Education: Teacher on TV

There was nothing odd about the brown-eyed lady walking down the street of Evanston, Ill. one day last week—except that two little boys kept shrieking: “There she is! .There she is!” Adult passers-by could not help but stop and look. To most of them, Dr. Frances Horwich of Roosevelt College was probably unknown. But to the small fry of Chicago and its suburbs, Miss Frances is a celebrity.

Frances Horwich achieved celebrity only this month, when she took a leave of absence as chairman of Roosevelt’s education department to become founder, principal and only teacher of something called the Ding Dong School. Today, Ding Dong has hundreds of pre-kindergarten pupils, all of whom attend television classes five mornings a week. By last week, Ding Dong was getting so much fan mail (more than 100 letters a day) that station WNBQ decided to keep its experimental school open.

To 44-year-old Miss Frances, Ding Dong answers an age-old problem: what to do with the moppets whose older brothers & sisters have just trudged off to school. Most mothers, Miss Frances thinks, are far too busy with housework to pay much attention to the children left at home. The result: the children either feel left out, or start getting in mother’s way.

Each morning at 9:30, Miss Frances opens her school with a song (“I’m your school bell! Sing dong ding . . .”), and then class begins. Sometimes it is about modeling clay, sometimes talking about buses or fruits. Miss Frances goes in heavily for demonstration: “Little children love to touch things. But no one takes the trouble to teach them language for what they discover. We try to give them some feeling for shapes. They like to be able to say something is rough or smooth, oblong or narrow.”

Though her pupils do not realize it, Miss Frances is forever lecturing them. She may teach them to count by showing them a movie of a mother duck (“Now how many babies does the mother have? One . . . two . . . three . . .”), or she may lecture them about putting away their toys. She also slips in tips on good manners, e.g., the telephone: “When the person at the other end wants to talk to someone, we call them, don’t we? And we tell mother when we’re going to make a call. Yes, we do.”

At the end of each class, Miss Frances asks her pupils to get their mothers, then explains what will be needed next day (some clay, an empty milk bottle, or a paper bag with which to make a Halloween mask). After that, she signs off, while hundreds of tiny hands wave a frantic farewell at hundreds of TV screens. “My,” exclaimed one little girl at the end of school last week, “I think Miss Frances just loves us children to pieces!”