Quality In The Classroom

Tammy Campbell is hunting for ideas. Fourth-graders’ ideas.

Her students are penciling out heartfelt letters to characters in a sad Civil War story. Campbell encourages eloquence, cheers a good start and refuses to fret about spelling. Not right now.

“Dear Moe Moe Bay,” writes Kristin Zanger. “I am sorry that you got shot. I want to ask you a question. What is it like in heaven?”

Some children clutch their pencils, groping for ideas.

“All that information — you’ve got to find a way to get it out of your head, down your arm, into your hand and onto your paper,” Campbell urges, shaking one arm in sympathy.

Be it expressing their thoughts or lining up at the door politely, Campbell is raising these sneaker-clad, brand new fourth-graders to get to know something that will shape their adult lives: quality. Her 25 students at Blake Elementary School hear many times in a day this loving message: “I want you to reach for your best.”

This is no platitude; this is the nitty-gritty of Campbell’s life. That her students come from a low-income neighborhood in the Spokane Valley, with all the accompanying social woes, matters not at all.

“I see them as possible me’s,” she says.

Now 32, Campbell grew up in Lake Providence, La., a small all-black town with all-black schools. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a married man with his own family.

“I came from a very precarious upbringing,” she says. “We had nothing.” Summers, Campbell worked in the fields, chopping cotton.

But Campbell’s life was rich in love, rich in teachers who praised her abilities.

“If you had to choose whether to be rich in money, or rich in people, wouldn’t it be people every single time?” she says.

The library was Campbell’s lifeline.

“Books were like an airplane. I would open a book and I was gone from Lake Providence,” she says. She read Rudyard Kipling’s poetry and Mark Twain, classics like “Moby Dick” and books of inspiration, such as “Days of Grace,” by Arthur Ashe.

Words were her medium. In a high school talent contest, Campbell went up against the dancers and singers with a speech she called “Satisfied.”

“I asked, ‘Are we going to be satisfied with our lives the way they are,”’ Campbell says, smiling and ducking her head into her hands at the memory.

She graduated as valedictorian. With a full-ride scholarship, she went to college and tackled a pre-med program that would have taken her to Baylor University.

Life intervened then, and she met her husband-to-be, Kyle Campbell, who was in the Air Force. The Campbells, with their two children, moved to Fairchild Air Force Base two years ago; Kyle is a military policeman.

Her decision to teach? “I felt the calling.”

Watching Campbell at work, one gets the sense that she will be the most important teacher to a majority of the students she teaches. She is creating thinkers. She is creating children who will trust in their abilities.

She builds projects and assignments that give as many children as possible an open door to walk through and find their own success. A chess club, for instance - the first ever for Blake Elementary.

“I take an idea and I make it a little different so it will work for my kids.”

In one art project, the children are drawing their own dream home. But Campbell adds a writing assignment: Describe the inside of your home and make it so compelling that someone, perhaps even Blake Principal Jean Marczynski, will decide to buy it.

It’s almost recess time now.

A blond bundle of energy, Nick Holder, dives for the door, anticipating the bell. Campbell beckons him back.

“Do quality in everything, Nick,” she says, her voice resonant.

Her Louisiana accent is gone.

“I think I deliberately junked it,” she says. “I think Southerners are stereotyped as being stupid based on the way they sound. I didn’t want anyone to assume anything about me based on my voice.”

The students know her life story and why quality is so important to her.

“They know who I am down to the very bone,” Campbell says.

The children enter the room quietly after recess. Campbell thanks them for such courtesy, then goes an extra step.

“Why would a teacher make a big deal about being quiet?” she asks the class. Andrew Bogle starts to answer, then loses his train of thought.

“So it doesn’t bug you?” tries Tammy Lloyd.

“Do you think it bugs me when you’re loud? Let’s get to the heart of this,” Campbell says, her words spilling out.

Bottom line: Sometimes, quiet helps create the best environment for learning. The brief conversation is classic Campbell: Where another adult might simply call for silence, she creates a lesson.

She settles the children back on the carpet, to finish reading the Civil War story called “Pink and Say.”

“A book is like an airplane. Where are we going?” she asks.

“Back in time?” offers Ryan Armstrong.

The class is ready for the story when Andrew pipes up: “I remember what I was going to say: You have to be quiet to help others.”

Last spring, in Campbell’s first year of teaching, the Central Valley School District nominated her for the Sallie Mae First-year Teacher of the Year award.

She considers herself a winner just for earning the nomination. But Campbell is too busy, entrusted with the lives of 25 children, to worry about formal awards.

“If I had to say what’s the most important thing to me, it would be to teach children to reach for the very best in themselves.”

Says Campbell: “I will be creative of spirit. I will be creative of soul.”