... And Some Who Carry On

Helen Lambert Scott is a legend at Detroit's inner city Angell Elementary School. "It is quite evident which children come up from Mrs. Scott's third grade," says Angell Fourth Grade Teacher Dorothy Lindsey. "They are well behaved. They jump right in and attack their work. They listen. They participate."

Scott's classroom may be decorated with pictures of spaceships, but she is an oldfashioned, demanding teacher. Her classroom method is a blend of love, dignity, discipline and self-confidence rooted in unshakable dedication to children. Says she: "I don't care what a child looks like, or what he smells like. He has a personal worth that God gave him, and that should be counted."

Scott has been teaching for 40 years, and much of the current talk about teacher burnout irritates her. She knows firsthand all the problems and questions that beset teachers. "There's a breakdown in family life. Everyone does his own thing," she admits. "The number of children actually doing the work and keeping up are in the minority." Excessive paperwork? "The only way I deal with it is to try to do it," she says, though she now often has to grade papers during lunch hour as well as at home. Kids who won't do homework? "I assign work to the child with a note of finality, and I keep after him until he realizes that I will pester until the work is done. He might as well do it in the first place." Demands that take teachers' time from teaching? "Sometimes you have to fight to teach the basic skills, but I'm going to have reading every day with every child so I know what he knows." Scott is in favor of teacher competency exams.

These days Scott's most rewarding moments occur "when children come back after high school and tell me, 'You were hard on us, but I found out what you were teaching was for our own good.' " One such is Linda Harris, now a high school teacher in Georgia, who was one of Scott's students in 1958: "She had a great deal to do with my wanting to become a teacher. She really wanted the kids to make something of themselves." Concedes Scott: "It's a labor of love to keep going. With that love, there's a mixture of frustration and agony." But, she adds, "there are minds to be trained. You must press forward."

Lillian Becker wanted to teach so much that she went back to college for her degree at age 42 and graduated from the City College of New York as a Phi Beta Kappa. Today, at Intermediate School 70 in Manhattan's Chelsea district, Becker scrubs the desks in her classroom herself and sweeps the floor three times each day. Says she: "Kids sense the order, and they like it. They behave differently in a clean classroom."

She has other practical suggestions. "You have to keep calling parents. You have to keep trying to get homework done." She also believes in sentence diagraming and drill. "They can disregard it later on, but it only becomes part of you later on if you drill now." To discourage predictable student alibis like "I forgot my book" or "I lost my pencil," Becker spends her own money to keep an extra supply of paper and pencils on hand. She always has extra textbooks on her desk.

Recently she asked the class to draw such simple symbols as a flag or a dove of peace. Soon the lesson had blossomed into a study of the parts of speech. "I also had them drawing pictures of figures of speech, like 'you drive me up the wall.' They loved it. After that they seemed ready for similes and metaphors." Becker grades themes and tests at home at least three days each week, two to five hours at a stint.

She earns about $18,000 a year, but the payoff, of course, is that she knows her teaching works. Says she: "Most teachers don't teach for money. They teach for that recognition they see and feel when a student learns something. I think most teachers do a terrific job."

Carolyn Kelly, 33, whispers to a visitor: "I love this." Kelly has just led a spirited senior class debate on the best interpretation of H.G. Wells' The Man Who Could Work Miracles. "I feel rejuvenated when a kid expresses something in a manner that for him is totally new, totally his own."

The seniors are Kelly's star pupils. She also teaches a basic English class and acts as coordinator of teacher advisers at the Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Mass. If need be she can reason with students from slum backgrounds in their own street-wise slang, and she spends a good deal of time trying to make students understand that public school is still a gateway to opportunity. Says she: "My goal is not just academic; it's teaching kids what it is to be a human being."

Like most teachers she decries the loss of public support for the profession. "It is vital that we all understand how things have changed: the role of the teacher, the school, the church, the family. It does no good to isolate schools as the culprit when there are social changes that affect other institutions as well. Until we all realize that education is a reciprocal thing, we won't have understood much at all."

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