Krista’s classroom

KRISTA Shortino was living the life of a respected teacher at a top quality school in a high class district only half an hour from Manhattan.

After work she’d go on late night shopping trips in glamorous-sounding stores or for nice restaurant meals with her many friends.

But Krista, passionate about education and searching for new improving experiences to aid her vocation, left it all behind to take on the life of a teacher working at Whinfield Primary, in Darlington.

She endured the dreary winter, the daily trips on the A1, the shops closing at 5pm each day and a class with almost twice as many pupils as she has back home, but she has only one regret... that she can’t do it all over again.

“I love it,” says 42-year-old Krista, who has come to the region on a wellestablished exchange programme.

“The kids are great and the staff are great. And my neighbours are so welcoming.

I feel like I’m just getting into my stride. You really see a change in English people when the nights get lighter. Everyone’s suddenly going out, arranging meals and having fun after the long dark months and it’s not fair that I have to go now.”

Krista swapped lives with another respected teacher, Danielle Peterson, who usually lives with her husband in Newton Aycliffe and teaches seven and eight-year-olds.

“I can’t deny there are changes in lifestyle,” admits Krista, who lives with her dog, Guinness, “but not as much as you’d think. At one level it’s a question of going to work and going home, the same as everywhere else. One thing that’s different is the fact that where I live at home there are stores of all kinds everywhere open until 9pm. I often find myself in, say, a kitchenware store buying something I don’t really need.

“Then there’s going out for a meal.

Here there’s a feeling that going out to a restaurant is a bit of an occasion whereas at home we’d go out three or four times a week, with anyone around, no big deal.”

Krista explains that she noticed still bigger cultural differences at work.

But before taking her word for it, I decide to ask her pupils. I’m led into her classroom full of well-behaved children sitting in a circle. “What do you like about your teacher?” I ask and I’m immediately presented with 30 arms in the air. “She’s funny,” says one. “She calls baskets and containers ‘bins’ and when she asked us to put our work in a bin, we all put our work in the rubbish bin by mistake.”

More tellingly, other pupils say, “she moves about a lot” and “she’s fun”. There’s a respectful but happy, relaxed, free-and-easy atmosphere in Krista’s classroom.

IT fits with what Krista tells me herself about what she describes as a different organisational attitude.

Krista, who has 18 pupils in her class at home and 30 at Whinfield, believes that our schools are generally more regimented and that our children encouraged to be more conforming while US children have the chance to be more individual.

She cites the fact that every English child wears school uniform, which is not the case in the States.

The national curriculum set by the Government that must be adhered to is another difference.

But Krista, a teacher of 18 years, thinks much of the different attitude is simply down to numbers. With twice as many children in a class, there simply has to be more discipline.

“There have been times where I’ve said in the staff room, ‘this child said this’ and I’m kind of celebrating it and a colleague will say, ‘that’s cheeky, they should be more respectful’,”

says Krista. “There are more line-ups and more of a kind of crowd control here, but we’ve got happy kids who are learning and this is an incredibly creative country. In the end, there’s not really much different with children.

“Another thing that I really noticed was the religion in the school.

In New York, there’s no established church and so many people of different religions that you don’t really mention anything about it. So when every class does a nativity play at Christmas, I was actually a little bit shocked.”

A big change is the attitude in England towards teachers from parents.

“I might spend 45 minutes or an hour in a day just answering emails from parents,” says Krista. “Here there’s no parent who has the email address of a teacher and it’s not as common to talk to a parent out of school hours. In the end, it all gets in the way of actually preparing lessons for the children.

“Another thing is there’s a direct school tax at home. It’s always debated, ‘this tax is too high, we’re paying teachers too much’. It’s a bit strange. It’s a well-to-do area, so you get the attitude, occasionally, that you’re a kind of hired help. Here, there’s more respect for teachers.

But in a funny way I feel that, despite being a foreigner, I’ve actually got more in common with the parents here. Everyone’s trying their best and it gets taken as understood.”

In fact Krista, despite her glamorous Manhattan life, really does wish she could stay. “I’ve just got to know how things work, but there’s so much more to find out, I would love to stay for another year.”