Fully Integrated

"It's taken fire all over the state," said Madelyn "Mike" Wechsler Pressman '53. The team-taught, interdisciplinary humanities program she started at Oceanside High School in Oceanside, N.Y., where she has taught English since 1968, presents history, social studies and English combined on a time line. In the last decade, Pressman says, she has given "tons of workshops" and acted as a consultant to get similar teams going at schools all across New York. "It's an idea whose time has come," she said.
The time must have come at least by 1992, when the program was a joint winner of the New York State English Council Award for Best High School Program. In 1995 Pressman received the Teacher of Excellence Award from the New York State Council of English.
An English major at Colby, Pressman raised four daughters before completing an M.A. in secondary education at Adelphi in 1970. For her humanities program, she says she refined and expanded the time-line concept she'd used when she taught art history extension courses for Brandeis University in 1966-67. She believes she covers a period of art or a piece of literature best by taking account of concurrent styles or influences in other arts, politics, economics and even morals.
Students in the team-taught course divide into groups, each with a historical researcher, an analyzer-critic and a writer-integrator who together research one artist. They study the early music of Beethoven, neoclassical art and propaganda of the time while reading A Tale of Two Cities. This year, an offshoot of the curriculum is a partnership Pressman arranged between a local museum and a Guggenheim Museum exhibit while her charges research abstract art and the creative process.
After a museum lecturer spoke to her class, Pressman reports, "One student said, `I thought it was nice of him to talk down to our level.' `No, he didn't talk down to you,' I said. `You've become so sophisticated.' It's not just a course that helps with Jeopardy!. It's lifetime learning."
Off the success of the program, Pressman received an NEH fellowship in 1990 to study Mozart in Vienna. She was researching the G Minor Symphony, she said, "and I ended up writing a poem on it, which produced this idea of a connection between the essay and the sonata, which is very similar to the essay form--introduction, development, recapitulation. I developed the essay format based on the sonata when I was in Prague." Today, she says, Oceanside sophomores rank higher than seniors in many schools--especially in essay writing.
Pressman is quick to praise her own teachers. "The best decision I ever made was to go to Colby," she said. "I loved Shakespeare, I loved the poets, I loved the history. Every teacher I had was inspiring and made me curious." She especially credits Alfred Chapman and Mark Benbow of the English Department, who, she is sure, put her into the "subconscious mode" that resulted in her award-winning humanities program.
As for retiring, she might think about it, she said--if she won the lottery--but for now, no. "I'm having too good a time. I always think of my eighty-five-year-old roofer, who said, `I can't retire. My friend retired, and he died right after.'" She laughs. "He was ninety-two."