Happy December, everyone!  I don’t know about you, but there’s always something disconcerting about how dark it gets by late afternoon this time of year.  Full darkness by 5PM?  It’s enough to make you want to stay under the covers for a month or two straight.

But we don’t.  And this month’s first teacher interviewee Jerry Howland definitely doesn’t.  A teacher and school leader for the past forty-two years, including years at the McCormack Middle School, the former Jamaica Plain High School and currently, the pilot school ACC (Another Course to College), Jerry has been honored as the 1994 state teacher of the year and was one of four finalists for the national teacher of the year award.

But what comes out in this interview, even beyond these highest of honors, is his continued sense of mission, humility and a palpable belief that what makes the day-to-day work most worthwhile, is the opportunity to engage and challenge his students day in and day out.  And if his students and colleagues are any indication, he’s certainly been making the most.

***

First of all, thanks for taking the time to meet and talk a little bit about yourself as a teacher.  You were honored as the state teacher of the year in 1994, and I believe you were one of the four finalists for national teacher of the year?

I was one of four finalists, but I lost the swimsuit competition…

I’m sure it was a close call… (laughing)

(Jerry laughs)

You also mentioned that you are now in your 42^nd year as a teacher—an incredible achievement.  And I’m sure there are many, many other achievements and accomplishments that others, like [fellow ACC teacher] Chris Mee, would be quick to mention as well.

Chris credits me…but have you seen him?  [It’s] amazing what he does with the 9^th grade mind.

One of the key themes of The Teaching Pulse is an attempt to make conversations around best teaching practices a central focus of our professional organizations.  And one way I’m hoping to do that is by talking to some of the best teachers in the district and sharing those conversations with other teachers across the city.  I hope that these questions help guide us into a great conversation.

How would you describe yourself as a teacher? Can you give me a picture of how you approach your work as a teacher in BPS?

Chronologically, I started out as a math teacher and I was teaching at the McCormack Middle School in Columbia Point through the 1970s.  I went to Harvard, did a masters in the Education program, and then I went to Jamaica Plain High School as a housemaster (still teaching, but also doing discipline), and then I became a department head of math, science, health and physical education.

I was still primarily teaching math until the mid 80s when they asked me to teach a law class.  In fact, the person who was teaching that class got sick and I took over for the year and started teaching the law program.  And by the time English High School moved in, I stayed and I switched from teaching four math and one law [class], to teaching four law and one math [section], just the calculus class.  The law [course] became a very popular class.  And it’s a great course to teach because teenagers have a genuine interest in the law and [to know] what’s fair and what’s right.

I began doing mock trials after a few years.  And the excitement [they] generated because of the competition and drama was a clever way to engage kids without them [immediately] realizing that they were doing reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking.  And then [there was the opportunity] to take kids beyond that for those who wanted to do more.  We have [for instance] extracurricular interscholastic competitions with Harvard Law School and Suffolk Law School.

In the summer, I do an internship program called the Judicial Youth Corp.  It’s with the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts and that’s where we get usually about twenty kids [participating] from the city.  They work four days a week in the courts and I get them on the fifth day.  It’s an ideal way to teach—they’re in the real world, and then they come to me and I can [match] the theory with the practice.  And we end up at the end of the summer doing a major mock trial in a real federal court.

What would you say is your favorite part of teaching now?  What sustains you from day-to-day?

It’s the same… people ask me a lot of kids [if] kids are different today.  And I don’t see that.  I see the kids as almost exactly the same as they were forty years ago.

What got me engaged in Boston my first year was my assignment to the McCormack Middle School.  What they did then [during the desegregation of the city schools], if you were a first year teacher, they would assign you to an all black school and as you got seniority, they could transfer to the white schools.  So in the black schools, there was a turnover and they kept on getting brand new teachers.  That’s how I ended up there.

But you remained there.

I remained there.  And when I went for the interview, the principal told me ‘you don’t want to work here’.  [The Columbia Point] neighborhood and the housing project there had the 3^rd highest crime rate of any neighborhood in the country.  And actually at that time, I wasn’t planning on being a teacher.  I was just going to go teach during the day to go to law school at night.  I thought teaching would be a part time job, and no problem (laughing) … little did I know.

But when I taught there, I found the kids were very different from what he had described.  Kids had a lot more potential that they weren’t achieving.  I didn’t help them the first several years; it took me several years to make any kind of in-roads.  But I really enjoyed it.  And I decided to finish law school anyway but to stay in teaching.  So I ended up staying in teaching.

I took the bar exam.  And said just in case… in case I no longer enjoyed it, I could find something else to do.

That still hasn’t happened yet.

If I had started teaching in Newton North high school, I’d probably be a lawyer right now, because what attracted me to teaching was the social justice aspect.  And for me, I grew up in the city of Boston.  I grew up in a housing project right up the hill here, [on] Fidelis Way.  And it wasn’t until I was 21 years old and I was at the McCormack Middle School that I realized and understood what it meant that Boston was a dual school system.  And it was happening right before my eyes.

That was the first that I saw I was doing something worthwhile.  [It] was the first time that there was something that I thought was important.

[The] kids say “I want to be like you because you know everything.” So I say, “No, no, no… I think I know everything. There’s an important distinction”

A lot of folks I’ve talked to, including myself, are hungry to learn from master teachers.  Is there a specific “Jerry Howland” approach or a transferable practice that you can share with us?

The most basic thing is [to actively utilize] trial and error.  The first time you go through [a course] I may say ‘that worked, that was great so let’s save it in the program/curriculum for next time’ or ‘that didn’t, so I’ll either change it or [remove] it from the curriculum.’

It’s like you continually refine and you’re responsive to what’s working or not working.

[Another] thing that I thought was very effective was having the kids fill out evaluations at the end of each term.  And one of the best things about kids is that they’re painfully honest. (laughing)

How do your students describe you?  How do they describe Mr. Howland?

That’s interesting.  One that I get a big kick out of, because I’ve heard it a lot this year already, is that kids say “I want to be like you because you know everything.”  So I say, “No, no, no… I think I know everything.  There’s an important distinction”  (laughing).  That’s just an advantage of being around a long time.

Is there one particular moment in your many years of teaching that stand out and encapsulate who you are or who you strive to be as an educator?

Anytime you see a student doing and being successful at something that they didn’t think they could be successful at.  The most recent was a girl we had last year and that I had in the law class, who at the beginning was a typical high school public speaker but by the time she finished, she was so impressive.
When mock trials are over [for my law classes], I have the students face each other and I tell them to pick someone and tell them something they did well and why.  And so the kids usually put out everything that I was going to say and I only need to add, if anything, a few things.

My favorite thing to do though is to call the parent when something [really special] happens.  I call and I say hi, this is Mr. Howland [and] I have your son in my law class.”   You can hear the person suck and hold their breath; you can audibly hear it.  “I just want to let you know that your son did the closing argument in the trial today and did fantastic”, and then give details about why it was great.  And then you can hear them exhale in relief.  Because usually, no parent gets a phone call with good news.

So I love making those phone calls.  And I’m particularly eager to make them for those kids who were unusually successful where they hadn’t been successful before.

What are your thoughts on the BTU as a professional organization?  What role do you feel it’s played to support you as a teacher or should it play to support teachers like yourself or other teachers?   Who should we as teachers look to in order to sustain ourselves?

There’s definitely a need for the Boston Teachers Union.  Whether you agree or disagree with what they do, even if you don’t study history, you know there’s a definite need for someone to bargain on the behalf of the teachers.  Now you may disagree with some of the things that they prioritize, but I think the union has evolved over the years since 1970.  They’ve walked that line between doing both… what’s best for the students and best for the teachers.  They are primarily working on behalf of the teachers.  But I think they’ve done some things over the years that have benefitted both.

Economically, any time the economy turns bad, people start turning against each other and competing for fewer resources.  So that’s part of the issue now.  And also when you negotiate, it’s one of those things where when it becomes public, [a position] may sound absurd because you don’t start with what you want, both sides are thinking they are going to come to the middle.    It’s the nature of negotiations.

But there’s definitely a need for the union to protect the rights of teachers and the issues that are going on now with merit pay and those things.   I would be in favor of merit pay if there was a system to determine it.  But there isn’t.  They can’t design one.  It’s not possible.  It would create a lot more problems than it would solve.  Because they can’t give people enough money to make it a viable incentive and to get you to do something that you weren’t going to do anyway. And on top of that, [the exceptional] teachers do [all the extras] anyway.  So it’s not going to provide incentive, [but actually] a lot of bad feelings.  It’s going to create a tension and dynamic that’s not going to be productive.

And it’s all over a couple of thousand dollars. And then there’s the means for doing it.  With standardized test scores, there a very few standardized tests that relate directly to what someone is [teaching] in the classroom.  Take the 10^th grade math [MCAS scores] for instance.  Who’s responsible for that?  The teachers [who have taught the students] leading up to [that assessment], or the teacher that year?

When I was a headmaster here [at ACC], I told the English teachers here:  Teach a college level curriculum and don’t teach to the MCAS.  If you’re teaching a college prep curriculum, then the MCAS will take care of itself—you don’t need to worry about that.  And it’s not something we want to be judged by anyway.. it’s a low level test and if you want to teach the high level college level analytical writing skills, work on those.

I’d love to hear your perspective in your roles as a teacher and also as a principal/school leader.  What have you learned from those dual experiences?  What implications have your experiences had in shaping what you think it takes to have a collaborative school environment?  Are there any lessons that you think could be extended district-wide?

My philosophy as an administrator was to hire good people, and then to give them complete freedom to design and teach the curriculum, even [if their approach] was different from [my own personal way] to teach it.  We had the flexibility to do this because we are a pilot school.

The reason I did that was [in consideration] of the schools I worked at as a teacher.  The people I worked for at English High and JP High gave me complete freedom.  They let me do whatever I wanted and because they did that, it was my program.  So I did more than I would have [than] if I was [just] following someone else’s directions.  So I put so much more into it.  And I wanted to create the same opportunity here.

Are there any final words you’d like to end with?

I’d say in general, the teachers today are so much better than the teachers through the 70s and 80s; so much better.  [They’re] much more dedicated, more talented… and a big part of that has to do with the desegregation of BPS.

When I started teaching, people were in either all white schools or all black schools.  And when they were started to be desegregated, [white teachers] started getting kids of color, and a lot of them were unhappy about it.  It affected their teaching as they didn’t have expectations for those kids.  [It was] pretty ugly through the 70s and 80s.  Because of low expectations for them, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Some pretty ugly things were going on.

But those people are gone now.  And the people who are coming in?  We’re getting a lot of really, really talented people.

And maybe the question is how to get those teachers to remain and continue to have opportunities to grow.  But one thing that I’ve always felt is that I’ve always disliked that divide between newer teachers and those who are veteran teachers.   If there’s anyway to better connect the two groups, I hope we do it.  Hopefully this is a venue that helps to do that—to say we’re all teachers in the Boston Public Schools and this is what we’re here for.

I hope this also bridges the gap because people don’t get the chance to see what other teachers are doing.  You know how your day goes (laughing).

***

Yes, I absolutely do.  Thanks again, Jerry, for taking the time to do this interview.

For comments and conversation around any issues that Jerry raises, please visit the online forum at www.theteachingpulse.org.  And if anyone has one of those indoor sunlamps I can borrow in the meanwhile, give me a call?

[Click here and scroll down to see and add comments to this post]