Teaching

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

MARLOES SANDS, Wales - Nearly a hundred soldiers on horseback sprinted across the beach here last fall, dodging arrows and catapulted fire balls. Despite many casualties, the charging "Snow White and the Huntsman" army was determined to storm the castle of the evil Queen Ravenna, who not only can suck the beauty out of young women but also transmogrify into a murder of crows. Assessing the battle from an all-terrain vehicle was Rupert Sanders, a commercial director making his first feature film.

School term papers may be going the way of the typewriters once used to write them. "It's so easy to cheat and steal from the Internet that I don't even assign papers anymore," said Bobbie Eisenstock, an assistant professor of journalism at Cal State Northridge. "I got tired of night after night checking for cheaters."

The class clown from Mr. Gadberry's high school art class has made good - and how. Rebecca Mieliwocki teaches seventh-grade English at Luther Burbank Middle School in Burbank - but not next year. Instead, she'll be on the road as the National Teacher of the Year. It took her a long time to get to the classroom - she once worked as a floral designer, doing the flowers for Elizabeth Taylor's private jet - and eventually to the White House, where a fellow teacher, President Obama, crowned her as a national teaching treasure.

Dick Ribble is the typical See & Hear customer. He took piano lessons as a boy but lost interest. He soon forgot how to read music, much less play it. Then, at age 65 and headed for retirement, he found himself yearning to revive the avocation he had neglected for 50 years. "As I gradually wind down my career, I hope to pursue more of the things I want to do and fewer of the things I have to do," said the business appraiser, who lives in Dana Point.

In her letter (April 7), Alexandra Marie Irwin states that she has decided not to enter academia because she does " . . . not wish to be forced into inheriting the traits of a faculty member who neglects to remember her vocation and sole responsibility--teaching." Irwin should be apprised of the fact that not all academic systems are plagued by teaching apathy as is the Ivy League institution where she is doing graduate work. The California State University, composed of 20 campuses, views teaching as its primary function.

A bride at 16, a cancer survivor before 30, Stacey Bess is no stranger to struggle. Small wonder her first teaching job was in a metal Quonset hut under a freeway viaduct, and her pupils were the homeless. "There are some things I can share with these people. That's why they don't reject me," she said. "I don't come here without life experience." Her classroom, called the School With No Name, has since been moved to a family shelter on Rio Grande Street. Bess moved with it, continuing her roles as teacher, friend and champion to the children she feels she can't leave.

Re "A Portrait of a Man who Infuses His Teaching With Art," Sept. 11: While funding for art programs at city schools has been in decline for years, teacher Jose Ramirez stood up! Ramirez became a passionate advocate for children, teaching some school subjects with his drawing and painting, even if it meant he had to use his own crayons. Ramirez obviously loves what he does. He has fired up the imaginations of his young pupils. Thank you, Mr. Ramirez. You're a professional in every sense of the word.

Light snow speckled the bare dirt courtyard outside teacher Cai Limei's fifth-grade classroom. Inside, an ancient radiator was barely warm to the touch. The classroom at the Gaoyakou Central Primary School, about an hour outside Beijing and not far from the Great Wall, was as austere as it was cold. Little more than a Chinese flag and a blackboard served for ornamentation.

Let me express my appreciation on behalf of the 1.7-million-member National Education Assn. for the excellent editorials (Sept. 3), "Thanks, Teach," and (Sept. 9), "Dealing With a Staggering Loss". The editorial on teaching is particularly uplifting as it recognizes the real frustrations of teaching--being undervalued and unappreciated--while making positive suggestions to elevate the profession to the heights it richly deserves. Your comment that improving teachers and teaching will require leadership from teachers themselves--as well as from local, state and national governments--is well taken.

Things would be easier if Academia Semillas del Pueblo didn't have such low test scores. Then, the focus could be on the El Sereno charter school's International Baccalaureate program. Or on its trilingual curriculum: English, Spanish and Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico. Or on the two co-founders dedicated to teaching culture that stretches back to before colonial Mexico. Instead, the focus shifted in recent weeks to the campus' test results. Compared to schools statewide that serve similar students and when matched against campuses in the neighborhood, results are low. Last year, the school's score on the state's Academic Performance Index dropped 92 points to 624; the state target is 800. Just 22% of students tested at grade level in math, 30% in English.

To anyone who does not make a living peddling leadership courses, it might seem unsurprising to be told the whole leadership industry is nonsense. Whoever took seriously all those professors cruising the corporate training circuit promising leadership magic? Of all the dubious subjects chosen by academics, leadership may well be the most dubious. Barbara Kellerman, the James MacGregor Burns lecturer in public leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is an academic leadership all-star.

KHARTOUM, Sudan - Sudan and its southern rival slid toward a ruinous war Thursday, with fighting continuing along their contested border and Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir threatening to teach the world's newest country "a final lesson by force. " A protracted war between Sudan and South Sudan, which separated peacefully in July, would almost certainly have a devastating civilian toll and seriously damage the oil sector on which both economies depend. But diplomacy has gotten nowhere, and civilians on both sides were urging their governments not to back down.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, 16 students ages 12 to 19 gathered around three fold-out tables in an Echo Park storefront on Alvarado Street. Shelves of film canisters, movie journals and how-to guides lined the bright red and teal walls of the 900-square-foot space. Three teachers and a guest speaker instructed the kids to use an array of wooden blocks, plastic figurines and other knickknacks to build miniature models of their ideal cities. The brainstorming session will eventually culminate in a 16-millimeter student-made film that focuses on urban planning.

There was a shy seventh-grade boy sitting at his desk in the far back of the classroom, head down, looking bored and uninterested. Then Loyola High kicker Conrad Ukropina walked through the door. Suddenly, it was as if darkness turned to light and the boy became energized. "Your hair is longer," he told Ukropina, remembering him from a visit in January. For 30 minutes, Ukropina and another Loyola football player, Eamon McOsker, gave an economics lesson to a small group of students at Hillsides, a Pasadena-based center that helps educate youths who were abused or need special attention.

In his mind's eye, Rob Adler Peckerar is sitting with his students on a doorstep in the bustling heart of Eastern Europe. They are in a town, perhaps in Lithuania, perhaps Ukraine. It is summer, and a warm breeze rustles the trees. The students listen, spellbound, to a story written on this very spot a century or more ago in a language that is foreign and yet strangely familiar. And before them, the pre-Holocaust world of Eastern European Jews flickers for a moment to life - rich, lusty, funny, sad and achingly poignant.

Re "Teachers dropping out too," April 27 Teachers like Maurice Stephenson, who come from high-paying jobs in the industry they wish to teach, underestimate how difficult teaching truly is. Teacher retention is low, but those who cannot adapt to the needs of unmotivated students aren't the ones we want to keep. When I applied to teach on an emergency credential nine years ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District was taking anything that moved with a college degree, educational training or not. By raising teacher salaries, and not by the 6% our union just agreed on but by about 20%, more young graduates from college would take teaching seriously as a profession.

Re "A Teacher Falls in Love, Over and Over," Voices, June 18: Thank you, Linda Kovaric, for your wonderful article. I too teach middle school history and I share all your feelings. I too laugh out loud every day -- adolescents are crazy, fun, outrageous and easy to amaze. (These are compliments, kids!) Of course, some are annoying and unreachable for a variety of reasons, but the majority keep me coming back every year. And I'm ahead of you, Linda -- I started in 1965! Ann Bourman Los Angeles

WASHINGTON - Tennessee is poised to adopt a law that would allow public schoolteachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction, according to educators and civil libertarians in the state. Passed by the state Legislature and awaiting Republican Gov. Bill Haslam's signature, the measure is likely to stoke growing concerns among science teachers around the country that teaching climate science is becoming the same kind of classroom and community flash point as evolution.

The University of California is a hotbed of leftist faculty and politically correct thinking where many students are receiving a weak and unbalanced education, according to a report by a conservative organization of professors and administrators. The study by the California Assn. of Scholars repeats objections conservatives have had for decades over what they see as an overwhelmingly liberal academia that stifles dissent. Especially in UC humanities departments, study of classics and rigorous analysis have been replaced by advocacy of a leftist agenda and teaching about the grievances of various minorities, the report says.