by Alene Tchekmedyian, Chelsea Sektnan, Robb Fulcher, and Mark McDermott
Few professions touch as many lives and are as time-honored yet financially undervalued as teaching.
Nearly anyone who has achieved some degree of success in life – monetary or otherwise – is able to look back and identify a teacher, or several teachers, who made a difference. In a time when many athletes, entertainers, and executives earn hundreds of millions of dollars during the course of their careers, the average elementary or high school teacher salary nationally hovers around $50,000 annually, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
The profession is under particular assault in California. Since the passing of Proposition 13 in 1978 – the unintended consequence of which was to tie the state’s educational funding to market vicissitudes – California has dropped from the top ranks among the United States in per pupil funding to 47th. Since the most recent economic downturn beginning in 2008, thousands of teachers have lost their jobs, and those who remain face larger class sizes and less surrounding support services to enable them to do their jobs. At the same time, the increasing reliance on data-driven standardized testing as a measure of educational effectiveness – and the threat of defunding for schools that lag in such measures – has ratcheted up the pressure on educators.
The three Beach Cities school districts have encountered somewhat less duress than many districts in the state but have each endured millions in cuts. In Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach, educational foundations have picked up much of the slack – the Manhattan Beach Educational Foundation raises over $4 million annually, while the smaller Hermosa Beach Education Foundation raises roughly $1 million a year – allowing each to stave off significant class size reductions. Even so, MBUSD has reduced its number of teachers from 325 to 300, cut its number of admistrators by 40 percent and classified support staff by 25 percent; in the Hermosa Beach School District, counselors, teaching aides, an assistant principal, health aids and the entire elementary music program have been axed. The Redondo Beach Unified School District has reduced its number of teachers from 437 to 407 and in some grade levels seen class sizes increased by as many as five students per class.
And yet testing scores in each district have been among the highest in the state. MBUSD ranked third in the state last year in the Academic Performance Index, HBSD has remained in the top ten percent for a decade, and RBUSD – the largest and most economically diverse school district — has dramatically increased its API scores to become the only South Bay district to have three schools earn the coveted “10-10” rankings (meaning the schools are in the top decile compared to all California schools overall as well as those with similar demographics). Meanwhile, teachers in each school district have essentially taken pay cuts, insofar as they have not received pay increases and increasingly pay more in their health care costs.
RBUSD Superintendent Steven Keller said that teachers are simply doing more with less.
“The reality is you have more students whose needs you have to meet during real-time classroom lessons or at home, with more work to correct and feedback to provide,” Keller said. “You have more students to develop strong and lasting relationships with, and you have fewer and fewer resources, based on the state cuts. So you have to do more, with fewer resources, with more kids. It’s a tough job to begin with, and the job continues to get tougher…
“Meanwhile our teachers are working for the betterment of our youth and for the betterment of tomorrow. In light of more kids, less money, and more scrutiny – [teachers] are the front line. They are significant in public education. Anybody who thinks otherwise is mistaken. Now more than ever, our teachers need an apple and then some.”
One of the ways teachers do more with less is through the use of technology in the classroom. MBUSD, for example has pioneered the use of iPad tablets as a way of creating interactive lessons in tune with the ways children best learn today.
“It is definitely a way to engage students if it’s done thoughtfully, and done with clear objective of how you want to educate students,” Manhattan Beach School District Superintendent Mike Matthews said. “Students are so adept at these technologies, they readily jump on the bandwagon…We keep hearing from teachers that they start with these technologies and the students take it beyond where anyone ever dreamed it could be used.”
Matthews said that technology is also at play in the real-time data now available to analyze individual student and class-by-class achievement. He suggested this is changing the model of education – one tied to the “No Child Left Behind” standards-based, data driven ethos.
“The old model, when I went to school – the teacher teaches a unit in a couple of weeks, the teacher gives a test, you see A’s, B’s, C’s, as well as a couple F’s in there, then you move on,” Matthews said. “The new model is to give the test, and you may determine half the class does not meet the standards, so you do not move on – you figure out how to help those half of the students to get to where they need to be so everyone is on the same page. That’s the new model.”
“That is where technology can help us, not only in measuring where students are, but also in developing multiple ways in re-teaching [a subject] so students can get it before they move on.”
Keller said that ultimately, however, the key to providing good education always comes down to a fundamental element: finding good teachers.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same – in light of all the change, it still comes down to hiring the best people to put in front of our children, people who care about each and every kid,” Keller said. “The textbook may be moved from a hardback to a tablet or some sort of device, but the integrity and teacher’s ability to engage students is no different than it was when I taught over 20 years ago. The tools may be a little different, but that ethic of care hasn’t changed at all.”
Keller said RBUSD sometimes receives 1,000 applicants for a single teaching position, and stressed that simply having teaching credentials is not enough.
“That is not a problem,” he said. “The more difficult task is finding a teacher who truly likes – really likes – kids,” he said. “And who is willing to do whatever it takes to help them, each and every one of them – not just the ones who wake up excited to come to school, but the one who comes tired, or who wakes late perhaps because they don’t have a parent at home to encourage them.”
Matthews agreed that effective teaching, regardless of the means to achieve it, is about student engagement.
“I think that at the heart of a great teacher is that he or she is someone who finds a way to engage the students,” he said. “There are so many ways to do that. We have teachers who give captivating lectures – I know some teachers at the high school, for example, who students just love being in the classroom with because they are so utterly engaged when they lecture…We have teachers who use technology to engage students as well. I believe it is readily obvious how engaged the students are, and how much they learn because of that.”
Over the next several months, the Easy Reader will observe teachers, administrators, and support staff, providing glimpses inside the schools and classrooms of the Beach Cities and into what makes great teachers and great education.
“There are teachers, and then there are great teachers,” Keller said. “The day in the life of a great teacher is dawn til dusk. It’s total commitment. It’s preparing for the next day, before school with colleagues, or after school. It’s spending your own money flying to Target or Walmart at 8 p.m. to procure material for the next day you know you’ll need – and quite frankly, spending money you could spend on your own family that you are spending on your students. It’s picking up the tab for lunch for a kid you know doesn’t have lunch money, or spending extra time to help a kid because you know the parent isn’t going to be there. It’s your time and your dime, and in this case it isn’t the dime you are getting but the dime you are spending. We will never pay great teachers enough, never. And I mean that as sincerely as I can say it.”
Profile: Wayne Knutson
Wayne Knutson strolled through the seven rows of his second-floor, U.S. history classroom at Mira Costa High School one Monday afternoon, wearing a sea blue shirt and bright yellow tie. Flags representing the United Nations and the United States draped from the ceiling, above a world map sitting on an easel.
“Before this, the Germans had won every single battle – they had kicked the crap out of the French and had overrun almost all of Europe,” he said, discussing World War II to Costa juniors. “Finally, the allies get a win. Why does it matter?”
A wavy-haired student shyly lifted her hand. “It might show Germany it’s not going to be that easy?” she asked gingerly.
He pointed at her, approvingly. “It says, ‘Hey Germany, you can be beat,’” he bellowed, in front of nearly 30 students, with books and binders stacked on their desks.
At 9:30 p.m. the night before, Knutson arrived at his Hermosa Beach home, after spending the weekend with 40 students at the Model United Nations conference at University of California, Berkeley. Six of them returned with gavels, the highest award an individual could win at a conference.
Spray-painted in black on the walls of Knutson’s classroom – in which he teaches history, MUN and economics – are dozens of gavels. Each is accompanied by a student’s name and a date – “Laura Vaughn 2011,” “Elika Mazhar 2011,” and “Gabi Gold 2010,” to name a few.
That week, the Model United Nations co-adviser planned to put in an application for next fall’s Paris Model United Nations conference.
Even after a jam-packed weekend, Knutson was still delighted to return to the classroom Monday morning.
The importance of that, he learned from his father, an 83-year-old carpenter who retired just two years ago. “He said there was never a Monday morning where he didn’t want to go to work,” Knutson said. “He loved being a carpenter. That’s a pretty rare statement. I still love coming to work.”
It wasn’t always that way for the nine-year teacher. “I’ve had 157 different jobs,” he said. “I did voiceovers for commercials, I called bingo, I was a short order cook, I delivered furniture – I had every job you could possibly imagine.”
He grew up in the rural town of Columbia Falls, Montana, where his entire school district had around the same number of students as Mira Costa alone. At 10 years old, he’d help his dad with carpentry. “That’s hard physical labor,” he said. “(Being a teacher) is more hours, and you are more tired at the end of the week than I was building homes when I was a kid.”
His last job before becoming a teacher at a printing company bored him to tears. “I was making excellent money, far better than I ever made as a teacher, but it’s not exactly the most intellectually stimulating,” he said. So, he began a masters program in history at California State University, Long Beach; he’d earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. His teaching credential in social studies allows him to teach a variety of subjects, including psychology, sociology and geography.
A diverse career has given Knutson perspective in the classroom. “The more interesting you are, more interesting your teaching is,” he said. “I could’ve no more taught high school when I was 24 years old, than build a rocket and fly to the moon.”
It’s still a challenge for him to maintain his energy and vitality throughout the day. “You have to be interested and contacting the kids, or they will turn off instantly. You’ve got to be every bit as passionate at two o’clock in the afternoon as you are at eight in the morning.”
For Knutson, his passion for history keeps him pumping through his 60-hour work weeks. Not only does he like the material, he prides himself on knowing it well. “If you don’t know the material, I don’t care how good your technique is, you’re not going to be that good,” he said. “That’s kind of what powers me. I know my material.”
Sometimes, it’s hard for Knutson to gauge his impact. He recalled a student from several years ago who came in to his office during his senior year. “He said, ‘I wanted to tell you, I enjoyed your class so much, I’m going to major in history;’ which is lovely, it’s a lovely compliment, but I said, ‘You know, I think you missed half of the Fridays in my class.’” The student responded, “Oh, but I skipped your class way less than everybody else’s,” Knutson recalled, with a laugh.
After spring break this year, his economics students will be assigned business plans for different retail stores – local business owners will later critique the proposals. He’ll also assign a stock market competition where students will simulate buying and selling stocks.
Arguably the most traumatic assignment of the year is Knutson’s formal term paper on a topic of the students’ choosing – whether how history influenced women’s fashion in the 1920s, or how rock and roll music reflects changing social conditions in the 1960s, he said. The challenge for students is integrating information from books, websites, class comments and newspaper articles into a coherent, thoughtful paper. “It’s hard, it’s the highest order of thinking,” he said. “When they get to college, it’ll make all the difference.”
Knutson focuses his curriculum on preparing his students for college. “I’m never going to be good at, ‘Let’s do a mobile of the Korean War.’” But, he concedes, “I never made a poster in college, ever.”
Knutson appreciates the caliber of his colleagues at Mira Costa – a lawyer teaches an introduction to law class, and one economics teacher has a master’s degree in the subject, he said. “There’s this sort of assumption that public schools are just failures in every way, and that’s just nonsense,” he said. “I will put our social studies department up against any high school in America.”
On his father’s coffee table sits a 1954 issue of Reader’s Digest, he recalled. One of the lead stories was titled, “What’s wrong with America’s public schools.” “According to that, America’s public schools have been broken since 1954,” he said, with a laugh. “American schools have been terrible forever and yet somehow we manage to produce these really excellent students who go on to win Nobel Prizes.”
The teaching profession, however, faces challenges in the years ahead, he said. Of the 1,000 students he’s taught in his nine years, he estimated that only two have pursued a teaching career. “What undergrad in their right mind is going to go into teaching? There are no jobs,” he said.
Knutson was hired nearly a decade ago with 22 others, and of them, about three remain on campus, he said. “That’s the kind of attrition rate you would expect at a Walmart warehouse, not at an institute of learning. That’s shocking.”
He attributes the potential lack of interest in the profession to the economics. “One of the first things I teach my kids in economics is: anything you make harder or more expensive, you get less of,” he said.
And without good teachers, schools will be in shambles. “Anybody who tells you the most important piece of a successful program is anything other than the teacher is lying to you,” he said. “I can give you nothing but a chalkboard and stub of chalk and if you’ve got it together, those kids will learn… And it’s easy to forget that.”
[scrollGallery id = 346]Profile: Tim Ammentorp
Tim Ammentorp doesn’t have much time to read. Between grading papers, teaching, coaching and spending time with his family since his first day teaching at Redondo Union High School about 30 years ago, his hours have been completely packed.
As an English teacher, both students and faculty at RUHS think he is different. To Ammentorp, teaching isn’t about grades or tests. The reason he teaches is to “teach joy and ideas, and everyday make [the students] think about stuff beyond the classroom,” said Ammentorp. “That’s the joy of the English teacher.”
When he assigns a book he doesn’t expect the kids to simply read the assigned chapters; he helps and encourages them to truly understand the meaning of the words.
“It’s not like teaching the quadratic formula,” said Ammentorp. “I talk about ideas, like how a lonely character builds a fantasy world that will one day get punctured — that’s good especially if there’s a lonely student in the room.”
His English class is set up like a stage, with three sides filled with desks and the middle empty and ready for his exuberant daily lessons.
“He has this ability to make literature meaningful to students,” said Principal Nicole Wesley. “He fosters the idea that good literature teaches us how to be better to one another, even how to better understand ourselves. Most importantly, he does this with humor and a voice that is rich with emotion and drama. He pulls students in to the atmosphere of the work and compels them to want to hear more. This is such a rare talent to have.”
He wears a white beard. A red marker spells out the weekly assignments in a corner of the classroom’s board. However, questions not usually asked dot the white emptiness, filling it with much more than marker.
The C.S Lewis quote, “Very often the only way to get a quality (in reality) is to start behaving if you had it already,” is written in black and ready for a lengthy class discussion.
“Mr. Ammentorp is less concerned with drilling us with homework than with making sure we understand the piece of literature we study,” said RUHS student Brianna Egan. “I think it makes for a more laid-back class atmosphere because we spend more time asking questions or exploring aspects of the works than grading busy-work or being quizzed on vocabulary or grammar.”
His favorite book to teach is Ken Kesey’s novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“Students like it, which makes it more fun,” said Ammentorp during an interview. “One of the main themes, which is important in high school, is to be who you are and accept it.”
He also likes to assign it to his high school students because it teaches them that they have to be able to laugh at themselves.
“When you can’t do that, life is really hard,” Ammentorp said.
Not only does he teach English and AP Literature, he is also an AVID teacher and the assistant football coach.
“I grew up playing sports, I had two older brothers and we were heavily involved in them,” he said.
His father, also a teacher and a coach, is role model for how he wanted to live his life.
“Growing up we had a very stable, comfortable lifestyle,” said Ammentorp. “I loved life at home. [My father] lived a life that was fun – so why not pursue it!”
The Ammentorp name carries a legacy at RUHS. All three of his sons attended the school and were all-league football players. His wife Sandy was also involved in education. At RUHS she was a counselor, coach and teacher and is now the principal at First Lutheran School in Torrance.
“He is a dedicated coach both in and out of the classroom. He is always behind the scenes working hard, loyally committed to the various programs in which he is involved,” said Wesley. “Tim is fueled by his passion for teaching and coaching, his positive attitude, and the joy of knowing he is making a difference in students’ lives.”
For 30 years, Ammentorp has coached in almost every position available. He takes coaching just as seriously as teaching, and has had success both on the field and in the classroom.
“I enjoy equally teaching my English classes and working with the athletes,” said Ammentorp. “I like developing the skills of both students and athletes, and I particularly like the competitive aspect of sports.”
Ammentorp began his career as a baseball coach at U.C. Irvine but ended up yearning to teach in a classroom setting so much that he quit his job and ended up working at RUHS.
“Everybody at RUHS has great values and they really care about the kids,” said Ammentorp. “There are some really cool people who work here.”
Between competition on the field and questions on the board, Ammentorp thrives on getting his students to improve.
“It’s all about teaching good values and how to act,” Ammentorp said. “It’s a process — I’m always trying to get better.”
He has high expectations for both his students and athletes.
“I can tell that Mr. Ammentorp enjoys teaching,” said Egan. “He knows when to make fun of a student, and also when to encourage them. He also loves dramatizing a scene, like when he had a few students act out when Meursault shot the Arab in “The Stranger”, complete with a plastic pistol he pulled out of his pocket — or when he grew red in the face from reciting a Hamlet soliloquy from memory… He wants so much for us to know the meaning and implications behind works — and not just their bare facts.”
[scrollGallery id = 345]Profile: Christine Duclos
It’s Monday afternoon, right after lunch, and about 30 fifth graders are anything but sluggish inside Christine Duclos’ science lab at Hermosa Valley School.
They’re split up into pairs, peering through microscopes at honeybee wings, sliding small objects down a moveable ramp, graphing their own heartbeats at a computer monitor, and flopping down onto the floor to measure water condensation in a beaker.
The air is filled with the buzz of discovery as the kids lay their hands directly on the tools of the scientific method, take measurements and make mathematical computations, and jot results into workbooks.
The popular teacher, who leads the lab for third, fourth and fifth graders and also teaches sixth grade journalism, says the hands-on style of education inspires students, and helps them experience learning as fun and exciting.
“I can engage them in real time,” she said. “It will grab kids in a way it’s hard to do in a regular classroom because this is so engaging, and they get a chance to feel really productive.”
The tactile, visual, kinetic aspects of the lab seem to satisfy the energies of boys who might fidget during a static lesson with a book at a desk.
“Both boys and girls succeed here,” Duclos said.
As the kids measure and chart everything from sound waves to heartbeats, condensation of water and the velocity of moving objects, they are figuring out how to solve problems and study the world around them, and getting a handle on the scientific method and the nature of intellectual inquiry.
“We see that science is always changing, and it’s important to ask good questions,” Duclos said. “That’s what scientists do.”
Sean Keegan and Sofia Beck used microscopes to examine pollen grains, while Brigitte Ahrens and Nick Broussinos sprawled on the floor, using a green-sand hourglass and a water beaker to study how air temperature affects water condensation.
“I like science because the experiments are interesting,” said Brigitte, whose cheek nearly rested on the floor as she closely eyeballed the beaker and the hourglass.
“It’s fun,” Nick agreed.
He said he especially likes the physical sciences section of the lab with its “funny little tools,” like a desktop ramp that inclines to precise angles to measure the velocity of sliding objects.
The ramp was currently in use by Brandon Kelly, who was sporting a cast on his left arm painted green for St. Patrick’s Day, and partner Chase Goodlin. They were using the ramp to measure friction, by sliding blocks of wood, rubber and PVC downward at various angles.
“That’s 25 degrees, dude,” said Kelly, passing along a datum to his classmate.
Bryna Ross walked out the door with a paper airplane, and sailed it across a small open space. She would stand in the same spot and give the craft similar tosses, observing the differences in flight after placing stabilizing putty on the nose, and folding flaps into the wings.
Allie Smythe and A.J. Slater took turns placing a small clip on their index fingers and watching their heartbeats-per-second graphed out on the screen in front of them, on a bouncing electrocardiogram line like people see in a hospital. The two already had graphed their pulses another way, by placing their fingers to their necks and counting the beats out loud.
They described a sort of pleasurable eeriness in the claustrophobia of being clamped by the finger.
“It feels like you’re in a cave, and it gets smaller and smaller,” A.J. said.
While A.J. was clamped in, Nick came over and urged him to slow his pulse, until Allie sent him away, saying he was sending A.J.’s pulse spiking instead. A.J. reported a heart rate that speeded from 84 to 96 beats a minute during the measurement.
Brandon Tiradeau was playing a geography game. He clapped on a pair of headphones and faced a large globe, answering multiple-choice questions by pressing numbers on the globe’s base. He said he gets most of them right.
“We have these toys we get to use in our free time,” he said.
Alan Rasmussen, who worked with Duclos as district superintendent in the ‘90s and is doing so again as an interim superintendent, described her as a valuable educational asset.
“She really offers a dynamic learning experience,” Rasmussen said.
Duclos was born in San Diego, a daughter of a professor of biology and zoology at San Diego State University, who went on to work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, studying the Marianas Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans, with Jacques Cousteau.
Duclos has a sister and brother-in-law who are teachers as well, and her husband Jeff, a Hermosa Beach city councilman, teaches public relations at California State University, Northridge and the UCLA Extension.
When Duclos joined the Hermosa school district about 25 years ago, she ran a special reading enrichment program called the Learning Center at the second-through-eighth grade Valley school, and the kindergarten-through-second grade Hermosa View School. But the program was scrapped when Sacramento started “leaking money” and the school district could no longer afford it, and unexpected enrollment squeezed the Hermosa schools for space.
“In those days we had money,” she said. “We’ll never get to do anything like that again.”
Even as the Learning Center was going by the wayside, the school district serendipitously secured the science lab, with its hardware and software, just before the money ran out for that kind of thing in California classrooms.
District Technology Director Teri Tsosie got the lab on the cheap from a British company that agreed to use Hermosa as a demonstration site, where educators from other school districts could come to see the lab in action.
“Then the money ran out, and now nobody comes to see it,” Duclos said.
The lab’s British roots can be heard in a computerized voice that speaks to kids with an accent from across the pond.
Despite the way Tsosie was able to snag the science lab for Valley School, district funding for the lab actually ran out several years ago. But parents and other community members have kept the program afloat, using the annual Hearts of Hermosa dinner dance and other fundraisers to pay for the lab, and to cover as much as 10 percent of the district’s operating budget.
“The lab is always in jeopardy every year,” Duclos said.
“I can’t even order materials that I need, a lot of the time,” she said.
In an era of frequent standardized testing and retesting at the public schools, teachers say they are often forced to spend much of their time simply covering test material. But the lab allows Duclos to focus on engaging the students’ curiosity, and inspiring in them a love of learning.
“We do assessments in here,” she said, “but it’s to help them learn. The grade here is an effort grade. I want full effort.”
As the lab period ends, she leads the kids in a rhythmic clapping that gradually calls them back from their projects. Allie and A.J. begin to leave the heart monitor station looking disappointed, and Duclos lets them continue graphing until they finish recording their results.
The period seemed to fly by.
“It’s so fun to see the kids when they are really happy learning,” Duclos said. “It’s great to see them with smiles on their faces.” ER
