Isle school teacher still a student himself

Ryan Towata teaches fourth-graders at Liholiho Elementary School in Kaimuki

Ryan Towata loves going to school, both as a student and a teacher. As a teacher, Towata is in charge of a class of fourth-graders at Liholiho Elementary School in Kaimuki, where he has worked for the past four years. He also teaches at University Lab School during the summer, and before joining Liholiho, he taught English in Japan for three years.

Ryan Towata Title: Teacher Job: Teaches fourth-graders at Liholiho Elementary School

As a student, Towata graduated from Punahou School, then earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. He earned a Master of Education in Teaching degree from the University of Hawaii.

While in Japan, he burnished his Japanese-language skills, which he started learning in high school.

During the summers, when he's not teaching, Towata takes professional-development classes. He also keeps up on his extracurricular reading; currently he's reading "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong," by James Loewen.

Teaching runs in the family for Towata: Both his mother, Carolyn, and sister, Lori, also are teachers. His father, Wallace, is a retired planner-estimator from Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, and his brother, Troy, is a police officer.

Towata is enthusiastic about working at Liholiho, a school of about 340 students and about 20 teachers, which won a National Blue Ribbon in 2003 from the U.S. Department of Education, and whose principal, Christina Small, placed second for the Tokioka Excellence in School Leadership Award in 2005, awarded by Island Insurance Foundation.

In fact, Towata often works outside of his capacity as a teacher to help improve the school. He volunteers as a JPO (Junior Police Officer) leader, helping direct traffic outside the school in the mornings and afternoons, and is part of a group that is working to create an endowment for the school that would help supplement its funding needs.

Towata, 32, is single and lives in Makiki.

Mark Coleman: What grade do you teach and how many students are in your class?

Ryan Towata: I teach fourth grade, and I have 25 students in my class.

Q: Sounds intimidating. They must push you around a lot.

A: Uh, no. I actually like the upper grades. I've taught anywhere from third to sixth grade.

Q: How do you manage to keep control of such a bunch?

A: I give them a lot of responsibilities and freedoms. I just give them a lot of the classroom duties that many teachers take upon themselves, so it frees up a lot of my mornings.

Q: What are the various subjects that you teach?

A: I teach everything: math, science, social studies ... And fourth grade is Hawaiian studies. And then language arts, such as reading and writing, physical education, health ... I actually teach my students ukulele as well.

Q: Do you conduct the PE classes outside?

A: Yes.

Q: What kind of activities?

A: We do anything from team sports like basketball, flag football, a little bit of soccer ...

Q: What are your hours each day and what would be a typical day at the office for you, so to speak?

A: A typical day would probably be ... I get here about 7 o'clock, and I leave anywhere from 3:30 to 5 o'clock.

Q: Do you ever have to take work home with you, like to read and grade student papers or whatever?

A: Yeah, pretty much always. We always take stuff home. And I pretty much choose to do my grading at home, and all the correcting, because it's more relaxing. It's easier for me to just do it on my own.

Q: Which courses in the classroom do the kids seem to like the most?

A: Math and the sciences. They like it because that's what I enjoy teaching. My background is in biology, so they tend to love the sciences. You don't hear too much about science in school because it's not one of the tested areas, so I just try to give them more career options for later in life, especially in the sciences and technology.

Q: Are your kids in your class all day?

A: Yes, except for math. We decided to go with ability-level groups, so it's easier for us to teach math.

Q: They go to separate classrooms?

A: Well, we have three sets of teachers teaching the math, and it's smaller sizes so we can better fit the needs of the children.

Q: Are you all in the same classroom?

A: No, they go to three different classrooms.

Q: What time does this happen?

A: Math is in the morning, from 8:05 to 9:30.

Q: Is there a reason it's that early?

A: We had a discussion with the other teachers, and we felt the students are more awake in the morning, and it's easier for us to teach math in the morning.

Q: How do you deal with kids who are lagging behind in other subjects?

A: I try to give them one-on-one time as much as possible. Even during class, I can still assign a topic or a certain assignment and yet pull students who need the extra help to my desk for added instruction.

Because of the responsibility that I've given them early in the year, we've established the ability to do things independently. I have that freedom to work with the students that need extra help. The hard part is to create the self-directed learners and give them the opportunity to work independently, so if you can do that at the beginning of the year, I can work independently with the students that need the extra help and not worry about behavior issues.

Q: Do you have a particular style or philosophy of teaching?

A: My philosophy is pretty much hands-on learning. A lot of it is I want the kids to interact and learn by doing. Like just recently we took my math group to the Kapahulu Safeway, on a shopping trip, and they were given a budget, and they had to create a menu, purchase their food, incorporate tax, and then come back and cook. We cooked breakfast.

Q: You guys have a kitchen in the classroom?

A: No, I had burners and hot plates. So they had to learn all the math skills that come into play when you go shopping and you cook.

Q: Math skills in cooking?

A: Math skills in cooking is all measurements.

Q: Is it hard to avoid playing favorites with the students?

A: It's a little hard, but I try to treat everybody fair. Every teacher does have their favorites, but I give everybody the same consequences for mistakes, and I'm fair with homework.

Q: How long have you been teaching at Liholiho?

A: I've been here four years.

Q: What were you doing before you joined the staff at this school?

A: I was finishing up my master's, and then I taught English in Japan, for three years.

Q: How did that come about and who did you work for?

A: I worked, through the United States government, for the Japan Exchange Teaching Program, or JET for short.

Q: Where were you located?

A: I was Tenryu City in Shizuoka prefecture, close to Nagoya.

Q: Did you learn Japanese while you were there?

A: Yeah, I did. I studied Japanese in high school, but I learned how to speak it when I was in Japan.

Q: Why did you decide you wanted to be a teacher?

A: I love working with children. And my mom's a teacher, so teaching is kind of in my blood. My mom and my sister are teachers.

Q: What are their names?

A: My mom, Carolyn, teaches at the University Lab School, and Lori (Towata) is teaching at Lunalilo (in Makiki), where we all went to elementary school.

Q: Did you always want to be a teacher at the elementary level?

A: Yes.

Q: Why's that?

A: Because the biggest influences in my life came from my elementary school teachers. I can credit where I am today because of my elementary school teachers.

Q: What was the lesson you got out of it?

A: I could do whatever I wanted to do. They gave me every opportunity to succeed.

Q: Is there any sort of continuing education that you have to take to stay up with prevailing teaching methods?

A: We do take a lot of professional development within our school, and then I try to take classes in the summer, if I'm not teaching.

Q: Do you teach during the summer?

A: I work at the summer science program at the University Lab School.

Q: So do you ever feel like you've never gotten out of school?

A: Oh, I'm always learning, and that's what I try to teach the kids, too.

Q: What's the demographic of your students, would you say?

A: We have students from everywhere in Kaimuki, and also from Palolo Valley, as well as all the way from Wahiawa, that just want to come to this school, because they've heard great things about this school.

Q: Their parents probably.

A: Yeah, some of their parents were alumnus and they moved away and they still wanted their kids to come to this school.

Q: Do you ever have to do maintenance in the classroom?

A: We have a wonderful custodial staff, and they take care of our rooms and our grounds, and that's why our school is so beautiful, But I did bring back part of Japan with me, so I make the kids take care of the classroom as much as possible, because in Japan the students clean the school. So in my classroom, they have their jobs, and nobody leaves until our floor is spotless, to help our custodians out.

Q: What's the best part of your workday?

A: The best part of my workday? I think it's in the morning, because I do JPO in the morning, and just welcoming all the kids in the morning is the best part of my day. Just to make sure they're all smiling, so they'll have a great day at school.