88 year old HS teacher!

MotherOfTwo
Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:31:49 +0000

I hope I still know my name when I am her age! It is truly amazing!

88-year-old LA teacher still firing up high school students
By ANA BEATRIZ CHOLO - Associated Press Writer
Published 1:42 pm PDT Sunday, March 11, 2007
“Mama G” is on fire and her Advanced Placement English literature students are feeling the heat.

She dons a red plastic fire helmet as she excitedly begins lecturing on George Orwell’s novel “1984,” connecting current events to themes in the book - government surveillance, conformity and sexuality.

The headgear underscores the importance of being enthusiastic and energetic about learning - to be “on fire,” as Mama G says.

The helmet really isn’t necessary. It takes only a minute or two with the bundle of energy that is Rose “Mama G” Gilbert to get excited about just about anything.

And to forget that she’s old enough to be the great-great-grandmother of her Palisades Charter High School students.

“I want them all to just live literature, love poetry and love life - not just get caught up in grades,” the 88-year-old Gilbert gushes.

Pupils usually don’t start out liking poetry so Gilbert eases them in with love poems by ee cummings. “It’s very sexy,” Gilbert says.

Gilbert has used other techniques to stoke her pupils’ imagination.

Amy Sherman Smith, a 1970 “Pali” graduate, recalled Gilbert wearing a slip over her clothes while teaching about “Freudian slips.” When Smith reconnected with Gilbert last year for the first time in ages, Mama G hadn’t changed a bit.

“Very feisty, very opinionated and her mind is still as sharp as a tack,” Smith said.

Gilbert is old but she doesn’t act her age and that helps her connect with her pupils - she affectionately calls them “bubbelahs.” She engages and challenges them. A wrong answer or a student who tries to get away with something is likely to get a quick rebuke: “That’s bunk,” Mama G will say.

Gilbert doesn’t have to work - her husband left her millions when he died. But she loves it too much to quit.

Mama G’s energy is infectious, said Masha Elakovic, a 17-year-old senior who’s had Gilbert the past two years.

“She comes in, she is really pumped up,” Elakovic said. “That is kind of a sign she is ready to teach us and ready to be ‘on fire.’ … I love her.”

Gilbert is the oldest teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Two other female teachers, both 87, also work full-time in the district, the second-largest in the nation where there is no mandatory retirement age.

Gilbert started teaching in the 1940s, took a break and then went back to full-time in 1956. She transferred to Pali when it opened in 1961 and has been there ever since.

The racially diverse school located in a wealthy L.A. enclave has 2,700 students and an idyllic setting, perched atop a hill with a view of the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains serving as a backdrop.

Barry Farber, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University in New York, believes if teachers are satisfied with their job, they won’t want to quit, regardless of age.

“Teachers get burnt out not because they stop loving what they do but they can’t feel satisfied, like their efforts are not making a difference,” he says.

Gilbert’s classroom offers a litany of reminders of the difference she’s made. Part classroom and part museum, it holds thousands of memories - walls display cards and letters from students dating to when the school opened.

Students from her first class wrote: “She’s a rebel but we love her that way.” A picture shows a wastebasket stuffed with district memos and teachers’ guides, a nod to Gilbert’s dislike of bureaucracy and anything that gets in the way of teaching.

Numerous awards, memorabilia and plaques are scattered about. Photo albums line one wall from the 26 years she coached the academic decathlon team.

A clipping on one wall features the school’s first teachers. All the photos are crossed out except Gilbert’s.

About a dozen current teachers were Gilbert’s pupils. One of them is Holly Korbonski, who graduated in 1978. She said studying techniques Gilbert taught helped her get through college. Now she shares them with her students.

“She is formidable,” Korbonski said. “I think people are deeply respectful of Rose. I think we have a sense of what this job means to her.”

One recent morning, Gilbert began class by sharing what Zach Balin, a former student now at Princeton, wrote to her.

“It would take me a lifetime of authenticity to repay you for what you have so generously and genuinely given to me these past few years. I am certainly not the first nor will I be the last to say that you have changed my life.”

Students say in Mama G’s class typically read 500 pieces of poetry and 23 books each semester.

And Gilbert works just as hard. Elakovic says her teacher has been known to collect 10-page essays from a class with two dozen or more students and have them graded the next day.

Gilbert says she grew up poor in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles. Once known for it’s large Jewish population, it is now predominantly Latino.

She graduated from UCLA in 1940 with a degree in comparative literature and earned a teaching credential, then married multimillionaire real estate developer Sam Gilbert. The couple raised three children. Her husband died in 1987 and she has lived alone in a mansion near the school since then.

Gilbert underwent heart surgery a decade ago but it barely slowed her. She recorded lectures and had the substitute play them for the class. Exams and papers were delivered to her each day so Gilbert could grade them.

"I’m crazy, OK? " Gilbert says. “That is my attitude. I don’t dwell on the negative.”

If she did, she no doubt would focus on the biggest heartbreak of her life: her daughter Maggie’s death in 2003 from an embolism while brushing her teeth. For the first time, Gilbert said she felt like quitting. But she joined a support group and pressed on.

In Maggie’s memory, Gilbert donated $1 million to UCLA - also her daughter’s alma mater - and $1 million to build a swimming pool at Pali.

Her family tells her they worry about her and that it’s time to retire. Gilbert has no such plans - “It’s the numbers that are old,” she jokes.

Every morning, Gilbert lifts weights and does yoga. Weekends are filled with UCLA basketball and football games and visiting with the grandkids.

Asked when she will stop teaching, Gilbert pauses.

“When I’m tired,” she finally says. “I’m not tired. I have more energy than a kid.”