Heidi Watts

As a teacher of teachers in a graduate school of education I spend a fair bit of my professional life deploring the present state of schooling in America. We read the national reports calling for reforms, shake our heads and add our own indictments in courses like “Education in Social and Political Context” or The Politics of Schools.” Simultaneously, in courses like “Human Growth and Development” or “Reading Methods” I encourage students to delve deeply into their own memories of childhood to understand the children they will be teaching. When I do my own assignment and review my elementary school experiences, schools today suddenly take on a much better profile. With one exception, my third grade school and teacher, the elementary schools I attended are poor models for any era.  In the contrast between the schools of my childhood and the schools I know today I find hope for the continuing improvement of schooling; a profound respect for the progressive educatio...

The Chair of the Putney School Board, and a member also of the John Birch Society, pounded his fist on the table and roared, “We can’t have Heidi Watts in our school because Heidi Watts is a Quaker and Quakers are passive people.” It was 1966 and protest against the Vietnam War was heating up.  Corresponding rhetoric about the threat of communism was also on the rise, and the two forces were being played out over my contract renewal or non-renewal at the small elementary school in Putney, Vermont.  The audience was town’s people, some of them my outraged supporters who, nonetheless, could not suppress a smile at the confusion between pacifist and passivity. But they were not all supporters, either that evening in the library or in a later meeting in the school auditorium ,or in the letters to the editor and the General Store conversations. Earlier in the month a large sign appeared over main street saying, “Communists, aliens and pacifists, go home!". My husband was British...

The small white card, a little tattered on the edges, was tucked in with other notes and cards requesting services or offe.ring things to sell: “Gas cooker – nearly new!”; “Tutoring: only advanced students”; a pram, a sofa, oddments of furniture. I stood on the windy corner of Highgate Hill and scanned the notices on the board outside the news agent. I was recently divorced, living in London for the year with my two daughters on a salary of $400. a month supplemented by a per diem expense account of £7 a day – hardly enough for a family of three, even in 1978. I habitually scanned the board hoping to find something an American without working papers could do to earn a little extra money. “Educated Walking Lady Wanted” the card proclaimed. Well, I was educated. And I could walk. I liked to walk. When I called the number on the card a rich, heavily accented voice curled out of the receiver, “Hell-o.” I fumbled a few sentences: had seen the ad on the Highgate notice board, was...