| OCR Text |
Show San Juan County Schools Reta Bartell My first experience with one-room schools came in the fall of 1956 when I became elementary supervisor in San Juan School District. I brought to the job thirteen years of teaching experience, so I had a fairly good understanding of an elementary school curriculum. Besides being the largest school district in the state, San Juan was one of the poorest. For years a good part of the money spent on education in the district came from the State Equalization Fund. But none of this prepared me for the eleven one-room schools I was given to supervise, in addition to the larger schools at Monticello and Blanding. These eleven schools were scattered all over the district: La Sal and La Sal Creek in the far north; West Summit; East Summit; Cedar Point and Eastland between Monticello and the Colorado State line to the east; Aneth to the far south across the San Juan River at Montezuma Creek; Bluff and Mexican Hat in the southwest; and Fry Canyon and Hide Out, over fifty miles west of Blanding. The typical one-room school was a small, lonely building, off by itself, way out in the "sticks" and badly in need of paint. Inside were a dozen desks of different sizes, a teacher's desk, and several shelves attached to the wall. On the shelves stood a teacher's roll book and an assortment of basic reading, arithmetic, spelling, and language texts, most of them outdated and worn. One shelf held expendable supplies - notebooks, ruled paper, pencils, crayons, and a three-inch stack of colored construction paper. A stand by the door held a grey enamel wash dish and a galvanized bucket for drinking water. In the bucket was a battered dipper. Beside the big pot-bellied stove stood a coal or wood bucket, empty. 329 San Juan County It was the teacher's job to build her own fire after taking out the ashes. This was done early enough to thaw out the room and the drinking water before the children arrived. She swept her own floor and did the housekeeping chores. Her "homework" consisted of scheduling the necessary basic subjects to be taught to about eleven children in eight grades each day. Enrollment could fluctuate from seven to twenty-six students. She had attendance and progress records to keep. She had no breaks in the day. Lunch was brought from home and eaten at school. She was responsible for playground duty at recess every morning and afternoon, so she played ball and pop-the-whip with the kids. She kept the outdoor privy disinfected with powdered lime. She furnished Kleenex for running noses and Band-Aids for skinned knees. I saw some of the best education take place in our one-room schools. Dedicated teachers like Joan Saunders, Mamie Massatto, and Hazel Sobers who, besides teaching children to read, write, and do arithmetic, taught them to live cooperatively together, to respect one another, to be honest, to laugh and have fun, and to assume some responsibility for their own learning. I also saw some of the worst teaching. I always moved a little chair beside a child who was reading and had him read to me. One day the child read to the bottom of the page. Ending in the middle of a sentence, he slapped the book shut and put it in his desk. I asked, "Aren't you going to finish the story?" He said, "Teacher said to read two pages and that's two pages." I asked, "But don't you want to know how the story ends? What happens?" His look told me enough. Needless to say, I had a conference with the teacher after school, and reading in that classroom changed. That is what I was there for, to help teachers improve their teaching skills. I understood how the teacher was pressed for time. A blanket reading assignment of two pages may make sense if it is the last two pages of a story and you want a child to have the satisfaction of finding out, by himself, how the story ends, so he can tell you. But not odierwise. . . . 330 County Schools School children playing softball in Bluff, 1983. Photograph by G. B. Peterson, © 1983- 331 San Juan County I thoroughly enjoyed my visits to the one-room schools. My car was always loaded with books and supplies that were desperately needed. The boxes of library books which I circulated from Monticello Elementary School Library assured my welcome. This is contrasted with what took place in the district after the uranium and oil booms when, within just a few years, the assessed valuation of San Juan County shot up from 3 million to 153 million dollars. We became known as the "Rags to Riches School System." As money became available, an extensive building program extended over the whole district. New, modern schools demanded by increased enrollment were built at La Sal, Monticello, Blanding, Bluff, Montezuma Creek, and Mexican Hat. Large, spacious classrooms with wall-to-wall carpeting were equipped with flexible furniture that could be moved by the students themselves. Shelves and cupboards held basic and supplementary instructional material, learning aides, flash cards, basic texts, workbooks, reading laboratories, programmed reading workbooks, filmstrips and projectors, picture files, puzzles, math and phonic games, supplementary readers, and a wealth of library books. There were sinks with running hot and cold water, art easels, art supplies, and all kinds of physical fitness equipment. Teachers were encouraged to innovate. Some buildings had open classrooms, large spaces that could be converted into several small areas by pulling partitions out of the walls. New programs such as team-teaching and flexible scheduling were tried. The affluence brought about consolidation of schools in the county. Rural children were bused to the larger centers, and the day of the one-room school came to an end. But 1 learned that "things" do not make a child learn. The teacher is still the key person in the classroom. In the early 1960s we recognized a serious problem in the schools at Blanding and those south. The enrollment of Indian children in these schools ran from 30 to 98 percent, and most of them did not speak a word of English. We knew 332 County Schools that the teachers would have to teach English as a second language. After a thorough investigation of available programs we decided to invest in material that was being researched and published in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I spent a month of the summer vacation at the Southwest Cooperative Educational Laboratory in Albuquerque, becoming acquainted with and learning to use the material we had agreed to buy for the next school year. In order to participate in the program we had to agree to use the teaching material under close supervision, send feedback reports to them on a set time schedule to evaluate the program's effectiveness, and continually educate our teachers in the proper use of the material. This was the most thrilling experience I ever had in the classroom. I held a first-generation institute with fifteen teachers from the Blanding, Montezuma Creek, Bluff, and Mexican Hat schools for a week before school started that fall. They were teachers of Head Start and kindergarten children. We set up a learning center at the Park Terrace School. We placed five Indian children who knew no English on little chairs facing a teacher. The teacher used realia in her hands, such as a ball. She taught full sentences, conversational English, about the realia. For example: "This is a ball. Catch the ball," - fitting the action to the words. We used a TV camera to record each teacher's performance. The other teachers wrote their critique of the performance. Then the film was replayed, and the teacher made her own critique. A discussion followed, bringing out the important points of the lesson. At first teachers were hesitant about criticism, but they soon overcame it because you feel all right about being criticized if you know you can have a turn to criticize the others. During the week each teacher had numerous times to teach before the camera and to evaluate her and everyone else's performance. Later in the year I held second- and third-generation institutes with the same teachers. Each flip-chart lesson built progressively on the lessons which had gone before. We used this program for six years, going with the child from kindergarten through fifth grade. I have seen Indian chil- 333 San Juan County dren come into our schools not knowing a word of English and with this kind of instruction for thirty minutes a day be initiating conversation in English in three weeks. It was simply unbelievable! Other kinds of help were given to these children. One summer we took all third-grade Indian children from the Blanding schools to Salt Lake City to visit the zoo, the train station to see a train come in and leave, the airport to watch the big planes land and take off, and the State Capitol. They saw the city at night. On the way home one little boy said to the teacher, "I'm not going to tell my parents what I saw. They wouldn't believe me!" I was so pleased to see this article in the San Juan Record recently: Whitehorse High School Students Earn Nineteen Literary Awards With ardent teacher encouragement, many students nervously submitted poetry and short stories to several literary publications and contests this year. Bursting on the national magazine scene is Norma Jean Blackhorse. Her poem, "A Bridge Between" was purchased by the Indian Students, 1973- Photograph by Ken Hochfeld, USHS Collections. 334 County Schools Christian Board of Publications to be printed in their national periodical "Alive" in January of 1984. Gloria Todachinnie took fourth with "Missing You." Fifth was reeled in by Rose Clah with "Friends." Seventh place was taken by Sharon Lee's "The Little Girl." The prestigious Southwest High School Creative Writing Awards Contest from New Mexico State University received 876 entries from 56 schools. Two Whitehorse High students - Gloria Todachinnie and Ella Jay -- received honorable mention. All in all, Whitehorse students are lengthening their stride academically and stepping out into the world of published authors. I like to think that some of these students were exposed to our classes in English as a second language when they were in the elementary school at Montezuma Creek. One never knows how far-reaching are the seeds one sows. 335 |
