You have to love kids.

Pam S. is a 4th grade teacher at Pratt Elementary School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Previously, she taught preschool, 3rd grade, 4th grade, and 5th grade at various schools, and also got experience in kindergarten classrooms while in college.

To follow along with audio from the interview, click here.

Both my parents were teachers.


My dad was a principal and an assistant superintendent, so education was very, very important. They told me not to be a teacher- that it wasn’t worth it, that it was frustrating, and it didn’t pay enough. I didn't want to be a teacher, because that’s all I ever knew. I wanted to be a veterinarian so I worked super hard. I graduated Valedictorian of like 800 kids and I went to Ohio State, majoring in vet medicine, only to find that it’s very hard to get into vet medicine if you had not gotten to work with a vet. I was just in too small of a town. I didn’t have any connections with a vet and cows are really big. They’re really big. It was after I’m sitting in that barn watching them shove their arms up that cow that I thought, “I do not want to do this. This is not fun.”

By then I was realizing that it’s a whole different relationship you have with people. With teaching, there are tons of people to talk to. There are the parents, there are the kids, there's the other staff. There’s a lot going on all the time. You’re talking about everything under the sun and, you know, in contrast, you can’t talk to the animals. One of the things I like about teaching is that it involves music, it involves art, and it involves science. You can have millions of interests and incorporate them into your teaching. Shoving your hand up a cow doesn’t allow you to do those things. I had hung out with my dad at his school for years and helped and volunteered in all his teachers' classrooms. I was doing bulletin boards for them by the time I was in 5th or 6th grade. I’m a pretty good artist, and I missed having the opportunity to use those skills. I really missed it.

Pictured above: Jake, Pam's snake that she brought into the classroom.

"I did love animals and that was another thing that I’ve just gone into in a different way- I have lots of pets and I don’t have to put any animals to sleep or shove my hand up a cow." 1

By the late 1970s...

When I was first married, we lived in a very small town, not a suburb. At that time, there were not all the resources, such as social workers, to help kids. The district I was in- there were hardly any African-American kids. It was the low socioeconomic white kids who were challenging. My first year of teaching, I had a child in third grade, a little redhead, who had molested younger children. I had another one who spent every night at a bar with his mom and brought porn to school, and then one who was absolutely insane. He talked to imaginary people and crawled around the room on his hands and knees. He set his house on fire while I had him. I had them all in the same room and there weren’t counselors, social workers, and mental health support systems back then. We had special ed. classes and learning disabilities classes, but we didn’t have the mental health support. The principal sat and smoked in the boiler room with the engineer every day. Never saw him. We had one meeting in the two and a half years that I taught at that school. Nowadays, we have about three meetings a week. There are some pluses to that and there are some minuses to that. Kids were allowed to be kids back then. We could have recess. We could have art. You could do fun things. From that class, I have at least two students I still connect with on Facebook. They’re in their 40's and they’re very successful. More recently, I was at one of the toughest schools in North Minneapolis, and boy, did I learn a lot.

What I learned was I didn't know anything.


I had bought into this whole message that, “If we just put good teachers on the north side, we’ll fix those schools. Everything will be fine.” But I couldn't teach or reach the students. Many of the kids were abused, and so many of them had parents in jail or grandparents in jail. They all needed counseling. They needed counselors in the classrooms more than they needed teachers, and did we understand that, and empathize, and do arts, music, and more recess? No. We drilled the curriculum even harder. I was told what to do every single minute in that school, and those kids weren't allowed to have one second of fun.

The expectations for the kids are much higher. The expectations for the teachers are much higher. I made it through two years and then said, “I’m not doing this anymore, this is cruel.” It was cruel. It doesn’t help them. There should be more effort made to get African American students into education so that these kids can have teachers that look like them... and that's the beauty of Ms. Nevels (team member). There aren't too many teachers that are African-American, and a lot of them are older and "old-school". They need somebody they can connect with and I really wish more folks would go into education for that reason. Fortunately, we are getting more Somali teachers.

There’s a huge emphasis on data.

Collecting constant data to prove things that you know without collecting the data but you gotta collect it anyway. Unbelievable.

"This is a daily chart for one of the behavior problems, just to have the data to try and convince the parents to have him assessed for special behavior intervention." 2

Every hour of the day I’m collecting data. I’ve had this (individual student's behavior chart) for like two months. I have three or four of these going. We collect specific data on their work every six weeks. We have several common formative assessments like this that we are keeping track of and then we have a meeting where we present the data to each other. It sounds like it would be a great thing but you really don’t need all the data to do that, and you spend a huge amount of time collecting it. You spend a huge amount of time on meetings. A huge amount of time is spent worrying about culture, cultural fairness and diversity. I spend so much time justifying what I’m doing that I don’t have time to do a good job planning what I’m doing. That really frustrates me because I used to spend hours on my lesson plans. Now, most of the time I’m pulling it out of my rear end because you’re with the kids or in meetings all day. We used to look at kids as little individual people, now we look at their data, data, data, data, data, and it’s taking the pleasure out of teaching. It's not fun anymore. When you have to be mean all day long to keep the students on task, it's not fun.

I felt like I was a much better teacher after I was a parent because I have three very different kids.

I have one that’s an artist, has a degree in illustration and a Master's from New York University in costume design. She was not your traditional student. She was irritated by all the rules and pushed the limits, yet ended up doing very well. She graduated high in her class, but it wasn’t easy. She questioned everything and had that more artistic perspective. My middle one is a doctor. He had the very *pounds on table* perspective, and my oldest, who's the teacher, was the goof-off. I found out later he had all the girls do his homework in high school. He took naps in class, and the funniest thing is that he and I ended up teaching together. Nobody is more demanding of the students than he is. He can walk in his room and say, “We are having a quiet day where nobody is talking,” and they don't talk. It's just a different type of school but it's so funny because he was a real goof-off and now he expects everybody to be perfect.

I was very careful not to push my kids. I expected them to do their best but we did not obsess about five million hours of homework. I think you let them be kids, somewhat, with a lot of boundaries. It gave me a lot of insight to help me communicate better with parents because I had three very different types of kids who approached education very differently. I had a real good understanding of the school system and how things worked. I could do a really good job of steering parents through the middle school and high school experience, and give them advice as to what to get upset about, and what not to get upset about. I felt like I could coach parents and kids on how to be more successful at middle school, which I think is harder than high school.

Alex (son-in-law), Mary (daughter), Ralph III (oldest son), Marty (son), Jenny (daughter-in-law) 3

It's not the grade level [that’s important], it's the school and the group of kids you're pulling. I taught 4th and 5th grade five minutes from my house in southwest Minneapolis with a similar mixed group. It was a great neighborhood and I was there 14 years, so I knew the siblings coming up. I knew all the families really well, and I ran into everybody at the grocery store because it was my neighborhood. That was my favorite- teaching in the community you live in where you know everybody. I really like teaching 4th graders because they are starting to think more and they're interested in everything.

You have to be darn smart to keep all the wheels spinning.

A lot of people are getting out of teaching now because they can’t manage it. You have to be willing to work more than an eight hour day and if you aren’t, you will never make it. You have to respect parents, want to help the parents, and not find them to be a nuisance. You have to be able to use technology. If you're an elementary teacher, you have to be pretty smart in all academic areas because you have to understand way beyond what you're teaching to be able to teach it at the elementary level. You have to be willing to spend your own money; I spend about $5,000 a year on my classroom. You have to be organized and take initiative because you're not going to be told everything to do. You have to be able to get up the next day, start over fresh, and not hold anything students did the day before against them. There are a lot of people that can't do that, and they don't make it as teachers. You do have to be able to work with your teammates. There is so much teamwork now in everything you do. But first and foremost, you have to love kids. You have to.

Pam reading with a student 4

Photo credits:

1. Taken by Matthew Judson

2. Taken by Matthew Judson

3: Taken from http://pratt.mpls.k12.mn.us/uploads/rounded/size-400/allkids.JPG

4. Taken by Matthew Judson

Story facilitators:

Donyae Dillon, Gretchen Glewwe, Jeff Guaman, Matthew Judson