Jenna Oliverio's Interview with a First Grade Teacher

Mrs. X is a passionate, well-known, and very experienced first grade teacher. The school has a large Hispanic population, sitting at 94%, with the other 6% made up of White, Pacific Islander, and Black students. One hundred percent of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The district is currently under a state-appointed trustee, who has been given full administrative authority over the district. While there is a rough political climate affecting the district, Mrs. X has yet to lose enthusiasm for what she teaches and believes in.

Mrs. X is in her 30th year as a teacher and 27th in the district. After graduating from Chico State, she spent her first three years down in South County. She has taught in four different schools in her current district, teaching bilingual kindergarten, bilingual first grade, and her current position in a first grade English language development classroom. She has always taught in schools serving low-income students, primarily with high Hispanic populations.

I chose to interview Mrs. X because she has participated in so many different district-run and privately funded foundations. She began as part of the Mid-California Science Improvement Program (MCSIP), founded and funded by the Packard foundation. She was a science model and developed new science lesson plans and ways to improve curriculum over the summer and during breaks in the school year. For over five years, she was a literacy coach for Effective First Teaching (EFT) through the district. Later, she became a reading coach for the same program; her experience in bilingual and language development in kindergarten and first grade enabled her to be a master in the subject areas. She really enjoyed working for the district and taking a break from the classroom for the few years she did it; it truly helped her become a better teacher. The most beneficial and recent position she undertook was when she did consulting across the United States. She traveled with the program coordinator as a model teacher for Integrated Thematic Instruction.  It was a program developed to increase student performance and teacher satisfaction, with a primary purpose to grow responsible citizens. Now that she is back in the classroom, she definitely misses all the workshops and trainings, but is happy to use what she has been developing.

Mrs. X is such a neat teacher to observe. When I asked her about her own philosophy, passion filled up our conversation. She told me, "No one can take away your education; you have a choice to be educated." After thirty years in the teaching profession, she still cries at every back-to-school night while explaining this to the parents. It was interesting to me that she was the first in her family to graduate college and go on to a profession like she did; she called it, "her way out." Even though she is close to retiring, she can't imagine her life without urging students to give it their all and be as passionate as she is about education.

Mrs. X's classroom is bright and fun, with student work on the walls and posters to boost first grade knowledge. The students in her class are seated boy-girl, boy-girl in two separate columns of five rows with either two or three students in each row. Though Mrs. X is fluent in Spanish, she rarely uses it in the classroom. The only time she really relies on it is when she is speaking with parents, trying to calm a student down, or helping to better explain something to a student who doesn't understand. She started to learn Spanish while student teaching in Yuba City and became fluent through class at Hartnell and Salinas Adult School.

A normal day in the classroom consists of mostly whole class, direct instruction. Due to scripted curriculum, she is unable to truly do what she wants with the class, but tends to make the instruction creative in her own way. She will occasionally break the students up into leveled small groups. For example, there are four different reading levels for universal access; the stars (30+ words a minute), watermelons (8-20 words), bananas (3-7 words), and apples (can only make out sounds). She does a different reading activity with each group at the end of the day as to tailor instruction to each student's abilities. For the most part, whole group instruction seems to be very beneficial for her. The students stay on task and she switches subjects often enough to account for the attention span of a six year old.

Mrs. X has yet to lose her enthusiasm for teaching. I find this pretty neat because I hope that after 30+ years of teaching, I am just as enthusiastic as she is. She just said she enjoys the way she has a new class every year and by the time you really get used to the group, they are passed on to the next grade level. Every day, she has five to ten students from previous years come in during their break or lunch to help with the class. It is amazing to me that a teacher would have so many students who would rather stay in at their own free time to come back and help their old teacher. The most rewarding part about teaching for her is seeing the way the students soak up such a vast range of information in such a short amount of time. The one reason she has never gone up to higher grades is due to the difference she can make with these young students. While first grade is extremely tough, I can completely understand where she is coming from; the thing I find most exciting about younger students, is their ability to learn so much!

It was really neat to hear about all the extra things she has done in education. She has a true passion for children, education, and helping teachers improve their quality of instruction. I look forward to learning more about her and finding out how to become a teacher like her.