Classroom Heroes

About the Book

Classroom Heroes consists of a series of interviews that I conducted with thirty-seven public school employees from Oxnard, California. All but one were working for the Rio School District, and the people interviewed included teachers, administrators, instructional assistants and a bus driver. I asked them about their early experiences that shaped their lives, their goals and dreams while they were growing up as well as the obstacles that they had to overcome in order to achieve them, how and why they got into public education and finally, what advice they would have for parents. While all of those interviewed were from Ventura County, California, my experiences living and teaching in other areas of our country tells me that they are typical in many ways of teachers from all regions of the United States. The following excerpt from an interview is typical of what appears in Classroom Heroes.

Alex “I am one of four children. I grew up in Southern California. Both of my parents came from large families. My father’s family was one that didn’t have a father figure, which really effected his upbringing. My mother came from a different type of family, one with both parents, large family, very close-knit. My father’s family was just the opposite.

My father was not a high school graduate; my mother was. As I was growing up, I was aware that both of my parents knew about the importance of being educated, and they communicated that message to their children. They sent us to Catholic school for eight years.

Back in the’60’s, going to Catholic school was different than it is now. We used to get whipped, spanked, slapped, and my parents encouraged more of that. My mother would say, ‘If Alex is acting up, give him what he needs.’ Back then, it was called education; now they call it child abuse. I remember being smacked in the head by the Nuns, my knuckles being slammed by rulers. It made me hate school, and I became very nervous and anxious about going there.

When I got excited or nervous, I would stutter sometimes. This really caused me problems when I was young. You know what kids are like. They would tease me about the stuttering and call me names. I remember that the Nuns would put us in reading groups according to ability, and I was, of course, in one of the low groups. They would march us over to the Convent for special reading lessons, and everyone knew that the kids who were going there were the ‘boneheads’, the ‘knuckleheads’. You had to stand up out of your chair, with your head up against the blackboard, in front of the little group. I remember my head being smacked against the blackboard as I tried to read. It made me very nervous. Because I was under extreme pressure to read, I couldn’t do it without stuttering. Everyone thought that I was stupid! It wasn’t that I was stupid; I was terrified!

When I got into high school, it was just a carryover. I went to Smith High School in Southern California. I played for the legendary Cyrus Lowell. If you know anything about Cyrus, you know that his system was one of strict codes and rules that you had to abide by, both in and out of the classroom. He was difficult to deal with at times, but his approach was supposed to make you tough. He softened up in his later years, partly because of the law, I think. You couldn’t be that way with kids anymore. Smack a kid on the helmet; you couldn’t do that anymore. Grab a kid by the face mask and slam him back; you couldn’t do that anymore.

I remember one time when I was a sophomore in high school. We were preparing for a CIF playoff game to be played at Elk Valley Junior College against Agate Hills High School. The day before the big game, he brought up some of the JV players to the varsity, and I was

About the Author

Michael Wittlin is currently in his twenty-seventh year as a public schoolteacher. He has taught in rural Washington State, inter-city Los Angeles and Oxnard, California. He earned his BA from Occidental College, his Master’s Degree from Azusa Pacific University and his teaching credential from Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. He lives with his wife, Anne, and their two children, Julia and Robbie, in Ventura, California. In his free time, he loves to jog, read, spend time with his family and play the guitar and perform with the all-teacher band, “Slightly-Out-of-Tune”.