New Documentary Portrait Of Trailblazing Florida Teacher
At Forbes.com, I’m looking at a new documentary about a trainblazing teacher in Florida.
Film maker Boaz Dvir has created “Class of Her Own,” a documentary focusing on a challenging and inspiring tale of transformative teaching in Florida. It’s an instructive look at one trailblazing teacher’s work in Florida.
Gloria Jean Merriex grew up in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is a city of extremes; on the one hand, it's the home of the University of Florida and has many of the features of a big college town; on the other hand, the southern and eastern neighborhoods of Gainesville are home to crushing poverty. Charles Duval Elementary School was located in the center of an eastern neighborhood plagued with crime and poverty.
Merriex saw teaching as a path out of the poverty of her neighborhood, but she did not choose to leave the neighborhood itself. Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.
Then came No Child Left Behind, and with it, high stakes testing. In Florida, that meant the FCAT, used to give each school a grade, with rewards for A schools and punitive “interventions” for F schools. In 2002, Duval was rated F.
Merriex was troubled. She concluded that if the school was going to be transformed, she would have to transform herself.
She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her. So Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were unconventional. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response, movement and arts in the math and reading classroom. If some of her techniques seem less radical twenty years later, that is in part because of her influence.