Edna Nixon McIver
all your heart, like you have your heart in it." And I thought, "Good grief, how can we do that?" One more thing. When I did my student teaching my senior year in college, I couldn't do my high school student teaching at an EI Paso high school. Even though the high schools were integrated, the teaching staffs were not integrated. All of the black students who were secondary education majors had to do their secondary student teaching in the one predominantly black school in the city, and that was Douglass. So I had to do my high school student teaching out at an elementary and junior high school. Once I had gotten out of college, I thought to myself, now that I'm a teacher I'm going to make such a big difference in everybody's life, and it just doesn't work that way. In our education classes we were basically taught to teach in the ideal situations. I didn't expect to teach school and find whole classes of children that didn't smile and children that were underfed. That just wasn't for me. Now I feel that since I've raised five children of my own, and I understand firsthand what the learning process is all about, I could go back and be a much better teacher. Interviewed by Rebecca Craver, February 4, 1984, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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