From the Classroom

Like the members of almost every other profession, U.S. educators have a human proclivity for presenting one another with plaques, medals, scrolls, certificates and testimonials. But not often do such honors find their way to the level of the ordinary classroom. Last week, as a part of its bicentennial celebration, Columbia University paid tribute to six teachers who were selected for special honor in a nationwide canvass of schools and colleges. In so doing, it also painted a vivid portrait of the vast variety of theory and practice in U.S. education itself. The honored six:

>Miss Ada Shockley, 43, who teaches the first grade in the College Elementary School of the Central Washington College of Education in Ellensburg, Wash. A shy, quiet woman, Miss Shockley started her career in a country school at $50 a month. She toted ten gallons of water to school each day, made new, child-sized furniture, decorated the windows with bright cretonne to make school look "homey." Since then, she has spent her life arranging parties for her little charges, leading them through song and play until they are ready for books. Dedicated to the proposition that adjustment is as important as subject matter and that a child should not be forced to study until he is ready, she was chosen as a perfect representative of the "primary teacher who first unlocks for our youngest citizens the treasure chest of books and pictures and ideas . . ."

> Miss Helen Trask. 58, modish but motherly mistress in the third and fourth grades at the Munsey Park School in Manhasset, N.Y. A disciple of the learning-by-doing philosophy, Miss Trask keeps her classroom humming with activity. Most mornings begin with a "report period" in which her pupils exchange ideas or tell each other stories. After that, the class's regular work--social studies, science, reading, arithmetic--flows along with something of the ease of a stream of consciousness. Through spontaneous "poems," pupils begin to learn the power of words; through reading and trips around the community, they combine past and present history; and through a bewildering array of projects (e.g., wiring the classroom bell, building a weather station), they pick up the essentials of science--while also having a good deal of fun.

> Miss Lennie Green, 41, a Negro, daughter of a Pullman porter and a seamstress. As a child she fell in love with Latin and music, eventually won her master's at Atlanta University with a thesis on the letters of Pliny the Younger. An accomplished pianist, violinist and violist. Miss Green now teaches music at Atlanta's Booker T. Washington High School, also gives piano lessons at home. Over the years she has set hundreds of students to playing string quartets, singing chorales, attending symphony concerts in the city ("They come around to see her," says her mother, "just like she was their own mama"). But in spite of her popularity, Miss Green retains some ideas with a refreshingly old-fashioned flavor: "There is never a time when I don't want to teach. But in like manner, I never grow tired of studying, and always hold to the belief that one cannot be a successful teacher unless she devotes herself to a life of study as well."

<| Miss Fern Collier, 48, whose junior and senior classes in citizenship and the problems of democracy at Oklahoma City's John Marshall Junior-Senior High School are the very model of what the society-centered classroom should be. Instead of teaching history solely as a narrative series of events, Miss Collier likes to concentrate on such current problems as conservation. Once she set her class to reclaiming a 32-acre plot of land just outside of town, got botany students to study its plants, chemists to examine its soil, geology and art students to make up maps, agricultural students to irrigate and plant, and commercial law students to draw up a five-year lease with the land's owners. Last year her class decided that the community needed a new branch public library, engaged in a hot campaign to persuade city officials to think so too.

> Harold Hand, 53, professor of education at the University of Illinois, debonair devotee of the theory that traditional subjects are less important than service to society. As a member of the influential Illinois curriculum program, Professor Hand has spread his gospel throughout his state, has helped arouse dozens of schools and communities to work more closely together. "There are," he says, "community needs that simply have to be met. But anything we ask a youngster to do has got to have a clear relationship to something he wants. So we need to have things that the community needs make sense to youngsters."

>Theodore Greene, 57, who started teaching at the Forman Christian College in what is now Pakistan, later joined the faculty of Princeton, and finally, after a severe bout with polio, was appointed professor of philosophy at Yale. Since then he has become one of the brightest ornaments of his campus--a courtly scholar who each day painfully makes his way to class and there becomes the eloquent defender of liberal education at its best. His oft-taught belief: "The objective reality of beauty and its concrete embodiments, of goodness and its impact on human life, of God and His relation to man, is the major premise of the humanistic disciplines. Deny this premise and you make thoughtful, reflective study of the arts and literatures, of morality and religion, meaningless and impossible."

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