K-12 teachers have a fundamental problem: How do they pass their knowledge and understanding to the young minds in their charge? Student motivation, an essential element of this process, can be unlocked — but how?
For Menlo-Atherton High School leadership teacher and head baseball coach Joe Fontana, good working relationships in teaching and in life are developed by being honest and loyal.
“Honesty, although sometimes brutal, is the most important ingredient in any relationship,” he says. “With complete honesty, anything is possible.”
“Loyalty comes in a close second,” he adds. “I believe that leaders of a group need to be able to disagree and iron out differences by coming to a mutual agreement. Once the agreement is made, the leaders need to be on the same page, supporting each other and the cause.”
Joe Fontana, 45, is about to leave M-A after six years. With his wife Anna and their 2-year-old son Joseph, he is heading to Colorado to work with his brother at Global Visionaries, a nonprofit they co-founded 10 years ago to develop leaders to work on issues of social and environmental justice.
The Almanac caught up with Mr. Fontana, and separately with some of his leadership students, outside his classroom in Room B21.
Grooming leaders
Getting one’s name on Mr. Fontana’s leadership class roster for a semester or two or three is not like, say, signing up for a class in history or conversational Spanish.To get in, each student must obtain the signatures of 200 M-A students on an application form plus letters of recommendation from several adults, including a teacher and someone who is not a parent or guardian.
“You have to have the courage to walk up to people and say, ‘I’m trying to be in leadership next year,'” senior Abbie Smithson says.
There’s more. Applicants not interested in student government must write three essays, while potential officers — who are asked to give a speech in class — must write 11 essays.
Taken together, a tall order. “The purpose of that is to actually see if they can get something done,” Mr. Fontana explains. The essay element also allows entree to kids who may be shy and lacking charisma but are go-getters nevertheless, he adds.
Being a go-getter — being willing to work harder than everyone else — is a common leadership trait, he says. “Every year, you’ve got to show them that, that (leaders) are willing to do the dirty work. Sometimes, you have people as leaders who talk a real good game, but when it comes to doing the work, they’re sitting.”
Good leaders are apparently also good followers. “If you don’t know how to follow, you don’t know how to lead,” Mr. Fontana says. The leader’s ultimate purpose, he says, is to empower the people in the group.
A leadership class “is great training for whatever — to run a gas station, be a CEO, start a revolution. It’s all the same thing,” he says.
Looking back on his classes, Mr. Fontana notes M-A’s rich economic and ethnic diversity and how students have responded. “It’s great to see the kids from different zip codes, not knowing each other, thinking that they have nothing in common” and finding out that they do, he says.
M-A junior Stephen Hicks says he discovered an ability to organize an event, including such steps as booking a disc jockey and establishing a timeline. The class, he says, tested his comfort zone.
Stephen’s most valuable lesson from the class? “Pick your battles,” he says. “If you talk about everything, people won’t listen to you as much.”
Junior Paolo Lopez helped organize the painting of a school mural. “Hey,” he recalls saying to himself afterwards. “If I could do that, I could get people who weren’t in leadership (class) into leadership.”
Senior Kyra Brown, completing her third semester of leadership class, says it taught her delayed gratification, how to manage her time, and an appreciation of how much work leadership requires.
A nurturing commnuity
In looking for a role model growing up in a single-parent household on the North Side of Chicago, Mr. Fontana needed to look no farther than his own home, he says.His parents divorced when he was 10, and for the next six years, his mother raised her five of her six children on her own while completing her undergraduate degree and master’s degree in child development.
The support of neighbors helped, he recalls, as did his mother’s commitment to do a better job with her kids than her parents had done with her. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but it never felt like that,” he says.
Mr. Fontana says his upbringing taught him to be independent, responsible and involved. His mother taught him to “look at the world around you, recognize the injustice, and do something about it. You’re not powerless,” he says.
With his mother’s encouragement, he walked a picket line outside a Chicago grocery store during the grape boycott of the mid-1960s.
Asked for an assessment of his leadership teacher, M-A junior Paolo Lopez offers: “You can go up to him and talk to him and it will feel like you’ve known him for a while. He’s one of those types of people.”
Junior Stephen Hicks says he initially didn’t know what to make of Mr. Fontana, noting that the teacher and coach describes himself as “really, a nice guy.”
“I kind of never really believed that,” he says. “(But) it’s definitely become apparent that that’s actually the perfect way to describe him.”
“It’s his honesty,” he adds. “The first time you come into contact with someone who’s that honest, it’s like ‘Whoa.’ That’s a good thing and a rare thing, to be different and, at the same time, likable.”
Students call him “Fontana,” a name that evolved, Mr. Fontana says. “It’s more a term of endearment, depending on their tone,” he adds with a smile.
“I would say that Joe Fontana has had a great impact on this campus during a relatively short tenure,” longtime economics teacher Jim MacKenzie says. “We also enjoy his wonderful sense of humor and optimistic approach to education. … The staff and students will greatly miss his presence.
“He has completely revamped the student government, organized scores of students into community service projects … and revitalized the student activities at the school,” Mr. MacKenzie says. “One of his greatest legacies will be the baseball program’s new home at Bettencourt Field — a project that Joe masterminded almost single-handedly.”
A game like no other
If you didn’t already know that Joe Fontana likes baseball, his cell phone’s ring tone — “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” — would remove all doubt.“Baseball is my first love,” he says. “My wife is my greatest love. My first love is baseball.”
Not too surprisingly, he’s a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan, a family tradition. He says he remembers his grandfather “just shaking his head,” as Cubs fans are wont to do, with the team’s having not been to a World Series since 1945 and not having won one since 1908. “Maybe that’s why I can teach kids to dream,” he says.
Under his coaching, the M-A Bears have played in the Central Coast Section postseason three times. “His just all-around love for the game is just hard not to take in yourself,” says varsity catcher Stephen Hicks. “He always thinks we’re going to make CCS. He always thinks there’s a chance.”
Steroid scandals have roiled Major League baseball, but that hasn’t been a problem at M-A, Mr. Fontana says. “We mostly concentrate on mental steroids,” he says, which includes keeping one’s head in the game, leaving emotions on the field when it’s over, and getting perspective from a conveniently located top-notch team at Stanford.
Asked about stand-out players during his tenure, he recalls two M-A Hall of Fame members from 2002: Eddie Browne — “one kid that probably loves the game more than I do” — and T. C. Ostrander, now a quarterback at Stanford University and a former M-A pitcher with a 90-mph fastball.
“I still think he should have chosen (Stanford) baseball,” Mr. Fontana says.
