Classroom

ENTER A FIRST-GRADE classroom and all the lofty talk about how children learn to read dissolves into a blur of youthful energy. A master teacher will quickly steer her children's attention toward the tasks at hand. For novice teachers, that challenge will be far more difficult, especially in schools where children bring to class the distractions common to neighborhoods plagued by poverty and crime.As reporters Debbie M. Price and Stephen Henderson continue their examination of two city elementary schools during this school year, the nature of the challenge facing many teachers will become evident.

For today's students, computer literacy is as fundamental as reading, writing and arithmetic. From elementary school through college and beyond, computers and the ocean of online information they make available are as essential to the learning process as pens, pencils and paper once were. So students in Baltimore County will have a big leg up when classes start in August with wireless high-speed Internet access installed in every one of its 171 public schools. It will be the region's only system with wireless connections in every classroom that let students download instructional materials from the Web with the click of a mouse.

THE LESSON of the failures of the open-classroom concept in Howard County, and elsewhere, should be taken to heart by educational innovators who feel that just because an idea sounds good on paper, they must proceed full steam ahead. Howard is now spending millions of dollars to retrofit or replace older schools that were built en masse during the Age of Aquarius schools-without-walls era.Alas, if you think "open schools" represent the last tinkering with something that didn't need fixing, you're probably wrong.

From the rain forest of Nigeria, children's book author Isaac Olaleye has brought award-winning stories to America that have also won the hearts of some Maryland schoolchildren and their teachers.Olaleye (pronounced Oh-la-lay-eye) was among the authors from around the globe who shared stories about themselves, their cultures and their work with some of those teachers last week at the annual conference of the State of Maryland International Reading Association Council in Towson."A children's book is a lifetime celebration of youth," Olaleye said.

The Baltimore County Sailing Center at Rocky Point can continue with fall programs, but prospects for next summer and beyond are less certain, county officials told volunteers yesterday.In a sometimes-contentious meeting, county recreation and parks director John F. Weber III tried to allay the volunteers' fear that the center, which teaches hundreds of children and adults how to sail each year, would have to relocate.Despite his friendly words, leaders of the nonprofit center said the county was dragging them through endless red tape and pricking them to death with details.

In her years as a fourth-grade teacher, Jeanne Mueller has created a classroom where students make pumpkin pies, watch sheep shearers at work, write about the merits of pigs as pets and get homework on popcorn.To the children, it's fun. To Mueller, it's agriculture.Yesterday, Mueller shared her tips for infusing agriculture into every subject -- from math to English -- with 54 Maryland teachers enrolled in the ninth annual Ag in the Classroom Summer Workshop. The instructors, 11 of whom came from Baltimore and Baltimore County, paid $100 to attend the five-day conference in Edgewood.

It is the third day of school, and the morning routine in Kerry Markert's fifth-grade class at Charles Carroll Elementary School is set.Today's schedule, which includes physical education and health, isprinted neatly on a chalkboard in the front of the classroom. Like on other days, a warm-up writing exercise and two sentences, grammatically incorrect and without punctuation, also have been written on theboard.But before Markert, one of more than 100 new teachers in the Carroll school system, begins class discussion about the exercises, she introduces Nick Mitchell, a boy who just moved here from Baltimore.

For years, the Baltimore schools' bloated North Avenue headquarters staff was the whipping boy for every major challenge the system faced. Whatever the problem, the proposed solution always seemed to involve reassigning headquarters staff to classroom duty. And for whatever reason, school officials always insisted it couldn't be done. Now Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso has accomplished the impossible. As a result of the budget reorganization he initiated last year, more than 140 headquarters staffers will be headed back to the schools this year, and the system will have a teacher surplus for the first time in decades.

Valerie Belton's fourth-grade class has been through many ups and downs this year. On the first day of school, the teacher treated her pupils to a surprise: She had decorated her drab portable classroom at Gardenville Elementary School with new furniture and colorful rugs donated by IKEA. But last month, vandals broke into three classrooms at the Northeast Baltimore school and undid all of Belton's work. They tore down posters and children's work from the walls, sprayed books and furniture with a fire extinguisher, threw items out of a window, and stole a computer and board games.

If you want to learn about nature's wonders from Bob Chance, bring your hiking boots.Chance is likely to take you on a hike down a muddy trail or give you a ride in a canoe rather than have you show up for class in a school room."