Remembering Fran Martin

The two great themes of my mother’s life are teaching and family. What she really wanted to do, from a very early age, probably grade school, was to be a teacher. When she and her friends would play together, they played “school.” And my mother would always be the teacher.

Frances May van Mourik grew up not far from here in Alhambra and Arcadia and Los Angeles. She was athletic, full of energy. She was the youngest member of what might as well be called the Court Street van Mouriks, the impromptu street baseball team with her 3 sisters and brother. In high school she ran track. She was also musical, taking up the accordion at her mother’s suggestion. She loved playing, and would play for her family and at school. The accordion gave her a place in the school besides being “the smart kid”.

With those smarts, she set her sights on college – the only college within reach was UCLA. She got in with good grades, and paid for it with some financial help from her father, by living really cheaply in a co-op with several other women, and a lot of odd jobs, like working in department and dime stores, baby-sitting, and ushering in movie theaters. She did OK in her regular classes, but stellar in all her education courses. Everything was aimed at one goal – getting that teaching degree.

I think she really wanted to teach the lower grades even then, because so much happens in those first few years that can determine the arc of a child’s life for the rest of school, and even beyond.

1948 was a year like no other for Mom. She buried her mother, graduated from UCLA, married my father, and in the fall, started her first job, a first grade at Alvarado School in Richmond, California. It so happened that UCLA had just about the finest teacher education program in the country, so she was exceptionally well-prepared. Was she as nervous as the children on their first day of first grade? I wouldn’t be surprised. She was determined to excel at teaching and had enormous energy and drive, so she spent hours and hours every day preparing materials for each day’s lessons. First year is always like that, but this would be my Mom’s MO for the rest of her career.

Near the end of that year, an expert on teaching children visited the school. He looked in a lot of classrooms, including my Mom’s, where she was having a discussion with her kids about a story – she used to say that one of the most important things she learned as a teacher was how to get kids to talk and participate. That’s one of the best ways they learn. At the end of the day, he gave his impressions — what was his impression of my Mom? “She is the finest first grade teacher I have ever seen.” This in her first year! She was that good. She always attributed her success to the great instruction she received at UCLA “I just did what I was taught, and everyone thought it was marvelous”

After a couple of years, she and my Dad moved to Alexandria, Virginia and Mom taught first grade at George Mason school till I was born in 1955.

Besides teaching, the other theme in Mom’s life was raising a family. My sister Pamela was born in 1957. A year later, we moved to Stockton and Mom met Dr. Audrey Reynolds, an excellent doctor who became our pediatrician. They became great friends, and Dr. Audrey, as we called her, became a de-facto member of our family. A couple of years after that, she met Mauzie Howell with whom she developed a deep friendship which would last for the rest of her life.

Now that she was a stay-at-home Mom, my mother devoted her prodigious energy to raising her children and making a home for us. Mom provided the opportunities so Pamela and I could discover and follow our dreams. She got us to all kinds of activities, like music lessons, horseback riding, ballet, scouts, swimming. She surrounded us with books and resources so we could grow intellectually, spiritually, athletically, and artistically. She showed me how to borrow library books. There was a children’s branch of the public library on my way home from school, and I used to spend hours there, reading and selecting a book to borrow. When I got home, Mom asked “What did you get?”, and I showed her. “Good, but homework first!”. She knew me well.

She would always say “I was able to follow my dream of becoming a teacher, really loving what I did, and I want that for you, too. Whatever it takes, we’ll find a way give you the same chance to do what you really want to do.”

Music had always been a big part of Mom’s life. Her mother had been a fine violinist and played at one time with the LA Philharmonic, and I think Mom’s love for classical music, especially on the violin, came from her. Mom also loved to listen on the record player, and I think she chose most of the classical recordings that we had, such as Toscanini conducting Beethoven symphonies, Heifetz playing the Sibelius and Tchaikovsky violin concertos. She was determined to give us the same chance to experience the joy of making music that she’d had as a child, and we both took up the piano; for my sister it became her vocation.

Mom loved to make things for us, for her friends, for the house, and for herself. In addition to all the holiday craft projects, she sewed clothes for Pamela and herself, but she only used Butterick or McCall’s patterns. Those Vogue patterns, while supposedly yielding great-looking clothes, had instructions that were so cryptic they offended the teacher in her. “Why those Vogue pattern instructions are just terrible. They just say

1. Make it
2. Iron it
3. Wear it “

So, no Vogue.

But she was always making something, or doing a craft project like a clown rocker for Dr. Audrey’s office, or antiquing some piece of furniture for a room in the house, or all of them at once. Did I mention she had a lot of energy? In later years even though most of her time at home was spent working on materials for her class, she started a beautiful miniature dollhouse project, which I built with her. Sadly, she did not get to finish it – but I will.

Mom threw birthday parties. Not just ordinary parties, mind you, but the full Hallmark experience, with matching paper plates, cups, homemade centerpieces, streamers from the overhead lamp and even party favors of one kind or another. Each party had a theme, like pirates (for me, with eyepatches for all the swabs) or Alice in Wonderland (for Pamela).

These parties had organized games, disorganized mayhem, and menus with imaginative names for the foods. The Alice party was the apex, the high-water mark of Mom’s birthday party creations. The invitations were in mirror writing, and Mom had me dressed up in a coat and hat to help the guests climb through a barrel set horizontally in the front doorway – the rabbit hole. The hall had a table with juice labeled “Drink Me”. Then, into the dining room for the Mad Hatter’s tea party. All the guests got white paper pinafores as party favors.

Mom always said “My job was making memories”, but some memories fade, so thank God Dr Audrey, the archivist of our family, was on hand with her trusty Polaroid to capture the images that give substance to those memories that Mom created for us.

Dr. Audrey was also the outdoors enthusiast who really got our family into camping. We went on several trips to Lake Alpine in the Sierras. I’d fish with Dr. Audrey, and by myself (I’m like 8 or 9 at the time), bring back a 6” fish, proudly show it to Mom.

“You caught it, you clean it”

Right. Then she’d cook it up for us and it would be the best fish we ever had. We’d hike around with Mom and Dad and Dr. Audrey, play with other kids, eat s’mores at night around a campfire, and, as Mom would say, just have a high old time.

But Mom’s greatest outdoor adventures were with Dr. Audrey. Once a year they’d go on a wilderness outing for a week or two, and we were left with Dad’s cooking. They went rafting on the Columbia river, kayaking on some part of the Snake River, where they flipped the kayak, but managed to save most of the supplies and equipment. They went salmon fishing in Alaska, where she caught one that seemed nearly as big as I was, fought it for an hour before landing it. Those trips fed her soul. We ate a lot of takeout. I’m glad now that she went, even though I missed her then.

Mom loved all holidays, from Valentine’s Day to the Fourth of July, and had great fun with celebration, but Christmas was the biggest holiday of the year, and it started on the way back from Thanksgiving dinner at Nana and Grandpa’s.

“Can we sing Christmas songs now?” we’d ask.

Mom and Dad would say, “Yes, now you can,” and we’d sing carols for the next hour, till we fell asleep.

Christmas for Mom would probably start much earlier, with plans for projects, food, and parties.

She did craft projects and made gifts that amazed us all, like the candy house she made for Dr. Audrey. Such an amazing level of detail, and she didn’t gain a pound.

The dollhouse she and Dad made for Pamela with three floors, individual shingles, and full interior. The three wise men, the intricate crèche ornament, and elaborately decorated socks for Pamela and me.

She did this for one simple reason — she loved us and wanted to make us happy, and she did it by putting something of herself into each one.

Mom made the whole house beautiful, but the tree was the centerpiece. Mom hunted through multiple tree lots to find exactly the right ten foot tree for our living room..

Dad strung up the lights, then Mom put on the ornaments, and the tinsel. Mom always said she was in the business of making memories, and some of my most vivid are of those trees. The tree was the most imposing, awesome sight to my ten-year-old eyes. I can still see the image of a gigantic tree ablaze with light, glittering with tinsel and covered in beautiful ornaments of all colors and descriptions, from whimsical to exquisite. How’s that for a memory?

Every Christmas Eve, just before bedtime, Mom brought out a book she’d saved for this moment. She read to us. The stories were often poignant or a little sad, but the moral was always about the wonder and special nature of that night, when animals talked, people walked with angels, and the world was forever changed.

Christmas day was the payoff. The excitement in our eyes, the amazement and joy was part of what she wanted for us for that holiday. Mom retained a childlike enthusiasm for all parts of Christmas and a sense of fun that was just magical sometimes. On one Christmas Pamela received a yellow plastic mat which had a hopscotch pattern printed on it. At some point Mom got up, took off her slippers, and proceeded to play hopscotch on the mat using a piece of hard candy as a marker. I think Pamela joined in too. We laughed at a grownup playing a kid’s game, but the point was my Mom could still connect with that inner child and she let her out to play.

One Christmas, I remember receiving a framed picture I had not asked for , but which Mom knew I loved – as I opened just the corner, I recognized it and turned to her “You didn’t!” Her face had a look of pure delight and I think she may have clapped her hands together as I finished opening it. That feeling she showed in her face was the essence of giftgiving – there’s nothing better than giving something that’s a total surprise, but is also highly desired. Later, when Pamela and I were much older, we made a sock for her. Pamela sewed it, and we wrote “Frances” on it in glue and glitter. We filled it with a few small gifts and hung it on the mantle Christmas morning when she wasn’t looking. She’d told us that she’d never hung a stocking up for Santa, so we thought we’d fix that. We included a note from Santa to the effect that in the future, Fran was to hang her own sock up, as he had enough to do that night filling stockings without providing them as well. She just cried and cried with happiness, and I think we experienced a little of the essence of giftgiving ourselves.

Mom could really step up to a hard situation when she needed to, even when it was exceedingly difficult. Just like in her younger days when she just did whatever was needed in order to get that education degree to become a teacher, after the divorce, when she had to support us, she went right out, renewed her credential, and started job hunting. She said later, “It just had to be done, nobody was going to do it for me, so I just did it.” Even though she had been a fine teacher, that was 16 years before, and she wasn’t sure she could still do it. As it turned out, she hadn’t lost her touch at all.

When she returned to teaching in 1972, I saw the hours and hours of preparation, the incessant studying of books on teaching techniques, the experiments and the workshops, the trials and successes.

Mom loved the process of teaching, showing the way, and the chidren’s response as they began to understand, grow, and figure out how to get along in the world. Teaching is not a one-way street — you change, you alter, you adapt to each child as the child teaches you what he or she needs.

She worked late after school and at home, lining manila cardboard for word cards, transcribing stories word by word so they could be taken apart and put back together again. She spent hour after hour lining, writing, lettering, cutting, gluing, and covering with contact paper. I can see her sitting on the living room floor surrounded by finished work, shreds of cardboard and colored paper. She filled shelves and shelves of the garage with teaching materials for language, art, science, math, and music. She re-used and added to them, year after year.

I only visited my Mom’s classroom a couple times while I was in high school and college, but I vividly remember it: The children were in several small groups around tables or on the floor, engrossed in what they were doing. Mom was working with one group, moving around to another, checking progress, encouraging, asking questions. She was totally in her element.

Steve Bialystok was a young teacher that my Mom mentored almost from the beginning of his teaching career. He reminisces:

More than 30 years later, I still recall her classroom. Some kids were writing in journals; other kids were doing these independent activities, all involving some sort of manipulatives – analogical matching of pictures to objects in a jar, finding the right screw to match the bolt, and so forth. I remember being so impressed by what I saw – the child centered activities, the self-direction of the children, and her relationship with them. I remember thinking to myself, “This is what an open classroom is all about.” I returned to the school several times, only to watch Fran teach and how the children operated in the room. This was the kind of teacher I wanted to become. Eventually, we became friends.

When Mom first talked to me about Math Their Way, a new way of teaching children mathematics, with concrete objects and a focus on finding and creating patterns, I could see she thought this would really connect with the way children learn. She had read the books and taken the workshop, which had a big impact, as her friend and Math Their Way colleague Susan Iwamoto relates:

Taking a Math Their Way workshop was a life-changing event for a teacher. It was extremely powerful, especially if they had been math phobic themselves. We learned how to teach children in ways that made mathematics meaningful. It wasn’t about using the latest textbook series or cute worksheets. It was about teaching teachers to look for patterns in the number system – creating an environment where discovery by doing was the highest priority.

After having taken a few workshops and tried the techniques in her classroom with great success, Mom went through the training and became one of the first Math Their Way workshop instructors. Steve was there assisting when she ran her first workshop:

She was wonderfully supportive but it was like watching a master work. This was her very first workshop after training. Shouldn’t she have stumbled? Not only was Fran remarkable at teaching young children, but now I was observing her equally as impressive teaching adults. It was like a gift. She had the teachers eating out of her hand. And the course evaluations proved it. The comments were not only good — they were scary good.

First she taught workshops locally in Stockton and then (once she taught all the elementary teachers in Stockton) further afield in California and all over the country from Brownsville, Texas to Missoula, Montana, to Selma, Alabama, to Unalakleet, Alaska. She taught several workshops a year for over ten years.

Even when she finally retired from the classroom, she still had so much energy and devotion to helping other teachers that she continued to give math workshops, gave several workshops that she created on using real children’s literature to teach language, and co-authored several books giving ideas on how to teach children using themes. Each book shows how to use a specific theme — for example, the ocean– and put together literature, art, music, and math in a unified and fun way. This is the way she was taught back in UCLA, and this is what she thought to bring to others through the books. Steve again about Mom’s philosophy and practice of teaching:

As a teacher schooled in the time of progressive pedagogy, she always tried to create curriculum that children actually cared about; she orchestrated a classroom where children actually wanted to come to; she did things with kindergarten children that most kindergarten teachers today could not even imagine or risk doing.

She continued to do workshops around the country until she physically couldn’t lug those 50-pound suitcases around any more. But she was still eager to help other teachers with advice and encouragement, and materials from the garage. She continued to help in classrooms and even tutored adults.

Then cancer came and robbed her of energy and strength, but she fought off the cancer twice before she was finally overcome.

Mom used to say that her job as a Mom was making memories for us kids. But in a broader sense, she also made memories for her friends, especially Mauzie, and for all the children she taught and all the teachers she instructed.

She wasn’t a perfect teacher, but she was really, really good. Better than most, and for the teachers she taught and mentored, like Steve and Susan, she lives on as a exemplar, a standard, a way to teach that has the best interest of the child at heart. Her legacy is the improvement in the lives of the children that she taught, either directly in Mrs. Martin’s classroom, or indirectly in the classrooms of the teachers who took a workshop from Fran Martin. If you multiply it all up, that’s a lot of children with better lives because Fran Martin made memories here with us.