Even after all these years, Ruth Leiderman still gets nervous and can’t sleep the night before the first day of school in September. It’s the joy of being around children that keeps her going, the very thing that sparked her interest in teaching when she was a teen-age baby-sitter in Pasadena.

“I wrote my vocational notebook in seventh grade on being a teacher,” she says.

But much has changed since 1973 when Leiderman, fresh out of San Diego State, began teaching.

The war in Vietnam was nearing an end, Richard Nixon was still president and gas prices had climbed to about 40 cents a gallon. Americans had no cell phones, home computers or microwaves in the kitchen.

And—get this—kindergartners had nap time.

Leiderman, who just turned 60, can’t believe how the curriculum for kinders has evolved.

Now, she says, kindergarten is basically “like first grade” was in the 1970s.

“When I first started teaching, the kindergartners didn’t even hold a pencil,” says Leiderman, who teaches kindergarten at Murray Manor Elementary School. “It was basically developmental. It was naps, painting, all the developmental types of things. Lots of artwork, lots of cutting and pasting.”

Now, the 4-, 5- and 6-year-olds who begin school are asked to do much more. They learn to read and write. They do math. They go a full day—no more half-day classes. And nap times are history, just like 40-cents-a-gallon gasoline.

“If you would have asked me 30 years ago if kindergartners would be capable of doing that, I would have said no,” says Leiderman. “But here I am today, teaching what I thought was a first-grade program 30 years ago.”

Leiderman appreciates some of the changes, disagrees with others but remains enthusiastic about her career, which will come to an end after next school year when she plans to retire. Thirty-eight years after her first day on the job, Leiderman now ranks as the No. 1 teacher in the La Mesa-Spring Valley School District for longevity, a fact she finds hard to believe.

Especially, she says, when she feels like “I have so much energy.”

 “The kids keep me young,” she says.

Long, Varied Career Since SDSU Graduation

Leiderman, who commutes each day from Poway where she lives with her husband, has taught kindergarten at Murray Manor in north La Mesa for 14 years.

Since joining the district out of SDSU, where she earned her degree in elementary education, she’s taught every grade through sixth, including a combined third-through-sixth class of gifted students at Northmont Elementary that she calls “the most magnificent experience” of her career. Being able to watch those students develop, over several years, was enormously satisfying, she says.

“They came to my wedding; they saw me through two births,” she says.

After taking about five years off after that experience to raise her two sons—now 22 and 24—Leiderman returned to teaching, and had a variety of assignments until landing at Murray Manor.

Principal Guido Magliato says Leiderman “has touched the lives of thousands of students and their families over the years,” and admires her commitment and skill.

“I love that she remains a strong advocate for all her students,” he says. “She believes passionately that we not only teach the academics but also develop the whole child developmentally.

“The mentality that has crept into some educational institutions has been ‘put away the clay.’  Not Mrs. Leiderman and her incredible kinder colleagues. I can walk into her classroom on any given day throughout the year and she has something amazing going on for the students. It could be a life-size igloo made of milk cartons, a Polar Express train running down the middle of her room, or all the students dressed as kings and queens.”

Those are examples of the old-school kindergarten values that Leiderman still believes in.

While teachers are now held more accountable for test scores and measured student growth, Leiderman continues to incorporate as much hands-on play as possible.

In her classroom, she still has sand tables, easels, a playhouse and uses clay and Play-Doh, whenever she can mold them into the curriculum.

As she says, “I’ve adapted.”

Yet she disagrees with some of the change.

“The standards have increased,” she says, explaining kindergarten evolution. “And I don’t mind saying, I personally don’t feel for the better. ... I’m actually sad to see the way it went. Very sad.

“I still think the kindergartners should be doing things other than reading and writing. There’s plenty for them to do that’s developmental. … I think learning through play is lost. I truly believe that children learn through play. And that’s gone. All those discoveries that they used to make on their own.”

Leiderman says she’s grateful that at Murray Manor she’s been allowed to blend the old with the new. She knows it’s not the norm at some schools.

As the day unfolds, two hours of language arts are scheduled in the morning, followed by recess, math, lunch and then social studies, science, music, art and “developmental time” when she can blend in the clay and the play.

And is the old-school approach hurting the new-age expectations?

No, says Magliato. He says Leiderman still “maintains rigorous academics” and her class is exceeding the reading-level expectations for this year.

“Married to My job”—Even on Vacation

Leiderman usually arrives each morning about 6:30 or 7 for the school day that begins at 8:30. Four days a week, class gets out at 2:50 p.m. (with a shorter day on Tuesday). Still, she often doesn’t leave school till about 5, cleaning up and doing prep work for the next day. Even when she gets home, she’ll often do lesson planning at night.

Teaching, she says, is her passion and she says feels “married to my job.” Even when she goes on vacation, she likes to pick up things “for the kids.”

While she’s taught many grades, kindergarten brings its own special rewards. For one thing, a teacher can watch the students for several years as they develop in later grades.

And kindergartners, she says, have an innocence that is endearing. The boys and girls have special nurturing needs that older students don’t. Sometimes, they’ll lose a tooth in class. And, when they fall down, they need a Band-Aid to make things better, even if there’s no cut.

Also, because they are such a blank slate, the impact of teaching is immediate.

“The growth from Day One till June, when we send them off to first grade, is incredible,” she says.

Retirement Coming in 2012

As much as she still loves teaching, Leiderman has decided to retire after next year.

It’s a decision, she says, that has her husband and others close to her worried. They wonder what she’s going to do without it.

“Everybody always said, the secretaries always said, ‘Oh, Ruth is going to be the one, 85 years old, walking up and down the hallways still teaching,” she says. “Because I really had no retirement date set.”

That, however, changed when fiscal shortfalls led to spending cuts, teacher layoffs and increased class sizes. For the past several years, legislation dictated that class sizes remain small—about a 20-to-1 ratio–in lower grades. Next year, however, district cuts will trim Murray Manor’s six kindergarten classes to four, and kindergarten class sizes will rise to 30.

This year, she has 21 students, and the only way she says she’s been able to cope has been because of the parents who volunteer to help each day in the room.

Thirty students, she says, is too much.

“Next year is my last year,” she says. “Do you want to know why? Write it carefully when you write it. I don’t like the way education is going. I’m upset that there’s 30 kids in kindergarten. I think there’s no business for 30 kids to be in kindergarten. And it’s become so academic it’s almost against my principles of teaching like this. Really. It shouldn’t be that way. That’s what made me make my decision.”

It’s a decision she can barely talk about without getting emotional. The idea of walking out for the last time next June is something she doesn’t want to contemplate. She has no plans. She just knows she needs to leave, yet it’s going to break her heart.

So she’s focusing on this year and next, on the teaching and the kids, saying, “I stay real positive.”

But there’s a song that’s popular right now, called The House That Built Me that she thinks of when she thinks about her career.

“The lyrics are about how when we grow up in a house, we get all our experiences from that house and from that neighborhood,” she says. “I can truly honestly say that there’s a song for me—that’s The District that Built Me.

“I was 21 when I started in this district and the confidence that I have developed and my whole personality have developed because of this school district, in a very positive way. I’m always smiling, I’m always happy. …

“The district has been so good to me all these years. I mean, oh my goodness. So good to me in more way than even I can explain.”