Ms. Bastian

Ms. Bastian is a recently retired Arizona certified teacher. For many years she has stood in public and charter districts’ classrooms and learned what a child can do in fifty minutes if the work is the right size and the room is not a circus.

The tools she already knows are the ones West Valley schools already use: Beyond Textbooks, McGraw Hill, I Ready and Singapore mathematics. She does not ask a second-grader to become a new kind of student for her sake. She asks him to finish the thing he almost knows.

Retirement did not mean she was finished with children. It meant she could keep the two days that still have quiet in them — Tuesday and Thursday — and open her house in Sun City to a few families from Glendale, Peoria, and Surprise. Grades one through four only. Math, reading, and writing. Some materials provided. The rest can come from the child’s own backpack.

She is a grandmother’s age on purpose. The early grades do not need a trend. They need a grown woman who has seen the same hole a hundred times and is not alarmed by it.