W
There’s really no need to apologize.
Middle school, to Peterson, is not at all the image that lurks in the popular imagination, and middle-school students are not the alien life forms many people believe them to be.
“They have such energy. They still like you,” said Peterson, 65, a seventh- and eighth-grade language arts teacher at Lebanon Middle School. “They want to do, and want to learn.”
That may be, but Peterson, who’s worked with seventh- and eighth-graders for the past 43 years, 29 of them in Lebanon, is at least partly responsible for bringing out the qualities she praises.
In March, at its annual conference in Rhode Island, the New England League of Middle Schools honored Peterson with its Master in the Middle Award for her lifelong dedication to helping young people find their way in the world through reading and writing. Though much has changed in her four decades of teaching, that dedication has never wavered. Peterson has always believed that a classroom is its own kind of family.
“Pam takes the time to build trust,” said Lebanon Middle School Principal John D’Entremont. “You have to be willing to take that time to build that relationship with kids.”
Evidence of that relationship is everywhere around Peterson’s classroom. On her desk, there’s a growing stack of single-serving Froot Loops cups: “The students just decided to bring me breakfast one day.” Taped to a cabinet are cards and notes from students and colleagues. In a corner of the room, there’s an antique bell, brought in by a fifth-grader who attended a special poetry event Peterson organized last month and noticed that the bell she was using to get students’ attention didn’t do the trick. In another corner, a large bin holds fabric strips that students can braid into dog tug toys to donate to a local charity.
And then there are the bookshelves lining the classroom walls, filled with a few thousand books. Every one of them Peterson has purchased herself, and every one she’s read. How else to match each student with that perfect book that will stir the imagination?
Books plucked from Peterson’s shelves emerged from backpacks as seventh-graders arrived in her classroom last Monday morning. All was quiet as the students found their seats around tables and in bungee chairs beneath the windows and picked up their places in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, Jason Reynolds’ Patina and other favorites.
The quiet was telling. Peterson believes young people are capable of extraordinary things if you create the right conditions.
That starts on the first day of school. “I think how you spend the first four or five days in the classroom is so important,” Peterson said. “You sort of establish that connection and that trust.”
Deep and broad reading is another leg of the stool. Peterson connects her classes’ reading themes to the school curriculum, while offering her students choices in what they read.
“Often, we feel so isolated in our lives, and literature’s a connection,” she said. “Books today truly reflect society.”
Books also help students probe important issues. Her eighth-graders, who are studying World War II in social studies, are reading children’s books about the Holocaust in her class. After they read, they answer critical thinking questions such as, “Would you read this to a 6-year-old?”
“I wait till spring of eighth-grade to do that unit,” Peterson said. “I think they’re mature enough by then. … They get it. It just brings out in them all the emotions I know they have.”
Peterson also devotes ample time to writing, mining it for everything from grammar instruction to relationship-building.
“It’s how you learn who your kids are,” she said.
Peterson grew up in Enfield and graduated from Clark University, in Worcester, Mass. Her first job was teaching seventh grade in the Mascoma Valley Regional School District, where her former geometry teacher was now her boss.
“I was petrified. I felt like I was in geometry class again,” said Peterson, who still lives in Enfield, with her husband, Bob, and their cat, Grayson.
While at Mascoma, Peterson started coaching baseball and cheerleading, beginning a lifelong habit of rolling up her sleeves and helping wherever needed. Over the years she also coached soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and basketball, some of which she’d never played. “That’s how it was,” she said.
In 1989, Peterson came to Lebanon Junior High School. As part of the job interview, she recalled, she had to sell milk in the lunchroom, evidently to demonstrate how she interacted with kids.
It’s little moments like those that run through Peterson’s mind as she looks back on her years of teaching. She remembers comforting her students and taking comfort in them after the space shuttle carrying New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe blew up and, decades later, after the 9/11 attacks; the look on one of her students’ faces when he got on base during a baseball game for the first time; the little Christmas tree some students delivered to her door the year she’d moved and hadn’t had time to get a tree; the message her home-room students left on her answering machine telling her they’d won a big game in her honor after her father died.
“My classroom is a family. We, like families, might disagree, but we always stand up for each other,” Peterson said. “We genuinely care for and respect each other. When you have that, the academics come easily.”
Academics, of course, have changed substantially since Peterson began teaching, as has the culture inside and outside school. Peterson has been at the forefront of some of that change, pushing for collaboration among teachers, connections among subject areas and student choice in learning. And some of it, she’s had to adapt to.
“I think technology has changed things the most, for better and for worse,” she said. “There’s a kind of maturity that comes with social media. … I do think it opens their world to things that are happening.”
One big change in Lebanon was the move, in 2012, from the former junior high, which housed just seventh and eighth grade, to the new middle school, which pulled in the fifth- and sixth-grade classes — part of a shift in grade groupings happening around the country. Then, too, Peterson rolled with the changes, finding ways to forge connections between the younger students and older students. When administrators told her there was no way she could incorporate fifth- and sixth-graders into the annual winter carnival she’d started at the junior high, she proved them wrong.
And this year, Peterson piloted a program in which a group of eighth-graders visit a fifth-grade class to help with homework. “It’s about giving them opportunities to feel good about themselves,” she said.
Those approaches haven’t changed over the decades, Peterson said, because ultimately, young people haven’t changed.
“Kids are the same as ever, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said.
Peterson is much the same as she’s ever been, too.
“She teaches from the heart,” said Kassie Dunkerton, who was in Peterson’s class at Lebanon Junior High in the early 2000s and is now her colleague at Lebanon Middle School. “The kids always come first. That’s what Pam’s always been about.”
Peterson sparked Dunkerton’s interest in writing and helped her blossom as a student by making her feel comfortable, said Dunkerton, who teaches sixth-grade language arts.
“She was always very caring and accepting of everybody, but always had very high expectations for us,” she said.
Students in Peterson’s current seventh-grade class echo those sentiments.
“Mrs. Peterson has a presence. It’s like you want to impress her,” said Conner Chin, 12. “She gives you a lot of work, but you feel like you really learn. It’s very effective.”
“She’s been teaching forever, so she knows a lot about what she teaches,” said 13-year-old Mitchell Wallace.
“I like how she blends the humor and all these fun kinds of things into our learning,” said 12-year-old Kayla Rickrode. “She’s very strict, but she’s strict in a good way. … This is a place where your ideas are welcome.”
That influence continues long after students leave Peterson’s classroom. Students regularly come back to visit and look her up on social media.
“She’s one of the first people they think of when something big happens,” said Dunkerton, who remembers seeking Peterson out one morning a few years ago when she learned a close friend had died unexpectedly. “She was my shoulder to cry on.”
Dunkerton, who credits Peterson with inspiring her to be a teacher, is thrilled that her former teacher now serves as a mentor to her and many other young teachers.
“I could never be the teacher that Pam is,” she said. “If I was half the teacher that she is, I would be content in my career.”
When she received the Master in the Middle Award in March, Peterson had recently announced that she planned to retire at the end of the school year. Since then, she’s changed her mind and plans to teach one more year.
“I know that after 43 years, there’s still so much to learn,” she said.
Sarah Earle can be reached at searle@vnews.com or 603-727-3268.