Eugene Williams Sr., gray-haired and wide-eyed, scooted to the edge of his chair, leaning forward with childlike enthusiasm.
"I am really, really excited about this man," he was saying of President-elect Barack Obama. "I am motivated by this man."
Williams, an educator for 40 years, is so motivated by Obama that he has self-published a book that is, in a sense, about the new president. It's certainly inspired by him. It is a word-search guide that uses descriptions of the Obama family to help boost students' vocabulary and reading skills.
Williams was waxing on about Obama at the Beltsville office of International Graphics, a printing company, when his editor, Fahim Munshi, interrupted the riff to ask about the book, a 156-page paperback, Words, Cross & Across.
"How did it all start?" asked Munshi. "I was very curious all along: How did you get to this idea?"
It all started, Williams said, back in February during Black History Month. He was teaching English at Annapolis Road Academy, an alternative high school in Bladensburg that's part of the Prince George's County public system.
Williams had drawn up a lesson plan around Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and a chapter from Obama's autobiography, Audacity of Hope. His idea was to teach them side by side. It didn't go well, starting with the King speech.
"I was just astonished at the fact that so many of my students - 10th 11th- and 12th-grade students - couldn't pronounce the words," he told Munshi. "They didn't know the definition of the words, yet they had all recited it as kids. And that disturbed me."
"Students," Williams remembers telling the class, "we have a problem."
Heads nodded on that February day. One boy in the back agreed with his classmates and asked Williams if he had ever considered teaching them with word searches - grids of letters in which words are embedded vertically, horizontally and diagonally.
Word searches? Williams crinkled his nose at the memory. He told Munshi that he is a rather recent convert to these puzzles, which in truth rely on little more than patient scanning until a word emerges.
But anxious to engage his class, Williams offered a compromise. He would teach word searches, but only paired with charts that defined the words and used them in sentences.
"Once I got them to agree to that," he told Munshi, "we just had fun."
