Hallowed Hallways

It would have been a more lucrative career. But in 1989, during her senior year of chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lisa Meiers ’05 had an inkling that her professional life was going to veer from the path she had originally envisioned.

What she wanted was work that held deeper purpose and meaning for her. Never a quitter, Meiers completed the degree and applied for jobs in her field, but there was a problem. “I went on five or six plant trips and received three job offers,” she recalls.

“While watching my friends jump up and down at their offers, I didn’t feel that way — even though the offers were for a good salary. I didn’t see myself working in a fossil fuel plant that generated electricity. I didn’t think selling chemicals to the paper industry would really make a difference, and I didn’t have the patience for lab work. So I said ‘no’ to the offers.”

This baffled and shocked her parents, who couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to try at least one of the jobs she was offered.

It took Meiers a year and a lot of thinking, but she decided to get certification in teaching. “I wanted to make a definitive difference in people’s lives,” she says. “I wanted to be creative. I didn’t want to do the same thing every day for long periods of time. I wanted to be able to laugh, I wanted some job autonomy and I liked the fact that every year I’d meet and work with new students.”

And her parents eventually came around, too. “Once I started teaching and they saw how much I enjoyed it, they thought my choice to change careers was a good one.”

Meiers received her master’s degree in Educational Leadership from Wichita State in 2005, but even then she didn’t want to leave the classroom for an administrative position. Teaching continues to be her passion, and making a difference in individual lives remains of utmost importance to her.

And so each morning, she strolls the hallowed hallways of Wichita East High to her classroom nestled on the third floor in the oldest wing of the school where she teaches algebra to her students. She began teaching at East shortly after she moved to Wichita in 1998. Since then, she guesses she’s taught about 1,000 students.
 
Hallowed History

As the oldest public high school in Wichita, the history of East High can be traced back to 1878, when it was known merely as Wichita High School. The school most Wichitans have come to know and recognize was completed in 1923. Following the completion of Wichita North High in 1929, East High adopted the name it uses to this day.

Known for its Gothic architecture, East High is the largest high school in Kansas and claims such famous graduates as Kevin Kasting, the classical composer and recording artist; Jim Ryun, former track great and politician; and acclaimed author Antonya Nelson. The biggest claim-to-fame is current U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who was the keynote speaker at East High’s commencement on May 27.

The school has evolved with the times and contemporary additions have been constructed as Wichita’s population has swelled, but East High still retains its 1923 character.

Meiers’ classroom, for instance, has more of the appearance of something out of “Dead Poets Society” than “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

She uses an overhead and a computer to teach, and in the front of the room is a markerboard. Yet the room also has hardwood floors in remarkably good shape and original molding. Old chalkboards — minus any chalk in the troughs — still line the walls of the room. These days chalkboards may seem like archaeological relics to most students, but they lend a juxtapositional air to Meiers’ teaching environment: present coupled with the past, a reminder to students of how far our society has come in the nearly one hundred years since their school was built.

Finding the Proper Fit

In addition to Meiers, many other teachers at East High are also Shocker alums. The paths that led to their teaching careers are myriad, but it’s this diversity that contributes to the teaching profession’s uniqueness.

Some, like Janice Feyen ’79/84, were inspired by their own high school teachers. Others found teaching the perfect opportunity to immerse themselves in a particular field of study they enjoy.

“I’ve always enjoyed figuring things out and sharing that with others,” says Steven Shook ’85. “I seem to have the ability to rephrase and clarify information for people in a way that helps them understand. I enjoyed certain subjects in high school and saw teaching those subjects as a way to stay engaged with the content I so enjoyed. The scholarship I received at WSU allowed me to pursue a course of study unencumbered by a preoccupation with school expenses. Studying to be an educator fell right into place.”

Prior to teaching, Linda White ’73/02 worked as a chemist and then owned her own store for many years. “After I closed my business, I started substitute teaching. When I found out about the Transition to Teaching program at WSU, I knew I could teach without going to school for two more years,” she says. “When I was a high school student myself, I really wanted to be a math teacher. I had had an excellent math teacher who inspired me to be like him. In college my adviser talked me out of teaching and into working in industry. Unfortunately, the jobs for chemists in Wichita are mostly quality control, which I find quite boring.”

For Susan Richardson ’88, teaching seemed natural. “It’s a good fit for me,” she says. “Teaching fits my goals and abilities and my lifestyle and personality.” Being a teacher herself also is a way of thanking her former teachers. “It’s a way for me to express my deep gratitude for the amazing gifts given to me by my own teachers. It may sound a little clichéd, but it’s true.”

Transformations

The secondary teaching environment has changed during the past 15 years, say educators, who cite a number of examples. “Students today (seem to) have more problems that keep them from learning,” Feyen reports. “The amount of rudeness and disrespect has increased toward adults and authority. It’s difficult to deal with students who don’t want to be in school. This spoils the learning environment for the kids who do want to learn.”

Meiers can relate. “It’s challenging to work with students who don’t have a good work ethic and who easily want to give up,” she says. “For example, last year I had a student who wouldn’t do his Algebra ii assignments, but I knew he could do well in the class if he did them and applied himself. All year it was a struggle, and ultimately he didn’t pass. Yet, at the end of the year when we were talking about his future plans and I mentioned that it had been frustrating for me not to see him reach his potential, he thanked me for being his teacher and appreciated my not giving up on him.”

With 23 years in education under his belt, Shook views the changes in education from two perspectives. He spent the first 10 years as a high school classroom teacher and the past 13 as an administrator.

“The most significant change, I believe, is the interpersonal issues students carry with them to school. Those issues draw upon their attention and energy in ways that interfere with learning,” he says. “It also impacts many students’ hopes and ambitions for the future. It takes special educators to penetrate that thick outer shell and plant seeds of ambition. I think educators making connections and intentionally developing a community for the students to thrive within is extremely valuable. In the past, the emphasis, at least at the secondary level, was ‘knowledge about content,’ and while that certainly is important, building relationships has become the fertile soil of effective teaching and learning.”

Workload Challenges

The recently-deceased film director John Hughes became famous in the 1980s for movies about high school students, such as “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Breakfast Club,” films that deal with teen angst, students rebelling against teachers and administrators, and teenagers struggling to find their place in an adult world that doesn’t seem interested in helping or understanding them. The ever-present Generation Gap looms large in these movies.

Hughes wasn’t the first to tackle such subject matter, of course; 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause” and “The Blackboard Jungle” explore similar issues and incorporate the sometimes violent world teenagers face. “The Blackboard Jungle” offers two points of view: the teenagers’ and the teachers’, but the problem of bridging the Generation Gap, of finding common ground, remains. While times have changed, the challenge of one generation relating to another hasn’t vanished — in movies or the real world.

“It is often challenging to look past the superficial, outer appearance and attitude of students and continually express respect, interest, care, compassion and desire to invest in a student’s life,” acknowledges Shook, a sentiment echoed by White: “Since I loved school, I have a hard time understanding someone who doesn’t like school and learning.”

Despite the difficulty, White is dedicated to finding common ground with her students, as are her colleagues. They spend hours both in and out of the classroom synthesizing old and new methods of teaching and analyzing instructional technologies in their search for ways of connecting with students. It is an exhausting enterprise determining how best to teach in a new age of learning — never mind teaching itself.

“Teaching takes a lot of energy and is very tiring,” Meiers notes. “Once the school year starts, a typical work day does not have any downtime in it because of the number of students a teacher has these days. You have to prepare lessons, make copies of any worksheets, quizzes or tests you want to use, and then you also help students during lunch and after school."

It’s also a job teachers take home with them. “My students never quite leave me,” she says, “because of all of the grading that comes home with me, and there’s a lot of mental energy I spend thinking and planning the lessons I’m going to use, and on ways to try and bring individual students into their own learning and how to help explain a concept in a way that students will understand.”

Some of the workload, however, has little to do with students, prep work or grading. “Working through the endless mandates that pass from the national, state and local levels to the schools and classrooms can be frustrating,” observes Shook.

“These are mandates that have relatively clear intentions, but when the real-life practical applications are laid in the arms of a classroom teacher, who is trying to do well for six or eight dozen students, a person begins to wonder, am I doing this for the students, or those who legislate from afar?’ Those whose primary expertise in education is the fact that they were simply once students themselves?” Shook adds, “What is worse is that in spite of their well-intentioned ideals, the schools and classrooms of their generation do not exist in any significant way in the culture and society of America in 2009.”

Fertile Soil

Ultimately, the rewards of teaching far outweigh the challenges. For White, this year marks a milestone in her career: it’s her 10th year of teaching. “It certainly is easier to teach now that I know what I’m doing,” she jokes. “But I think it may have been easier for me to come into this profession as an older teacher because of life experiences and having kids of my own.” Feyen finds it “very rewarding to see the kids grow and learn. I take pride in realizing that I have helped them become more confident, knowledgeable young adult.”

And Meiers has no regrets. Teaching has provided her with what she was looking for when she went on her journey of self-exploration 20 years ago. She gets to be creative, her job has variety, she certainly gets to laugh — and she’s making that definitive difference in people’s lives that is so crucial to her.

Like her colleagues, she gets to see that difference; she gets to see, in part, the legacy she’s leaving.

“I am able to help and watch as students learn, grow and mature. It’s especially rewarding when students who don’t think they can succeed actually do succeed — be it in algebra or in setting and achieving other goals in life. I love hearing a student come back the next year and say they miss having me as a teacher.

“I am surrounded by youthful energy.”