THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 11, 1994 TAG: 9409090506
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: COVER STORY
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 186 lines
TRUMAN WAS president. No one had heard of rock 'n' roll, much less Elvis or The Beatles. For all the world knew, the moon really was made of green cheese. In 1950, Virginia D. Maddrey, fresh out of Greensboro College, walked into a fifth-grade classroom in the small North Carolina town of Roanoke Rapids and waited for her first batch of students. She was provided with little more than textbooks and chalk to go with her teaching degree. It would be a couple more years before she'd get anything different in the way of supplies: one roll of cellophane tape.
Her second year, she had 42 students in a sixth-grade class, some of them 15 and 16 years old, held back four and five times. ``Wall-to-wall children,'' she described it.
``But it was OK - you just went in and taught. It was a whole other world.''
There weren't a lot of career choices for women in rural North Carolina at the beginning of the 1950s. Secretary, nurse, teacher - that was about it. Maddrey's mother had taught for a decade before quitting to raise her daughter and son. She similarly urged a young Maddrey to train for the classroom. It would give her something to ``fall back on,'' her mother told her.
Maddrey's mother died when Maddrey was 18 and just starting college, but the daughter took the mother's advice and ran with it.
Maddrey took time out when her children were young and when she briefly tried a different job, but she kept returning to the classroom. Now, 44 years later and after some 30 years inside schools, she's winding up her education career.
Teaching wasn't something she fell back on. It was something she embraced.
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Maddrey had been raised in Norfolk and, for a couple of years, lived on her parents' dairy farm in old Princess Anne County. She met her insurance-agent husband after college, about the time she began teaching in Roanoke Rapids, and they soon married.
She stopped working outside the home soon after that, when the first of her four children were born. The youngest, a boy, died before his first birthday from a congenital condition, a tough situation for the young family and one that caused Maddrey to develop a strong Christian faith.
They were now living in an even smaller town - Weldon, N.C. - that was short of teachers. After her youngest entered school, Maddrey found herself drawn back to the classroom, substituting at first before eventualy returning full time. She wound up teaching all three of her children.
They refused to join other white families in abandoning the public schools during the rough road to integration in the 1960s. ``I just felt it was the right way to go,'' she said. ``I couldn't see pulling the kids out and see the school system go. . . . I just always felt people were people.''
By the end of the 1960s, Maddrey's marriage had ended, and she returned to South Hampton Roads and family. She had teaching to fall back on, and taught for a decade in Chesapeake, switching among grades three through six before working as a reading specialist, earning a master's degree at Old Dominion University along the way. She liked to work different jobs within the schools.
``After you do something two to three years, it's boring. At least it is for me,'' she said. Changing ``makes me dig a little more.''
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That desire for change led her to leave the public schools in 1980 and start a private Christian school at the Open Door Chapel in Virginia Beach. She ran it for three years, missing the daily classroom give-and-take but enjoying helping other teachers get started in the profession.
Then the bug for change bit again. Maddrey completed two months of ministerial training in Florida and ran the church office for Open Door Chapel for a couple more years. But the classroom beckoned again, this time in Virginia Beach. She taught fourth-graders and then worked in different schools with small groups of children who needed extra help in math, her favorite subject.
Two years ago she joined the first staff of Bayside Middle School's Sixth-Grade Campus on Jericho Road.
``The kids love her,'' said Assistant Principal David B. French.
Most of the other teachers on her team - throughout the school, in fact - weren't alive when she began teaching. Many had less than three years' experience. Maddrey found herself answering questions about how things were long ago, about how teaching and children have changed, about whether a proposed program might work.
They knew she had seen most of it before. The realization that she was considered a resource kind of surprised her. She was just another teacher, she thought. But she was just another teacher with three decades of classroom experience.
``I didn't realize it, but I've seen a lot,'' she said.
Others did realize it. A. Dianne Joyner, Bayside Sixth's principal, called Maddrey a ``very calming influence'' on her young staff.
``What Virginia has brought to us is her wisdom in working with sixth-grade students,'' Joyner said. ``She's a great pleasure for us to have her.
``Many of the teachers will go to Virginia. . . . They'll ask her opinion. Which I think is worthwhile.''
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Sitting in her empty classroom the week before school started - shelves bare, blue plastic chairs stacked along the wall, brown linoleum floor buffed over the summer to a high shine - Maddrey thought about the changes she's seen.
Many of the changes are superficial. Instead of carrying plain paper and pencils to class, children drag parents to department stores weeks before school opens to buy the latest superhero-decorated notebooks and pens and lunch boxes.
Teachers spend a week decorating classrooms with blown-up cartoons and store-bought posters where they used to come in one day early to hang up rough, homemade informational and inspirational signs. Maddrey used to cut up paper plates to help explain fractions and penciled her grades in a lined book; now she uses ready-made blocks and logs her records into her home computer.
But many of the changes are deeper and more disturbing to Maddrey. More of teaching now is disciplining. Restless children of the cable-TV generation have shorter attention spans and greater need for sensory stimulation. More broken families often mean fewer of the social skills necessary to get along in a classroom.
She no longer can just trot over and meet parents at their homes like she used to - too many split families, too many different work shifts, sometimes just too many families - so she has to keep in touch more formally, by phone and scheduled conference.
And a boy who keeps his coat on in class may not be insolent but genuinely afraid his expensive team-logo jacket will be stolen from the classroom coat rack.
``I see some who've been raised to respond correctly do so,'' Maddrey said. ``And I see others who haven't been raised to respond correctly.
``My point of view is: I went into teaching to teach, not be a policeman.''
And she believes children are pushed too hard, too early, in too-organized a fashion. ``I do find children have a hard time exploring on their own,'' she said. ``Because they have so many things to distract them - they have their Nintendos, their computers. You know: `Push this, do that.' . . . I think creativity suffers.''
As does discipline.
``We have a lot who say: `What do we do now?' I want to say: `Find something to do for a few minutes. Read a book! Work a puzzle! Find something!'
``Generally, I think kids expect something more. I don't think it is the kids. I think it is the society. . . . They go home and ask their mothers for something to do.''
Society intrudes in another way it didn't often in 1950, she added. Instantaneous news coverage brings atrocities from around the world into the children's households. And two years ago, an older student was killed in a drive-by shooting. That's a far cry from no-TV 1950, when Maddrey remembered her students playing catch and drawing pictures in the dirt.
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In late August, Maddrey drove her 18-year-old grandson to college in Florida. She has raised her daughter's son since he was 12, after the daughter's marriage broke up. He's studying to be a minister.
One of her sons already is a minister. Another is an insurance agent, like his father. Maddrey's daughter is a medical transcriptionist. None took up teaching. And soon Maddrey will give it up.
She's retiring in October, when she turns 65. She didn't want to disrupt the students by leaving early, but her bosses wanted her in a classroom for as long as they could have her.
Fellow teachers and her principal say they'll miss Maddrey. Principal Joyner promised to continue calling on her for help.
The first thing Maddrey did in her empty classroom this year was put a couple of pieces of tape - she gets all she wants now - on the back of a small sign and placed it on the end of a bookshelf. She knows many of her students will file past it without a glance, but it's a favorite of hers.
It reads: ``Learning is only limited by your attitude, not by your ability.''
Maddrey still plans to take a couple of computer classes before leaving to retain her teaching certification. She helps take care of her 95-year-old father, who lives next door to her in Cypress Point. She hopes to travel to Israel later in the fall. She'd like to work in a church after that. And maybe do some tutoring.
After all, she's a teacher. ILLUSTRATION: MOTOYA NAKAMURA/Staff color photos
This is the last year sixth-grade teacher Virginia D. Maddry[sic]
will decorate her classroom. The 40-year-plus veteran will say
goodbye to teaching in October, when she turns 65.
ABOVE: Maddrey chats with fellow teacher Percy Carter during a
meeting at Bayside Middle School in Virginia Beach.
LEFT: Maddrey points to math equations on her classroom wall.
Photo
MOTOYA NAKAMURA\Staff
Virginia Maddrey hangs a plaque in her Bayside Middle School
sixth-grade classroom with an inspirational message that says,
``Time: A daily treasure which attracts many robbers.''
by CNB