On a Saturday earlier this month, my daughter and I were talking about education while two of her children, Carolina, age 12, and Daniel, 10, were eating breakfast at the kitchen’s island table. After a week of negative news, both national and anecdotal, I was lamenting the decline of standards in U.S. schools, public and private. My daughter agreed to an extent, but then she said, “The kids have a pretty good geography teacher.”
I looked at Carolina and Daniel. “Chad’s in northwest Africa,” Daniel volunteered. “Libya and Egypt are in north Africa,” Carolina added. Within a minute or so, I discovered they were studying the “-stans” and could locate Ukraine on a small globe. When I asked about capitals, Carolina piped up, “New Delhi’s the capital of India,” and Daniel said, “It’s Seoul in South Korea.”
By this time, Grandpa was fist-pumping the air and dancing around the kitchen. “Yes, yes!” I practically shouted. “This is exactly what I’ve been saying! Kids can learn these things! You two probably know more world geography than 90 percent of Americans, including me.” I looked at my daughter and said, “I’ve got to meet their teacher and find out how she does this.”
Background Basics
When we spoke by phone in mid-March, I learned that Rebecca Huffman of Scranton, Pennsylvania, had earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Delaware and then acquired a master’s degree in physical therapy. During her freshman year of college, she met her future husband, Philip Huffman, who practices internal medicine. They are the parents of seven children. The oldest, 24, is married with a daughter and another child on the way. Their youngest is 10.Though Ms. Huffman has kept her physical therapy license active, once she became a mother, she left that work and focused on her children. As they came of age, she began homeschooling them, enrolled two of them in a Montessori program, and soon helped found a co-op Montessori school, where she taught geography for six years.
Modus Operandi
“I got my love for geography from my dad,” Ms. Huffman says. “You could give him a map, and he could just occupy the children. He would do that with my kids. He’d just start talking about the map.”That love for world geography expanded during the years Ms. Huffman was instructing her own children at home and the classes in the Montessori school with which she was first involved. “My students had those Montessori puzzles,” she tells me. “They’re basically a puzzle of a continent, but every color is a different country. And they’re not labeled. So there’s this whole Montessori method where you’re naming countries in sequence around the puzzle.”
At Maria Kaupas, where she teaches geography and history through eighth grade, Ms. Huffman kept the concept but changed the materials. “I didn’t want puzzle pieces all over the place with so many kids,” she says, “so I had my daughter, who’s artistic, draw maps on paper and on poster board. Every poster board has a different continent, and we work with that because it’s not labeled.”
Layered Learning
But unmarked maps explain only a segment of Ms. Huffman’s approach. This year, she’s added a Memoria Press geography book, which she highly recommends and which the students find useful for their home studies. Her classroom has globes—“I need a magnifying glass to see the names,” she says, laughing—and wall maps, and she encourages her students to have similar maps and atlases available in their own homes. She also advises students to watch educational videos on YouTube and play online geography games.In addition, her students frequently write about and report on certain countries and their cultures for class, which reinforces the lessons they’re learning. Quizzes also help in this department, “and they’re learning how to take tests, which is a really good skill,” Ms. Huffman says. Contrary to popular belief, she has also found that “the kids like to compete.”
I think our educational system, and even sometimes homeschoolers, they have the attitude, ‘Should we be so competitive?’“ she says. ”But the kids like that healthy competition.”
All these points help explain why Ms. Huffman’s kids, who meet as a class only once a week—they do the rest of the work at home—are learning their geography. Yet these techniques and her years of teaching geography, as valuable as they are, still don’t fully explain Ms. Huffman’s success. That comes by way of something very special that she and other good teachers bring to the young.
Passion, Joy, Love
Though some of them don’t even realize it, all outstanding teachers bring three gifts to their classroom: passion for the subject they teach, joy in the act of teaching, and love for their students. When Rebecca Huffman speaks of her students and their classroom activities, these three gifts blend together in her voice and make a song of all she says.She gained her passion for geography, as stated earlier, from her father, but also from 14 years of teaching it in both a Montessori and classical school, bringing to the latter the lessons she learned from the Montessori method. She clearly thinks that girls and boys as young as 10 can acquire and memorize details that all too many other teachers consider beyond their students’ capabilities.
Bracing up Ms. Huffman’s confidence in the abilities of the young is her joy in sharing what she knows and the consequent broadening of a student’s perspective on the world. My grandchildren are living proof that this joy is infectious.
Finally, in every first-rate teacher I’ve ever known, there lies one more gift, which is often hidden even from them. They love their students. They want their students to succeed and are troubled, to the point of losing sleep, when they fail. Once the light clicks on inside the mind of a child, for the teacher, that moment is Christmas, New Year’s, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.
When classes end for the day, many teachers lug home satchels or briefcases stuffed with gradebooks, tests, and compositions. Along with that baggage of paper, they often carry thoughts of how to improve their presentations and encourage their students to push themselves and achieve more.
But Rebecca Huffman and others like her, those teachers whom students will remember for the rest of their lives, also carry those kids from the classroom in their hearts and prayers.
