May 25, 2010
 
MANN TALK: How I Learned Geography
 
By Perry Mann
 
Teachers and politicians and parents and principals are at odds, as forever, over what needs to be done about public education. An educational leader recently opined that “policymakers who have never worked in classrooms ‘have absolutely no idea what they are talking about’ when it come to fixing schools.”
 
A columnist is optimistic because great amounts of money are available to help fix schools. Also, he has learned that bright young college students have come forward in great numbers to join Teach in America. In fact, 50,000 have applied for only about 4,000 slots.
 
All this causes me to recall my teaching days. In college I studied liberal arts. I majored in English and minored in French. I did well: I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa my junior year and I graduated with honors. I loved the study of the classics. I couldn’t get enough of books; so when I graduated, I decided to teach so I could be near them and earn a living teaching them. I graduated in June of 1949 and became a teacher at Covington High School in August of that year. The pay was $200.00 a month and I was told that I would have to furnish my own grade book.
 
After some orientation, I learned that I was to teach five classes of geography, one of which consisted of students who had failed the course the previous year. The total enrolment in my five classes was 160 students. They did not know that they were to be taught geography by a teacher who had not had a class in geography since junior high school. But never having been in a classroom as a teacher and being filled with optimism and eagerness to teach regardless of what subject, even one I knew little about, I showed up on the first day of school with keen anticipation and high morale.
 
Geography, I soon learned, was a dumping place for problem students, slow students and students whose education would end dropping out or with a high school diploma. Most of them were from homes of the working class. College bound students rarely elected geography as a subject. So, it should have been no surprise to me that what I considered important and interesting geographically was not important and interesting to 90 percent of my students. I soon realize that most of my students were more interested in their peers than what I had learned and could teach. Also, trying to maintain order with so many students in a class was a perennial problem. Thus, at the end of the first six-weeks, I was thoroughly demoralized. I realized that I had been given a job, the scope and goals of which were beyond my abilities and capabilities to cope with satisfactorily. Textbooks, blackboards, desks and a room were not enough to achieve a classroom victory under such condition. I was heartsick with disillusionment. Education, I learned, is a hard sell.
 
I was issued a textbook and I had to read it and do research to learn enough geography to stay ahead of the few students who took the class seriously. I knew that reading the text assigning it and lecturing on it was a dead end. So I innovated. I had taken National Geographic for years. I got together many of them and index articles in them that I thought students would enjoy. I took all those magazines to school and tried to get them to read them. It failed.
 
Next, I learned that the state had a library of geographic films of different countries. I learned to operate the projector and I ordered films week after week and showed them to the students. While the films were running peace came to the classroom. But I couldn’t follow up effectively to determine what the students learned from viewing them. I just had too much to do and too many students to take care of. And my morale was so low that incentive was subverted.
 
I was a failure. I had been faced with a task that I was ill equipped to deal with, a task that was so overwhelming, I doubt that anyone could have dealt with it and said at the end that he or she had succeeded. The chances of success in such a situation are rare. For students to learn and teachers to teach calls for a situation in which the students are motivated and the teachers are competent to teach the subject. If one or the other is missing not much happens educationally. One can take a horse to water but he cannot make him drink.
 
Fortunately, I taught long enough to say to myself that I had succeeded as a teacher. I taught a junior English class in Roanoke High School in 1961. I remember teaching "Idylls of the King" by Tennyson. The class was small and motivated and from homes where education mattered. It was a breeze, a joy, for me and the students. I thanked the fates that, before I left the profession, I had the opportunity to teach to students ready and eager to learn and I had the knowledge to teach it. There are few experiences more satisfying.
 
From thirteen years of teaching, I have learned from it and formed opinions respecting education. From teaching geography, I have been a lifelong student of the subject. For instance, I learned that seasons are the result of the earth’s axis being 23.5 degree from the perpendicular of the plane of its orbit around sun; and I learned from a film on Norway just what a fjord is.
 
I believe that the motivation of students is the indispensable key to success in teaching; that background of the student and his or her environment are critical; that the character of the teacher in addition to his or her competency in the subject matter counts; that to place a teacher in a situation that is beyond his or her abilities and capacities to cope with successfully, or for anyone to cope with, is a injustice to teacher and students and society.
 
Students should have a second chance at public education, since many students are not ready to learn when they enter high school. And many are not ready until they are in their early twenties and realize the importance of education, have integrated themselves and developed self-discipline, a trait that is essential to succeed.
 
My experiences corroborate the educational leader’s opinion that those who have not taught do not know all they should know in order to propose policy reforms in education. Teaching under adverse conditions is to learn about education what one cannot learn any other way. Further, I suspect that many of those bright and eager applicants for slots in Teach for America will find in the classroom a challenge they did not imagine and conditions that will cause an end to their teaching careers.
 
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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.