Stories From The Classrooms

Folks around Piqua, Ohio, will tell you that Beatrice Evans didn’t get into teaching to get rich, which is a bit like saying a fella doesn’t take up flagpole sitting to enjoy the spacious legroom.  She got into it for the same reason a master carpenter picks up

Down in Ohio, a dear reader of ours—we’ll call her Mrs. Gable—goes to work every morning to perform a simple, honest craft.  She is a teacher.  Her goal is to take a lump of unformed clay, the mind of a child, and shape it into something useful,

Eleanor Vance once told me she does her best accounting at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, right after grading a mountain of lab reports.  She’s not balancing the books for the school district, mind you.  She’s reconciling the $87 she spent at the hardware store for

A letter arrived the other day from a dear reader, a certain Mrs. Gable from Ohio.  She’s been teaching third grade for thirty years. In that time, she’s seen more fads come and go than a Paris fashion house. She’s outlasted “whole language,” “new math,” and the

Dear Reader, We got a letter the other day from a Mrs. Rubin, a third-grade teacher out in the sprawling cornfields west of Omaha. She’s been in the game for twenty-seven years. She remembers when a disruptive child was told, quite simply, to sit down and be quiet. It