Volume 7 Number 2
New Teachers: From Surviving to Thriving
ESTACADA, Oregon — At 6:45 a.m. on the day after Labor Day, Sam Fisher enters the doors of River Mill Elementary School and walks to a classroom located at the far end of a long hallway. His fourth-graders won't join him here for another two hours and 20 minutes, but he wants to be ready. The week before, he came in to set up bulletin boards, arrange desks, and meet his fellow teachers. A few of them rolled their eyes and wished him luck with "that bubble" of fourth-graders he's been assigned. He shrugged off the warnings, eager to start the year with hope as his only prejudice. Outside his classroom, he has posted a construction paper sign that reads, "Welcome to Mr. Fisher's School." There are 24 little fishes — one for each student — swimming toward a schoolhouse.
At 9:05 a.m., when the students enter the room, they are quieter than he expected. He settles them onto the carpeted corner of the room for a get-acquainted game. Shyly at first, they size him up. They notice that he is bearded but has shaved his head so he looks bald as a cue ball. He wears shoes with the heels missing and tie-dyed socks. One student asks why he wears those hoop earrings. Doesn't he know that guys wear studs? When he smiles in response, 24 grins come back at him. He tells them that he and his brother grew up in Estacada, too. They play a name game, filling in the blanks in the sentence: "I'm _____ and I like ______." At the end, he manages to go back around the circle, showing that he knows all their names and something special about each person.
The next day, the school counselor tells him that a boy who had a rough go of it last year is excited to be assigned to this classroom. "I think Mr. Fisher is interested in me," the boy confided. Hearing this, Sam Fisher grabs for his heart.
His teaching career has begun.
* * *
In classrooms all over the country, about 100,000 new teachers are launching their careers this school year. They are among the most closely observed rookies in history, as researchers search for effective ways to support newcomers and stem the looming teacher shortage. Half of those who started teaching in September are expected to leave the field within five years. Why do some stay? What makes others leave? And how do the inevitable bumps of their first year affect the learning of students entrusted to their classrooms? For a new teacher like Sam Fisher, the school year opens with more questions than answers. Has he made the right choice? Is he up to the task? Can he be everything he hopes to be? He and his 24 students will discover the answers together as the school year unfolds.
At 30, Fisher is a little older, and perhaps a little wiser, than the typical rookie. Although he grew up in a family of educators, he didn't head into the field directly after college. "Money was important to me for a while," he admits. After earning degrees in business and theater from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, he worked in sales in Seattle and then moved to San Francisco, hoping to combine his passion for music with business opportunities in technology. That bubble burst around the time a first marriage failed, and he came home to Oregon to regroup.
Estacada is the kind of place that made the Westward Migration worth the walk. Located on the banks of the Clackamas River and in the shadow of Mt. Hood, it's a classic timber town of about 2,000, 45 miles from Portland. Fisher's great-great grandfather homesteaded here in the 1860s along a spur of the Oregon Trail, and members of his extended family still own 700 acres of forests and fields. From the living room of the house his parents built when he was 10, Fisher can see a patchwork of green rolling toward the horizon. Every stick and stone within sight belongs to someone in his family.
For all its splendor, Estacada has seen hard times in recent decades, with a rural poverty rate pushed upward by mill closures. When Fisher was in sixth grade and again during his junior year of high school, Estacada made headlines for having to close its schools because tax levies had failed. Today, the state has a safety net to prevent such school closures, but Estacadans are still debating how to build a more stable economic base for their town.
For Fisher, especially, Estacada holds a melancholy beauty. In 1998, he spent what he remembers as "a perfect day" here with his parents, enjoying the sweet, simple pleasure of being in each other's company. A day later, his mother and father were killed in a car accident. Suddenly, everywhere he looked he could see their footprints — at the house they designed to have no right angles, at the historic community church where the family has gathered for generations, in the garden they tended during long summer vacations. His mother taught high school German in Portland; his father was a school psychologist in Vancouver, Washington.
After some soul-searching, Fisher decided to steer his own career toward the familiar waters of education. "I took some time first," he says, "to make sure I was deciding to go into teaching for the right reasons." He re-enrolled at Lewis & Clark College. But as the old saying goes, you can never step into the same river twice. This time around, he was a graduate student in education, pursuing a master's degree in teaching. During the 15 months of that rigorous program, he somehow found time for love. His new wife and her two young sons joined him at the Fisher family home, which began to feel wonderfully full again. When he heard the boys' voices echoing from the loft, he couldn't help but smile. This was a house made for child's play.
When it came time to look for a teaching job, Fisher set his sights on Estacada. During the summer before the 2000-2001 school year, the principal at River Mill called to invite him for an interview. Fisher recognized the name: Larry Adamson had been his pre-calculus teacher at Estacada High School. Fisher was excited by his summer interview. It involved not only the principal, but also a team of teachers. What's more, the principal had arranged for five students to come in so that Fisher could demonstrate his classroom skills. "It felt friendly," he recalls. When Adamson showed him around the building, Fisher discovered that his classroom would be right next door to the music room — where the same teacher who taught him when he was in elementary school is teaching a new generation of children to love music.
To be honest, Fisher doesn't remember much about his own fourth-grade year. "I remember the relationships, but not what I learned in history or science." He knows that standards have become substantially more important since he was a kid, but he hopes there's room to help kids reach benchmarks and also master social skills. "A lot of school is about how to relate," he says. "If these kids can function as human beings, they can learn to do anything."
* * *
A month into the school year, Fisher stands before his class, textbook open to a unit on earth science. The book describes an experiment in which students are supposed to mimic erosion by dripping water onto sand. It isn't working. Sand doesn't behave the same way that soil does. The teacher detects another problem. During his year of student teaching, Fisher worked alongside a skillful veteran who used the inquiry method to teach science. He remembers the look in her students' eyes when they were engaged in investigations that answered their own authentic questions about the world. He looks up now and sees vacant stares heading for the windows. He snaps his book shut and asks the class, "Is it just me, or is this boring?"
That gets their attention.
"Tomorrow," he promises, "we'll start a new unit."
Then he asks the class to suggest ways that the Earth changes. That's the larger lesson that fourth-graders are supposed to master in science. What do they wonder about? What intrigues them? In the lively discussion that ensues, several students bring up questions about volcanoes. Fisher feels his own curiosity heating up. "Tomorrow," he promises, "we'll start on volcanoes."
A promise made to 24 students means that a rookie teacher will be up all night, surfing the Internet for materials he can use to teach about volcanoes. But over the following weeks, as he invents a hands-on earth science curriculum one day at a time (and with the help of a Web site called Core Knowledge, at www.coreknowledge.org), he has no regrets. He watches students build their understanding by making clay models of Earth. They start with the core then build out, using a different color for each layer. When the tennis-ball sized planets are complete, he slices into them with a guitar string, revealing the geologic layers within.
Next he assigns a team project. Table groups build models of volcanoes using papier-mâché and cardboard tubes. He enlists his students as fellow researchers. With resources they find at home and online, they assemble a class library on volcanoes. Meanwhile, Fisher gets the idea of weaving together science, social studies, and writing. While the completed volcano models sit "dormant" on a window ledge, he assigns students to write their own myths, in the style of the Native American story that describes the long-ago eruption of Mount Mazama and creation of Crater Lake. After the students read their myths aloud, they will imagine their own volcanoes erupting. To connect the volcano projects to the real world, they begin planning their first field trip: a full-day outing to the observatory at Mount St. Helens. Six parents have volunteered to drive, keeping costs to a minimum.
It's an ambitious plan, to be sure. But so far, Fisher's energy shows no signs of flagging. Shucking that dull science text was one of his smartest moves, even though it's meant more work for him. "I felt high for a week," he reflects later, "like a weight had lifted." The experience reminds him of something he learned from Nancy Nagel, a professor of education at Lewis & Clark. "She taught us that to tackle the hard work of problem solving, we need to be interested and involved. That's true for both teacher and student — we all find it hard to try new things. We have to struggle to break out of what's comfortable."
Even as he gains confidence to try new approaches in the classroom, Fisher worries about the pace of teaching. "How much should I try to do? And what's fair to expect of my kids?"
Those would be good questions to discuss with the two other fourth-grade teachers in the building, but he seldom bumps into them. Fisher's room sits between the music room and an exit to the blacktop, across the building from his grade-level colleagues. He makes a note to check in with a fifth-grade teacher who looped with her fourth-graders from last year. He recalls hearing about a program in California, where new teachers are matched with mentors for two years. There's no time for feeling envious; he has a million details to take care of before that field trip.
* * *
Twenty minutes before school begins, half a dozen kids have put away their backpacks and are dancing to the music that spills out of Mr. Fisher's boom box. A couple others play computer games. One girl relaxes with a book on the sofa that Fisher picked up at a garage sale. These are the precious moments that make the classroom feel like a community.
With a ring of a handbell (the same one his grandmother used in a one-room schoolhouse and his mother used in her high school classes), Fisher signals that it's time for students to take their desks. But not everyone's quite ready to settle in for the day. One boy realizes he left his backpack on the bus. Another has forgotten his glasses. Fisher sends them off to take care of business while he steers the rest of the class toward a math assignment. About every six seconds, someone else begins a question with, "Mr. Fisher…?" He makes the rounds as fast as he can. He's in such constant motion, he might as well be on roller skates.
Peter*, a quiet boy with dark hair and big brown eyes, tries to focus on the assignment on his desk. But he's easily distracted. He chews his fingers, writes on his hand, builds little sculptures out of masking tape. He's one of nine students in the class identified as having special learning needs, which range from attention deficit disorder to giftedness. His needs are the result of fetal alcohol syndrome. Fisher has been meeting with Peter's foster parents to learn more about the syndrome and how it affects learning. Usually, the boy is pulled out to work with an aide during math. It's a subject he understands well, despite his struggle to concentrate. Today is an experiment, to see if Peter can stay on track within the larger class setting. Fisher keeps circling past his desk, calling the boy's attention back to the task at hand with a soft word or deliberate arch of his eyebrows.
Without warning, Fisher stops in his tracks and claps his hands together. Conversation halts. "I just heard a scream," he says. "There's no reason ever to scream during math. Math isn't scary." The noise level plummets and he's off again, answering the next 'Mr. Fisher...?" question. With five minutes left in math period, Peter picks up his pencil and tackles the math problem.
So far, class management hasn't taken up too much time. "These are great kids, and most days the class takes care of itself," Fisher says. "But," he adds, "so much more is going on here besides academics." Three times a day, for instance, a timer on his belt goes off and he gives a hand signal for a certain boy to head to the office for his medication. He uses motivators with a couple kids who struggle to keep their behavior under control. He's grateful that fourth-graders will extend themselves for a reward as humble as a Pokemon pencil.
Fisher has been reading aloud Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing. He draws on his drama background, throwing in funny voices that the kids seem to like to underscore the wise humor of author Judy Blume. His acting skills come in handy for crowd control, as well. "You don't want to see Mean Mr. Fisher make an appearance, "he warns when the noise level starts to escalate. Even at his silliest — when he's using Monty Python accents during a math lesson — Fisher is careful not to seem too loose. "I dance on that fine line all the time," he admits, "between having fun and keeping things under control. I figure if the kids are happy to be here every day, that's not a bad place to start. And I make an effort to stay consistent so they know what to expect from me."
When it's time for morning recess, 24 pairs of shoes hit the floor, ready to dash for the outdoors. Fisher motions for a boy named Jeremy to stay behind. He balks, but Fisher reminds him, "It's the consequence of not doing your homework last night. Have to do it now." He doesn't back down when Jeremy tries whining. He tries not to let Jeremy see him smile when the boy makes a crack that, truth be told, is pretty funny. But when Jeremy turns in his homework, Fisher is quick to offer praise. And he stretches out recess for an extra five minutes so the boy can enjoy some time outside.
* * *
Grace perches on the sofa, signaling that she has a story ready for conference during writers' workshop. Mr. Fisher leans in to hear her read a tale about two girls on a quest to find a golden diamond. When she finishes, he compliments her effort. But he has questions. So many questions: Why did the girls sneak out of the house? Why do they need the golden diamond? Why is it important? How did it feel when they walked through the spider web?
Grace's eyes seem to get bigger with each question. She nods when he reminds of her an earlier class discussion, when they talked about how reading is like mountain climbing. "Every detail the author gives is something the reader has to put into his backpack," Fisher tells her. "The reader has to carry that backpack to the top of the mountain. If a detail is not important, then why ask the reader to carry it?"
She takes back her paper and makes a beeline for her desk.
Karen plunks onto the sofa next with a story about a horse race and three girlfriends. "This is so much better than the first draft!" her teacher says. She beams. He goes on, "Now it's time to edit. You don't need to add anything more to the story. Check the spelling of these words," he suggests, circling several spots on the page. "And use quotation marks to let the reader know when someone is talking. Remember how?" She does.
Karen is barely off the sofa when Grace returns. She has added more details. But Mr. Fisher has even more questions for her. She rolls her eyes on her way back to her desk. The girl who's next in line for a conference reminds her, "Don't make that backpack too heavy!"
Writers' workshop has moved into first place as Fisher's favorite part of the week. His students seem to concur. Last week, because of an assembly, the class had only half the usual time for writing. Students groaned their disappointment. "I was thrilled,"Fisher says. He also has begun to appreciate the benefits of having a smaller class for the part of the day when eight students are pulled out for tutoring or other help. "That leaves me with only 16 kids for writers' workshop," he says, "and I can give them so much more attention."
To his surprise, students were slow to warm up to writing fiction. "They all wanted to write about their dogs, or what they did last summer." Then, inspired perhaps by the approach of Halloween, one boy tried his hand at a ghost story. Fisher invited him to read it aloud. Suddenly, everyone was writing ghost stories. As part of the school's Halloween festivities, the fourth-graders will share their scary tales with the first-graders. Knowing that they will soon have an audience is adding energy to the writing process.
When he sees his students so excited about learning, Fisher feels exhilarated. "I can't wait to come to work in the morning," he says.
At other moments, however, he looks around the room at the miscellaneous activity and asks himself, "We're busy, but have I really taught them anything yet?"
Reading, for example, has been a frustration. Although his students are all nine or 10 years old, they read at levels ranging from second to seventh grade, perhaps even higher. Fisher has tried splitting the class into literacy groups but struggles to find the right reading materials. His training gave him a solid understanding of literacy theory, but what he needs now are practical tips to help him teach struggling readers. "We talked in grad school about how to form meaning, but not how to form words. That's where I feel weakest right now," he admits. It doesn't help that he has no class sets of books for students who read below the fourth-grade level. He's tried having one group read How to Eat Fried Worms, a personal favorite, but the girls don't seem to appreciate the book's humor. Meanwhile, his most proficient readers want to tackle The Sword and the Stone. Fisher worries that it will prove too challenging, but he doesn't want to get in the way of their ambition.
In a few weeks he'll have to issue his first report cards, assessing not only reading and math, but also skills such as spelling, public speaking, and handwriting that they haven't given much attention yet. Assessments will have to show students' progress toward meeting the state requirements for the certificate of initial mastery. He makes a mental note to design a template so he can write report cards on his laptop. But where's he supposed to find the time to work with these kids on their handwriting?
* * *
Winter has spilled indoors, dusting the halls of River Mill Elementary with cut-outs of penguins and paper snowflakes. Fisher has decked his room with an evergreen he harvested from his own property. The kids made paper chains to decorate it. He has rearranged the classroom furniture, too. "I like change," he says with a shrug. His once-shaved pate is sprouting a fresh growth of brown hair. But he's still wearing those tie-dyed socks.
Fisher introduces a guest who's guaranteed to hold the students' interest, even with the start of the winter holidays just two days away. Elwin Shibley, Fisher's uncle and a retired principal, arrives wearing a plaid shirt and jeans with a big buckle. With his white beard and that twinkle in his eyes, he'd make a great Santa. "Did you know," he asks the class, "that you're sitting right on the Oregon Trail?" Before they can answer, he's tossing handfuls of pennies onto each table. "Whose picture is on those pennies?" "Lincoln!" the kids answer. "Right, and that's who was president when Mr. Fisher's family came across the Oregon Trail." History has come to life in Room 16, and Shibley draws everyone into it. "You're all part of this story," he says. "Wherever you've come from, you're Oregonians now."
Although Fisher grew up amid the landmarks of the Oregon Trail and has a family tree loaded with ancestors who made the trek West, he dragged his feet when it came time to teach the subject to his fourth-graders. The social studies textbook devoted only three pages to the Oregon Trail. Fisher knew the rich subject matter deserved better treatment, but he wasn't sure how to tackle it.
When he decided to stop relying on the canned material in the textbook, he began to envision new possibilities. "I had to psych myself up," he admits, "but when I got excited, the lesson plans started coming together, just as they did with the volcano project." Using resources he found at a Portland bookstore, he has turned his classroom into a caravan, with each table group playing the role of a family aboard a covered wagon. In this simulation, they are now 500 miles into the 2,000-mile trek. Today's task: Write a letter home, telling the highlights of your journey so far.
As he explains the assignment to his students, Fisher reminds them to make use of the writing devices they've been studying. They began to get acquainted with similes and metaphors on a recent day when the principal stopped in for a formal observation. Adamson was pleased to see the students excited and actively participating in the lesson, and equally impressed by Fisher's animated use of body language, voice inflection, and facial expressions to keep the pace upbeat. "Students were required to think a great deal in this lesson," Adamson noted in his written observation, "but I doubt they realized it."
At times, Fisher can make learning seem as easy as breathing for his students. Behind the scenes, though, he drives himself like a taskmaster. He arrives at school by 7:30 a.m., and seldom goes home empty-handed. Lunch is an orange, which he eats on the run. He constantly pushes himself to stay organized, to plan ahead, to get papers graded and returned quickly. "Where's my clipboard?" he mutters now, looking for the checklist he uses to keep track of where students are with their various writing projects. He starts each day with a clean desk, but by noon it's buried in papers.
What the students want most from him, of course, is his undivided attention. He does his best to spread it evenly among the 24 expectant faces. When he listens to a boy read his journal entry for today's Oregon Trail assignment, Fisher catches certain words as if they were treasures. "I like a word you used there — you said tumbled." Or, "I loved how you said 'something tragic' was about to happen. That got my interest." When he hears an ending he likes in another story, he tells the girl who wrote it, "That's beautiful," and mimes wiping away a tear.
When a quiet, bespectacled student named Lydia volunteers to read her passage to the whole class, he tells her, "Pretend your great grandmother is sitting in the back of the class, and she really wants to hear you." Lydia amazes him by booming out her story. "Awesome!" he says at the end, clapping and grinning. "We could hear you and understand you! Fantastic!" Another girl, for whom speaking up is no challenge, is next to share. She cranks up the volume in imitation of Lydia, making herself giggle. Soon the whole class — including Mr. Fisher — is giggling, too. But she manages to work in two similes, which her teacher catches with delight.
* * *
By the time parent conferences roll around in March, the year feels as if it's shifted into hyperspeed. The calendar has taken on added importance since Fisher learned that in May, he'll become a father. He's planning to take a week off when the baby arrives, which means he'll be mapping out his lesson plans even further in advance.
The class has recently wrapped up a four-week unit on electricity. Fisher introduced the subject with a hands-on project. Giving students batteries, light bulbs, and wires, he asked them to see what they could figure out. Principal Adamson happened to stop by just as several kids were discovering how to wire up the components to shock themselves. "I'd never try that again," Fisher admits, "at least not when I'm being observed."
Although they're now focusing their science studies on the human body, Fisher's students have no trouble recalling key concepts about electricity when he calls out random questions. If they get stumped, they can refresh their memory with the words to the song they wrote as a class. "We brainstormed the lyrics, which include all the major concepts I wanted them to remember — atoms, conductors, closed circuits, insulators," he says. Coming up with a tune meant acceding to his students' musical tastes. But he seems to have struck gold with the catchy number "Whoops! I Got Shocked Again," set to the tune of the Britney Spears single "Whoops! I Did It Again." (Fisher rolls his eyes, admitting he had to listen to the pop star's music for a week to get inspired. "The sacrifices you make as a teacher!")
Out on the playground, when Fisher overhears his kids belting out the song or teaching it to others, he knows it was worth the effort. And he's amazed, looking back, that he was terrified to try songwriting with his kids, even though he's been performing music for most of his life. "Writing songs together was a goal I had, but I kept putting it off. Then one day the school counselor visited our class, and she brought her guitar. She made it look so easy! So I brought in my electric bass when we were studying the Oregon Trail. We wrote a song called 'The Oregon Trail Blues' (set to the tune of 'Heartbreak Hotel'). One of my best experiences as a teacher was having my kids ask me if we could write a song about electricity, too. Wow!"
During parent conferences, the mother of a boy who has been mouthing off and missing assignments lately mentions that she and her husband are splitting up. That helps explain the boy's change in attitude. The toughest session, though, is with parents whose daughter is one of four in the class identified as gifted. They want to know if Fisher is doing enough to keep her challenged. Is he pushing her hard enough? The silver lining of the week: a rare Friday holiday — no lessons to plan, no homework to grade, nobody calling out a question that begins, "Mr. Fisher...?"
* * *
When the calendar reaches May, Fisher has mapped out his lesson plans two weeks in advance. The baby is not due until mid-month, but he wants to be ready to hand off his responsibilities at the first labor pain. Plus, he's promised the class a beach trip to end the year, and that will take some organizing.
He's not the only one looking ahead. The principal will have to make some hard decisions next year because of a district budget squeeze, exacerbated by declining enrollment. Would Fisher be willing to loop up to fifth grade with his current students, plus a few more?
Meanwhile, Fisher has been struggling with Jeremy over missing assignments, bad attitude. He begins wondering whether he wasn't firm enough earlier in the year. "Did I let him get away with too much? Laugh too easily at his jokes?" Such are the questions that keep the new teacher awake at night. "At times I've questioned my ability to teach him," he admits, "but not to be a teacher."
There have been more high points than lows, however. A girl who never seemed to catch on to multiplication has had a breakthrough in understanding. When Fisher showed her how to group numbers, she could see that four groups of five means the same as four times five. "The lights went on! And she just took off." A favorite moment: calling her mother to share that the girl had won a math award.
Another high point: Watching a reading group decide to tackle Call of the Wild. One boy in the group had seemed unmotivated all year during literature circles. "But he liked that book, and he kept up." The group had to work hard to understand the book's symbolism, and Fisher warned them that it would be difficult. "I told them, if it's too hard, they can stop and move on to a new book. They saw me do that earlier in the year when I closed the science book and tried something else. We've all found out it's OK to struggle." They did struggle at times with Jack London, but they plowed ahead. "When they were done, they felt fantastic." And so did he.
And another: A boy's story about brain-sucking aliens. "He's a really quiet, shy boy, and this was just hilarious. And he went on for five pages, longer than anything he's ever written before. Amazing! That's what it's all about — moments like that."
In late May, two weeks behind schedule, Kenneth Steele Fisher is born. The substitute for Room 16 arrives to find a week's worth of lesson plans ready and waiting.
* * *
Between the new baby's arrival and the end-of-the-year assemblies and the day trip to the beach, the last days of school fly by in a blur. A week after the final bell, Fisher is taking a well-earned moment to catch his breath on the deck overlooking his garden of roses and raspberries. He and his wife Robin have just finished a leisurely, late breakfast. Baby Kenneth is napping in his cradle. The horses are munching new grass. The sun is shining over Estacada. An entire summer stretches before him — a gift to be opened one day at a time.
Time for quiet reflection is rare in the life of a teacher, especially a new one. "If I have any advice to offer other new teachers," he says, "it's this: Make time and effort to go talk to your peers, because they probably won't have time to come find you. Make an effort to hang out in the staff room. I didn't do that early enough or often enough." Not once did he have an opportunity to watch another teacher at work in the classroom, or to be observed by a peer. Late in the year, he was worrying aloud in the faculty lounge that he might not get all the way through the math textbook because some students needed more time to cement their understanding of division. Some veterans exploded in laughter. "I was beating myself up, but they reassured me that nobody finishes the textbook!"
He suspects he also spent too much time inventing materials that other teachers would have been willing to share. "Good teachers collect ideas. They have files full of stuff. The major weakness of being a new teacher is that you don't have five years of stuff to pull from." Every day, for instance, he invented math challenges for the kids who breezed through their homework. "Then I had a great substitute who gave me a book of ready-made math challenges. Sometimes," he admits, "I work too hard."
As for next year, he's agreed to loop up to fifth grade, a benchmark year. Because of budget cuts, class sizes will be larger. He expects to have 31 or 32 students, 22 of them returnees. Jeremy, the boy with whom he found himself butting heads by spring semester, will be assigned to another room. So will the TAG girl whose parents worried about keeping her challenged. But Fisher and the other fifth-grade teacher have agreed to work as a team. For the first time in his school career, he'll have a colleague with whom he can brainstorm and share resources.
Already, he has a zillion ideas percolating. He's making a mental list of things he'll do differently next year. But on this perfect summer morning, Fisher can imagine no better job than the one that takes place in the classroom. "I love how fast the day goes. I'm never bored. It's so different from the world of cubicles and clock watching. I can see myself doing this," he says, "for another 20 years — at least." 
* Names of students have been changed.
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Date of Last Update: 12/21/2001 
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