AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS ERB. Interviewer: Jewell Willhite. Oral History Project. Endacott Society. University of Kansas

Transcription

1 AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS ERB Interviewer: Jewell Willhite Oral History Project Endacott Society University of Kansas

2 THOMAS ERB B.A., History, DePauw University, 1967 M.A.T., Social Studies Education, Northwestern University, 1968 Ph.D, Curriculum Theory, University of Florida, 1977 Service at the University of Kansas First came to the University of Kansas, 1978 Assistant Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, Associate Professor of Curriculum & Instruction, Professor of Teaching & Leadership,

3 AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS ERB Interviewer: Jewell Willhite Q: I am speaking with Thomas Erb, who retired in 2005 as a professor of teaching and leadership in the School of Education at the University of Kansas. We are in Lawrence, Kansas, on September 17, Where were you born and in what year? A: I was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in Q: What were your parents names? A: My dad was Russell Erb and my mother was Deone McGinnis Erb. McGinnis was her maiden name. Q: What was their educational background? A: They both had some post secondary education. Dad had gone to business school and had become an accountant, eventually becoming a certified public accountant. Mother had gone to what I guess at the time would be a secretarial college. They met at work at Magnavox. Q: So your parents worked for Magnavox. Did you have brothers and sisters? A: I have a sister, who is about three and a half years younger than I am, living today in North Carolina. Q: Did you grow up in Fort Wayne? A: I did. I spent the first 18 years there then went to college in Indiana. So I was in the state the first 22 years of my life. Q: Where did you go to elementary school? A: We moved around a little bit, partly because the family moved, partly because the city was expanding, and school attendance districts got changed. I started out in an integrated 3

4 elementary school right across the street from my parents rented house. I was there for kindergarten and the first part of first grade. Then we moved and I went to an older school for a while until a newer school was built in our neighborhood. So I went to three different elementary schools through sixth grade. Q: Were you in organizations such as Boy Scouts? A: I was a Cub Scout but I didn t take Scouting beyond Cub Scouting. And Indian Guides, which is a YMCA program for fathers and sons. My dad and I were involved when I was a kid. Q: Did you pretend you were Indians? A: I don t remember exactly what we did but we would study various crafts and cultural practices and that sort of thing. Q: Where did you go to junior high and high school? A: At that time in Fort Wayne the seventh and eighth grades were part of a K-8 school setting. So that s when I went to Harrison Hill, where my wife-to-be was attending school. I spent two years in seventh and eighth grade there and then went to South Side High School, one of five public high schools in Fort Wayne. Q: Were you involved in extracurricular activities? A: Yes, there were a couple of things I was very involved in, the Speech Club called Wranglers. I m not quite sure where the name came from. We did a lot of public speaking in different categories. Q: Was this like debate? 4

5 A: Some of the categories were similar to debate, but you have humorous interpretation, dramatic interpretation, original oratory, extemporaneous speaking, poetry reading, and a couple of other categories. Q: And these were competitive with other schools? A: Yes. You compete in several speech meets, and at the end of the year there were sectional, regional, and state level tournaments in these various categories. That was a big part of my life. I was also very active on the school newspaper. I was, among other things, sports editor for a while, and had some other positions. I was also the associate editor of the literary magazine my senior year. Q: I didn t know high schools had literary magazines. A: South Side High School had a very strong commitment to English and English education. It was bolstered by a very strong school newspaper that won many national competitive awards for high school newspapers at the time. It was a very well known newspaper among high schools. Q: Did you have influential teachers from those days? A: Yes, there were a number of them. I just happen to have a list of them here that I have prepared for a presentation I made a couple of years ago. There was George Davis in chemistry, Florence Emshwiller in English. I m going to read through these real quickly and then go back and make a comment about it. Ronald Gersmehl in English, Mildred Luse in math, Richard Sage, who was my home room teacher, Evelyn Spray in English, Robert Story in speech, Wilburn Wilson in social studies and Lutie Young in math. See, they come from all these different core areas. I had excellent instruction in math, English, social studies, science, and speech as well. These were all teachers who took a 5

6 great interest in their students, particularly from my perspective. But they were all very demanding people. They wouldn t let you get away with not doing your best. But at the same time they were not just ogres and taskmasters. They were someone who you knew cared about you. But yes, I had some very good teachers. Q: Did you have honors in high school? A: Yes. I was recognized for my activity in the speech club. Actually, in original oratory, if I may be so modest, my senior year I was the Indiana state champion in original oratory. Q: Oh, really? A: And was a state finalist in dramatic interpretation. Q: In original oratory you wrote the speech on a subject. Do you remember what you talked about? A: Actually, I do. It grew out of my interest in social studies and politics. It dealt with the foundations of Communist theory. The topic was dialectical materialism, a Marxist synthesis of Hegel's dialectics and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach's materialism. How did I make an interesting speech out of that? I frankly don t know how at this point in time. Q: Well, you must have. A: It was fun and very challenging. That was the biggest part of my life. Outside of school I was doing a lot of drama and theatre as well in community theatre and a theatre group and even a religious theatre group at our church. We had a religious group and particularly at Christmas time and Easter time we would travel around to various churches in northeastern Indiana and present various religious plays. Q: What denomination was this? A: Methodist. 6

7 Q: Did you have jobs after school or in the summer? A: During the summer between my junior and senior year I started picking up various jobs, painting, stocking shelves. Then I got a job right after my senior year as a playground assistant with the Parks and Recreation program. And I continued that for several summers while I was in college. Q: It was probably always assumed that you would go to college since you were doing quite well in high school. A: Yes. There was no question about it, either in the family or at that school. Q: When did you graduate from high school? A: In Q: Did you then go to college right away in the fall? A: Yes. I went to DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, which is about 40 miles west of Indianapolis in the central part of the state. Q: How did you happen to choose that school? A: Well, that s hard to remember for sure. I do remember having a conference with my high school principal. He had a conference with every senior about their plans for the future. I said that I thought that I might be interested in going into teaching. I didn t know whether I wanted to go to Ball State, which was the state teachers college, or DePauw. DePauw had been founded by the Methodists. We had kind of a connection to it. It was known among the family. I had an uncle who had gone there during the Depression. He never finished because he had to quit DePauw and go to work. So we had some connections. So he said, There s no question. You should go to DePauw. So I did. Q: What was your major there? 7

8 A: I was a history major there. Q: How did you happen to choose history? A: I was always interested in politics and historical issues, those sorts of things. I can remember way back when I was still in elementary school my mother had gotten me a couple of books. One was called The First Book of Presidents. The other was called The First Book of Stones, or rocks or something like that. I could care less about the geology stuff. I really got interested in that presidential history and what had happened in the different administrations. This interest grew over the years. In high school, I had some very good instruction in history and international relations from Wilburn Wilson and Jack Weicker, who later became principal. I just decided I wanted to know more about history. Q: Did you have influential teachers at DePauw? A: I did. Not surprisingly, several of them were in history, fortunately. James Cooper, whom I had for a course on the U.S. Constitution. He was excellent in challenging us. Clifton Phillips, my major advisor, was an expert in Japan and Southeast Asian history. That opened up a whole new part of the world to me. Raymond Pence, an English professor, was one of the most interesting professors I had. At the time I had him as a freshman, he was 81 years old, long past mandatory retirement. He continued to teach one section of freshman English and then a senior seminar. For him, we never wrote anything the first semester longer than a single paragraph, but we had to have a conference with him every week where we had to justify every word in that paragraph. That s where I credit my learning to write, which was the payoff later, as we get further into this discussion. I really enjoyed him and Prof. Cooper and Prof. Phillips, also Robert 8

9 Weiss in the Speech Department. There I took some course work in American public address, which fit into my interest in history. We looked at how rhetoric had been used historically to advance causes, etc. Another history professor, John Wilson, who I had as a wet-behind-the-ears freshman in a 30-student lecture class, was one of the best lecturers I have ever had. He was able to intersperse concepts with anecdotes. As you were catching up on the concepts he was giving you these live anecdotes. Then you moved on. He was very good. Then I had him again in my senior seminar, where I wrote my senior thesis on the Mexican revolution ( ). Q: When you are a history major as an undergraduate, do you specialize in any particular history? A: I tended to take more American, more U.S. history courses. But I wanted to make sure I had a wide variety of exposure. I took some European history courses and Asian courses, as well as American. Later on in graduate school I added more work in African history and some other parts of the world that I had missed as an undergraduate. In fact, African Studies was my official doctoral minor, accompanying my major focus in curriculum theory. Q: Did you live in a dorm or were you in a fraternity? A: I consciously chose to remain independent. I didn t want the entanglements of a fraternity, I guess. I was too serious in those days. I don t know. And the dorms there were organized a lot like fraternities, in the sense that they were relatively small. You knew everybody in your dorm, if you wanted to. If you didn t care, that was fine too. It was an enjoyable living experience. Q: Did you participate in theatre or debate in college? 9

10 A: I did do some theatre in college. During the summers after my freshman and sophomore years, I continued to do summer theater back in Fort Wayne. My senior year I appeared in the light comedy Mary Mary. Also, I was involved in the International Relations Club. We would often invite counsel generals and other consulate officials from Chicago and Indianapolis to come in and talk about the countries that they represented in the United States and that sort of thing. I was also involved in dorm government. Q: You said something about continuing the job with Parks and Rec. Is that the job you had during the summers while you were an undergraduate? A: For a couple of years after high school, I continued to work for the parks and recreation department in Fort Wayne as a playground leader during the days and did summer theatre in the evening. Q: Did you have honors in college? A: Yes, I did reasonably well. I graduated with distinction and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Q: What year was that? A: That was Q: What did you do after that? A: That was an interesting time, if you recall, Q: Oh, yes. A: I had taken no education courses as an undergraduate. I was a history major, trying to figure out what to do with that history major at a time when the draft laws were constantly being changed as the Vietnamese War revved up. I firmed up a decision to go into teaching, which presented a little problem, since I didn t have the course work or 10

11 license or anything. So I started looking around for graduate teacher education programs, of which there were several available at that time, created to address the teacher shortage, which the country was facing. So I wound up at Northwestern University in a master of arts in teaching program. That took me to the Chicago area in 1968, which was going to be an interesting time indeed. Q: Did that affect Northwestern or you? What did you think of all that was going on, especially as a former history major? A: Well, the night Abraham Ribbicoff stood before the Democratic Convention downtown in Chicago and looked right at Richard J. Daley and said: "With George McGovern as President of the United States we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago," I heard that on the radio because that very night I was helping my best buddy from high school, who had also gone to DePauw and who was also now at Northwestern, though his decisions were all made independently from mine. He was moving his new wife into a new apartment because he had just been drafted into the Army. So he was setting her up for his impending departure to boot camp. I was helping him move. There was some personal involvement in the goings on, although I was not down in the Loop during the convention. I was still watching that on television. Q: You married about this time, didn t you? A: A couple years later. At that time my wife-to-be, Karen, was still living in Europe. She was in Portugal in the spring of 1968, as I recall. I would take clippings out of the Chicago Tribune and make a package of goodies and send these off with letters relating the news to keep Karen up to date on what was going on back in the States. Then during the summer of 1969 I took a trip back to Europe to try to solidify this relationship. To 11

12 make a long story short, Karen came back to the United States that fall. She came back to teach at South Side High School in Fort Wayne. I went back to my teaching job in the suburbs of Chicago, where I was teaching in Wilmette, Illinois. Q: When did you get your Master of Arts in Teaching? A: I completed my M.A.T. degree in August, just at the end of that fateful summer of Q: Did you have influential teachers in that program? A: Yes. However, the most influential teachers were the ones I was working with in the middle school, where I had my year-long teaching internship. Q: So you did practice teaching then? A: The entire year I spent teaching in an eighth grade classroom while taking course work at the university. Yvonne Kuhlman deserves a great deal of the credit for turning me into a middle school teacher. She was a teacher in the next room who had a common planning period with me. We processed a lot of my beginning teacher issues with her. She was terrific, and I credit her with propelling me into middle grades education and into becoming a good teacher and staying there right to the end of my career. Q: What subject were you teaching? A: I was teaching social studies. But that first year I was also hired as an English teacher. I had a block of time where I taught integrated English and social studies and then what they called group guidance. It was kind of a home room group at the junior high level. Then we evolved into teaming, which became kind of the cornerstone of middle grades education, where you have two or more teachers working together with the same group of students to teach the core subjects: social studies, language arts, mathematics, and science. 12

13 Q: Did you like working with middle school students? Some people find them rather challenging. A: They do. I took the job because it was available. I was actually trained as a high school history teacher. I did my student teaching during the summer of 1968 in a high school. Then I got the job at Howard Junior High School, eighth grade, a block schedule. With Yvonne s help, I learned to become a good middle school teacher. It took me about three years to stop looking for a high school job because I had always thought I wanted to be a high school history teacher. It finally dawned on me that this was a very unique time in life, this transition from 11 to 14 years old, when kids are leaving childhood behind and becoming more self-aware and learning to think in new, more abstract ways, not to mention dealing with pubertal changes. It is a time of tremendous growth and excitement. I really came to love that group. After that third year in teaching, I never, ever regretted not getting a high school job. Q: Was this a middle school system of sixth, seventh and eighth grade? A: It was seventh and eighth the first year I was there, but they added the sixth grade about two years later. So by the time I left Wilmette it was a sixth, seventh, and eighth grade middle school. Q; How long were you there? A: I spent four years teaching in Wilmette. Earlier, as an undergraduate at DePauw I had spent six months abroad during a junior semester program centered in Freiberg, Germany. Q: Where did you go? 13

14 A: I studied mostly in Germany and then some in England during the summer of I took a British literature course in the summer. And I traveled extensively because I was gone for six months. I traveled in Europe from Greece to Norway and almost every place in between in Western Europe. This was still a divided Europe at that time. The only time I spent in Eastern Europe was a little time in East Berlin. I was all over Western Europe, except for Iberia. I didn t go into Spain or Portugal. So three years later in 1969 when Karen was living in Spain and Portugal, I thought that s an opportunity to see that part of Europe and see more of Karen. So that s why in 1969 I went back to court her. She didn t know that at the time. Then I traveled around Spain and Portugal with a side trip to Morocco. To get back to the point here, I decided that I wanted to live overseas for a while. I m not quite sure what the origins of that idea were. However, I just wanted to travel and see the world. So I started looking for teaching positions overseas. I interviewed with an international school in the Hague. I interviewed with Sao Paulo, Brazil. I interviewed with Beirut, Lebanon. No job offers resulted that year of In the meantime later year in September, Karen and I were married. She had come to Wilmette and also had a teaching job there. So we continued to look for jobs overseas. In the spring of 1972 there were positions that came open at the Escola Inglesa de Luanda in Portuguese-speaking West Africa. Karen, who had been in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, wanted to go back to Africa. I didn t care where I went, as long as she was with me. We signed contracts and went off to Escola Inglesa to teach for two years. Q: This was a school for foreign people rather than Africans, I suppose, because it was in English. 14

15 A: It was an English language school. The largest population was students from the United States or Europe who either spoke English at home or whose parents wanted them to have an English medium elementary and middle school education. There were some Angolan students. Some of the employees of the school could send their children there. And there were some Portuguese, as well, who sent their children there. However, it was not an indigenous school. It was a very different experience for Karen from having been in the Peace Corps, where she was dealing with the local population. Q: What subjects were you teaching here? A: There again I taught primarily social studies. This was a very small school, actually. It only had about 110 kids from kindergarten through the eighth grade. So I taught the entire fifth through eighth grade social studies curriculum, plus picked up a sixth grade math class, a sixth grade art class and fourth through eighth physical education. That s where I learned a lot more about teaching middle schoolers. Q: How did you like living in Africa? A: I loved the adventure and the experience. There were certainly frustrations, but we also had lots of stories to tell about our adventures in those days. I m sure we don t have time for them in this context. Just traveling around and getting from one place to another was quite an adventure at times. Q: I don t suppose you had a car. A: We did have a car. When we traveled in Angola we would drive around from one end to the other. When we left the country, we would fly. Q: So you saw some other parts of Africa? 15

16 A: We did not come back to the United States for two years, so we took all of our vacations in Africa, which we had about every three months. It was three months of teaching and then some time off. We traveled extensively in southern Africa. We were in South Africa when it was still an apartheid state. We were in Mozambique when it was still a Portuguese territory. We were in Rhodesia when it was an illegal state after Ian Smith had broken off from the British. We did return to Nigeria twice, once in the middle of our stay and once on the way back to the States at the end of our teaching contracts in We also traveled in the Congo (Zaire) and went to Malawi and Kenya in East Africa as well as Namibia in southern Africa. We made every effort to see as much as we could because we knew that that part of Africa was going to be changing rapidly. The Portuguese were under terrific pressure to give up their colonies, which they called overseas provinces. They were still making the myth that these African colonies were all part of Portugal. But there was a coup in April of 1974 while we were still living in Angola that overthrew the government in Lisbon and led to the process of granting independence to their overseas colonies. Then, of course, shortly thereafter South Africa gained its independence from itself, in a sense, overthrowing the apartheid regime. So southern Africa has changed greatly. But we were able to see something that doesn t exist any more the last of the European empires in Africa. Q: You were there during the colonial period. A: Yes, we were. Q: How long were you there? A: Almost two years. Q: Then what did you do when you came back to the States? 16

17 A: When we left the States two years earlier, we had the idea that we would come back to do additional graduate work. We didn t know where and weren t totally focused on what we were going to do. But we had our experiences overseas, not only in Angola but when we returned to Nigeria studying the education system that was developing there. We thought we might go into international education or comparative education, where we would study different educational systems. We didn t know where exactly. One day our head master at Escola Inglesa, who was a New Zealander, came up to us and said, There is a professor from the United States that you ought to get to know. And we did. It turned out to be Haig Der Houssikian, who was the director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. So we got to talking to him about possibilities for studying international education at Florida. There were several educators from the College of Education who were also associated with the African Studies Center. We went to Florida thinking we would be focusing on African studies but from an educational perspective, education in Africa. That was our intent. Both of us were accepted to graduate school. I had a master s degree and was accepted into a Ph.D. program. Karen had her bachelor s degree from Indiana University and was ready to go on to a master s degree. We came to Gainesville, Florida, in the fall of 74. Q: Was your major African studies as a Ph.D. student? A: Well, things don t always turn out the way you plan them. I actually got into a curriculum theory program with a minor in African studies. I continued to take courses in political science and history and comparative education and sociology that all had an African focus but also an educational focus. I was working with education in Africa as a minor. But I got a regular curriculum theory doctoral degree in the College of Education. 17

18 While I was there I didn t know it at the time some of the leading figures in the emerging middle school movement were at the University of Florida. William Alexander, who is considered the father of the middle school movement, was there, though he was near retirement, and a young professor by the name of Paul George was there. Well, I got hooked up with them, first as a graduate assistant to Paul George. He led me around to seeing the possibilities in staying in middle school education. Now, that s what I had always taught, at Wilmette and at Escola Inglesa as well as during a year in between at the University of Chicago Laboratory School. So I knew the age group and I knew in my guts that it was important, but I didn t know it was a field of study within education. That was just emerging at that time. That was exciting to me and I diverted myself back into middle school education, away from international education. Q: So this was a time when they were changing from what we think of as junior high, seventh, eighth, and ninth, to sixth, seventh and eighth. Is that what is considered middle school? A: The issue is not so much the grade configuration. The focus is on the program that is provided for the age group. In the mid 20 th century, too often junior high schools were mimicking high school programs. They were teaching using high school strategies to 12 and 13-year-olds who weren t ready for them. The idea of the middle school was to change the structure of the school and the curriculum so that it more addressed the developmental level of the younger students and provided a smoother transition out of elementary into high school. So there is more to it than just grade levels. But by and large what was happening over the next 20 or 30 years was a transition out of 7-9 schools 18

19 for that age group to 6-8 schools. But K-8 schools continued to exist and other configurations continued to exist as well. Q: How long were you in Florida with this doctoral program? A: We were there for about four years, until the spring of Q: Did you have children during this time? A: We did. Our first two sons were born in Florida and proud of their Floridian heritage. Q: What are their names? A: They are Christopher and Gregory. Q: What was your dissertation on for your doctoral degree? A: It was about teacher attitudes toward the use of African content in a middle school social studies curriculum. Africa has not been very well taught, if at all, in our schools in this country. We greatly oversimplify it. We often teach it from a European perspective. So I was studying what this situation was and how teaching about Africa could be improved. So I did use my African background as part of my curriculum dissertation. Q: When did you receive your Ph.D.? A: Actually, in December of But it was right in the middle of the academic year, so I was hired the spring semester as an adjunct professor in the College of Education while I searched for a position. That s when I got the position at the University of Kansas, in the spring of 78. So I started here in the fall. Q: When you came here you were with the School of Education. A: Right. Q: What were you hired to teach? 19

20 A: Two things really. Primarily to be part of the developing middle grades education program, to take prime responsibility for developing it here. The university had had a common learnings (combined social studies/language arts) program for a long time with a junior high focus. But they wanted to expand that into a full middle school teacher education program. At the same time the state was adding middle level certification. Topeka schools were transitioning into middle school. The State Middle School Association, the Kansas Association for Middle Level Education, had just been founded the spring before. So there was a lot of movement toward middle schools around the state, and the university wanted to be a part of that to prepare teachers for these middle grades. So that was my prime responsibility. But I also would teach general curriculum planning and curriculum theory in the graduate program as well, both graduate and undergraduate middle school and general curriculum theory. Q: The Lawrence Public Schools are coming to the middle school concept rather late, aren t they? A: Very. In 1986 I was a member of a study committee in Lawrence that did recommend going to middle school at that time. The board did not accept the recommendation. Again in 1991 there was another study group. The recommendation did not go through. That was in conjunction with adding a second high school. We were talking about moving the ninth graders at that time to create four-year high schools. It did not work out. So, finally I went away to DePauw last year and I came back to find out that the school board made the decision to go to middle schools in Lawrence, Kansas. Q: And I assume you think that is a good thing for them to do. 20

21 A: Yes, I think it is a good thing for them to do, if they do it right. There are some people in the district who know how to do it right. Q: What building were you in when you came here? A: When I came here we were in Bailey Hall. We have moved around a bit as we have reorganized over the years. We spent one summer over in the basement of Wescoe while they remodeled Bailey. Then along around 2000 we moved to J. R. Pearson over on West Campus Road. It is a lovely renovated facility, designed for our purposes. My only complaint is my office was two thirds the size of the one in old Bailey. So I had to clean house after being here about 20 years. Q: Did you originate any courses? A: Well, really all the middle school courses were originated. The curriculum courses were things that were part of the graduate curriculum. But I think each of us responsible for these courses taught them from a slightly different perspective. So we created our own courses in the graduate school, even though they may have had similar titles. Q: Has the department grown or become smaller? How has it changed through the years? A: The department I m trying to remember. There were a little over 20 faculty members, I think, during that first decade I was here. I chaired Curriculum & Instruction from 1989 to I think we had 22 members of the department at that time. Shortly thereafter the directive came down to consolidate departments in the School of Education. We had, I think, seven or eight departments in the School of Ed. when I came here. Eventually, the music education, music therapy, and art education departments were moved out into the School of Fine Arts. We were in Curriculum & Instruction at that time and were focused primarily on teacher education. We were combined at one point with the administration 21

22 and social and historical foundations department and policy people into a much larger department named Teaching & Leadership. There were some other mergers too. The counseling psychology people were moved out into another area in the university counseling center. Then the Educational Psychology people were in a separate department. The kinesiology and exercise science folks were in another department. So we were down to about four departments in the School of Ed. for a while. That s the way it was when I left in But in the meantime, I understand, Curriculum and Instruction has been separated off again from the Administration and Policy people. They are once again two departments. So it ebbs and flows, depending on the needs of somebody to reorganize. Q: What have your research interests been? A: Well, it has been on middle school curriculum and school organization, as well as middle grades teacher education. I have written in all three of those areas over the years. Q: You were saying you had been chairman of the department for a while. I ask about administration responsibilities. A: It was not a good time for me then in the late eighties. We had four children at home. The two oldest sons were in junior high and high school; our youngest son was in elementary school, and our newly adopted daughter was in preschool. We also had an exchange student living with us. Q: Where was your exchange student from? A: That one was Eduardo from Quito, Ecuador. Eight years later we hosted Eric from Mexico City. Q: Were they college students? 22

23 A: No, these were high school students. Eric was a sophomore when he was here. Eduardo was a senior when he was here. There were a lot of family responsibilities during this time. I was finding that I was spending all my time at the office. Weekends were shot. So I did not complete a full five-year term. I resigned after two. Q: Have you had sabbaticals? A: I have had two of them. The first one was back in the eighties. I spent a lot of that year in the Shawnee Mission schools because that was the year that they were undergoing the transition to middle schools. I worked extensively with the six or seven middle schools as well as the five high schools to prepare them for how their lives were going to change as a result of the middle school transition. Then in I had another sabbatical to finish a book that I was working on about team organization in middle schools. Also, I began editing the Middle School Journal on that sabbatical. After that first year, I then became the permanent editor of, and continued to edit the Middle School Journal, during the entire time I was here at KU up until June of Q: You mentioned that you were the author of a book. A: A couple, actually. I guess from my perspective the most important book was this one on middle school teaming that I edited with Tom Dickinson, a very close professional associate who is at DePauw University now. We looked at all the aspects of teaming that we could think of, how interdisciplinary teams relate to the rest of the school, how they relate to the counseling program, how they support student achievement the research base for that. In addition, we used several vignettes or case studies written by practicing teachers about their experiences with teaming. So we had that. Also, about 10 years earlier Nancy Doda and I had written a book on Middle School Teaming, Promise, 23

24 Practices and Possibilities. There have been a couple other things I have done on educating gifted students in the middle grades. Then I ve done a couple things recently which were edited works for the National Middle School Association that illustrate carrying out of the basic principals of that association for middle grades education. There are now 16 characteristics that define effective middle schools. I have edited two books that provide concrete examples of these 16 characteristics in action in effective middle schools. Q: I suppose you ve been on university committees. Any you particularly remember? A: Well, I was here for 27 years, so I had a lot of service over the years. A number of times, I served on personnel committees at the departmental and school level, search committees as well. I can t remember them all over the course of time. One of the things I did on numerous occasions, over 30 times during the course of my career, was to write outside reviews of research for people going up for promotion and tenure in my field at other universities. So I ve had quite a bit of experience looking at what was happening at other universities as members of my field were going up for promotion and tenure. Q: Have you had honors? A: Yes. In 1994 I received the Career Teaching Award from the School of Education. In 2002 I received the Faculty Achievement Award for Service in the School of Education. The Kansas Association for Middle Level Education presented a couple of citations over the course of my work for them, one in 1982 another in They even named an award after me at one point, the Thomas O. Erb Teaming Award that they give to outstanding middle school teacher teams in the state of Kansas. Then just before I retired 24

25 the National Middle School Association presented me with their John H. Lounsbury Award, which is their highest honor for distinguished service to middle level education. Q: What do you think makes a good teacher? A: My answer to that would come from a question that I asked my own students here at the university and then at DePauw. Early in a course on middle grades curriculum and instruction I ask them to reflect back on their own careers in junior high in this case and tell me who is their favorite teacher and why. And who is your least favorite teacher and why? When you read hundreds of these and get into discussions with hundreds of students over the years, there is a real clear pattern that emerges about who the best teachers are, who the students really liked and respected. On the one hand, they are demanding, they have high standards and push students and won t let them get away with not doing their best. But they aren t just ogres who are impossible to work with. The other side of that demanding excellence and high standards is someone who cares about students as real persons. They know the students. Students want to succeed to reciprocate the respect they experience from the teacher. There is a personal relationship between student and teacher. So students are willing to work because they know that their teachers have their best interests in mind. The teachers are not being demanding in an impersonal way. They are being demanding because it is good for the student. So it is that juxtaposition of, You can t get away with this mediocre work because I care too much about you. It s that tension between these opposites of demanding and caring that I think makes a really great teacher. Q: Do you keep in touch with some of your former students? Do you have outstanding former students who have gone on to greater things? 25

26 A: Yes, I m still in communication with some of the students that I taught at the University of Chicago Laboratory School. One is now a physician in Seattle, Bainbridge Island, Washington. He was a sixth grader when I taught him back in About three years ago I got an from another student, asking, Mr. Erb, are you the teacher who taught me at the Escola Inglesa? It was from another former sixth grader, whom I remember as a little 11-year-old kid, who is now an international businessman. He has worked all over the world. He was ing me from Budapest. I don t know where he got my name. But on the internet I guess we are all exposed. So we reconnected. I have had several doctoral students who have gone on to careers in other universities around the country. I ve had some outstanding undergraduates too. The ones that come to mind are some fairly recent students I ve had whose starts at the university were really rugged. Their backgrounds were kind of iffy. They were marginal students coming in. But once they found themselves and what they wanted to do, they had a real drive and they brought an intelligence to the work they do. And they have gone on to later success. One of them practically flunked out of this university. In fact, he wasn t even admitted to the teacher education program the first time he applied because of his background. Q: How does the teacher education program work then? Do you have to have a year or two before you go into it? A: Yes. The admission to the teacher education programs would come at the end of the sophomore year. Q: Do you have to have a certain grade point? How does it work? 26

27 A: Yes, you do. However, we have a little fudging space, if there is some compensating factors in the student s resume. On the other hand, you can t blow off your first two years of undergraduate education and come into teacher education. I ve had a number of conferences with young males, particularly, over the years who didn t know what they wanted and had partied their way through two years, and, consequently, teaching was not an option for them at the end of their sophomore year. One exception I m thinking of turned out to be an outstanding teacher and within three years of being hired by a school district here in eastern Kansas was an assistant principal. He has gone on to publish some curricular material. He went with us to the U.S.-China Conference on Education in 2002 and gave a presentation in Beijing. And he didn t even get into the teacher education program the first time he applied. Then I had a student at DePauw who was very similar. He practically flunked out; he was on academic probation his first two years at DePauw University. By the time I encountered him I couldn t believe he had been through all that. He was an excellent student. When I watched him teach an eighth grade class, he did a far better job than the regular classroom teacher. He did one of the most outstanding jobs of holding a tough audience and teaching them that I have ever seen. He s now working for the Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. He s not in education, but he s using that background combined with his work in political science very effectively. Those types of stories are of students you really remember. Q: You belong to professional organizations, I suppose. A: Yes. The National Middle School Education Association has been my prime affiliation over the years. I was on the board of directors for a while. Over the years, I chaired a 27

28 couple of their committees, the teacher preparation committee and the research advisory committee. I am also a member of the American Educational Research Association and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, which also deal with various education issues from different perspectives. Q: I don t think we mentioned the names of your children who were born in Lawrence. A: That s correct. We did overlook them. In 1982 Brian was born and in 1987 Emily was born, but she was born near Cuernavaca, Mexico. She came to live with us about 22 months later, as our adopted daughter. They have all moved on in life now. Christopher is a resident in internal medicine at Yale/Haven Hospital in Connecticut. Gregory, at the end of next month (Oct. 2010), will finish a residency in family practice at KU Med in Kansas City. Brian is in his seventh year of teaching high school in the Bronx, New York. And Emily is on the verge of graduating from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. Q: Do you have grandchildren? A: We do. We have three at the moment. Christopher, our oldest son, has a daughter, 3 and a new little son who was born just in June. Gregory, our second, has an 11-year-old just about to enter this age group that I am supposed to be expert in. Gregory is getting married next summer and that will add two more grandchildren to our mix. Q: Have you been involved in community activities here in Lawrence? A: To some extent. One of the activities that took me into a school was connected to my work at KU as well. I spent seven years as the liaison to Central Junior High. I actually taught my undergraduate middle school course at Central and worked with the faculty 28

29 there. We concentrated our KU interns there. I spent time at Central almost every week for seven years. Q: Were you teaching kids or teachers? A: I was teaching our KU students at Central and working with Central teachers doing inservice education. We grouped several of our own interns at Central each semester so that I spent quite a bit of time on site, getting to know and work with the faculty. That tended to be my focus. I also often worked with other local junior high faculties in professional development when they were going into teaming, even though Lawrence maintained 7-9 junior highs right up to this year. West Junior High particularly and Central to some extent were engaged in teaming. In addition to my work with local junior high schools, I worked with teachers in more than 90 school districts in 23 different states during my time at KU. We also ran an institute at KU for about six years where we would invite school districts to send teams of teachers and administrators to the university in the summer for a week of learning and planning. We would usually have some theme or focus such as student assessment or school effectiveness. We combined presentations by KU faculty or invited experts from elsewhere with time for each of the school teams to work on some type of project, creating curriculum in some area or addressing a discipline problem, or whatever it was that they had defined as an issue that needed to be addressed. So we facilitated that in the summers for about six years. I directed it for the first four. Then some other KU faculty took it over. Q: You ve been retired about five years now. What have you been doing in retirement? A: I continued to edit the Middle School Journal until June of I did that from Lawrence. I traveled to Columbus, Ohio, where the journal is published, about five times 29

30 a year. I also had two distinguished visiting professorships at DePauw University in that time. Immediately upon retirement from KU, I went to DePauw for a year, partly to work with a friend I had previously written with, whom I mentioned earlier, Tom Dickinson. Then both Karen and I went back last year for a second assignment in teacher education for me and work with international students for Karen. I was helping them develop a new fifth-year, graduate teacher education program. Q: Did that happen while you were here, when they went from four to five years? A: That happened in the early 80s. I was here from the conception of the five-year program and very much involved in its creation. Q: Do you think that is the way it should be? A: I m in favor of that. Now I understand that the School has gone back to a four-year program here at the University of Kansas. Q: I didn t know that. A: I was not privy to any of the discussion leading to the elimination of the five-year program. I don t know the rationale. I don t know how I feel about the specific decision. I have thought for some time that it is important to build a teacher s education on a fullfledged liberal arts education, so that future teachers have a chance to experience all of the liberal arts in some depth. They would better understand how inquiry occurs in the sciences and humanities and different areas of human endeavor. Then they would have a one-year, site-based teacher internship where they would learn how to apply their knowledge and experience to the teaching world. I think that s a sound model for teacher education. That s the type of program that I experienced in the late 1960s. I had this undergraduate degree from DePauw in history. Then I went into an M.A.T. program. I 30

31 was an intern in a school for an entire year and took additional course work to prepare to be a qualified teacher. I think it is a good model. However, there are economic forces out there pushing institutions into shortening teacher education programs to speed potential teachers into classrooms to alleviate the current teacher shortage, a shortage exacerbated by an uneven distribution of teachers in certain high need areas. These shortages are being addressed by a proliferation of short, hurry-through programs such as Teach for America. Q: Are your teachers able to get jobs now? I thought some schools were cutting back. A: That s an interesting question. I do not know what happened with all of the students from DePauw last year. I do know some of them have jobs. But I don t know what percentage of them. For the longest time here at KU, our students were prized by recruiters. I remember when we went to a five-year program back in the early eighties, I would go to teacher education conferences with colleagues from other teacher education programs around the state, and there are 23 of them, or there were at the time, in the state of Kansas. Colleagues would talk to us, and especially if they were from another regents schools, they d say, You are going to price yourself out of a job. No one is going to go to KU to get a degree in teaching when they can get a four-year degree cheaper at 22 other places in the state. Well, we kind of bit our lips and bided our time. And true, we had a little bit of a dip during the transition into the new program. But it didn t take long to build up the program. We had so many applicants that we had to put a cap on admissions to teacher education. We didn t have enough resources to handle everybody who wanted to be here. The effect of that was that the quality of the students went up because we could be choosy. Consequently, instead of 31

32 killing teacher education, the five-year program improved it. There are principals in this state who will tell you that they look to KU teacher education graduates first because they know they are going to get someone who is likely to stick in the profession, who s more mature to begin with, who has that extra year of training and perspective, and has more experience in the classroom. Therefore, KU teacher education graduates were more sought after compared to graduates of other state institutions. So why the decision was made to cut back on KU s teacher education programs, I don t know. And I m sure there were some good reasons for it, but I m not sure that it is good for teaching and students in the long run. Q: Anything else you plan to do in retirement? A: Karen and I are looking for opportunities to continue our interest in travel. We ve been to a number of international countries over the years. We have our far-flung, growing grandchild group. We have friends and relatives in North Carolina, Colorado, Florida, and elsewhere. We may do some road trips and visit some old friends. Then we have more than 40 years of photographs and slides and things from our past adventures that we need to digitize and make more accessible to modern viewing. Q: To finish up, what is your assessment of KU, the School of Education, past, present, hopes for the future, that sort of thing? A: I m a little bit separated now from the School of Ed, since it has been about five years since I actually worked in it. And it has gone through a reorganization and a change in its teacher education program that we have just talked about. So I don t know that I can be terribly current about what the future of teacher education is at KU. I do have my concerns more generally about what is happening, in that there are more and more people 32