Teachers Learning from Students

Individuals writing about what they learned from former teachers is common. It is uncommon, however, for teachers to write about what they learned from former students. I do not mean those many instances when tech-savvy students helped teachers solve hardware and software problems. I mean the kinds of learning that doesn’t come from only books but from the questions students ask and the thoughts they express in and out of class.

I learned from Carol Schneider, a 16 year-old junior in my U.S. history class at Glenville High School in Cleveland. The year was 1958. I was a 23 year old teacher beginning my third year of teaching at Glenville. I relished teaching six classes of U.S. history a day in this largely black high school. By the end of the day, I was bone-tired (yeah, I shudder to think what teaching four straight classes, a break for lunch, then two more in the afternoon would do to my body and mind now). I went to Western Reserve University (soon to become Case Western Reserve) two evenings a week to get my Masters degree in history and had begun to prepare classroom lessons in what was then called Negro history. I  created readings to supplement the history textbook that said little about slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crowism. Of my six classes, three responded very well to the readings. Do any readers remember the purple-stained hands that came from using the school’s “spirit master” or ditto machine? The other three classes, well, they were much less enthused. Carol was in one of those responsive classes.

Carol who came from a working class family steeped in left-wing political ideology was keen about history and had read widely. Within a few weeks, Carol and a cadre of friends were the stars of that class. They would come in during my 35-minute lunch period and after school to continue talking about ideas raised in class and school issues. For a novice teacher, this was heady stuff.

One afternoon, Carol brought in a book that John Wexley had written (1955) about the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg case. She asked me to read it and wanted to know what I thought of it. The Rosenbergs had been indicted and convicted of treason in 1951 for passing atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II. They were executed in 1953.

I had known of the case through newspapers and magazines. The Wexley book clearly argued that the Rosenbergs had been innocent of the charges; they were not spies and were wrongly convicted and executed. I read the book within a week and was stunned by the amount of evidence that Wexley had compiled from court records and independent sources. Moreover, he had arrayed the evidence into a persuasive argument that the Rosenbergs had been framed. I totally accepted Wexley’s portrayal of the case, remembering the outrage I felt at the miscarriage of justice. I also recall some discussions Carol and I had during lunch and after school about the case itself and the material that Wexley had compiled. Whenever I would raise concerns about Wexley’s sources or portions of his argument–some parts sounded too pat for me–Carol would rebut my points and counter the concerns. She would then ask me questions about Wexley’s statements that she doubted. We had an intellectual give-and-take that, up to that time, I had never experienced with a student. I remember speaking to my wife and friends about the Rosenberg case and the Wexley book. For the first time as a teacher, discussions, even debates with a student rippled through my life.*

There is another encounter I had with Carol after she graduated from Glenville. I and my family had moved to Washington, D.C.  I taught in a program training returned Peace Corps volunteers to teach in urban schools. After teaching in and directing the program for four years, I returned to classroom teaching at Roosevelt High School. By that time, Carol, in her early 30s, had become a social studies teacher, gotten married,  and moved with her husband and family to D.C where he worked for the U.S. Department of Justice. She was assigned to Roosevelt also. In 1971, Carol and I team-taught a U.S. history class–at least that is what my memory registers. I remember the semester we worked together as intellectually exciting. After school and on the phone, we would plan together, deciding who would take the lead in each part of the lesson. Our paths parted after 1971 when I went to graduate school and she and her family eventually moved to Madison, Wisconsin. We would exchange annual holiday cards. In the 1990s, when my oldest daughter went to the University of Wisconsin I re-established contact with Carol. By that time she was a member of the Madison school board–a post she served in for 18 years, retiring in 2008.**

What did I learn from Carol? I admired Carol’s intellectual and political engagement, her feistiness as a high school junior who not only questioned mainstream beliefs in class discussions but also her history teacher. We had rousing discussions about ideas in a controversial book. What I came to see in retrospect was that at age 23, I was ready to challenge conventional wisdom. Carol helped me do so.

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*In 2008, a convicted spy who had served 17 years in prison admitted that Julius Rosenberg  had been a courier for the Soviet Union but that Ethel was not involved. By then, a consensus among historians, using decoded cables from the Soviets, emerged that Rosenberg had been a Soviet spy.

**Carstensen continues to be an advocate for funding and improving schools. Last year, a Milwaukee paper included this item:

Carol Carstensen, a former member of the MMSD school board and current member of Grandparents United for Madison Public Schools, said lawmakers can still provide a tax cut. “There is enough money available to fund an increase in public school funding and, if they must, give some property tax relief,” she said. “Let me repeat — we have enough state revenue to do both, so as citizens of this state, we have to let the legislators know that we demand more and better.”

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