Whitman Elementary School

Lately I’ve been feeling nostalgic, or perhaps just in a documentary mode. I looked up all the places I have ever lived on Google Maps and saw them in a way that was at the same time alienating and comforting. Comforting because these *places* still exist in the world, but alienating because of the aerial view — a relation to those places that I never experienced in my phenomenological embodied movement through doorways, around people, pets and furniture and on lawns, stoops and fire-​escapes.
So it was with some manner of astonishment that I looked up my old alma mater Whitman Elementary School and saw it as a sort of starfish amputee or propeller on an old single-​engine plane, dividing those fields and grounds on which I played and laughed and suffered for 6 formative years of my life.
I actually went to Whitman in the 70s. I have no idea if it is at all the same today. In remembering Whitman I always think of my friends and enemies and my own eccentricities in relation to the place. I remember collecting palm fuzz from a tree with a girl who was a Pima Indian. I remember trying to outrun the cloud shadows as they swept the large field. Playing «horses» or «Spiderman» with my friends. Eating in the cafeteria and being made to eat my vegetables by the cafeteria ladies. Wearing my old blue and gold (read: yellow) «Whitman Wildcats» shirt. Going to the school carnival with my parents and making «Spin Art» or winning a «Fortune Telling Fish» that curls up in your palm. Being jealous of Michelle Greenwald’s perfect cursive handwriting. Puzzling over the lyrics in 70s songs. Being sent home because I thought the «F word» was «fart» and thus had no idea why I got in trouble for saying the other word at the prompting of my arch nemeses M., D. and K.
I am sure Whitman is different now, what with «No Child Left Behind» (a hauntingly Christianly «Rapture”-ous slogan given our administration!) and its standardized testing. Now, preparing to become a professor myself I have been thinking about the pedagogical strategies that got me here and I think the teachers at Whitman played a great role.
My teachers at the time were a pretty diverse lot: Miss Sanchez for 1^st grade (who became Mrs. Hernandez half-​way through the year), Miss Patterson for 2^nd; Miss Watanabe 3^rd; Mr. Smith 4^th; and Mr. Spotten for the one-​year combo 5−6^th grade for «gifted». Mr. Smith was African-​American and looking back I realize that in the 70s it was pretty remarkable that I had African-​American, Mexican-​American and Japanese-​American teachers even though our school was predominately white and maybe 10 percent Native-​American.
Pedagogically, I think we were one of the last schools in the U.S. to teach the New Math. I have to admit that I cannot do regular math very well (e.g. figuring out percentages, quartering a recipe) because of this, but I am excellent at symbolic logic, problems dealing with set-​theory, topological problems, etc. But because of TNM I have a tendency to see numbers in concrete terms; to think of them as «things» existing in space and time and having relationships with each other.
But if TNM was reactionary, other policies were very progressive. In 2^nd grade the school began experimenting with the «Open Classroom» and «mods» concepts. The accordion-​fold partitioning walls were opened to allow interaction between classrooms and we were given a number of assignments that we needed to finish by week’s end. We could work on anything any time we wanted. I was addicted to the SRA reading labs where we would read short passages or stories and then answer questions about them. I think I ran through 3 grade-level’s worth in a year. We also had many art classes and music classes and science experiments.
One time, some «special visitors» came to our class and together we all gutted an old broken console television, filled it with lights and crinkled Mylar and hooked it up to electronics that would make the lights flash to whatever beat occurred in the songs we played on the stereo. On «show day» we turned off all the lights and everyone brought their favorite 45s and watched the «light show». Don’t tell me these visitors weren’t stoned! Ah the 70s!
We also had a ton of fieldtrips throughout the years — to mine «Apache Tears» in a place that has since sold-​out to a cat litter manufacturer; to Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti which was new at the time and was kind of like a kibbutz for architects; to the many museums — art, natural and historical — in the area; to theatre performances and movies (we saw 1776 and no one could figure out what «Salt Peter» did!).
Most importantly we were given a lot of time for play and creativity and exploration of stuff *we* were interested in. Jr. high and high school are a blur to me learning-​wise and only after I started going to the University did I feel that I’d returned to the joys of just learning about crazy stuff that I had experienced in my formative years at Whitman.