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DOCUMENT RESUME

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AUTHOR Dropkin, Ruth, Ed.TITLE Recollections of a One-Room Schoolhouse (An Interview

with Marian Brooks).INSTITUTION City Univ. of New York, N.Y. City Coll. Workshop

Center for Open Education.SPONS AGENCY National Inst. of Education (DREW), Washington, D.C.;

Office of Education (DREW), Washington, D.C. Projectsto Advance Creativity in Education.; RockefellerBros. Fund, New York, N.Y.

PUB DATE 75NOTE 27p.; Marian Brooks interview conducted by Arthur

Tobier in June 1974 for presentation at the Roots ofOpen Education in America conference, New York, NewYork, April 12, 1975

AVAILABLE FROM Workshop Center for Open Education, Room 6, ShepardHall, City College, Convent Ave. and 140th Street,New York, New York 10031 ($2.00)

EDRS PRICE MF-$0.76 HC-$1.95 PLUS POSTAGEDESCRIPTORS Activities; Child Development; Community Involvement;

*Educational History; *Educational Philosophy;Educational Resources; Facilities; Interviews; OneTeacher Schools; Progressive Education; *Rural Areas;*Small Schools; *Student Teacher Relationship;Teacher Education; United States History

IDENTIFIERS Elementary Secondary Education Act Title III; ESEATitle III

ABSTRACTIn this interview (funded via a Title III Elementary

Secondary Education Act grant) the roots of progressive education arerevealed as Marian Brooks recounts the beginnings of her teachingcareer in 1924 at the age of 15 in a one room rural New Hampshireschool. The interviewer's questions encompass the: (1) nature of theearly teacher preparatory programs; (2) involvement and interactionbetween the teacher and the community; (3) composition of thecommunity; (4) relationship between the student and the teacher; (5)

development of curriculum and curriculum guidelines; (6) models forchild development; (7) common educational activities; (8) physicalfacilities; (9) academic assessment; (10) school district policies;(11) administrative philosophy and procedure; (12) interactionbetween teachers within the district; (13) salaries; (14) differencesbetween various early educational philosophies; and (15) childcentered approach vs the learning centered approach to education.This interview describes an emphasis on child centered, informallearning situations born out of the necessity to facilitate learningin a one room, one teacher school and to utilize integrated gradelevels and family and community resources and involvement. (JC)

fl f (I

1,1 S. DEPARTMENT OP HEALTH.EDUCATION & WELFARENATKINAL INSTITUTE OF

EDUCATIONTHIS DOCUMENT NAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROMTHE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONSSTATED 00 NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE OFEOUCATION POSITION OR POLICY

-PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS COPY-RIGHTED MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY

Workshop Centerfor Open EducationTO ERIC AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATINGUNDER AGREEMENTS WITH THE NATIONAL IN-STITUTE OF EDUCATION FURTHER REPRO-DUCTION OUTSIDE THE ERIC SYSTEM RE.°IVIES PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHTOWNER

This publication was prepared for the all-dayconference on the Roots of Open Education inAmerica, held at City College, April 12, 1975.

Ruth Dropkin, Editor -

THE CITY COLLEGE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION WORKSHOPCENTER FOR OPEN EDUCATION is a free facility

for all teachers, administrators, paraprofes-sionals, and parents who are interested andinvolved in open education in the New York City

area. Its work is supported by a grant fromthe U.S. Office of Education under Title III of

the ESEA of 1965, supplemented by funds fromthe National Institute of Education, the FordFoundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and

City College. It is sponsored by the New York

City Board of Education and the City College

School of Education.

Copyright 4) 1975 by the Workshop Center for

Open Education. All rights reserved.

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As we planned for a conference on the Roots ofOpen Education in America, Marian Brooks and Iconsidered how much there is in the past thatwe would want to revive for young people's use.To begin with, we of course turned to progres-sive education as the obvious source. Wewanted to evoke for students, to strengthentheir present work, the serious longitudinalchild development studies from Iowa, fromMerrill-Palmer, from Bank Street, the DeweySchool experience, the Eight-Year Study. Butwe soon realized that our approach was tooacademic, suitable for a bibliography. As wetalked books and bibliographies, we began to-think not so much of research reports as ofLittle Women, Son of the Middle Border, LittleTown on the Prairie, My Antonia -- a wholeliterature reflecting community life, institu-tions and values on which progressive educationwas able to build.

In what soil in our own past did progressiveeducation and later, open education take root?For Marian what first came to mind was her one-room schoolhouse experience which preceded herstudy of the ideas of progressive education.But from what experience did she draw -- alone,a girl of 15 -- to support her work? She drewon her own experiences in a big family, her ownparticipation in the work and life of her neigh-borhood, her own developing interests in naturestudy and in mythology. For my part, I joined .

Marian in recollecting my own experiences asmiddle child in a big family, each one of usdifferent. My recollections included reflec-tions on these differences -- never related toany uncertainty about place in the family, forthat was defined by membership. But otherexperiences also were remembered -- two weeksof Chautauqua when I lived in West Virginia,my father's comments on Labor Schools and hiseducation through union work, joining Settle-ment House activities, the experiences I hearddescribed when I lived in Virginia of the

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Highlander Folk School -- and much more. Laterthere was the study of progressive education,of institutional planning for children.

What was it that seemed to me to relate myearlier experiences to this planned study? Whatindeed was central to these experiences and thedevelopment of open education? The community?The preservation of the cultural inheritance?The intergenerational character of the experi-ences? All these and more, for inherent in allwas an offering of educative experiences to thelearner without selection mechanisms or certifi-cation systems or prior qualifications. Indeed,

as Marian and I mulled over the experiences wehad pulled out of our memories, such offeringsand such reception of the willing learner seemedto be the expectation of many groups in theirvision of America, particularly the immigrantswho in their coming challenged their inheritedclass and educational status and asserted them-selves as people with potential. They organizedcultural experiences to sustain them in thisstrange land; they joined many educational enter-prises -- literary societies, singing clubs, andso on -- to help find their own path to self-fulfillment without old-world constraints. Theyof course used the public schools as well asthese extra-school experiences, but it is clearfrom the number of communal educational groupsthat the schools provided insufficient nutrientsfor the ordinary man's drive for further develop-ment and cultural continuity.

It was confidence in the human as learner thatinspired progressive educators, and the learningitself, which they studied in their effort torevitalize the schools. Whether English orAmerican, they drew on what they knew of thelearner, as observed in informal settings --family experiences and the communal culturalexperiences -- and they tried to figure out howto plan for, maintain and keep continuous thevigor of this informal learning within theschools. The sensitive educators who planned theDewey School, for instance, reacted to what theyinterpreted as the drying up of available in-formal educative experiences and attempted torevive their nutritive force in the learningprocess by including them in schools.

And so, as we organized our conference we agreedthat these many informal and communal educationalexperiences are our roots which at this time we

celebrate.

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Recallectiooto

ae-t_Qoom L9ie2c2/1c2aoe

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARIAN BROOKS

I understand that you started teaching in a one-room rural school in New Hampshire. Would youtell us about those early years?

When I graduated from high school in 1924, ascarcity of teachers brought representatives ofthe State Normal schools to the high schools tointerview those of us who were consideringteaching as a career. I was one of several stu-dents who were selected for an intensive six-week training program in the summer and assignedto schools in September. I was then 15 years old.

What was that training program Zike?

Very traditional, as I recall. It consisted ofan overall course in methodology in the areas ofreading, mathematics, history and geography,another in language arts that focused on spelling,writing and grammar, as well as courses in "class-room management," how to keep records and an over-view of the New Hampshire state law requirementsfor teachers. We were, of course, introduced tovarious kinds of teaching materials, mainly text-books. There was no training in child.developmentand in ways that would help me consider children'spersonal needs.

What was the school community Zike?

I was hired to teach in a small one-room schoolin an Irish farming community of about 15 faml-lies who were living mostly on small dairy faresor working as laborers for the road construntioncontractors. Two families, whose children attendedschool, were French Canadian, living :In the com-munity on a temporary basis as workers for thesmall lumbering jobbers; they would move on whenthe "spring drive" of logs down the river wasfinished.

There were six one-room schools situated on theoutskirts of the town, which had a population ofabout 1000. These schools, with the two-roomschool in the town center, comprised the schooldistrict under the leadership of a superinten-dent who visited each school about once a monthto bring supplies, check on the progress of theprogram and assist the teacher with any questionsor problems she might have. About every twomonths all the teachers in the district met athis office for a conference.

Did you Zive in the community?

Yes, I lived with a young Irish couple with twoyoung children, right across the road from theschool. They lived the very simple life of adairy farmer, which was pretty much the patternof the community: up early in the morning tomilk the cows, a big breakfast at 6:00, do thechores around the farm, some truck gardening,then milking time again in the late afternoon.Bedtime came early.

The community was 20 miles from the city ofBerlin. On Saturday evening the family usuallywent to the city to shop and as recreation,sometimes to a movie. In the winter time, whenthe deep snows tended to keep the families closerto the warm hearth, they held Irish hoedowns onSaturday night. Sometimes they used the school,removing the desks to make room for the dancing,but most often they all gathered at a home, onethat had a large room. With a fiddler in thecorner they did Irish square dancing, stoppingfrom time to time for refreshments prepared bythe women of the community. Being a young tea-cher in the community made me the belle of theball. It was great fun. I learned Irish squaredancing, but most significant for me was feelingthe community spirit of getting together andknowing the families in an informal setting.The children came to these dances, falling asleepin some corner as the evening became late.

School parties almost always involved parents.It was a tradition in the neighborhood that onHalloween Night children would go out after darkto the different houses and play tricks. Wespent a lot of time in preparation for Halloween,designing and making costumes -- and trying tothink up new tricks we could play. I raised thequestion with them: What's the meaning ofHalloween, where did it originate? The older

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children read about the background of Halloweenand wrote their own Halloween stories. On Hallo-ween Night we went out, played our tricks, thenwe came back to the school and had a candy pullwith the parents. You cook molasses candy untilit gets quite hard but not brittle. Then youbutter your hands and pull it -- stretch it outand fold it up and stretch it out and fold itup until it becomes very light colored andchewy when it cooks. That was fun to do eventhough we had quite a sticky mess to clean upthe next day -- and they all pitched in and didit.

The parents seemed to have great respect for theteacher; I was considered a very important assetto the community. Teachers usually stayed notmore than three years, so each new teacherbrought something new to the life of thecommunity.

Tell us about t children; you seem to indicatethat you knew them very well.

Having only 11 children in Grades 1 to 8, I wasable to see each child as an individual. I hadtwo children in Grade 1, a very bright littlegirl in the eighth grade who planned to go tohigh school, two brothers in the sixth grade;the other children were in Grades 2 and 4. Theolder brother J. was not interested in schooland was waiting for the time to pass when hewould reach the age of 16 and legally leaveschool. His record card showed that he had re-peated the earlier grades, and as learrtng becamemore and more difficult for him, he had been"passed on" year by year. I had been warned bythe superintendent that J. had been a trouble-maker but that he must stay in school until thelegal leaving age. I decided right from thebeginning that I must try to win his support.Since he was a big. adolescent I believed oneshould treat him with respect for his physicalgrowth and his maturing development. I asked J.to help me with much of the manual work aroundthe school. I was not only the teacher, I wasalso the janitor. The school was heated by apot-bellied stove in the corner. J. would comeearly, for he lived nearby, and build the firefor me. Then he stayed at the end of the dayto sweep and help me clean up. He and hisbrother painted some of the old tables that weused as work areas. At Christmas time he led

the whole group out to the woods to find a treeto cut, then made the base for it. He liked toassume these responsibilities; they gave him afeeling of manliness, I believe, and also satis-fied his need fOr my attention and approval. He

was very close to my own age and we establisheda good comradeship.

I exerted no great pressure on J. to "learn thetext books" for he had great difficulty withreading. But I did insist that he do some workevery day: reading from a book he selected (hisbrother or I would read with him), helping theyounger children with their math, taking part inthe discussions I had with the older childrenabout events in American history, and listeningto the stories that I read. He enjoyed the booksthat I read to the older children at the close ofeach day, boots such as Pinnochio, Tom Sawyer,Grimm's Fairy TaZes. From my memories of my ownhome life and my contact with children, I knewthat children of all ages like to be read to,especially from books that were above their ownreading ability. Often G., the eighth graderwho read very well, would read in my place.

I learned a lot about a young boy growing upfrom my talks with J., my observation and my re-flection upon him, even though he gave me someanxious times. I think he passed the time witha better attitude toward himself and his rela-tionship to others.

I had another pupil who demanded from me a lotof thought as to how to teach him. E. was a re-tarded child, at eight a big boy who had devel-oped fast and was very lanky and awkward in hismovements. He had been in the school for threeyears but was still in first grade. E. wouldcompensate for his lack of success in learningby his size and physical strength, "picking" onthe younger children who were superior to himin mastering reading and math. He walked threeto four miles to school, as did two or three ofthe other children, which meant they ate lunchat school. E. used the lunch period for anta-gonizing the children and starting fist fights,in which he was always the winner.

My problem with E. was to find things that hecould do that would give him a feeling of per-sonal satisfaction as well as help him gain re-spect from the other children. He liked to

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draw; he liked to sing and to dance. His dan-cing was really quite delightful, with lots ofrhythm and freedom and charged with a real joy.But because of his lankiness, a sort of loosejointedness, the children thought that he wasfunny and "nutty," as they called him. Theylaughed and poked fun at him, which of courseset off more fist fights. He also liked dra-matics, to play out stories and situations.His language was poor, as'he had a severespeech impediment, but with his body he couldexpress his idea of things and happenings. I

praised him profusely for his dramatics, en-couraged him to draw more, and wrote the sto-ries that he told about his pictures which wedisplayed along with the drawings of the otherchildren.

I myself liked to draw so we all did many draw-ings with pencil and crayons of our personalexperiences, illustrations of our historystudies and our frequent observations thatwe made of the world of nature. Paints werenot available. These drawings were usuallyaccompanied by written comments that the olderchildren would write or assist the youngerchildren in writing. Always before beingdisplayed, each drawing was shared with therest of the group. Since the children inGrades 1 and 2 finished school an hour earlier,our sharing time usually came before the lunchhour. I did not purposefully incorporate theseinformal reading-writing experiences as a wayof acquiring the skills of reading and language;they were natural responses that came out of theatmosphere of living together as a group andsharing interests and achievements.

Out of my personal interest in M., the oldersister of the two brothers, a common projectdeveloped which integrated many areas of learn-ing. The mother in this family had died whenthe children were very young. By the age of12, M. had become the woman of the household andhad assumed many of its responsibilities, suchas the planning and cooking of meals. M. oftenstayed after school and chatted about things inher home life. She needed a woman to talk withabout her role in the life of the family, some-one who could be responsive to her personalquestions and needs. She was interested in hercooking so I gave her help in planning the mealsand new recipes to try. She had difficulty withmath, and I used her cooking interests to makeher mathematics more meaningful for her; each

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Saturday she went with her father to buy food,so during the week we figured out what to buyand how much it would cost. Her father tookgreat pride in M.'s mathematical accomplishmentwhich I think was perhaps greater than his own.7ince I made many of my own clothes, M. wantedto learn to sew. As I recall she made a petti-coat and a dress -- again we planned togetherhow much material to buy and how much it wouldcost so she could purchase everything on hernext trip to town.

Of course the other girls wanted to sew also.Since it was natural for me to think of curtainsfor the windows, an item that very often wasmissing in their home setting, we made curtains.This became a good starting point for the wholegroup to learn about color and pattern as weplanned how we could make our school a morecolorful place. As I said before, the olderboys painted some of our old tables.

What guides did you use to structure the cur-riculum?

I was required to follow the teaching guideissued by the State Department of Education andthe textbooks in reading, math, spelling, gram-mar, history and geography. There were very fewresource materials such as maps, games, supple-mentary reading books; these the teacher had tosupply if she wished to have them in the class-room. I was also required to have posted a de-tailed timetable of each day's program, and Istill recall the struggle I had in making atimetable that would include all the contentareas: ten minutes of first grade reading, tenminutes of fourth grade reading, ten minutes offourth grade math, and so on. kt it was a.greater and more frustrating stnible to followit each day. I finally gave up, ignored it andwent about establishing an organization thatseemed to make more sense to me and the needsof the children.

We read together at the same time or did mathtogether. I would work with one child, such asthe little boy in first grade who needed myhelp in beginning to read, or with a group; therest of the children would help each other. The

fourth graders would read from their historytext together as a group or individually if they

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wished, helping each other with the study prob-lems at the end of the chapter or the one thatI often gave them as a focus to structure ourdiscussion later in the day. My very competentlittle girl in the eighth grade often read withthe children in the second grade, then later Iwould work with them on the reading skills.

As I look back on those years I realize what agreat learning experience it was for me as abeginning teacher. Sure, if I had had an exper-ienced teacher to confer with and give me somesympathetic guidance and support I, no doubt,would have done a better job in reassessing mypractices and making changes. But it wasequally important for my own development thatI was free from many outside pressures and hadthe time to find my own style of responding tothe children and to discover ways of makinglearning and school an experience that theycould become excited about and enjoy.

With no experience as a teacher and littlestudy, as you've said, of child growth anddevelopment, what model did you use for yourobservations of the children and your organi-zation of their learning experiences?

I grew up in a family of five children and ina neighborhood of many children of all ages.We were always an active group of children, re-creating many of the adult activities of thecommunity: playing lumbering, being a photo-grapher, playing school, building treehouses,and so on. I enjoyed directing the play acti-vities of the younger children. For my highschool years, I went away to a boarding schooland there often "sat" with the faculty chil-dren. I had had a lot of contact with childrenbecause I was interested in them and liked tobe with them. I think I took my own experienceswith children as the key to my observations ofthe children in this school.

As an individual I always had a very difficulttime working within a rigid structure that didn'tpermit any deviations. I think that it wasprobably as much for my own comfort in the situ-ation, a feeling "this is the way I can teachthese kids the best." I couldn't teach in atight structure, that is, reading from textbooksand answering questions and rigidly following the

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timetable. When I was working with a child ora group it didn't seem to make any sense to meto restrict the rest of the children to a veryquiet, passive kind of activity when it was pos-sible for them to work in an informal, family-like situation. While I would be teaching onechild to read, for instance, the others wouldquite naturally turn to each other for help.There was much tutoring and reading togetherfrom the library books, especially projectstudies.

Were there times when all the children workedtogether on a common activity?

Yes. We did a lot of planning common activi-ties together, and we always hadrat least oneproject that we worked at together. Workingtogether came naturally once you set up anenvironment in which one didn't have to sitstill and be silent and work alone but couldtalk and work with others. With the help ofthe two older boys, we took out some of thefixed desks that we weren't using and piledthem up in the coat closet area so that wewould have a larger space to work in together.

Was it standard at that time for children tobe seated behind nailed down desks?

Most classrooms had rows of fixed desks withthe teacher's desk at the center front. Mydesk, when I arrived at the school, was evenset up on a raised platform. It came down verysoon, was moved to a corner, and the platform be-came a great working area for the children orour stage for play making. When I asked thesuperintendent if I could remove some desks,he raised questions; he was somewhat fearfulof my making the room more informal and flexi-ble in its use. There had been a turnover ofsomething like two or three teachers in theprevious school year because they couldn'tmanage the older brothers, and this was his bigconcern, but as long as I wasn't having serioustroubles with these boys he accepted the change.

To return to '1* question of common projects,I especially recall one that developed out ofmy reading of myths to the children. My eighth

grade student G. got very excited about mythol-ogy; her parents were well educated and helpedher to get books of myths from the city of

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Berlin library. These she brought to school toshare with the rest of us, by reading or tellingthem to us. We wrote our own myths and had funusing myths in play making, improvising verysimple costumes and props. As usual the chil-dren made many crayon drawings.

Thinking back on it, I realize how little Iused the life of the community. Actually myreal use of this was in my understanding of thefamily life of the children themselves. I usedthe natural life of the area more because of myinterest in nature. These children had only ameagre awareness of the variety of animal andplant life right around them. They hardly knewhow to watch the changes in nature. We begangathering many samples of leaves to take to theclassroom, made flower collections, drew picturesof birds and animals, made feeding stationsand bird houses out of scrap lumber that thechildren found at home. J. and his brotherwere especially helpful to the younger oneswith the carpentry -- they knew how to handlethe tools. The good readers did research fromthe books that I would bring them from my ownpersonal library or from the Town Library. Wetook lots of walks around the area to look fordevelopmental changes. Our school was right onthe bank of a brook, so we had the possibility,especially in the spring, of using the brookand seeing what was happening there, such as thefrog's eggs and the tadpoles that we took intothe classroom to watch in their development. Wedidn't do any planting because the childrenknew more about planting than I did probably.

Another related experience that I recall asvery exciting for the group happened in theearly spring when dandelions were bloomingeverywhere. I have never seen a group of youngchildren that could refrain from picking a bou-quet of dandelions. These children kept ourclassroom arrayed in these bright yellow flow-ers. In their homes they ate the leaves asdandelion greens. One morning I urged them tolook carefully at a dandelion flower for Ifound they were not really aware of its charac-teristics. We examined the arrangement of thepetals, its hollow stem and leaves close tothe ground, and so on. Then we went out tolook for flowers that had not bloomed, stillin bud. We located an isolated spot of dande-lions that we fenced in with sticks so that wecould watch what happened in their growth.

Most of the children had blown the seeds towatch them float through the air but they hadnot put together the relationships of thingsbeginning (being born), growing and making newseeds for the next year's growth, then dying.Nor had they examined the seed to see why itfloated so easily. I showed them how to make aparachute from a handkerchief. We had manycontests with parachutes, testing time, size,distance relationships. One little girl inthe fourth grade made a book of the dandelionstory, mounting the different parts and stagesof development with written explanations.

One winter there was a lot of snow, with bigdrifts formed along the school yard fence.

One of the things that we did, which I had doneas a child, was to dig tunnels and caves in thedrifts. Sitting in our caves one day I askedthem how it would be to live in a snow house.After our conjuring up such a life I told thema little bit about the Eskimoes. The children'sgreat curiosity led them to do some reading,looking at books and making a model of an Eski-mo village. It was one of their first consider-ations of the fact that people live differentlyin different parts of the world.

When the spring rains came, the school yardbecame very muddy. The younger children lovedthe mud, making the usual cakes and pies fromcans and jars, decorating them with sticks andstones and baking them in the sun. They also

made houses and dikes for the rivers wherethey sailed their boats. I showed them how tostrengthen the mud by mixing dried grasses andtwigs. Many spontaneous play situations cameout of this mud environment which they hadcreated: the older children returned to theirinterest in myths and stories of knights andcastles and joined the mud play making moats,

castles, bridges. The children in Grades 1and 2, who finished school at 2:30 p.m. and sohad an hour to wait for brothers and sisters,spent that time in their own mud play. In the

winter time they usually stayed inside, findingtheir own things to get involved in. It was an

unsupervised time for them, with the only limi-tation that they must not interfere with thework of the older children. It was in this

hour that I gave attention to G., my eighthgrader, who had to learn beginning French andgeometry for entrance to high school.

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Did the six-week course give you help in asses-sing the child's learning? Can you describehow you reflected on what you were doing?

The six-week course,as I remember, it focusedonly on methodology that I've already spelledout. I do not recall any consideration givento what children are like, how they learn, thekind of environment that you would provide tostimulate and support the individual child.Some attention was given to the making.of testsand formal measurement as a means of gradingchildren's academic achievement.

School was presented to us as a place where wewere to teach children the basic curriculumareas following the syllabus issued by theState Department of Education. Learning was apassive activity: reading textbooks, memorizingcontent, answering the questions put.forth bythe teacher and taking tests. Learning wasstructured by the textbooks the school selectedfor use. That was pretty much the model ofelementary schools all over the country with theexception of a few that had sensitive teachersand administrators who envisioned education asmore than the mastery of those fundamentalsthat would have bearing on the child as an adult.

The teacher was the one to obey and the child wasto do what he was told: "Read the books andremember what you have read, do your math exer-cises, learn to spell correctly and write in thePalmer method." The parents of the communityhad similar expectations for their children:that they would learn to read, to do arithmetic,to spell and write, and know historical datesand important events. Continuing education intothe Berlin High School was not considered a"must"; many dropped out as soon as they reachedthe age of 16. G. was the only child in thecommunity whose parents planned for her to go tohigh school. Actually the children of thefamily that I lived with went on to highschool; that was because I talked the family

into it. The young people tended to stay withthe farm, marry and get a farm of their own.

When J., for example, became 16, the one thingthat he wanted most was to have a job. I

talked with the men who took care of the roadsabout the possibility of giving him a job. Inthe spring in that area of the country therewas always a lot of road upkeep, from the

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effects of the winter. J. went to workimmediately.

At the end of the day as part of my planningand preparation for the next day, I would reflecton what had happened during the day, and what Iwas going to do with individual children whowere at different levels of learning. With anorganizational structure of usually one childto a grade, at the most perhaps three or four,one tended to think not about grade levelaccomplishments but about what the individualchild was learning, what was coming forth fromthe group activities and the kinds of relation-ships that existed or were being developed. I

drew upon our being together in an informalenvironment and the intimate relationshipsthat we had established with each other.

It was not until five ye-ars later when I taughtin Burlington, Vermont, under a principal whohad recently graduated from Teachers College,that I was introduced to the ideas of JohnDewey and William Heard Kilpatrick, ideas thatconfirmed my own teaching experiences. I also

took courses in child psychology and sociologyat the University of Vermont.

You say you were visited by the superintendentabout once a month. What happened during thesevisitations? Did he advise you as a helpingteacher might do, or was the visit more of asupervisory check up?

Mr. C. came about once a month and usuallyspent a couple of hours observing my teachingand commenting briefly on techniques and con-tent that he thought I should give more empha-

sis to. He'd ask me if there was any way hecould be of help to me, if I had any questions.He looked at my plans and records; he broughtthe supplies that I had requested at his pre-

vious visit. He also had monthly meetings inthe town center with all the teachers of thedistrict, but those meetings as I recall wereconcerned mainly with routine kinds of things.There was, of course, some sharing among thegroup of teachers and talking about things that

we were doing. Sometimes Mr. C. would comment

on a specific teaching technique that he had

observed in a school and ask that teacher totell the group about it.

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One time I remember he asked me to tell aboutthe way I was teaching reading. The basicreading series was the old Winston Reader.The first reader was composed of the storiesof Little Red Hen, the Ginger Bread Boy, and

Three Billy Goats Gruff, and so on. Childrenloved the stories but the series as a whole,with its very heavy vocabulary load for begin-ning readers, often had a discouraging effecton their learning to read. The really greatthing about these stories was that they hadlots of repetition of words and sentences, onesequence building onto the other. I began toread the stories with the children, helpingthem to hear and see the repetition of wordsand phrases and not making it a burden forthem to know every word. In this way theycame to enjoy the stories. I had started byfollowing very carefully the Teacher's Guideand expecting them to know the words throughisolated word card drills. But I discardedthis method when I realized how tedious it wasfor the children, so much so that they wereacquiring a dislike for reading. We went onnot only to read the stories together, but toread them over and over. They also learnedthe vocabulary that way.

It is interesting, as I think back about itnow and have more knowledge about the processof learning to read, how much use I made ofthe repetitive patterns; to hear the repeti-tive sound patterns and to see the patterns ofwords, the patterns of phrases. At this tea-chers' meeting we discussed my method criti-cally since Mr. C. had doubts as to whether Iwould get good results and the children wouldlearn to read.

This method was unique to him, but he was opento it?

I believe that was one of his strengths as anadministrator. He wasn't an educator who hadreal insights into the developmental processand how children learn -- but he was open-minded,and supportive of you if you had valid reasonsfor what you were doing, and he could see evi-dence that the children were learning.

Were there many teachers of your own age in thisschool district? How long did you stay in thisschool?

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Most of the teachers were young, new graduatesfrom the two-year training program at the Nor-mal Schools in the New England area. Teachers

tended to stay in these one-room schools fortwo to three years and then move to the largerschools where the salary would be higher. I

expect the need for professional companionshipwas another reason for the change. I stayed twoyears and then was transferred to the centralschool in a nearby town.

What were you paid?

$720 for the year. My room and meals with thefamily cost me $5 a week and if I went away forthe weekend, the farmer's wife insisted that shetake off a dollar! Still I saved enough of mysalary to pay for my studies in the summer.(There was the requirement that to be rehired asa teacher one must continue study in the summertoward fulfillment of the state criteria forcertification.)

Row was this school different from your firstschool?

This school was in a small town with a mixedpopulation of the original families and new fam-ilies from French Canada and Prince Edward Island,who had been attracted to the town by the lum-bering industry, its major occupation. There wasa small nucleus of parents who were quite sensi-tive to the social changes in American life andto the reality that their children would not re-main in the town on reaching adulthood. They

felt therefore that the school should providean education more in tune with their expectanciesof the future. A few years earlier this grouphad influenced the town to consolidate all ofits one-room schools into a central school sothat the monies could be spent to better ad-vantage, that is, for better qualified teachersand expansion of the educational program toinclude the first two years of high school. As

well as the usual academic subjects, a studentwas required to take the new high school programincluding manual arts and home economics. The

subjects were viewed as points of departure toa life into the broader industrialized society.Some of the youth completed the high schoolprogram by attending a high school in a largernearby town, living with families or attending

0021)

a semi-private academy where dormitories whereavailable. When I came to the town a few ofthe youth were attending college.

There were four teachers in the school: one forthe lower grades 1 - 3, a second for the middlegrades 4 - 6, and two in the upper grades 7 - 10.

I taught the lower grades, with approximately24 children. Here as in the first school, Iviewed these children as a group of learnersrather than as children at the different gradelevels, even though I was responsible for agraded curriculum based on the State syllabusor textbooks. I continued many of the samepatterns that I had developed in my first school;working with one child or small group, with therest of the class working cooperatively togetheron their assigned work or individual interest.The first graders finished the day an hourearlier. Those who came on the bus were more orless responsible for their own activities orplay during that hour, either outside or in theclassroom depending on the weather or theirinterests. Often they painted, made drawingsor worked on constructions, as we did a lot ofconstruction from paper, boxes and wood. Theyall were pretty familiar with woodworking toolsfrom their home experiences.

I recall one project that all the children wereinvolved in: making, on a large sand table, amodel of the lumbering industry. We depictedthe cutting of the trees in the winter, takingthem to the river bank where in the springfloods the logs were "driven" down the riverto the pulp and paper mills in Berlin, 30miles away. The older children in Grade 3added displays of products that were madefrom the pulp and how it was made into paper.One day after school, a group of us went to the"river drivers" camp built on the river banknear the town, to talk with these men when theycame in at the end of the day. They were theitinerant workers who moved with the loggingjobs, and they had exciting adventures andstories to relate to the children while we atethe big molasses cookies that the camp cookgave us. Some parents had cautioned their chil-dren to stay away from river drivers as beingbad men but the visit gave us lots of answersto our questions and also raised many new onesabout the life of the river driver. Some of the

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children had fathers who worked on the lumberingjobs, so that these young children had had somefirsthand contacts with the lumbering industry,hearing about the daily happenings. Yet it wasthe first time, I believe, that they had sensedthe special life these men lived. Our visit

helped them put together observations and tounderstand the continuity of process and humanactivities, from the tree in the foreit to thesheet of paper that they might be writing upon.While much of my teaching I would consider todayas inadequate learning-teaching practices, thisparticular activity did reach deeply into thelives of these children, offered them many mean-ingful ways to use language, reading, mathematicsin social living that came from the mutualsharing of experience.

The reading program for the beginners was veryboring to me to teach; the Aldine Readers thatI was required to use began with such materialas: "Page 1: This is a ball, The ball is red.

Page 2: This is baby. Baby plays with the

ball. Baby plays with the red ball." I remem-bered my own first grade teacher and the waythat she had made reading an enjoyable and ex-citing experience by writing adaptations of theold folk tales and myths for us to read. I

used her as my model and wrote large books(charts) on folk tales, using many of those from

the Winston series. We read them together. It

was not unusual at other times during the day tosee small groups of children gathered around astory, reading it to each other. Meeting thisteacher, later as a teenager, we talked aboutthe books that she had written, her love forliterature, and, as small children, our own lackof interest in the primers that were requiredand the scarcity of good literature and books inthe classroom. She too had been a beginningteacher, graduated from a liberal arts collegemajoring in literature, who found the readingprogram uninspiring for both herself and thechildren.

Each summer I would attend a summer school fora period of six weeks to continue my work toward

the attainment of a teaching diploma and certi-

fication. It was during the fifth summer andon completion of the requirements that I wasoffered a teaching position in Burlington, Ver-mont. This change offered me several opportu-

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nities to reassess my ideas about children andteaching. I fortunately had as principal ofthe school in which I taught, a young woman whohad just completed a doctorate at Teachers Col-lege under Kilpatrick and Rugg and was committedto the philosophy of viewing the child as thecenter of the learning experience and using thecurriculum to support the growth of the indivi-dual child. The Superintendent also supportedher in her attempts to break away from strictadherence to the syllabus and textbooks. Sheliked the things that I told her about the wayI had worked with the children in my previousschools and wished me to establish a similarprogram in this first grade, individualizing itto allow children to progress each at his ownpace. We became intimate friends and had manydiscussions about the ideas of Dewey, Kilpa-trick, and Rugg's Child Centered School, whichI had begun to read. I also began studies asa non-matriculated student at the Universityof Vermont and got into those areas that I waspersonally interested in: biological sciences,psychology, and sociology.

I left Burlington at the end of two years withmany regrets, for not only had I been very happythere but my own thinking about children,learning, and school had been profoundly chal-lenged by the progressive leadership in theschool system. But the lights of Boston beckoned,and Boston University seemed to be the place forme to complete my studies for a B.S. degree.

This interview was conducted in June 1974 byARTHUR TOBIER, then co-editor of publicationsfor the Workshop Center for Open Education.

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MARIAN BROOKS, Professor Emeritus of City Uni-versity, began her teaching career in a one-room school in northern New Hampshire. Afterfour years in rural schools, she worked inthe public schools of Burlington, Vermont as afirst grade teacher, then in Lexington, Massa-chusetts, first as a teacher and later anassistant principal, at the same time finishingher undergraduate studies at Boston Universitywith a minor in music education. Following aperiod as supervisor of music in the elementaryschools of Needham, Massachusetts, she took aleave of absence to study at Teachers Collegewith Harold Rugg and George Counts and to ex-tend her interests in music education and childpsychology. As an assistant to Professor Ruggshe helped him organize a luncheon-discussiongroup of students who met weekly with personsprominent in the various educational disciplines,the arts and social action.

Professor Brooks came to City College in 1948 toteach in elementary education, later becomingChairman of the Department of Elementary Edu-cation. In 1967, she invited Lillian Weber,with whose background in early childhood educa-tion she was already familiar, to join thefaculty. She welcomed the expanded view ofschool possibilities that Professor Weber hadstudied in England. Since that time she hasbeen intimately identified with the developmentof the Open Corridor program in New York Citypublic schools and with the City College AdvisoryService to Open Corridors. After her retirementin 1972, she joined the staff of the WorkshopCenter for Open Education where she serves asconsultant.

2

The entire proceedings of the ROOTS OFOPEN EDUCATION IN AMERICA conference,together with an Annotated Bibliographyof related readings, will be publishedon January 1, 1976. Copies at $5.00each may be obtained on written requestaccompanied by payment to:

Workshop Center for Open Education6 Shepard Hall, City College140th Street and Convent AvenueNew York, New York' 10031

I LIKE THE WAY I AM RIGHT NOWJose Luis Pizarro

THE WORKSHOP CENTER SAMPLERRuth Dropkin (Ed.)

TEACHING BILINGUAL CHILDRENArthur Tobier (Ed.)

SCIENCE IN THE OPEN CLASSROOMRuth Dropkin (Ed.)

EVALUATION RECONSIDEREDArthur Tobier (Ed.)

EXPLORATIONS OF VISUAL PHENOMENAEleanor Dimoff

READING FAILURE AND THE TESTSDeborah Meier

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THE OPEN CORRIDOR PROGRAMHandbook for Parents $ .50

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THE WORKSHOP CENTER FOR OPEN EDUCATION

Lillian Weber, DirectorJoanne Schwartz, CoordinatorRuth R. Adams, David Bole, Marian Brooks,Stanley Chu, Georgia Delano, Ruth Dropkin,Betty Gee, Wilma Heckler, Jean Mandelbaum,Martha A. Norris, Barbara Owens, EttaProshansky, Evangeline Richardson, NancySchaffer, Loren Weybright, Benny T. Wong,Renee Woods

002r 4111Ionme