Education the Oakwood Way

                                          Education the Oakwood Way

               Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 5/3/20

            It was Cobb County’s summer school of 1992. While my senior English class did research in the library, I sat and graded papers. Soon Dr. Carla Northcutt, the summer school principal, walked in and took a seat at my table.

            “I’m looking for a good, hardworking English teacher to join us at Oakwood,” she said.

            Twenty-eight years later I’m still surprised that I replied, “Well, I’m hardworking.” My answer surprised her as well since it implied interest. Oakwood was an alternative high school, Dr. Northcutt its principal. Its faculty was a creative bunch who knew how to engage students with diverse methods. Northcutt knew I was a traditionalist. For many years I had been the English department head at Wheeler High School and she was one of the department’s most effective teachers and the most non-traditional.

            Northcutt knew that I required – and that students enjoyed – modest amounts of memory work. She knew I required students to teach a lesson, engage in formal debate, write constantly, and read regularly. She knew that students understood the second bell was for starting class, not for last minute dashing into the room. She well remembered that, regarding literature, I was a strict constructionist, that is, I taught that an essay means what the essayist meant (just as the U.S. Constitution means what its writers meant and not what history scholars say they could have meant). She knew I believed that Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s rightful status was just below the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How then could I fit in at an alternative school with those abundantly creative teachers?

            “So you are interested?” Northcutt pressed.

            “Oh, I’ve thought about Oakwood a few times, but you know me. I’m probably not what you need.”

            Northcutt began to insist that Oakwood students needed traditional teachers too. I relented, and although the new school year was fast approaching, my North Cobb principal, Dale Gaddis, was very kind to release me from North Cobb.

It’s August of 1992, my first day at Oakwood. Three very pregnant girls and two pink-haired ones walk into my classroom followed by a young man clad not in a T-shirt but a doggone for real undershirt. Uh, Dr. Northcutt had oriented me on certain alternative school issues, but a boy coming in wearing an honest to goodness, old fashioned undershirt wasn’t one of them. I must be true to myself. I ask him if he perhaps had left his shirt in his car. “Naw sir, but I can find me one.” He leaves and within minutes returns properly dressed.

The school is small; the classes are small; teachers are granted much latitude. Wise school board members, realizing that students have varied educational needs, had continued to fund the low-enrollment school. While this first class of 15 enters, I’m sitting at a desk in the back. After the last bell rings, the deep-seated mischief in me rises up. I try something.

With elevated voice I spoke. “Please rise while the teacher proceeds to the front.”  Every student stood up, even the pink-haired girls! I never let on that I was messing with them.

 Early on I learned that two girls in the class had been in Advanced Placement classes at their home schools. Why did they choose the alternative school? “I got tired of the morning announcements that didn’t pertain to me,” one testified. That response is illustrative of so many high schoolers who are “drifting on the periphery of the pack” as C. Bradley Thompson puts it in his book, “Our Killing Schools: How America’s Schools are Destroying the Minds and Souls of our Children.”

To see how I managed at an alternative school for 11 exhilarating years, see paragraph 4 above. My teaching changed not a whit, though my pace did. Students who had come to Oakwood didn’t need a different curriculum, just a little more time and attention. They wanted academics and a diploma, not socialization or football. Frankly, they needed love.

The pregnant girls, the pink haired ones, the recovering druggies, the rebels, and all the rest inspired me, but nothing was as uplifting as the sparkling teachers, males and females. Among them was Marietta’s current First Lady, Jean Alice Tumlin who particularly showed this traditionalist how to be himself, enjoy students, and still be … a strict constructionist.

Our current pandemic lockdown is altering educational methods. Ideally it will lead to more innovation – more Oakwoods, perhaps - where teachers and students can be closer, where high tech doesn’t kill high touch, and where fewer students are on the periphery.

The departed Dr. Northcutt would smile down on that.

Roger Hines

4/29/20