How I Learned to Hit a Baseball and Love my Students
From 6th graders to Life Long Learners
That’s me gesturing.
I can’t help it.
I’ve been teaching for 50 years.
My co-teacher Ruth and I have a class of 40 Life Long Learners studying race in America.
I love this group of students just as I’ve loved every class, for 49 years.
50 years ago I taught my first class.
Another 40 students.
6th graders.
I hated them.
This is a story about how I learned to love my students.
But first I’d like to tell you a story about baseball.
My dad, a big bat and a bag of beans
In the summer of 1960, I was 11 and in the middle of my third season of Little League baseball.
The Peter, Paul and Mary song Right Field told my story: two innings played a week, one at bat, usually a strike out, and right field.
My father knew little about baseball but he did know how things worked.
He applied his engineer brain to help turn a perennial bench warmer into an All Star.
One day that summer he came home with an adult baseball bat and a bag of navy beans.
He took me out in the backyard and said I should throw a bean in the air and try to hit it with this big bat as the bean passed my belly button. And to stride forward with my left leg and time the forward movement so that I hit the bean in mid-stride.
“Go through the bag”, he said, “hit toward the garage and don’t clobber your mother when she’s hanging the clothes.”
By the next summer, after bags of beans, I was clobbering not mothers but baseballs out of the park.
Pony League for 13 and 14 year olds followed along with more homers.
My father hadn’t just taught me how to hit a baseball.
He taught me that I could work my way to competence.
That lesson came in handy a decade later.
That 6th grade class
You need to understand something about that pack of 40 6th graders I inherited in 1972.
I was hired mid-year because this group had driven the previous teacher to early retirement.
Sister Nancy, the principal, was desperate.
I was available.
On the Thursday of my first week, Steve D. threw a chair at me.
On the Monday of my second week, the principle summoned the 6th grade parents to an evening meeting to talk about discipline.
I sat in the back of the classroom asking myself what I had gotten into.
Weeks went by with no improvement in classroom behavior.
Every night that first year I quit.
I was again stuck in right field.
Sister Mary Ellen’s advice
The 1973 school year brought a new principal, Sister Mary Ann.
She suggested I walk the halls during my free period and observe other teachers.
Raleigh, also in his second year, kept his door shut. Even through thick walls I could hear the bedlam and Raleigh’s bellowing. I knew from the noise Raleigh offered no answer to my problem.
Sister Mary Ellen Schulte’s math room was down the hall. Her door was always open.
One day I looked in and saw my 6th graders now one year older.
They didn’t look like a gang or pack but like students.
In the basement teacher’s lounge the next day, I asked Sister Ellen how she did it. She said:
No secret. You have to show them that you love them and then you have to firmly tell them what they can and cannot do. And by firmly I mean you must start out hard and then you can loosen up. You cannot go the other direction.
Growth vs. Fixed mindset
When I was a kid, I had what psychologist Carol Dweck labels the fixed mindset. I thought skill levels were set. My dad’s bean lesson taught me this was not so. That I could make myself into a good hitter. More important than hitting, my dad had taught me the growth mindset.
I didn’t become a good hitter overnight.
It took calloused hands.
The same was true with gaining control of my classrooms.
It took an attitude change. And a white lie.
I no longer taught Social Studies to my old 6th grade class. But whenever I saw one or more in the hallway I put on a smile. I pretended I was glad to see them.
I did the same with every new class.
Until my pretense became my reality.
Afterword
Decades later I would meet Sister Mary Ellen at Mount Carmel in Dubuque, Iowa, a retirement community for the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
I thanked her for the advice she had given me and said I repeated it to myself before the start of each class.
College students too needed love and firmness.
Even Life Long Learners.
Revised version of a story published on paulmuses.com on February 14, 2022.
