Guilford, Connecticut, is a quietly glossy enclave along the northern verge of Long Island Sound, just a few minutes east of New Haven. It is a community of professionals and pedigrees, the sort of place magazines once described as "tony" and envied, as such places often are, for the excellence of its schools. Education in the shadow of Yale is a serious matter.
Guilford's public school system has attracted considerable attention of late from the state's public agencies: in 1995 alone, one of the teachers at the city's E. C. Adams Middle School received the official citation of the Connecticut General Assembly for promoting integration of the arts in the classroom and for fostering "multicultural awareness"; one Adams teacher won the state's Celebration of Excellence, awarded yearly to teachers who devise innovative curricular projects; one Adams teacher received the prestigious Katherine Dunham Award from the Connecticut Education Association's Human and Civil Rights Commission for her work in the arts and cultural diversity; and an Adams teacher was one of only four national recipients of the Hilda Maehling Grant from the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education.
All of this recognition went by no coincidence to Adams Middle School in Guilford, and all of the recipients by no coincidence were named Amanda Ober Wallner.
"I think the irony there is that I went to a school that was known for preparing teachers, but I had no intention of ever teaching," reflects Wallner, a 1964 School of Music graduate. "But I did what I set out to do -- I performed music -- and now I'm teaching." A mezzo-soprano who vied in a regional Metropolitan Opera competition and studied voice in Germany, she currently keeps a full complement of middle school choristers very busy: about 150 in her seventh-grade chorus, more than that in her eighth-grade chorus; about 50 each in girls' and boys' ensembles, another 30 in her "select" ensemble -- not to mention a barbershop quartet. Left to her own devices, she will doubtless make them all famous.
Ever since Amanda Ober married William Wallner over 30 years ago and had children of her own, she has been working hard at improving the odds for childhood development. When William, with his new Cornell doctorate in entomology, took his first faculty appointment at Michigan State University, Amanda Wallner quickly found herself in contention with the East Lansing television station, which had proven "not very receptive" to viewer suggestions about its after-school programming and indifferent to the effects it was having on children. Her response was to found the Lansing Committee for Children's Television, a grassroots group that, with other such local committees, gained national attention in the 1970s and earned her a civic award and a tribute from the Michigan legislature. (Her husband's fellow patrons at the local barbershop paid her another kind of tribute when she took the station's programming policies to task in the editorial slot on their local news: ignorant of her connection with the man getting a haircut, they castigated her roundly.)
When the family moved to Guilford in 1976, Wallner simply continued doing what she had been doing in Michigan, performing in recitals, concerts, and musicals. A fellow aficionado turned out to be the principal of Guilford's elementary school, and he persuaded her to become a music teacher. "Once I started teaching, I didn't sing any more," she recalls. "I had nine classes a day -- I could barely talk."
In a short time she had settled into E. C. Adams Middle School, introduced her charges to a standard repertoire, and enjoyed her unexpected career as a teacher. Then she decided it was time to stretch a little and included in the curriculum one of her own long-standing musical interests -- gospel music. "When I played Mahalia Jackson for them the first time," she recounts, "they laughed. Not for long, but they laughed. It was strange to them and they were a little bit afraid of it."
West of New Haven, not too far from Guilford, lies the old industrial town of Bridgeport. Except for geographical proximity it might as well have been on the moon, until Amanda Wallner moved it a little closer. It is home to the Bridgeport Mass Choir, a black gospel group nationally known for an annual performance of Langston Hughes's "Black Nativity." Wallner persuaded the choir's musical directors, Haywood Anderson and John Hill, to come to Guilford and meet her young singers. "I knew I couldn't teach them gospel myself," Wallner admits.
Intending that they be taught properly, she had them first read a biography of Mahalia Jackson; by the time the gospel choir directors arrived on the scene they were reading Langston Hughes, courtesy of a cooperative colleague in this prototypical multidisciplinary program. Still, they were hardly prepared for the experience of Anderson and Hill and the singers who accompanied them to Adams Middle School that first day to rehearse. No one laughed then at this mastery of voice and harmony, these musical intricacies that dazzled. They were hooked.
Their immediate enthusiasm persuaded Wallner that she could play a little harder at integrating the arts while broadening their cultural perspective. She invited the African American actor Moses Gunn to read some Hughes poems to the entire student body. "When he recited that poetry," she recalls, "it was like heaven. His voice was so rich, so educated." In the meantime, her seventh- and eighth-grade choirs had improved sufficiently under the rigors of gospel training to attract the attention of network television. They were invited to perform a gospel version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" on -- what else? -- CBS This Morning.
Then, two summers ago, Wallner accompanied her husband to Washington, D.C. While he spent his days at an entomological conference, she hopped the metro over to the Phillips Collection for an exhibit of Jacob Lawrence's The Great Migration -- 60 panels depicting the depression-era migration of America's blacks from the South into the North by train. The experience of this monumental and moving series of paintings still causes her to speak in a breathless rush.
Wallner could envision the possibility of every subject area's "using this as a ribbon running throughout and keeping them all connected." ("I like to do collaborative work when I can," she explains. "It's learning through discovery when it's reinforced in all the classes.") She promptly solicited all the information she could get at the museum -- the itinerary, the teacher's packet -- and discovered that the exhibit was casting up the following season at the Museum of Modern Art, just across Long Island Sound and close enough by train to wrangle 300-plus middle schoolers into New York for a deeper draft of multiculturalism. "It all seemed to fit together so nicely," Wallner says. "Lawrence's migration series was about the train; we were traveling to New York by train, from the Northeast this time, but still . . ."
In preparation for their museum junket, Wallner invited Russell Goings, Wall Street financier, founder of Essence magazine, and foremost collector of African American art, along with Mary Kordak, the educational director of the Yale University art gallery, to address her students on the significance of Lawrence's work. When the day finally arrived, 300 middle schoolers filed onto the New York-bound train. "Everyone was so afraid of this trip," Wallner concedes. "We had to make sure it ran perfectly. The other teachers would ask me, 'You mean I have to take 60 kids with me?' and I'd tell them, 'No, you're only taking 6 kids -- I'm taking 60 with me.' I just think that when you're not introduced to something -- whether it's riding by train, Langston Hughes, gospel music, Jacob Lawrence, opera -- you're always afraid of it."
The Jacob Lawrence project, as she calls it, generated a great deal of pedagogical mileage for the entire student body. It pervaded the curriculum, so much so that the litany of classroom projects it spawned goes on encyclopedically: "In art class they built a steam engine; in math class they did formulas measuring the engine, measuring the dimensions of the cars; science kids did an exhibit on steam; in health they studied stress and the emotions this watershed experience evoked in the migrants, and they sewed a migration quilt depicting some of Lawrence's scenes in fabric panels; in physical education class they hosted a visiting jazz dance instructor; in math class they also calculated numerical proportions for blues harmonies. It did make a lot of work for the teachers," she adds.
And in a fascinating collaboration of art, computers, and English teachers, the students produced computer animations of some of Lawrence's panels, complete with soundtrack; isolated digitized figures and "lifted" them from the digital computer matrix to animate them further; and then gave them independent existence of a sort by composing poems speculating about their lives. The English students also conducted "grandparent interviews," documenting on audio tape the reminiscences of their own grandparents on the depression years and creating an archive of oral histories.
While all this was transpiring, others were busy shooting video segments of each classroom project as it unfolded. This flurry of learning was finally capped by "Jacob Lawrence Celebration Day": the students virtually crammed the school gymnasium with exhibits of their projects, then returned that evening to present performances in music, dance, and poetry.
The Lawrence project brought Wallner several awards and attention from such media as the New York Times. Yet official recognition, welcome as it is as an affirmation of what she is doing, pales against moments of daily reality: When her young choristers, the ones who had laughed at Mahalia Jackson's style of singing, were rehearsing for their morning television spot, one young man ran up to her wide-eyed. "Mrs. Wallner!" he exulted, pointing to the gospel director. "I shook his hand!"
She smiles. "These were kids who had made fun of it all [because] they were afraid."
Wallner regards education as a campaign against fear, and she is an unrelenting campaigner. This winter her choruses joined members of the Bridgeport Mass Choir for a gospel concert in observance of Black History Month -- never heretofore a major date on Guilford's cultural calendar. This alone should be an argument, in case one is necessary, for increased support of public education. Wallner, of course, has other arguments up her sleeve. For example, she received grants a couple of years back from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer Inc., and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts ("all these programs Congress wants to cut," she laments) to commission a piece of music by Thomas C. Duffy, Yale University music professor and director of Yale bands. Her students provided the lyrics by simply recording sayings typical of their own parents -- not proverbs, exactly, but things like "When I was your age" or "Clean your room" or "Just wait 'til you have kids." Duffy wrote "Parent Machine," a pastiche of syncopated rhythms, polyphonic fugues, and four-part harmonies that turned out to be "a blast."
Wallner's students appeared on New Haven television's evening news and on public radio, and the "Parent Machine" chorus toured the state. When the chorus performed the piece at a regional music festival, the judges rated them superior to "even the best high school choirs."
Wallner's next project, for which she is seeking seed money in grants, is a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of women's suffrage. It will be, she says, "a celebration like we did for Lawrence, but on a smaller scale," and, of course, a multidisciplinary experience: art students will do portraits of women; English students will compose poetry about women; student choruses will be "doing music by women that I would probably never have done otherwise."
It is a celebration, but it is also part of her campaign against fear. "Studies by the American Association of University Women show that when they reach middle school age, girls suddenly begin to do poorly in school. They're insecure; there aren't many role models for them," she speculates.
But at least one role model comes immediately to mind. In Oliver Stone's recent film biography Nixon the Henry Kissinger character looks away from a television set on which Richard Nixon is resigning the presidency, peers owlishly into Stone's camera, and asks rhetorically, "What might this man have been had he been loved?"
Or, one might wonder, if he'd had a teacher like this.