A new teacher has "got to hit the ground and keep on running," says LouAnne Johnson, an associate professor of teacher education at Santa Fe Community College.

Johnson is a veteran educator, but she gained this wisdom during one of her first teaching gigs, at a wealthy California high school in a classroom full of poor minority students bused in from a neighborhood several miles away — students who hated school, hated teachers and mostly hated themselves, she says. Lucky for them, they were tossed to a newbie who knew too little about teaching to decide straightaway that they were too stupid or too stubborn to learn.

She had a master's degree, but she'd never taken any teacher-training classes. "Which is probably why ... I was able to teach," Johnson says. She laughs. "I didn't know what I was supposed to do."

Instead, she used her background in psychology and her military training — she had served in the Navy and the Marines — to help sort out her students' struggles. When a kid threw a book at her, she didn't get angry. She got to the root of his aggression. "I thought, 'maybe he can't read,' and that was the answer."

It turns out, she says, that she had a knack for getting kids who hate books to sit down and read. In this role, Johnson earned celebrity status — but not celebrity pay, she says — a half-dozen years later, as the Marine-turned-teacher portrayed by Michelle Pfeiffer in the 1995 film Dangerous Minds.

Johnson doesn't look much like Pfeiffer, and nobody ever called her "White Bread." She had one rule, she says — respect yourself and everybody in the room — and her students followed it. They were real kids, not the hard-luck stereotypes of blacks and Hispanics portrayed in the film. In fact, Johnson says, Dangerous Minds is only loosely based on her book about these students — originally titled My Posse Don't Do Homework — and Pfeiffer was one of the few people in Hollywood who had actually read it. Pfeiffer wanted the role, Johnson said, but "they weren't going to let her play the part because they said she's too pretty to be a teacher."

Pfeiffer's performance was one of the few aspects of the film Johnson was pleased with.

"There were a lot of things in the movie that I really objected to, particularly that they stereotyped the kids." She had little involvement in the production — "I went once, but they told me to go home because I was difficult" — and she had signed a contract with wording that ensured she wouldn't make a dime off the profits from the box-office hit.

But she's OK with it, in the end, because somewhere in the movie was a message that didn't get lost: If you teach students that they can succeed, they very likely will. She cites her "posse" as proof: They're now software developers, engineers, teachers, coaches, store managers, an MBA and even a video-game designer who makes, in his own words, "obscene amounts of money."

"My philosophy has always been, 'If people believe success is possible, they'll try,' " Johnson says. "And that's at any age."

She recalls teaching English as a Second Language to adults at a North Carolina community college. Most of her students worked long shifts in a mattress factory. "They're tired and they're hungry and they're poor and they're trying to learn English." They resisted. But she insisted, "We can't say can't." Her students learned English, and many went on to earn their GED degrees.

Johnson was drawn to teaching at age 29. She had worked as a journalist in the Navy, earned a bachelor's degree in psychology and was serving as an officer in the Marines. And then she realized that she didn't want to lead men into combat.

"I kept reading about kids who couldn't read or write," she says, "and I think that's really criminal."

So she left the Marines and earned a master's degree to teach English. She entered the classroom for the first time as an intern, teaching reading and writing to high school students who didn't know a word of English. On her first day, she threatened to jump out the window, she says — only one girl got the joke — but she and her students worked together: She taught them English, and they taught her the Spanish they had spoken in their homelands. She then taught the posse kids — she's careful not to call them "at-risk"; she calls them "disenchanted."

Johnson hit the ground, and she hasn't stopped running.

She's been teaching at high schools and colleges, mostly in New Mexico, and she's been writing books about teaching ever since. In September, Knopf published her first novel, Muchacho, about a Hispanic 16-year-old in a fictional New Mexico town. The narrator, Eddie, is not a gangster — Johnson is adamant about that — but he can't stay out of trouble.

She didn't plan to write it, she says. "I heard this voice in my head ... and I sat down at the computer. ... I just started typing: 'I seen Miss Beecher today. ... I knew it was Beecher on account of her hair is the exact same color as a car I stole once. Bronze metallic.' He just kept on talking, so I just kept on writing. ... I'm really happy with the book because I think it gives a voice to a lot of kids who don't have a voice."

Johnson believes that voice rings true for many of New Mexico's teens. She has lived in the state for 17 years, working at schools in Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences. "I love New Mexico," she says. "I like everything about it. I like the light, I like the land, the people, the food, the music. ... I like the intersection of cultures here."

In January, she moved to Santa Fe and began teaching in the community college's Teacher Academy, an alternative-licensure program for people who have degrees in other fields.

Johnson says she encourages teachers-in-training to keep their lessons short, keep things moving, have a clear and consistent plan for discipline. Don't be a pal to your kids, she says; be a role model. Don't punish a student for making mistakes.

Don't get bogged down by an overload of paperwork that comes with acronyms like "IEP," she says. She rolls her eyes. "I threw it away."

Most importantly, she says, don't let a label get in the way of learning. Johnson has countless stories about kids with labels who succeeded in her classroom.

She remembers one high school student, a girl in special ed, whose light sensitivity — a painful eye problem often misdiagnosed as dyslexia or another learning disorder — was finally detected. With new glasses, Johnson says, the teen was ready to read. A few years later, the girl returned to thank Johnson for looking past her label. She was in college, studying to be a teacher. She wanted to teach the special ed students, the kids with labels, "so people won't tell them what they can't do."

IF YOU GO

What: Telling Tales: Tips for Teaching Students from Storytelling

Who: LouAnne Johnson and Dawn Wink

When: 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Thursday

Where: Santa Fe Community College, Board Room 223



What: LouAnne Johnson reads from her novel, Muchacho, and gives update on Dangerous Minds students

When: 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. April 27

Where: SFCC, Board Room 223


ON THE WEB

• To learn more about LouAnne Johnson, visit her Web site at www.louannejohnson.com.

• To read 'The LouAnne effect: Positive labeling in the classroom,' by Matthew Wilkin, visit www.podology.org.uk/#/the-louanne-effect/4540240998