WISE TEACHER
Interview With Roxanne Wise
“In all my years of teaching, you are the only student who has known the word crepuscular!”
Roxanne Wise, a fifth-grade teacher at Willow Glen Elementary School in San Jose, is relating an incident from her class’s weeklong science camp experience. One of the teachers there had asked, “What animal comes out at dawn and dusk?” and Roxanne’s student had answered, “The mosquito—it’s crepuscular!”
A teacher at Willow Glen for 34 years, Roxanne has always emphasized science in her classroom. And she believes in an integrated curriculum. If her students are studying insect behavior, they encounter crepuscular in their reading. The word is also on their vocabulary and spelling lists.
“Science is a great carrot for kids—they love it!”
Roxanne’s eyes sparkle as she warms to talking about teaching and the wonderful efforts of the Environmental Volunteers.
For 18 years, EV docents have come to her classroom with hands-on learning stations, like a globe showing the earth’s tectonic plates; or a furnished dollhouse, placed on a shaking table, which shows students how to prepare their homes in earthquake country.
Roxanne Wise’s classroom is larger than its four walls. Geology has been an important part of Roxanne’s science curriculum for a long time. Her students work on poetry outdoors on the grass, they join the Audubon Society, entering it’s California Wildlife Poster Contest each year, and they experience pioneer life with History San Jose’s Westward Ho! program. They also hike the interpretive earthquake trail at Los Trancos Open Space Preserve with the Environmental Volunteers. But these field trips are not just fun outings. According to Roxanne, the EV field trips are expanded classrooms.
When EV docents are in her classroom, Roxanne enjoys watching these other teachers expand her students’ horizons. “The EV has an outstanding curriculum. I learn from them,” she enthuses. “EVs ask critical thinking questions. They ask questions that make the information personal, such as, ‘On what kind of soil would you want to build your home?’ or ‘In which kind of rock would you find fossils?’”
A former student, Erika Elvert, is volunteering in Roxanne’s classroom as she begins her graduate work at UC Santa Cruz, where she is studying to be a secondary science teacher. She remembers dissecting owl pellets and hiking with the EV at Los Trancos as a fifth-grader. Erica exclaims, “Because of Ms. Wise, I was one step ahead of everyone in junior high with respect to science.” And, because of Roxanne Wise, Erika is embarking on a career of teaching science.
With her emphasis on science education, Roxanne Wise hopes to make her students better custodians of the environment. Her philosophy mirrors that of the EV. Her kids learn that they are part of the animal world. The excitement comes, she says, when they transfer knowledge from a field trip or a classroom presentation to their personal lives, when they begin to care about the world around them.
“I have so much fun watching them learn, and watching others, like the EV, broaden their experience—I can’t retire!”