Now that I work as a substitute teacher I find that my appreciation for those who taught me has grown considerably. I have also become acquainted with the way that the passage of time changes one’s perspective. A few years back I took a teaching course under the auspices of Region Thirteen of the Texas Education Agency. Our instructors were pushing the idea of group learning. They were acting as if this were the latest thing to come down the road. Many of our sessions were held in a group learning format. We came to expect the instruction: “Break up into your groups,” as a part of our routine. Of course for me as for any of us who were freshman with the Class of ’64 at Madison this was old hat. We had shared the experience of teaching ourselves under the direction of Mr. Bradford.
At the time I thought it was a ploy on his part to avoid doing the work of a teacher. After all, in keeping with the temper of the times, Mr. Bradford would have been quite justified in saving his energy for the job that really counted. He was coach of the baseball team. When I tried to explain to my mother what was going on she asked, “And just exactly what the hell does he do. Sounds like you kids are teaching the class.”
He did run the first six weeks in a more or less standard fashion, but instead of dealing with content he taught us what would be expected of us for the last five grading periods of the year. We were to be divided up into small groups. Each six weeks the class would tackle a continent. Each group would be assigned a country or a group of countries. As a group we would write a paper and produce an oral report. Group leaders would be responsible for keeping Mr. Bradford informed about the group’s progress and the contributions of individual members. Heaven help the kid who got a personal conversation with Mr. B because he wasn’t pulling his weight.
I now realize that Mr. Bradford’s genius was in his selection of the team leaders and his ability to confidently delegate responsibilities that most teachers guarded jealously. He insured that report days would be fun days by suggesting that extra credit would be given to teams that brought in some food from the country that was the subject of their report. I remember when my team did Chile we brought in chile which begs the question, “Do they eat chile in Chile?” I also remember the day one of the other teams presented each student in the class with a chewy cookie-like object that tasted kind of sweet. After we had eaten them we were informed that each “cookie” contained the hard boiled yoke of an egg.
We even helped write the tests. Each team presented a set of questions to Mr. B as part of the written report. While he reserved the right to ask questions of his own if he found it necessary my recollection is that this was a rare occurrence. He often telegraphed his intentions by interviewing the presenting team in front of the class after they had given their oral report. I had very little capacity for paying attention in those days, but I still managed to glean enough to earn my usual “C.”
Was the proof in the pudding? Thirty years later I got a Carmen Sandiego game and found that somehow I still knew quite a lot about the people, places and things of the world. In 1998 I took six hours of geography at Austin Community College and earned a double ace including one in a course that was self-taught. I conclude, therefore, that Mr. B. not only knew what he was doing he was thirty years ahead of his time.