Student Teaching

To glimpse what many see as the future of teacher education in America, don't visit your local college campus.Rather, drive out Reisterstown Road to Owings Mills Elementary, site of one of several "professional development schools" in the metropolitan area. There you'll see 14 Towson State University juniors in what would be a residency - were they studying to be physicians.Five Towson State education professors come down from the ivory tower to teach the would-be teachers at the Owings Mills school.

Steven Robert Hardy, a Harford County public school educator whose career spanned more than four decades, died June 13 of cancer at his Bel Air home. He was 64. The son of a real estate salesman and a homemaker, Mr. Hardy was born and raised in Havre de Grace. After graduating from Havre de Grace High School in 1965, he earned a bachelor's degree in elementary education in 1969 from what is now Towson University. He completed his graduate studies in education administration at Morgan State University and had earned a master's degree from Loyola University Maryland.

Western Maryland College is about to provide a new technological link for Carroll County's public school teachers and some soon-to-be teachers.Beginning in the fall, the college will open a computer laboratory that will not only complement college programs in library science and education, but will bring together county teachers and their student teachers before they work together in the classroom, said Dr. Kenneth Pool, dean of the library science graduate...

Helen G. Rigler, a former elementary school educator and opera buff, died Saturday of heart failure at Mercy Medical Center. The Parkton resident was 93. The daughter of a Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. draftsman and a homemaker, Helen Gill was born in Baltimore and raised in Boring. After graduating from Franklin High School in 1936, she earned a bachelor's degree in education in 1940 from what is now Towson University. After completing her student teaching at Lida Lee Tall School on the Towson campus, she began teaching at Margaret Brent Elementary School and later at Stoneleigh Elementary School.

A national study on the quality of student teaching at schools of education ranks two of the three programs examined in Maryland as weak. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which ranked a random sample of three institutions in each state, gave Mount St. Mary's University and Salisbury University "weak" ratings and University of Maryland, Baltimore County a rating of "good. " The council spent two years working on the study, which looks at the student teaching experience at 134 institutions of higher education.

A crisis in the British royal family pushed Jessup Elementary School clean off the ABC Evening News one evening in late February, bitterly disappointing students and their families and teachers gathered around their sets.Then ABC used the Jessup footage two months later to demonstrate the nationally acclaimed Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP). Only one problem: ABC never mentioned the school or its home district, Anne Arundel County, by name."Fifteen seconds of my face," laughs one teacher, "but not my 15 minutes of fame."

In the spring of 1991, Deborah Armenti, 35, learned she had cancer. Defiantly, she wrote about it for The Evening Sun's Other Voices page:"I wake up in the morning thinking about cancer and I go to bed thinking of cancer. I am terrified, and yet I go through the motions of an ordinary life. . . . My friends tell me how brave I am and how they admire my courage. Whenever I hear those words, I think about how I don't want to be brave; I want to be well."She wrote again this April 9 that a year of treatment had not worked.

IT'S NOT TRUE that practice makes perfect, at least in the world of teacher education. But practice helps a heck of a lot, and where it helps most is in the training of reading teachers. For almost a year and a half now, I've been observing college students as they move through their final courses in what educators call "pre-service." What I've found, not surprisingly, is that the more practice they get in the "real world," the better prepared they are to handle 29 squirming kids on the fateful and scary day they begin teaching solo.

Minority residents and Carroll County educators discussed last night issues affecting diversity in the school system.Sponsored by the Carroll County Branch of the NAACP, "A Partnership in Our Future" is "one step among many that we are taking to improve communication between members of the minority communities and the schools," said Leon B. Dorsey Jr., local chapter president.In Carroll County public schools, slightly more than 2 percent of county teachers and three of the 125 supervisors are African-American.

Western Maryland College is about to provide a new technological link for Carroll County's public school teachers and some soon-to-be teachers.Beginning in the fall, the college will open a computer laboratory that will not only complement college programs in library science and education, but will bring together county teachers and their student teachers before they work together in the classroom, said Dr. Kenneth Pool, dean of the library science graduate...

A national study on the quality of student teaching at schools of education ranks two of the three programs examined in Maryland as weak. The National Council on Teacher Quality, which ranked a random sample of three institutions in each state, gave Mount St. Mary's University and Salisbury University "weak" ratings and University of Maryland, Baltimore County a rating of "good. " The council spent two years working on the study, which looks at the student teaching experience at 134 institutions of higher education.

Students at Edgewood Middle School face the task of teaching adults. Using games, charts, maps, balloons, posters, golf balls and putters, the children will give presentations about birds, migration and conservation issues to about 450 members of the corporate community, and conservation and government organizations. "The idea behind this program is to teach children, by having them teach others," said Thelma Redick, director of conservation, education and outreach for the Wildlife Habitat Council.

Nick Sabo, a South River High School senior, recently received his yearbook order forms, including ballots to vote for senior superlatives, such as most popular or class clown. He hardly recognized any of the nominees' names. "He didn't know anybody, and it broke my heart," said his mother, Mary Ann Sabo, who lives in Edgewater. "I guess students are afraid." Sabo was born with cerebral palsy, a brain injury that put him in a wheelchair, slurs his speech, and made him an outcast among his peers.

Graduate-student leaders and labor activists squared off against university administrators yesterday over a bill before the General Assembly to grant teaching assistants and contractual faculty the right to form unions. The debate in a House of Delegates committee centered - as it has in other states - on the question of whether giving graduate-student employees the same collective bargaining rights as other state workers would undermine the educational relationship between professors and students.

Wendy Nelson's two daughters, Carley and Molly, get A's and B's in school, but they do not do as well when they take tests. "When they get to taking tests, they do very poorly," Nelson said. "We just think they study the wrong things. I think they take the wrong kinds of notes." That's why the Nelson daughters are taking a series of classes called the Stressless Tests Program, designed to help them do just as well on tests as they do in the classroom. The program consists of four classes, held in the evenings at local schools.

As I leave the teaching profession and begin to work in the "real world," I am constantly reminded that teaching and this real world are mutually exclusive. For years, we have all heard the clichM-i, "Those who can, do; those who can't do, teach." That's not necessarily accurate, as many teachers are fine educators and realize they have one of the most noble jobs in society. But another clichM-i - "Teaching is not the real world" - appears more plausible. I resigned from teaching after less than three years.

Give teaching the respect it deserves The Sun's article "Privatizing schools calls for diplomacy" (April 21) alluded to the untapped resource of knowledgeable but "uncertified" teachers in the population. I may be guilty of arguing from the particular to the general, but I have seen some of this untapped talent in action in the public schools. I have seen accountants hired as math teachers, even ones who have student teaching experience, throw their hands up in the air and quit their first year.

Helen G. Rigler, a former elementary school educator and opera buff, died Saturday of heart failure at Mercy Medical Center. The Parkton resident was 93. The daughter of a Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. draftsman and a homemaker, Helen Gill was born in Baltimore and raised in Boring. After graduating from Franklin High School in 1936, she earned a bachelor's degree in education in 1940 from what is now Towson University. After completing her student teaching at Lida Lee Tall School on the Towson campus, she began teaching at Margaret Brent Elementary School and later at Stoneleigh Elementary School.

BALTIMORE'S Teach for America threw a 10th anniversary bash in the rain Thursday night. Fifty-four corps members beginning their second year of teaching in Baltimore welcomed a record 108 newcomers, all fresh out of college, and Tuesday they'll fan out to 41 city schools. The Teach for America idea, proposed by Wendy Kopp in her senior thesis at Princeton University in the 1980s, is simple: Outstanding college graduates commit to teach for two years in the nation's neediest urban and rural schools, where they work for the pitiful pay of the beginning teacher.

Give teaching the respect it deserves The Sun's article "Privatizing schools calls for diplomacy" (April 21) alluded to the untapped resource of knowledgeable but "uncertified" teachers in the population. I may be guilty of arguing from the particular to the general, but I have seen some of this untapped talent in action in the public schools. I have seen accountants hired as math teachers, even ones who have student teaching experience, throw their hands up in the air and quit their first year.