What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [95]
Portable classrooms are a fact of life in South Florida’s schools. School construction in Broward County has had great difficulty keeping up with decades of booming population growth and immigration. Portable classrooms have been the only solution to its Sisyphean battle with overcrowding. For Nancy, whose classroom is just steps from the main school building, there are benefits to being apart from the hubbub inside the building. And, after all those Chicago winters, she enjoys the advantage of keeping the door open to the Florida light and air as much as the thrill for her students of the occasional sparrow that joins the class.
Her classroom walls were covered with samples of student writing, bright paper butterflies, a chart of the constellations, night-blue illustrations of outer space (including a chart Nancy favors, showing how minuscule our solar system is within the known universe), vocabulary words in English and Spanish, a math board showing place values, a calendar, and the traditional class jobs list. Soil and materials for a Delta Science earthworm project were mounded in the center of the room. “I’m so glad we’re done with the maggots,” she said when she showed me around the classroom. She was, admittedly, more comfortable in the reading nook with its lively book-tree rug. She noted the sign with her one unbreakable rule: NO SHOES. (“This rug cost too much,” she said.)
“Mrs. G, you forgot to collect lunch money,” one of the boys called before reading began.
“Okay, if you’ve got lunch money, bring it up to me,” she said. Then, when the students were resettled, she checked to be sure they were all on the correct page before she turned on a tape recorder. A narrator began to read Chinatown, a children’s book by William Low, in which a child visits New York’s Chinatown with his grandmother. Nancy hiked herself onto a desktop at the side of the room and marked the students’ planners, as the children read along with the narration. In the story, a boy and his grandmother encounter Chinatown’s small-town life in a big city where they watch tai chi practitioners, greet a street cobbler, and visit the fish market, an herbalist, and a kung fu class. The story culminates with a parade celebrating Chinese New Year. Chinatown ends with the salutation, “Gung Hay Fat Choi!”
The students mumbled the phrase.
“Come on, say it again, like you’d say, ‘Happy New Year!’ ” Nancy said.
“Gung . . . Hay . . . Fat . . . Choi!” they yelled in unison and convulsed in laughter. Nancy laughed, too.
Next, she asked students to read aloud, individually. For someone who has not sat in a second-grade classroom in recent years, it was a reminder of how little should be taken for granted—and of how patient and questioning a teacher needs to be to be sure that young children understand what they are reading. When one of the children stumbled while reading the word “composition,” the mistake became an opportunity for Nancy to lead her students in an exploration of the ending sound and then of the word’s meaning. “We don’t use that word, ‘composition,’ much in elementary school anymore. We use the word ‘writing,’ but you need to know it,” Nancy said.
With playful, unchallenged control, she turned the students’ attention from reading to a discussion about the difference between main ideas and supporting ones in the construction of a paragraph. After schoolwide writing scores flatlined three years earlier, her principal, Bruce Voelkel, had made improving student writing a priority at Banyan. And Nancy was determined to not let him down.
“So, what do we call that sentence besides a main idea?” Nancy asked. Her students raised their hands and called out their answers. Most were pretty far off the mark. She repeated her question in a different way, and then another, and then another, until finally a look of comprehension spread across