encourage them to go into teaching - especially students of color,” said O.J. Cotes, the district’s coordinator of staff support services. “We weren’t finding a lot of diversity in colleges as we looked for teachers. We wanted to try to support our own kids.”

Whether the students ultimately become teachers or not, Cotes said the teaching academy curriculum builds their ability to present themselves and organize their thoughts. Because of MacQuinn’s efforts, students are feeling a growing sense of self confidence.

The 24 teaching academy students - of all races - say they want to make positive changes in the ways schools work.

On first meeting the Rogers students, Jeannette Abi-Nader, an associate professor of education at Gonzaga University, wondered how prepared they would be to handle the tensions of today’s classrooms.

“My immediate reaction is these students are the creme de la creme. I asked them, ‘How are you going to relate to students who don’t like school, don’t like teachers and are alienated.’ Then I found out that’s where many of these students came from.”

Many teaching academy students have common threads of experience. Many say that, for them, school was not an easy place to exist and grow. Many say they have been discouraged by teachers.

But each remembers a special teacher who changed his or her life - and they imagine they will become that teacher for someone else.

“When I was in fourth grade the kids on my block were growing up to be stoners,” Meithe said. “But I had a teacher who pointed me toward athletics. He pulled me out of the gutter.”

Another student, Nicole Walters, said she knows from personal experience the signs of troubled kids.

“I come from a family where there was abuse, drugs and alcoholism,” the Rogers senior said. “So I’ll know when a kid walks into my classroom who feels like that.”

The stories are on the tips of the students’ tongues. MacQuinn had them take a journey of self discovery during the first semester.

They wrote 40-page autobiographies. They taught each other. And they discovered that different people have different methods of learning.

“The major thing they will need is not teaching tools, but a knowledge of themselves,” MacQuinn said. “They’ve got to be able to relate to love and horror in the lives of little people.”

A 23-year veteran English teacher, MacQuinn sees teaching as “a constantly changing kaleidoscope of kids needs.” The best teachers know how to change themselves to fill those needs, she said.

“It isn’t what you teach that stays with your students, it’s who you are,” MacQuinn tells her class.

Right now she is introducing her students to the most basic rigors of professional life. The students are finding the academy to be something of a boot camp for would-be teachers.

“In every other class I can be a student, a kid,” senior Shawna Martin said. “In this class I am an adult.”

Students must call MacQuinn before 8 a.m. any time they are going to be absent from school. Too many absences and they are forced to drop the class.

Students had to find quotes that describe what teaching is about and then teach their classmates a lesson about what it meant. Students used a box of crayons and skits to introduce preschool students to the colors of the rainbow. They researched the developmental stages of children in elementary school and presented their findings to each other.

“I push myself harder because of Mrs. MacQuinn,” senior Melissa Hansen said. “Even if I’m sick or dying, I come to this class because I know if I don’t I’ll miss out.”

The students will soon leave their Rogers classroom and spend one hour a day working with students at nearby Whitman and Cooper elementary schools. Classroom teachers in those schools volunteered to mentor the high school students who will serve in their rooms.

Already the Rogers students have been assigned to specific classrooms and have met the young students they will work with.

“Their best experience will be to be great kids with other kids,” MacQuinn said. “Not pretend student teachers.”

A visit last week to Whitman brought all the excitement and fears to the surface. Whitman home liaison Joan Pelkie met with the Rogers students and explained such procedures as signing in and out of the building, documenting what individual students are learning and keeping confidential student records - just as she would with new employees at the school.

Senior Brandi Patterson’s face was pinched with nervousness. Another senior, Andrew McGee, smiled and said he was excited to be given the responsibility of working in a school.

Pelkie gave Patterson, McGee and the other students a tour of Whitman. Stops included the teachers lounge. Inside the doorway, MacQuinn pointed to a sign that reads, “No students please.”

“That sign is telling,” she said to her class with a smile. “You’ve just crossed a line here.”