My own struggle with learning disabilities left me with very strong feelings on education. With the help of one very brilliant and patient woman, Veronica Russo, I was given the resources to follow an academic path that was once unthinkable. I got an English PhD and taught college students about reading and writing after my parents feared I would never learn to read and write myself. The experience of learning how to read with Veronica gave me an understanding of reading, writing, teaching, and learning from the inside out and catalyzed my desire to be a teacher. Veronica taught me how to read and write but also how to teach. All I want to do is continue this cycle.
Now that I’m a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow myself, working on a series on pedagogy, I thought I’d ask the amazing Veronica, or Ronnie, as I call her, to share some of her pedagogical secrets. Given the generosity that characterizes her approach to education, I wasn’t surprised that she was happy to share. She remembers getting a call about me, a “six year old, who despite a couple of years in preschool and a year of kindergarten and first grade each, could not read or do math and was not going to be able to go into the second grade.” She tried to explain to my mom that she already had a full-time job as the Director of Pupil Services and didn’t have time to tutor, but my mother, who has always been quite persuasive, convinced her to tutor me before work and on weekends.
She recalls,
“At our first face to face meeting I was concerned that I was not what your mom was looking for and told her so, and that she would not see you sitting at a desk, but rather, sometimes on the floor and sometimes outside in the dirt. I told her instead of hearing you recite, she would hear laughter. She surprised me by saying all of that was okay and she kept her word, never questioning what we did or how we did it…So you and I would play and read and act out scenes, but our favorite way to read was lying on the couch while I held the book above us.”
Ronnie avoids too many labels when it comes to learning disabilities, but when I was struggling to learn something, she shares that we
“would draw the letters in the air as big as we could. When you still had difficulty making the capital I in cursive (it went the opposite way to begin), I put your little Fisher Price people on the table and had you start at the policeman and go up the mother, around to the dog, etc. You got it in no time, but maybe that is why you like driving directions given by toys! So you and I danced. We read and painted, and acted out plays, and dressed in costumes and we laughed. That was the best part. We laughed. We started with easy books like Hop On Pop and moved progressively on to higher levels and on to harder books. Since you didn’t read at first, I did all of the reading to you and then, as you got a few words under your belt, you read a little and then a little more until you were reading the whole book to me.”
Ronnie recognizes the incredible balance involved in teaching:
“I have always tried to meet each student where he or she is at that time and bring them forward at his or her successful pace. Too slow and it is not as successful as it could be, with the child missing out on what you don’t get to but could have, and too fast… well you know. So teaching is an impossible dance of finding out where the student is, deciding where the child needs to get to (based on being a successfully employed and contributing citizen in society at adulthood), figuring out what is needed to produce this educated, employed, functioning citizen, and then figuring out how to deliver all of that to each individual student in a way that he or she can understand. Yikes! If I’d told that to the future teachers from Vassar and Marist I was supervising during their student teaching semesters, they’d probably have chosen another profession. I have found that the age of the student does not matter. It is the same dance whether teaching kindergarten or adult education.”
For Ronnie, regardless of the size of the class or the age of the students, it’s really
“about meeting each student where he or she is and moving each forward…But now as I think about it, isn’t that the definition of a teacher? When I took courses in college that took place in big lecture halls, where the professor spoke into a microphone to maybe 50 or more students, was that teaching or just disseminating information that would fall on discerning ears or not? Is there a give and take in teaching, a giving of information and experiences, and active receiving of that information, which then comes back to the teacher as a shared experience, a coming together, a melding of things taught and things learned that then both experience together?”
Ronnie is that rare teacher who faults herself and not the student if the student isn’t learning. She says,
“I can usually figure out how a child learns and teach that way. If a student is not ‘getting it,’ I never look at the student as being at fault, but rather think it’s on me for not figuring out how to make it happen for that child. Once that happens, I am rewarded with not only watching the light go on, but also having someone new with whom to share whatever the student just learned…So everything you learned I then experienced through your eyes, which, in turn, opened new ways of seeing for me.”
Ronnie views teaching as an ever-changing organism. As she puts it,
“Whenever teaching I have a bag of tricks, things I can turn to if what I am doing is not working. How else can I provide this information? How else can I help this student to experience what I am trying to teach, and I always start with what the student already knows, has already experienced, something that I can hook the new learning to. And I will not hesitate to make that change. If it isn’t working, I need to find something that will. What am I missing? Let me try something else. So I guess to me teaching is a lively, living entity that changes and morphs according to the needs of the student(s) and never gets old.”
Of her college teaching, she says,
“I loved it and I was a real ham, snoring and sleeping on the floor in front of the class as Rip Van Winkle. They would laugh so hard, but I knew they probably wouldn’t forget what they were laughing about and the writing fact or literature we were discussing. When teaching them about the Berlin Wall (the Berlin Wall?!?) I brought in an electric frying pan and moved their desks to each side of the room in lines facing each other. I didn’t explain. I just let them sit for a few minutes while I cooked German sausages in the pan. They kept asking me why the desks were set up the way they were, and I finally answered them as I gave out the sausage to only one side. Because only this side is on my side and can have sausage. From there I explained the division in Berlin by this offending wall, and then before I knew it it was 1981 and President Reagan was telling Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall, and he did and we did. Together. We moved all the desks back to where they belonged as a unified class.”
Ronnie knows that, ultimately,
“teaching is not for the faint of heart. Balancing the needs of the individual student and covering all the curricula expected throughout a school career is an almost impossible task especially with a high student load…Perhaps it is all a house of cards, but, maybe, just maybe, some magic will appear in the form of a really great teacher for whom it all seems to come so easily!”
During college, I spent two of my summers working with children with special needs. One summer, I was assigned to work one-on-one with Nicholas, who had Down Syndrome and ADHD. My supervisor warned me before we started working together that he was the toughest kid they had. After the first week, I was completely bewildered. I had been peed on, hit, and ignored. But then I realized that he never did these things when we were working on our poetry together. So, for the rest of the summer, whenever he started acting out, I would teach him a new poem or have him teach me one of his. I rarely saw the “troublemaking” side of him again. That’s when I saw it: earlier in the summer he hadn’t been bullying me; he had been communicating. Even more than that, he had been asking to learn.
Years later when I was teaching college English, I came upon a student who reminded me of Nicholas. He was very angry about all the writing he needed to do for my class. Through talking to him I discovered that he liked to rap. So we started having him come during office hours to deliver his papers in rap form for an audience of one (followed by an agreed upon paper version). It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had teaching, and I think he had a good time, too. But where did this impulse that I had with Nicholas and with this other student—this drive to creative, compassionate teaching—come from? I believe it came from Veronica Russo.
P.S. That drawing in the beginning is one that I gave Ronnie years ago after she taught me to read and do math.
This is part of a series, Adventures in Pedagogy. You can read previous essays here:
Teaching Your Students to Become Textual Flâneurs
What I Learned About Teaching College From Being a Parent to Young Kids and Vice Versa
Asking College and High School Students How They Want to be Taught
Pedagogical Resources
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Pedagogy Unbound
The New York Times Learning Network
Academy of American Poets: Teach This Poem
The Derek Bok Center For Teaching and Learning at Harvard
Northwestern Searle Center For Advancing Learning and Teaching
University of Michigan Center For Research on Learning and Teaching