This conversation with Jane Roth, Director of Academics at TJ is wide ranging. From how she found TJ to how we think about educating high-ability students, there is a lot covered in this conversation.
Matthew:
Hi. I'm Matthew Troutman, Head of School at Thomas Jefferson School in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm proud to be the current Head of School of such an amazing institution with so many great alumni. That's why I wanted to start a conversation series with alumni to get to know them, know their story, and how TJ has impacted their lives. We have so much to learn and so many people to talk to. To begin, let's get started by talking with one of our most important alumni to TJ currently. She's an alumna from the 90s and currently our director of academics. Mrs. Jane Roth is also a parent of a current senior, a graduate, and hopefully a future TJ student. She's also been somebody I've worked closely with for the last 10 years in the academic administration of TJ. She has so much to say about the academics here, our program, our history and knowledge of the institution, and why we do what we do at TJ. She's also a great example of somebody who lives the mission of the school. I hope you welcome Jane to our conversation series now.
Matthew:
I'm sitting with Jane Roth, director of academics, teacher, parent. What courses have you taught at TJ? I'm forgetting some things.
Jane:
Oh wow. Well when I first started teaching, let me think. I was hired to teach seventh grade English, ninth grade English, and second year Italian. So Bill was stepping away from Italian and I got to step in. And then as Ken Colson seemed to drop pieces, I picked up 10th grade English and then I picked up first year Latin, which I'm back to teaching again and I absolutely love, and senior English.
Matthew:
Is there a course that you haven't taught that you would love to eventually teach?
Jane:
Oh wow. What a question.
Matthew:
Other than calculus. I'm sure that's on the list, right?
Jane:
Gosh. I mean the... I've actually never thought about that question. That's so interesting. I mean on the one hand, I am fascinated by the notion of doing something on the social studies side. I think teaching senior English and nonfiction readings about how history and culture form identity through those inherited stories that may or may not be entirely true. The only English classes that I haven't taught are eighth grade English and AP Lit. So I suppose AP Lit just because I really miss aspects of teaching 10th grade English. Those are some of my favorite works, but also the literary analysis piece I think I get less of in senior English since it's centered around nonfiction readings. So probably I would steal Mr. Roth's AP Lit course.
Matthew:
I'm sure he wouldn't have any problems with that, right?
Jane:
Right.
Matthew:
I mean we could do a swap at some point, right? Just one year to switch the two. No problems. It's really easy to plan for a totally new course, right?
Jane:
Right. He still hasn't forgiven me. I mean 20... What is this? Almost 25 years later. So I inherited ninth grade English from him. So when I came, he took on AP Lit. And he had been teaching Rhyme of the Ancient Mariners, which I had never read. And so I didn't feel confident at the time keeping that on the syllabus. And to this day he has not forgiven me for taking that off the ninth grade syllabus.
Matthew:
So he just puts it back into his course right? That's how that works?
Jane:
Right. Exactly. Yup. 100%.
Matthew:
Well let's step back. So we dove into the teaching side, and I think my bias is showing there trying to go to the academics as it is today. But you also are a student, or were a student. I guess we're all students here. But you're an alumna of TJ. How did you find TJ? How did you learn about it? How did you get to know the school?
Jane:
Well, so my family went to church with Bill Roe's family at the time, and as my mother tells the story, she and Bill were standing around at coffee hour after church services one Sunday. And I was in sixth grade at the time at a local public school, and I don't think I really realized the extent to which I was bored and underchallenged. But I guess she had been sharing those impressions with him, and he said, "Why don't you have her come check out TJ?" And truth be told, independent school was so off my radar as a sixth grader, and I did admissions for years here and really got a sense of how elementary school kids in independent school really make that assumption that they're going to go off to another independent school at the secondary level and that's just par for the course. But I just had no clue. I had never heard of John Burroughs. I had never heard of Thomas Jefferson.
Jane:
And I remember visiting and just feeling like I had found my people. I mean I was nervous as anything, dorky little sixth grade girl, but everybody was just so funny and relaxed and there was this ease across ages. And truly my only interaction with older kids had been those miserable rides to school on the bus where the middle school boys would throw spitballs at each other.
Matthew:
At best.
Jane:
Right, right. Right. And hurl insults. So I had this terror in my mind about what it would be like to be around people who were that much older than I was, but everybody was just so easy to be around.
Matthew:
And we don't have the bus rides to worry about too much, except for going to rep, which at least nowadays the only thing that might be thrown is a wireless charger to help somebody out to charge their cellphone before coming into the rep.
Jane:
Yeah. Well you took me back to my early days with your question about what I started teaching, and one of my fondest and funniest memories was having to drive the, we called it the whale, it was the old big blue passenger van. It was one of those kidnapper vans except it was blue. And we would pile into it and, I don't know, go to the skating rink or go for a walk someplace. And there's this phenomenon that happens when the teacher climbs in the seat and the students are all back. It's like they forget we exist and they talk about everything, and it was just so funny getting a glimpse into what mattered and what they were thinking about and cracking jokes about.
Matthew:
I was going to ask about that. You had the experience of being a student, and then coming back as a teacher. And I'm sure there are a number of students who have ideas of what teacher life is like or what we do. Was there anything that stood out when you started, maybe it is the conversations you could be a part of, that really stood out as something that, "Wow I didn't know teachers did this." Or, "I thought this would be much more interesting when I was a student."
Jane:
I think the first thing that comes to mind is actually grade meeting. We had this sense that the teachers all piled into a room together and talked about all of us and how we were doing. And it sounded so... I don't know. Every aspect of us was scrutinized and talked about. And what it's actually like to be in those meetings, it is just a room full of care and concern about how we can help these young people, some of whom are confused about calculus, some of whom are confused about what it means to be a teenager in 2020, but as a student it felt scary. And as a teacher it feels... Oh I don't know.
Matthew:
Supportive?
Jane:
Right. Well I think part of it is, we don't get to teach every student every year. And we do step through every single student and consider not just how things are going in geometry, but how things are going socially, emotionally, just sharing our impressions on where this young life is in this moment and what we can do to best support that young life.
Matthew:
So we don't talk about dating as much as maybe students think that we do.
Jane:
No.
Matthew:
So I'm curious, trying to go back to the transition that you had from TJ student to post TJ student. So maybe talk a little bit about how TJ may have helped prepare you for the next step in college, and then prepared you for coming back to teach at TJ.
Jane:
Right. And I think I've got this, just by virtue of experience, this long view of the program as it was and how it served me. And as it is and how I see it serving not just our students, but my student. The students that have lived in my house. All right. So I think the word I've heard most associated with TJ, or that I heard most associated with TJ when I was a student and even in my early days of teaching, was rigor, which is a word that can scare a lot of people away. And it was rigorous, right? And it's supposed to be rigorous. We're supposed to put meaningful challenge in front of high-ability young people. And we do.
Jane:
I think that something that I am proudest of in my role, not so much as a teacher but as an administrator, is humanizing the experience, especially for the middle school students. I remember when I came in and seventh graders took four classes just like the seniors did. We had three hour exams at the end of every quarter just like the seniors did. There was no structure for us in the afternoon unless our advisors got irritated with us and decided we needed to be in a study hall.But really we were treated as middle schoolers back then, just as anybody else would have been. And I think the upside to that was that we really worked hard to learn from the students who were ahead of us.
Jane:
The downside, of course, was that our brains were jello and we didn't have the self-discipline, and the self-motivation frankly, to manage our time well, to prioritize, to get stuff done. The hours I can remember playing cards in Yellow House with my classmates in the middle of the afternoon, and other sorts of learning certainly take place. In my case it did not take the form of Algebra One or Two or whatever.
Matthew:
Right. Well and there's tons of research that shows what that system set up is maybe not the best, or developmentally appropriate, for students at that age. And since then, I think this is an area where just highlighting some of the work that you've been doing here at TJ is bringing in some of the best practices and really trying to serve those students where they are and where we should be serving them, rather than throwing everybody to the equally deep end of the pool at the same time and seeing who survives or who uses their time appropriately in the afternoons, playing cards or doing homework or finding other things to use with their afternoons.
Jane:
Exactly. And such an important piece of, I think, what leads to a graduate's success comes from the freedom and independence that they experience here, and that they use well and sometimes use poorly. I think any of us can look back on mistakes we've made that turned out to be really beneficial to us because they corrected whatever that unhelpful behavior was. And so preserving... I mean my goal, I think, has been to find developmentally appropriate ways to preserve opportunities to experience the freedom, to experience the independence, to practice time management and organization with that safety net of adults around who can help somebody correct course as needed.
Matthew:
Right, because we know that's going to happen too. That's going to be a part of it.
Jane:
Right. One of the hardest things, I think, about being a parent is watching your kid screw up. And we have to do that.
Matthew:
Right. How is that unique to the high ability students, the gifted students that we serve?
Jane:
You mean the need to practice failure?
Matthew:
Practice failure, and how does a TJ student experience that failure maybe differently than other students? And how do we support them differently?
Jane:
Great question. I think there are different flavors of failure that high ability students can tend to experience. I can start, perhaps, by speaking to what feels like a intellectual failure, maybe. I think bright kids, and of course there is a lot of literature that backs this up, kids who have been labeled gifted and talented or high ability or who all their lives have been told how smart they are, encounter the level of challenge that we offer here and it can feel really uncomfortable when they're hitting that wall for the first time. And they haven't had practice overcoming that, pushing through it, maybe accessing resources that they need in order to push through it, if that makes sense.
Jane:
And so I think that is a way we are built, really, to benefit the growth of those high ability kids. Yeah, sure, you're smart. And another angle of it is, you may be really smart in math but maybe writing is hard for you. High ability kids tend to make this assumption that if they are good at one thing they should be good at everything, and that's not real. And so also helping them gain some self-awareness about their own talents, their own abilities, their own areas for growth. Just because you haven't had to work at math doesn't mean you don't have to work at English. It doesn't mean you can't be as successful at English as you are at math, if you stretch through that discomfort and do the things we're asking you to do, to grow.
Matthew:
So how do you, knowing that students are going to have areas of skills and strength and other areas of weakness, but that there's this internal monologue that's really difficult, at times. I know I experience it. "I'm good at math why am I not good at English? It must be because of some other factor." Or, "I'm just lazy." It's either internal battles or external. So as a teacher, how do you come into the classroom and help support the students if they're strong in the areas you teach, or not so strong?
Jane:
A piece of it certainly is having big and sensitive ears to hear what they're saying and almost hear what they're not saying about themselves. But also I feel that it is really important for the adults in their environment to model for them our own, not just failures, although that's certainly part of it, but expose for them the places where we have learning to do. I mean I think they... Maybe I'm giving us too much credit here, but I think they're used to viewing their teachers as the experts in the field. I mean you are teaching calculus because you are good at calculus, right? And yet we don't now, we can't know, everything. And so showing them where we have to fill in gaps in our knowledge, where we're excited to fill in gaps in our own knowledge and seeing that as something fun rather than scary or mark of failure.
Matthew:
What's an example that you have experienced? Maybe recently, maybe not so recently.
Jane:
Oh sure. I mean recently, gosh with this move to remote instruction last spring and the hybrid modality that we're dealing with now, learning video technology. I can try and make it seem as if I know everything, but when I ask a teenager, I'm going to get a lot better information. And they're excited to help. I mean it gives them an opportunity to show off what they know and feel that teaching buzz that keeps us going. And in this stretch in particular, we have never, as teachers all around the world are experiencing, we have never taught in this hybrid mode where some people are in the room and some people aren't. We have technological screw ups sometimes that happen for reasons outside our control, but sometimes happen because we're figuring out what we're doing and owning that and acknowledging that we don't always have it all together.
Matthew:
Right. Yeah. To acknowledge that something's not going well, I think we're all here because we're nerdy and love to learn and want to keep growing, just a quick question. Is it easier for you to go to a student that you teach, don't teach, or is it easier to go to the young people in your house or who share your genetics? Is it easier to go to somebody who's not as connected?
Jane:
Huh. What an interesting question. I think it depends on what I'm trying to learn, right? So I am nearing the end of my graduate degree, and when I had to take the GRE as a full-grown adult person who should have remembered 10th grade math but absolutely did not, I sat at volleyball games and got tutoring in whatever, geometry, statistics, from students, from my colleagues. But probably more from the students because it was so fresh in their minds. It was easy to do that and certainly humbling too.
Matthew:
Well I think it puts us in check, and I think that's helpful to know too, right? If we are not always the experts, sometimes they're great teachers too because we put the information in front of them, and they know how to acquire it, to use it, and when they can do it back to us, I think that's special. I think that's very cool. I always enjoyed listening to... I've learned more about sentence diagramming in my time here than I did in my entire English career in high school, middle school, any time.
Jane:
That's funny.
Matthew:
Well I'm curious, talking about... Let's zoom back out a little. First, I'm going to ask you, if you could give advice to a current sophomore, what would that advice be? And I think the second part of that question is, I chose that year intentionally-
Jane:
Oh I was going to ask you why a sophomore.
Matthew:
Well I'm curious what you think, why I chose sophomore year as somebody to give advice to?
Jane:
Well should I pull out the Greek root of the word and talk about how it means wise fool?
Matthew:
It wouldn't be TJ if we didn't go to etymology.
Jane:
It wouldn't be. Yeah they're squarely planted in the middle of the high school program, and generally either they need to be... This isn't my advice by the way. This is my observation of the creature that is the sophomore. They either need to be careful not to burn themselves out, or they need to realize they can't wait too much longer to take things seriously. Gosh. What advice would I give a current sophomore? I guess I would say, you probably think everybody is paying attention to you and what you're doing all the time, and they're really not because they're too busy paying attention to themselves. So don't take yourself so seriously and spend so much energy on what you imagine other people are thinking about you.
Matthew:
A couple rapid fire questions before we wrap up. All right. First one. Favorite TJ meal as a student?
Jane:
Oh man. Does it have to be a whole meal? The first thing that comes to mind is Vera's hot fudge pudding.
Matthew:
Nice. Favorite teacher while you were a student?
Jane:
Oh wow that's going to get me in trouble. Well, Cindy Hood was my 10th grade math teacher and by all rights I should not call her a favorite. But she was always so kind and my memories center way more around the outside of the classroom than the inside of the classroom. I remember, for example, we had a lip sync contest and Amy Dell, Kristen Belin and I did a Supremes number, and I was Diana Ross, and Cindy Hood let us practice this number, I swear, for hours on end. She must've heard You Can't Hurry Love 9000 times in her apartment in Red House. She was so patient.
Matthew:
That's awesome. So looking back now, with some hindsight-
Jane:
We lost by the way.
Matthew:
Oh. I was going to ask, what act won? What was the-
Jane:
Oh it's such a joke. Val Chulamorkodt and Lela Ossoli jumping around to The Doors. I'm bitter to this day.
Matthew:
Was it a crowd vote?
Jane:
I think it was a crowd vote. I don't even remember.
Matthew:
Yeah. But you lost to the... Were they the popular group?
Jane:
They were seventh graders.
Matthew:
Oh. Well cuteness factor.
Jane:
I guess.
Matthew:
We might need a recount on that one.
Jane:
We'll have to reprise it at Karen Fairbanks's retirement party.
Matthew:
The Supremes? Or the seventh graders dancing around?
Jane:
Both.
Matthew:
Okay. We can do best of, all time.
Jane:
Right. Right.
Matthew:
Looking back now, who is a person that was more impactful than they would have known while you were here as a student? So looking back now, who had a big impact on your life?
Jane:
Oh wow. It's not an individual. I can remember being a little, I don't know, seventh or eighth grader and going to Crestwood Mall on a Wednesday afternoon was the height of excitement. And Tory McAllister gave us a ride in her little Ford Escort to the mall one time, and we thought we were royalty. But that is representative of the way older kids would take us under their wings and treat us kindly when they probably didn't want to and didn't have any reason to. I can remember that Neal Salyapongse was the president of the student council when I was in seventh grade, and I always got stuck waiting the senior and junior table that was right outside the dining room. Table five. It was the scariest place you can imagine for a seventh grader.
Matthew:
Older students.
Jane:
Yes. Older students. It was always older guys. And I didn't understand what they were joking about. I was self-conscious the whole time. One time I was carrying a ginormous, heavy hot bowl of clam chowder to the table and I tripped, and I spilled it all over Neal Salyapongse, and he was the most gracious human being you can imagine. And to this day I am grateful that he didn't mortify me in front of...
Matthew:
Does he know this story? Would he remember this story?
Jane:
I don't know.
Matthew:
Oh that's a good one to ask.
Jane:
You need to book him for your next-
Matthew:
That's right.
Jane:
I mean again, right? An example of some little teenager thinking that everybody else is paying attention to them when really... And I'm probably imagining it was this whole bowl of clam chowder, and I probably slopped a spoonful on him or something. I don't know.
Matthew:
Bigger in your mind, and probably smaller in his mind, no matter what it was. Yeah. Exactly. Going back to the curriculum, what's your favorite book from your TJ experience?
Jane:
Oh favorite book from my TJ experience. Probably... That's so hard. That's so hard. Probably The Great Gatsby, which then turned into one of my favorite things to teach. That's not even my favorite Fitzgerald, but... Yeah. Gatsby.
Matthew:
Pretty common one. I thought you were going to go with Count of Monte Cristo or something more...
Jane:
I actually didn't like it as much when I was a student. We read it as OR before seventh grade. I don't think I was big enough to appreciate it.
Matthew:
You read it in seventh grade?
Jane:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matthew:
Wow.
Jane:
Yeah. A lot of big boat words that I didn't understand.
Matthew:
Right. That's half of the first half of the book. A quarter of the book is boat terminology. Okay, so recently, what's something that you've read, come across, maybe outside of the TJ curriculum that you would recommend to others or made an impact?
Jane:
Ooh. Gosh. You know how hard book questions are for me because I love reading so much and I want everybody to read everything.
Matthew:
Everything. Well maybe you can narrow it down to, is it easier or more challenging if I said an article or another short piece?
Jane:
Books are good. I think some of my favorites in the recent stretch, Lisa Holekamp actually recommended to me the novel Cold Comfort Farm, which is just sheer funny indulgence. This summer I read Americana, which I really loved. Themes of identity and race, really an impactful novel. E.B. White, I know I teach E.B. White, but I've been... He had a volume release called On Democracy in the last year or so and I've been reading that to see how it can dovetail with democracy in America when I teach that.
Matthew:
I don't know if you noticed this, but you started your answer with a quote, "Books are good." Surprised that... Yeah. Make sure that that's the headline there.
Jane:
Books are good.
Matthew:
Jane Roth, books are good. Okay quick hit. Best dorm, and you get one word to say why it's the best dorm.
Jane:
Best dorm. As a student?
Matthew:
No context. You determine the context.
Jane:
Oh gosh. Okay... And I can only have one answer?
Matthew:
One word as why. Yeah.
Jane:
One word. Okay. So I'm going to go the corny answer and I'm going to go Gray House, and I'm going to say family because that's where we brought little Liot home from the hospital.
Matthew:
Yeah. And it is one of the larger ones with two stories?
Jane:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Matthew:
Yeah. I thought you were going to say Gray because of the bath tub in one dorm room, but that's okay.
Jane:
As a student I think I would've said Gables because of all the shenanigans that happened over six years.
Matthew:
That's a good one. Gables just seems to bring shenanigans no matter what year, what time period.
Jane:
It's in the walls.
Matthew:
It's in the walls, that sometimes are more stable than others, more intact than others depending on how rowdy the students are.
Jane:
Right. There's your alternative title. Shenanigans are in the walls.
Matthew:
I will never forget, just speaking of Gables and walls, the first year I was a teacher I had an advisee who came up to me and he was the nicest, nicest student, Xiang Wang. Big guy, bigger than most other students. He came up and he just very sheepishly said, "I was walking down the hallway and I tripped and fell and put a hole in the wall." And we go over to Gables, and there is a human-sized hole in the drywall of Gables, and he felt so bad about that. And I just couldn't... Yeah. He offered to pay but I think we knew it was an accident. Well I think it was an accident. Who knows? And just wanted to make sure he didn't get too embarrassed that.
Jane:
You should've put a frame around it and called it an art installation.
Matthew:
That was option two. That would've been the cheaper option, I think, than repairing the drywall. And last question. Is there somebody you want to thank or apologize to?
Jane:
Ooh. Oh gosh. Mr. Roe, I am so sorry for all of the times I didn't do my homework, and I just want you to know that my chronic stress dream to this day involves walking into a classroom where you're giving me a mean room because I'm not prepared for class.
Matthew:
So to wrap up, I think what's really special about TJ is its mission. And I know every school probably thinks that their mission is unique, but I truly believe that ours is. I think two phrases, to me, always stick out. And one is the strongest possible academic background. So you're in the drivers seat of academics at TJ, so this is a very loaded question. But what does "The strongest possible academic background" mean to you?
Jane:
To me, it means acquiring this base of knowledge and a set of skills that is going to equip you to think critically about the thing you're reading, or the world you're living in, the thing you're hearing on the news or seeing in the newspaper or whatever. And to communicate clearly the input and the output, in terms of reaction to the world. And that requires, as I said, a base of knowledge, a foundation of knowledge, a set of skills when interacting that knowledge.
Matthew:
That's going to serve students for the rest of their lives. That's not just a skill that you need for college. It's a skill for being in a job, being a part of the world, contributing to that world, and being successful, whatever that means to you.
Jane:
Right. I mean I can say with great shame, but truth, that I remember very few things about AP Calculus, but what it taught me was that I could do this hard thing that I thought I couldn't do, and survive it. That in itself is a kind of skill, right? So it's not always the stuff that a place is trying to open your head and pour in.
Matthew:
Right. I would say that it's not just in the classroom. So you mentioned AP Calculus, but I would imagine that it also gives you the skills to survive developing a curriculum for a pandemic and serving that online, knowing that we can do this. And I think we're lucky to have the students and the faculty to pull this off, and I think that's helpful to be successful. But knowing that we can do this comes from this part of the mission.
Jane:
Right. Right.
Matthew:
The other part of the mission that's really, to me, just always... This is the part that's truly unique and, I think, special is that we have this phrase in there, "To uplift the world with beauty and intellect." I'm wondering if you could reflect on that a little bit and see... Well I could ask the direct question. How do you live the mission by uplifting the world with beauty and intellect?
Jane:
Wow. Heavy question. To me this is such, as you said, such a peculiar phrase to find a mission of a school, and yet it feels so TJ. To me it points back to the things students have learned to observe in the world, to recognize, but also what we're putting out in the world. I think there's this maybe literal read of it where we are putting items of visual or linguistic beauty out into the world. But I think there's something larger there, too, about goodness towards other human beings, goodness towards our planet. That, I don't know, resonates. That's what resonates for me with it, this notion of recognizing and putting out into the world things that just make us gasp in awe in a good way, and appreciate the gift of the mind and how it can help us recognize what is good and beautiful.
Matthew:
A wonderful note to end on. So Jane, thank you for your time this afternoon. It's always great to get some time to talk. And I'm sure we'll do so more in the future.
Jane:
Yeah. Yeah. It's harder now that we're not sharing the same physical space in the office anymore.
Matthew:
That's right. Just down the hall seems so far away.
Jane:
That's right. Well thank you.
Matthew:
Absolutely. Thank you Jane.
Jane:
I don't have answers to any of this.
Matthew:
Good. This will make it more authentic.