TEAM TEACHING

I want to tell you dear reader of a teaching experiment about 100 of my fellow class of 1964 classmates and I were a part of the three years we were in Easton High School.  It was called Team Teaching and the basic function was simple enough – the first three periods of the day we would have History, Algebra II, and English (these were a sophomores. juniors and seniors had different courses but the idea was the same) and the 4^th period was a common class, usually a study hall but sometimes used for programs we were all to see or take part in. 

The first hurdle was getting selected for the group of about 100 students the program could take from each graduating class.  Considering that our class eventually had over 600 graduate, that meant roughly 2 in 13 would get selected.  At my junior high there were 5 individual homerooms with probably about 160 students.  Which meant there were between  20 and 25 of us chosen from that school.

Here is the problem.  Since this program was conceived as an academic program, or at least that is how it operated, a student whose aptitude lay in areas other than strict academic pursuits, such as in business or in vo-tech (we called it shop then), had no chance to be selected for this program no matter how good they were.  I would draw attention to 3 people who were not academic (read that in college prep) but who proved to be quite capable in their fields.

Jim took printing and specialized in the Linotype.  The print shop teacher told my father, who worked at the school, that people a scapable as Jim, come along once in a  generation.  Ed and Alice were 2 of the 7 of our fellow graduates who graduated with perfect 4.0grade point averages and they majored in business. 

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