First Class

For new teacher Naomi Rubinstein, the realization came quickly that being a teacher is every bit as demanding as her old Wall Street job

By Sarah Pekkanen 

Naomi Rubinstein stands at the chalkboard in Classroom 5, writing a question in big, clear letters for her fourth-grade students to ponder: What does the neatest desk look like?

A dozen eager hands shoot into the air.

“There’s a spider over there,” a boy says, pointing to a corner of the room.

“That’s OK,” Naomi responds. “We’ll let it just hang out. It’s not important. I need everyone’s eyes on me.”

A dark-haired kid raises his hand, and Naomi quickly calls on him.

“Can I recycle this?” the boy asks, holding up a piece of paper.

“Right now, let’s focus on this,” Naomi answers patiently, pointing to her written question.

Finally, a little girl pipes up, laying out her ideas for organizing scissors, journals, compasses and folders with the kind of vision and detail that would make Martha Stewart rejoice.

It’s been just a few weeks since the school year kicked off at Potomac Elementary School, but already Naomi has discovered she is learning as much as she is teaching. When 27-year-old Naomi decided to trade in her high-powered job as a financial analyst in New York City to become a teacher and move back to her hometown of Rockville, she envisioned a gentler, more fulfilling lifestyle.

Is it more fulfilling? Definitely, Naomi thinks, as she fondly looks out at her 25 students. Gentler? Not quite.

Some people think teaching is a cushy job—summers off, a workday that ends at 3 p.m. and all those snow days! But what Naomi is learning is that for a dedicated teacher, fourth grade is all consuming, extending far beyond lessons on fables, terrariums, map skills and angles. Take the way Naomi positions herself in the classroom. At the chalkboard, she stretches out her arm to write while twisting her head around, so she can keep an eye on the children. When it’s time for small reading groups, Naomi chooses a seat that puts her back to the wall, so she can constantly scan the classroom.

“It’s multi-tasking to the nth degree,” says Linda Goldberg, principal at Potomac Elementary, who has the rapid-fire speaking manner of a woman who enjoys a close relationship with a strong cup of coffee.

“It’s the old story about the teacher with the eyes in the back of her head,” Goldberg continues. “That’s what a good teacher does: constantly position themselves to see the class and take the temperature, plus teaching your lessons, ensuring the kids are challenged, and taking care of the kids with special needs, because there’s no such thing as a ‘regular’ kid.”

All this means Naomi has to be as vigilant as a Secret Service agent, always on the lookout for whispered conversations that threaten to disrupt her class, or glassy eyes that signal a kid’s attention is drifting. At the same time, she needs to teach new vocabulary words, like “possess,” which on this particular Friday morning has many of her students stymied.

“Possess…um…means like…um… something that’s valuable to you,” offers a bright-eyed boy named Justin.

“Possess means something you have,” Naomi says in her gentle voice.

Naomi is a big believer in positive reinforcement, and rather than harp on what her students don’t know, she looks for ways to reward her kids for being kind and working hard. That’s why her desktop holds not only photos of her husband, Jordan, and that must-have for all schoolteachers—a big bottle of Purell hand sanitizer—but also a clear glass jar half-filled with black marbles.

A few marbles clink into the jar whenever Naomi spots children quietly reading or helping each other clean up their desks. The first time the marble jar filled up, the students had a serious discussion on how to reward themselves. One kid suggested skipping homework, which proved to be a popular idea, but the students eventually decided they deserved a certificate.

So now on the door to Naomi’s classroom is a certificate she created on her home computer: “The students of room five filled their marble jar in the first week of school! What an accomplishment!”

Making her children feel good about themselves—and each other—is as important to Naomi as ensuring that they learn the vocabulary terms on her Math Word Wall (polygon, trapezoid and acute angles, for those of you who weren’t paying attention in fourth grade). But while things like self-esteem and supportive friendships can’t be measured by a pop quiz, the Montgomery County Public Schools system (MCPS) expects Naomi to scrupulously document her students’ progress in areas that can be gauged.

So while Naomi sits in her reading corner and scans the room and listens to a little girl with freckles on her cheeks read aloud a story about a boy who could travel through time, she is also jotting down notes in her literacy binder. Naomi has a section in the binder for each of her students, and the comments and numbers in them will help determine their report card grades.

Gone are the days when a teacher could reach for a final exam score and murky memories, and dash off a report card. No longer do MCPS teachers have reputations for being unfairly tough graders, or “easy As.”

Now student grades are based on data and measures that must be backed up with evidence, such as how thoroughly a particular student answered questions at Naomi’s guided reading groups.

“In the past,” says Goldberg, “you’d have kids thinking, ‘How come I didn’t get that A the kid next to me got when I wrote kind of the same way he did?’”

The new Montgomery County grading and reporting policy, which is intended to make sure grading is consistent from classroom to classroom and school to school, will be in effect throughout the entire school system by 2008—but Potomac Elementary, like many other schools, began implementing it several years ago.

The new system means Naomi will have documentation should a parent question his child’s report card. The bad news? Teachers like Naomi are now struggling to complete unprecedented piles of paperwork that complicate an already strenuous job.

But it isn’t only Naomi’s students who are constantly being monitored and evaluated.

Naomi herself is under the microscope, and she has to provide evidence—yes, more paperwork—that she has met the six written teaching standards required of all MCPS teachers. They include Standard No. 5: “Teachers are committed to continuous improvement and professional development,” and Standard No. 1: “Teachers are committed to students and their learning.”

At the end of the school year, Naomi must present a portfolio to Goldberg documenting how she met the standards. Evidence might include published articles, her attendance at a science fair and copies of student papers that show Naomi’s written feedback.

“I’m going to make you into a teacher,” Goldberg laughs as she recites the list of Naomi’s responsibilities. “Actually,” she says, turning serious, “I’m going to make you not want to be a teacher.”

There’s more: Goldberg is required by the school system to pop into Naomi’s classroom several times during the year to assess her strengths and weaknesses. Add to this Naomi’s weekly 8 a.m. meetings with her fourth-grade teaching team, the different lesson plans she must prepare based on her students’ varying academic abilities and learning styles, and the co-sponsorship of the Student Government Association that she was recently asked to take on, and it becomes clear that teaching composes only a slice of Naomi’s job.

But Naomi says the golden moments she experiences every day make it all worthwhile. Like when she catches her students being kind to each other, or witnesses them grasp the meaning of a completely new concept. Then Naomi feels a sense of reward that energizes her to spend nights thinking of ways to make Aesop’s fables irresistible, or poring over the thick white “curriculum folders” the county has created for every subject Naomi is teaching.

“It’s so much, and people don’t realize how much work goes into the day, each day,” Naomi says in a tone that’s matter-of-fact, not complaining. “You have to figure you’re planning every subject almost every day of the week. You have to plan it, and gather the materials, and prepare them, and also grade everything.”

That’s why Naomi has yet to get home much before 7 or 8 p.m., and why she worked every day of the Labor Day weekend, and why she lugs home stacks of papers to grade every evening.

“In this profession, as in most helping professions, like doctors, you don’t cut it off when you walk out the door. You’re thinking about the day or a particular child…It’s all the time,” says Goldberg, herself a former fourth-grade teacher at Olde Creek Elementary School in Fairfax.

Naomi’s first year of teaching promises to be an unforgettable one, filled with distracting spiders and clinking marbles and magical flashes when a student suddenly, thrillingly understands something: “I get it!”

Maybe it’ll be unforgettable for one or two of her students, too. Maybe decades from now, they’ll look back and think of Mrs. Rubinstein, their kind, young fourth-grade teacher who asked her students to write encouraging notes to each other that she read aloud before she sent them home on Friday afternoons. What they won’t remember is what they never see: the evenings she spends alone in Classroom 5, cutting out pictures of trapezoids and pasting them onto index cards while, outside, the sunlight fades away.

Chevy Chase writer Sarah Pekkanen has written for the Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, Washingtonian and People.