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Hyped teenagers race around a corner, sneakers squeaking on the newly waxed floors, only to slow in unison when they see teacher Barbara Anderson.
“No sagging this year,” she tells one young man on this mid-August morning, the first day of school. “Didn’t you all get the memo?”
She stands unperturbed outside her classroom dressed in brown slacks and a light-colored blouse. Her short, dark hair catches the hall light, and she fingers reading glasses hanging around her neck. She watches the boy tug up his pants, walk on. He had already begun to resist. It makes her tired thinking about it.
Anderson teaches accounting, Internet application, office technology and on-the-job training, and she will have about 30 kids in each class. Every day, another opportunity for one of them to act up after the long summer break.
“Mrs. Anderson, my girlfriend left her 33-year-old boyfriend last night.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventeen. She’s off crystal meth, too.”
“Listen, listen,” Anderson says. “Do your life right. Watch who you’re hanging around with. You ready for school?”
“I don’t know. My hair is so frizzy.”
“Forget about your hair.”
This year will be more challenging than usual. She has bigger classes than in the past. Connecting with students will be harder. Sometimes she feels like Cedric the Entertainer, doing whatever it takes to keep kids interested, hold their attention and inspire them to learn.
• • •
At 7:25 a.m. Anderson welcomes students to Accounting I, her first class of the day.
“The salary for an accountant entry level is $30,000 to $50,000 a year. Get a CPA, you can write your own ticket. Businesses are begging for accountants.”
Accounting fascinates Anderson. No one can argue with numbers. If something doesn’t add up, an accountant must search through the figures and resolve the problem. It’s like detective work. Mysteries conveyed through equations.
She tells the students to fill out name cards and list their favorite hobbies and school subjects. Then they will analyze the “data” and determine the percentages of different answers. Lecture is out with these kids. They learn by doing.
She notices some boys with their heads on desks, eyes closed, arms limp at their sides.
“You are here to learn,” she reminds them. “Sit up, please.”
Anderson loved school as a child. The stimulation of learning, the sorting and organizing of facts into useful information excited her. As she grew older, she enjoyed working with kids. Teaching, however, had not always been in her future.
Her father was a preacher in Bristol, Okla. He picked boys in church for her and her five sisters to marry. But Anderson’s mother, who married right after high school, was determined her children would attend college and have more options than she had allowed for herself. She pointed out professional women for them to emulate: Miss Goodson, a teacher, Miss Cooper, a nurse, Miss Strong, another teacher.
Instead of marrying the boy her father chose for her, Anderson enrolled in Langston University in Oklahoma. Her senior year, recruiters from the Kansas City, Kan., School District hired her to teach at Northwest Junior High School. She packed two suitcases and in 1966 moved to Wyandotte County.
“You do yourself a disservice, young man.”
“What?”
“Talking in class when you should be listening.”
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