Author: Phyllis Swartz

When I was a kid, people loved jokes about New Math. Lots of people bought Tom Lehrer’s latest album with a song named New Math.

“You’ve got thirteen and you take away seven,” he sang, “and that leaves five . . . well, six actually, but the idea is the important thing.”

Even Charles Schultz cracked on New Math in his Peanuts comic strips.

“How can you do New Math problems with an old math mind?” Charlie Brown wails.

Sally agrees. “Sets . . . One-to-one matching . . . Sets of one . . . Renaming two . . . Subsets . . . Joining sets . . . All I want to know, is how much is two and two?”

I laughed at the jokes, but I liked New Math. It showed me how numbers fit together in ways that are precise and beautiful

New Math was invented because of Sputnik. Our American brains had gotten lazy, teachers told us, because we’d been given too many answers. But no more. Now we had to figure problems out on our own like the Russian kids. The Russians didn’t mollycoddle their kids. That’s why they were smart enough to launch the first artificial satellite into space. America needed to step it up. And this was why the president started NASA and the Space Race and New Math.

Like Lehrer and Schultz, some of the teachers didn’t like this new-fangled math, especially Mrs. Brandt. Sometimes she’d go on a rant. Just tell a kid that eight times seven is fifty-six, she’d say. No need to reinvent the wheel. And what do bases and sets have to do with the real world? If someone needs to figure out how much carpeting is needed for a room, they sure don’t need to know how to count in Base 5. Real arithmetic—that’s what kids need.

But sometimes I wondered. Maybe Mrs. Brandt said these words because she didn’t really understand New Math. She’d explain a lesson, but when we had questions or got stuck doing problems at the board, she’d act confused and start telling us it was our job to figure it out, not hers.

I’d look at Mrs. Brandt, with her white hair and her forehead knotted up with thinking, and I’d remember Charlie Brown wailing about doing New Math with an old brain.

This made me sorry for Mrs. Brandt, but not sorry enough to stop liking New Math.

He never knew I saw what he did.

It was long after the school day ended. The winter sky was already darkening, and the teacher parking lot was empty, except for my car. I was working late.

From my desk, I saw the superintendent carrying a stack of paper from the middle school across the parking lot toward his office in the administration building. These were pre-computer days when everything in education—teacher evaluations, lesson plans, board minutes, long-term planning—all this and more generated mounds of paper.

The surfaces in Dr. Froning’s office might have been lined by stacks of paper, but he hated litter. He bought into the Keep America Beautiful campaign. He installed trash bins around school buildings. And he sent a clear message across the district: Be part of the solution, not the pollution.

Just as he passed the bus garage, a gust of wind blew a piece of crumpled paper across his path. It caught at the edge of a curb.

Dr. Froning stopped and stared at the paper. He took three more steps toward his office and stopped again. He turned back. Balancing the stack of paper he already carried, he bent to pick up the litter. He carried it to a trash bin and tossed it in.

I had watched Dr. Froning stick to his principles as he wrote policy and led meetings and addressed teachers in school-opening convocations. Decades later, I remember few of these public words. But I do remember this private act of integrity. And I recognize its call to me as a young teacher—to take the high road, even when no one watches.

In many ways, we become what others teach us at odd moments, when they don’t know they’re teaching. We’re shaped by bits of wisdom people drop along the way.

And little do we know that while we watch, others are watching us.

“Don’t shout down the stairs,” I ‘d tell my kids when they were young. “Come and find me.”

But until I understood about upstairs and downstairs brains, this is how I interacted with my students. In my teaching, I’d stay upstairs in the thinking brain and call them to come up to learn.

The trouble was, they couldn’t always get there.

In kids and teenagers, the downstairs brain, which houses the limbic system, is fully built and functioning. It keeps them breathing and blinking and feeling alive—full of joy and laughter and frustration and anger. And ready with quick impulse to show what they feel.

The upstairs thinking brain, on the other hand, is unfinished, still under construction until well into the twenties. No wonder many young people struggle to plan and prioritize. No wonder they make decisions without rationale.  

A stairway, made of a network of neurons and synapses, connects the two brains. But because the upper brain is not fully functioning, the lower brain flounders.

“Think!” the partially-constructed upstairs brain advises. But the message isn’t clear enough or strong enough. And the lower limbic system doesn’t get the message.

Especially when the stairway is cluttered, as it often is when a kid is stressed. The hormones released during fight and flight episodes block messages from the upper brain to the lower brain, preventing logic from modulating emotion.

Kids don’t need adults shouting down from on high, telling them to think. They need someone to clear the stairs by giving them simple strategies for regulating—counting backward from ten, putting feelings to words, and walking off angsty energy.

The more kids use the neurons and synapses that connect the thinking and feeling brains, the more passable the stairway becomes and the better the two brains can collaborate.

Last week, my husband lost his little sister. Though they didn’t share genes, she called him Brother. Afterall, she lived in the Swartz home for almost four decades, having arrived when she was six years old. She came out of the Lapeer State Home, first known as the Michigan Home for the Feeble-Minded.

At the funeral, the word feeble did not come to mind. Dorell created her own definition of Down syndrome. Not a victim, she saw herself as the maker of her fate, always looking for ways to revamp reality until it corresponded to her dreams of how things should be. 

And so she took a developmental education course at a community college. She worked on the hospitality team at Taco Bell, greeting customers and wiping tables. Wanting to be a mother, she adopted a child from Compassion International. And she celebrated her own heritage, decorating her room with Cherokee-style blankets and pillows and wall hangings.

At the first Swartz reunion after our two children were married, Dorell asked my husband to call our family together.

“Got something to tell the new ones,” she said.

As Dorell directed, we sat in chairs facing her.

“You need to know,” she told our new children-in-law, “that I’m the aunt and you’re the niece and nephew. That I am in the generation above you, and you’re below me. And that you should treat me with respect.”

They agreed. And to record the promise, she brought out a paper for them to sign.”

Dorell came to the Swartz home in the early seventies when the Department of Mental Health began downsizing state institutions like the Lapeer State Home, which at its height housed over 4000 residents, making it one of the largest such facilities in the world.

It was Dorell’s fortune to move from this segregated asylum into the Swartz home.

But it was also the fortune of the Swartzes, as anyone could tell by the tributes at her funeral.

And if she had heard what we said, she’d have nodded her head, accepting the truth that she showed us all how to take courage in hand and think big and reach far.

A few summers ago, I visited the fighting swamp. When I closed my eyes, I could feel, once again, the charge in the air just before a fight. I could hear it: fists thudding, fighters grunting, and bystanders cheering.

“We’ll take this to the swamp,” Frank would say to Jerry after sharp words at school.

And Jerry had to show up. Otherwise, kids would call him a chicken all week.

The fighting swamp was five blocks from school, on the corner of Webber and Columbine—far enough to keep the teachers away, even though the muck and snakes and poison sumac should have been enough. Word of the fight always spread, and dozens of kids would ring the swamp, waiting for the fight.

Just before the first punch, the fighters would circle each other, fists bunched, jaws clenched, chins up.

“Come on. Give me a punch. Throw me one!” they’d taunt each other.

And finally someone would. It was during this circling phase that I once stepped into the middle. And it’s because Frank was taunting Tommy.

Tommy was my friend. He carried my books, and wrote nice notes, and back in third grade, offered me a plastic ring he won from a toy slot machine. I didn’t take it. Not because I didn’t like Tommy. I just wasn’t ready to get serious in third grade.

Fighting Frank in the swamp was the last thing Tommy wanted to do. And just as Frank bunched up his fists, something came over me. I stepped in between Frank and Tommy.

“This is stupid,” I said to Frank. “You only fight if you aren’t brave enough or smart enough to settle it some other way.”

There I stood. I was a little Mennonite girl with long braids, a modest skirt, thick dark glasses, and associated with God. I was quite certain I wouldn’t get hit.

The swamp grew silent. Tommy’s fists went down. So did Frank’s. Nobody, including me, knew quite what to do next. So we all went home.

In the sixty years since that day in the swamp, many of my peacemaking efforts have failed.

But that day, my friend Tommy didn’t get punched.

Our grandsons knew exactly where they were going. We followed them, down the aisle of the sanctuary to the pew that seemed to be theirs.

My husband broke protocol and leaned over me to whisper to them.

“Cows know where to go for their milking,”

And though our grandsons have never worked in a dairy barn, they knew what he meant.

We talked about this later at lunch. It’s not just at church that people seem to own their seats. On the school bus, in the lunchroom, and in classrooms, people claim places, even if they aren’t officially assigned.

Most students care where they sit. And they have a plethora of reasons. They want front seats to focus, back seats to see the whole room, middle seats to be among their friends, along-the-wall seats to feel safe.

No matter the desired vantage point, people like to establish personal territory in shared spaces. Usually, others tacitly assent. But when this unspoken rule is broken, I’ve seen students nearly come to blows.

Not all students have altruistic motives for seating choices. Some want to sleep or chat or daydream. But I’ve found that usually students are glad to be guided to the place where they learn best.

Some of my students stood at a counter in the back of the class, others pushed a desk up to mine. After some false tries, one of my seventh-grade students found his place under my podium. Closed in by three sides, he churned out excellent work, raising his letter grade by two in one marking period.

Cows in my grandfather’s milking barn knew their stanchions to be good places. There they found chopped grain in their troughs, water when their noses pushed a lever in their bowls, and relief from the heavy bags of milk they carried. In their stanchions, they could let go and breathe easy. 

And this is how students settle in when they find ideal spots for learning.

I once learned some rules that I now break with relish. Don’t mark in books or read while you eat. Don’t take them to beaches or into the bath. Don’t dog-ear corners or crack open spines or lay books face down on the bedside stand. A respect for books—this was the aim of the well-meaning teachers and book-saving librarians who taught me these rules.

It’s good these rule makers haven’t come to my study, where well-thumbed books fill the shelves.

They’d find volumes with food stains and water marks. Many have bent pages and worn-down covers. And a few have cracked spines and can now open wide.

And if they leafed through the chapters, they’d be able to tell that I read with a pencil—drawing arrows to link concepts, asterisks by sentences I like, exclamation points when I’m surprised, and question marks when I disagree. When I find scenes or points particularly striking, I draw vertical lines

In the margins I note striking themes and linguistic tools—irony, symbolism, juxtaposition, tone. And on front and back flyleaves, I copy favorite quotes.

Such markings alter the nature of reading, transforming it into dialogue. And months later when I pick up a book, I remember—the author’s thoughts, but also my own.

These are my books, of course, not yours, not the library’s. I love to borrow. But when I do, I sometimes stop reading a few chapters in. I return the book and buy my own copy. And when it arrives, I start over again in dialogue form.

Marking a book, I’ve come to see, is not mutilation. It’s a sign of regard. I’m paying attention, considering, engaging, which is, of course, what teachers and librarians want.

My dad quit school after seventh grade. Not that he wanted to, but his church thought seven grades was enough, that more education might take him away from the simple life and make him worldly. My dad was glad enough to be out of school that first summer. He wanted to run barefoot on the farm.

But this feeling changed one morning in early September as he plowed the field across the knob, getting ready to plant winter wheat. Plodding in the furrow behind Bob and Fern, the draft horses, he noticed bonnets and straw hats bobbling along the country road.

It’s the first day of school, he thought, and I won’t go to school ever again.

He wished in secret that someone would make the Amish Mennonites obey the law about going to school until age sixteen. But he knew he wouldn’t complain. This was the way of his people. He would learn at home like his father who read the Bible, and magazines like Newsweek, Farm Journal, and the Herold der Wahrheit. He would read his father’s books of poetry and theology and history.

Having settled this, he said, “Giddup!” to the horses. He gripped the plow handles, and field length by field length, row by row, he turned the fresh earth.

***

I sometimes think about that barefoot boy when I walk into my dad’s study for our daily visit. He’s no longer barefoot, no longer plowing fields. But he’s still holding to the contract he made with himself—to keep learning

He read the books in his boyhood home. And later, after I was born and the church opened the doors, he went back to school. Not hanging on his walls, but somewhere in his files are two diplomas—one for a bachelor’s degree, the other for a master’s.

Now at ninety-one, he still spends most of the day in his book-filled study.

“Guess what I’ve discovered,” he often says to me when I walk in.

That’s my dad.

***

You can learn more about my dad in my memoir, Yoder School.

Some of the best teachers I’ve known had tough first years.

Take a fresh-from-college guy we’ll call George. I helped to interview George, and I could tell he cared, genuinely cared about students. He meant all the right things he said in the interview—that he once had a teacher who changed the direction of his life and that he wanted to make this sort of difference for students he taught. He was a hard worker, he told us, wouldn’t mind staying up late to critique student writing. And he believed in taking one for the team of teachers he hoped to join.

So we recommended George. But for much of the year he wished we hadn’t.

The workload overwhelmed him. He couldn’t keep up with the ever-growing stacks of papers to be graded. He came to school on Monday mornings, exhausted by late Sunday-night lesson planning, and for every office form he completed, two more appeared.

Still, he might have been able to handle the work if he could have managed the kids. George made the classic first-year teacher mistake. Determined not to be a teacher with a brittle voice and snapping eyes, he came bearing gifts. And when constant chatter and paper wads and general unruliness turned him from a Santa Claus to a Scrooge, students revolted.

But five years later, George was still teaching. In fact, the principal was sending new teachers to his classroom to see how it’s done. And when those newbies watched George teach, they saw not only what worked. They also saw what George had learned from what hadn’t work. In education we call this reflective practice.

The longer I taught and watched others teach, the more I came to believe that the main difference between good teachers and bad teachers is that good teachers know when they’re bad. Then they do something about it.