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May 29, 2008

John Christner ending teaching career but not his involvement with students

By SHEILA SELMAN

NEW PARIS, Ind. — After 39 years of teaching fourth-graders, John Christner is ready to see a little more of the world.

On Friday, he’ll lay his chalk down for a final time. Sometime after that, the New Paris Elementary School teacher intends to depart on a six-week trip out West. He’s going to 16 national parks and visiting friends and family along the way.

After that, who knows?

“I’ve been kind of mentally preparing for the past year,” Christner said of his retirement.

He’s looking forward to “just being able to slow down and take it easy.”

Though “slowing down” involves continuing to work as a volunteer at Menno-Hof in Shipshewana, being more involved in his church, Eighth Street Mennonite, and doing the “lunch buddy” program next year at the school. He’s also looking at volunteering his services wherever needed in Goshen.

The barrage of well wishes and thank-yous has also helped prep him for the big day.

His co-workers gave him a party and an open house May 19. About 100 people showed up, he said.

Kids have been telling him they wished he wouldn’t retire, while others, while not happy to see him go, have given him tokens of appreciation.

One student made a book of lighthouses he should visit, something he might just do.

Christner’s a lighthouse buff and has collected quite a few miniatures over the years as a teacher. He’ll cherish them all, but one he received at his retirement stands out. One of Christner’s former students presented him with a glass beveled plate on which he had laser-etched a lighthouse.

“That’s something I’ll treasure the rest of my life,” Christner said.

With 39 years of teaching under his belt, Christner has a lot of special memories to take with him: getting hugs from former students, a strawberry pie a parent gave him, a coconut sent to him by a student on vacation in Hawaii.

“One of my main joys of teaching is getting that ‘aha!’ moment,” he said. “Getting that light in their eye that they’ve got it. It’s still fun to watch.”

That’s why fourth-graders are so special, according to Christner. They are at the age when they are independent and still enjoy learning, he said. “They’re inquisitive and they’re just fun to be around.”

Christner said, “I love teaching reading.” He tells students that they can travel anywhere in the universe and don’t have to pay a penny.

He also likes to have fun with math, doing brain teasers with the kids. Christner said he wanted to garner their interest and show them how math is a part of their lives.

Christner had also been teaching German once a week. His mother was Amish and he grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. He later took German and decided it would be fun to teach the language.

Christner’s brought a little bit of everything to the table to teach kids, which is also a frustration and one of the reasons he’s retiring.

Too much emphasis has been placed on test scores thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, he said.

Christner works with a wide range of students whose abilities go from second to sixth grades.

“There’s so much emphasis on test scores that we’re losing the main focus,” he said. Some important things are being overlooked, including creating a good citizen, while test scores are being emphasized.

And over the years as the family structure has changed, parents are working more and spending less quality time with their children, he said. As a result, parents may buy their children more technology to compensate. This means children aren’t socializing as much, and that is a trend that concerns him. Another end result is that children aren’t as physically fit.

No Child Left Behind is also placing increased demands on classroom teachers, he said. As a teacher, he said, “You can only take so much and that’s it.”

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