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Jean Marbella
July 24, 2007
Harry who?
SPOILER ALERT!!! This column has nothing about He Who Must Be Hyped.
No tally of how many millions of copies of Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows have sold in the time it took to read this sentence.
And nothing about unbearably cute children who haven't slept since
Friday, when they got in line at the Barnes and Borders a Million to
get their copy and have been reading nonstop ever since -- pausing
only to e-whine about the newspaper meanies who spoiled EVERYTHING
by printing early reviews of the book.
If you're still with me, you'll be glad to know that some kids
instead have been consumed by the tale of 10-year-old Kenny and his
family, the Weird Watsons, who set off from their Michigan home on a
hilarious road trip that turns deadly serious when they reach their
destination -- it's Birmingham, Ala., and it's 1963. Then there's
Peppe, an Italian boy in New York's Little Italy, who is ashamed of
his job lighting street lamps until one night when he illuminates
the whereabouts of his lost sister.
The Watsons Go to
Birmingham -- 1963 and Peppe the Lamplighter might not be getting
the breathless attention of Harry's final adventures, but as part of
the reading list of a unique summer learning program, they may be
casting the same magic on children: the love of reading.
"I just want to be smarter and smarter," says La'Monta Harris, 10, a
student at William Paca Elementary School in East Baltimore. "I
think I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I go to the
library, and I like to read about science. And I've read about
sports and adventurers and heroes, like firefighters and stuff."
Paca is one of 12 low-performing schools in the city that are host
to an intensive six-week program designed to boost reading, writing
and math skills over the summer, a time when kids in disadvantaged
neighborhoods tend to lose ground, setting them up to lag farther
and farther behind more affluent students as time goes on.
This summer, the Baltimore public schools contracted with a
well-regarded nonprofit called BELL, Building Educated Leaders for
Life, to offer a full-day, five-days-a-week program to prevent the
summer backslide. As part of the program, kids are encouraged to
read -- especially BELL's recommended books, which feature diverse
characters and authors -- for a half-hour or full hour every
evening.
The first thing you notice in the BELL classrooms at Paca is that
this is no ordinary summer school, the kind attended by sullen
students under threat of not advancing to the next grade with the
rest of their class in the fall.
All the BELL kids -- about 2,000 at the 12 schools -- are there
voluntarily. They take reading, writing and math classes in the
morning, then participate in "enrichment activities" in the
afternoon, which seem like a lot of fun but are also reinforcing
what they learned in the morning.
"It breaks the misconception that school has to be boring," said
Sharayna A. Christmas, manager of the BELL program at Paca.
In Adelia Carter's room -- and in the hallway as well -- first- and
second-graders were learning about physics. Yes, first- and
second-graders, not high school students. Actually, they think
they're building roller coasters and racing toy cars around a
circuitous track, but if they were to read the board, they would
realize they're engaged in "the study of force, motion, matter and
energy." In other words, physics.
"Miss Carter! Miss Carter! Look!" Jasmine Gamble shrieked, pulling
her teacher into the hallway. There, the 7-year-old and a classmate
had finally gotten a marble to loop-the-loop a makeshift "roller
coaster." (The trick: a bigger push at the start, and a smaller
loop.) They still hadn't gotten the marble to roll through the rest
of the course, but there's still almost two weeks left to the
program. (Hint: Don't use such tall chairs for the final hump.)
"It's a real hands-on approach," said Carter, who, like some of the
other instructors at the program, teaches in the district during the
academic year.
The students are called "scholars" in the BELL parlance. "We want
them to know we believe in them," said Carole Y. Prest, BELL's
executive director for the Mid-Atlantic region.
And they're expected to live up to the title -- there's no dumbing
down here, even among the youngest kids who will enter kindergarten
this fall. Forget "A" is for apple and "C" is for cat; in the BELL
classroom, the kids were learning that "D" is for dentist and "P" is
for pediatrician.
For Emma Snyder, a former teacher now working on a graduate degree
in creative writing, the summer program was a way of getting back to
the classroom, which she had missed, but one that offered more
flexibility and improvisation.
She teaches the "Kids' Economics" enrichment class, where rising
fourth-grade students are starting a classroom bank. The project
stemmed from a previous exercise in which they went shopping in a
classroom store and discovered that they were more likely to buy
something on impulse if they carried money in their pocket than if
they had to make a separate trip to get the cash first.
"Suddenly, it was like, 'Hmmm ... maybe I don't need a Jolly Rancher
candy,'" Snyder said. "They became really interested in banking and
how the bank gives interest and how it makes loans."
After econ, the students went to Mike Muempfer's class for chess,
where they've been working toward a tournament.
Davonte Pollard, 9, studied his opponent's move, one eyebrow rising
slowly as he figured out the strategy being waged against him.
"You're trying to take my bishop," he said, blocking the move.
"It's a lot about thinking," he says, tapping a piece against his
head. "It's a quiet game."
BELL -- yet another of those education initiatives started by
idealistic Ivy Leaguers (Yale and Harvard Law, in the case of BELL
co-founder Earl Martin Phalen) -- found significant gains in its
students' reading and math skills at its summer program at Dickey
Hill Elementary/Middle School last year. This year, the program was
expanded to 12 other schools at a costs of about $2 million, Prest
said, with $1.5 million coming from the school district's budget and
the rest from charitable donations.
While this year's BELL scholars are being tested before and after
the program, they're also learning another lesson: that much of life
is just showing up. Those with good attendance will get to go, with
their parents, to an Orioles game next weekend.
jean.marbella@baltsun.com |
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