When it came to finding the perfect age group to teach, two Center Grove teachers decided to meet right in the middle.
Pam Calvert, a sixth grade math teacher at Center Grove Middle School North is retiring from teaching after a 38-year career, the last 29 years of which she spent at Center Grove Community School Corporation.
Jeanne Schwartz finished her career this spring as an instructional coach at Middle School Central. Before becoming an instructional coach in 2015, she taught for 30 years, 28 at Center Grove schools.
Pam Calvert
Calvert found her love for teaching growing up in southeastern Kentucky, stoked by the compassion she found in her own teachers.
“I was what you would call a ‘Nervous Nelly.’ My teachers were very supportive and calming,” she said. “I had a teacher give me a piece of gum during a standardized test, and because I was a rule follower, I put it away and my teachers said ‘I want you to chew it during the test.’ I want to do that for kids. I want them to be comfortable as a learner and be responsible for their learning and I want them to know I’m there for them.”
Calvert studied education at Eastern Kentucky University, getting a degree to teach students in kindergarten through sixth grade. She spent the first two years of her teaching career in Kentucky, before teaching in Indianapolis Public Schools for seven years. S
From Indianapolis, she made her way to Center Grove schools, where she stayed for the rest of her career. She taught at Center Grove Elementary School for three years and Sugar Grove Elementary School for 19 years before spending the last seven years of her career at Middle School North, a school that didn’t exist when she first came to Center Grove.
Calvert said she decided to transition into middle school teaching because she wanted to coach, and spent time coaching basketball, track and cross country.
Students in elementary school are often extremely energetic and demand a lot of time and energy to keep up with, she said. But as students enter middle school, they often need guidance — something she was able to help provide at the middle school level both as a coach and as a teacher.
“I had an amazing Spanish teacher in high school who helped lead and guide me through what college I would want to go to and what person I wanted to be when I left high school,” Calvert said. “There are things I really got to instill in middle schoolers, who are just realizing who they want to be and the path they want to take. I wanted to come alongside them and help lead them in that way. They are little lost souls when they come into middle school.”
Teaching is about caring for the whole child, and not just about if they’re performing well academically, she said.
“My style was: once you’re mine, you’re always mine. We’re going to live together for 180 days and we’re going to learn to live and learn together and get along with one another,” Calvert said. “That’s how I roll, taking care of individual needs as they arrive on a daily basis. I wanted them to know what they were doing was important and was going to make a difference.”
The best gratification comes from students who visited her classroom after she taught them — when they come back even when she didn’t think she made a big difference with, she said.
“Those kids come back down the hall or come back to school saying ‘I had the best sixth grade year,’ or ‘I learned a lot in math’ or ‘what you taught me helped me a lot the next year.’ When you realize you made a difference, it’s a big ‘a-ha’ moment,” she said.
Jeanne Schwartz
Schwartz remembers walking to the newly constructed Center Grove Middle School as a student in 1976, with no idea she’d spend more than half her life there as a teacher.
“I was in the first seventh grade class that came over when that building opened in 1976. We were all doing middle school at the old Maple Grove (Elementary School) building that got torn down. In January, we packed up and crossed the road carrying everything from our lockers,” she said. “In a way, I’ve been in that building way longer than my teaching career.”
Schwartz started her career at Greenwood Middle School in 1985. Two years later, she started a teaching job at Center Grove Middle School Central, known at the time as Center Grove Middle School. She’s been there ever since. In 2015, she transitioned to an instructional coach role, and spent her last day in the classroom just weeks ago.
She can trace back to her childhood the time when she realized she wanted to work with children — with guidance from Sue Davis, her eighth-grade teacher when she attended Center Grove.
“She just made the students feel heard and she accepted us even when we failed,” she said. “I got a disciplinary notice and I was bawling my eyes out, and she listened and didn’t make me feel bad about it. At the time, I didn’t know what I wanted to teach, but I wanted to make an impact on students the way I saw her do it.”
After deciding to follow teaching as a career, Schwartz had to choose which age group to teach, and she saw middle school as the perfect balance, she said.
“I knew I didn’t want to do elementary, that wasn’t my jam with little kids, I didn’t have the mothering gene,” she said. “But I felt a little intimidated by high school. I was 22 years old, seniors are 18. I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll do middle school and switch to high school,’ but I fell in love with middle school. What I love most about those kids was they were young enough to still get excited about new things, they’ll laugh easily, there’s that energy, but they’re old enough to have rational discussions.”
Schwartz mostly taught English language arts, though she was also a social studies instructor. She remembers being confused at times as a middle school student taking language arts classes, and wanted to make sure her students didn’t have the same confusion, she said.
“Learning can be fun, we can do this a fun way and still learn. We can still do the things we need to do, but I would greet them with a smile,” Schwartz said. “I would use reverse psychology, I’d say, ‘Quit smiling, you’re supposed to be miserable here, you’re not allowed to do anything fun here.’ Everyone would laugh more, and it would build that atmosphere of having fun together.”
Although teaching isn’t a profession that pays a lot, it can be rewarding in other ways, ways that Schwartz said kept her in the classroom for almost four decades.
“No one gets into teaching for the money,” she said. “I understand teachers are worth more than they’re paid, but I knew I wouldn’t make a lot of money. A lot of things in this profession are unfair, but it’s so worth it. There’s nothing else I can think of that gives you that reward at the end of the day. My husband is not in education, and when we would swap stories, I would always win. You could have the worst days, but if you reach that one kid, that’s it for you.”
