Lessons

Annapolis is like urban centers all over the country. Middle-class families who love the amenities of the city live cheek by jowl with families too poor to escape the mean parts of city life.At our neighborhood school, children whose parents are both doctors or lawyers learn beside children whose dads are gone. Kids who take sailing lessons play with kids who don't have a family car.My children go to that school instead of the many private schools that seem to spring up around upper-income city dwellers.

Charleston, S.C.--The Andrew school of hurricane instruction is a hard school. It teaches hard lessons. If our leaders do not learn their lessons from this disaster, one day they will have to repeat them.In this regard, the city of Charleston could function as a kind of professor emeritus. Three years ago, Charleston learned its lessons the hard way. Hurricane Hugo struck the city with devastating force. Now Florida and Louisiana are digging out from the calamity of Hurricane Andrew, and the devastation is worse.

Sometimes the most important lessons learned in school are not found in a book, but garnered from school experience.The 75 hours of student service credit required for graduation from Carroll County schools often provides students with opportunities for personal growth and learning.Students at Sykesville Middle School recently participated in a school-wide student service project and learned what it means to help others.When physical education teacher JoAnn Stull was searching for a new fund-raising project to spark students' interest, she found an advertisement for "Human-i-tees" -- a company that produces T-shirts with environmental and animal themes.

All around the county, teachers are lobbying for more computers, yet at George Fox Middle School, there's a full-scale lab some still hesitate to use.For eight teachers yesterday, that hesitation turned to enthusiasm as eighth-graders taught them how to navigate the world of cyberspace."

When it came to the St. Mary's Cemetery controversy, the residents of Turf Valley Overlook never let the matter rest in peace.Instead, with persistent badgering and a willingness to publicly embarrass all parties involved, the residents were able to save St. Mary's from the developer's bulldozer. This week, the Howard County Council signed off on an agreement involving a three-way land swap that leaves the cemetery intact.Despite our earlier advice that the Overlook residents ease off, we cannot help but admire the dogged determination they exhibited.

Carol Jorgensen of Two Left Feet Dance will teach Latin and ballroom dances that can be done solo in a six-session program at the Bain Center, 5470 Ruth Keeton Way. Classes will be held at 12:30 p.m. Wednesdays, starting Sept. 13. Participants should wear leather or smooth-soled shoes; sneakers are not allowed. Registration is due by Sept. 8. Information or to register: 410-313-7213.

SINCE THE revelations of a little more than a week ago, St. Paul's School for Boys has been trapped in a storm that many must feel will never move offshore. That storm rages, too, in the hearts and minds of troubled parents and coaches, who wonder what it is they can say to their teen-agers, to their athletes, that will inoculate them against the kind of soulless pranks that have wreaked such havoc here. Parents and coaches know by frustrating experience that they have the attention of teens for only seconds at a time, and they know instinctively that they cannot compile a list of forbidden acts because the kids are very likely to do something not on that list and say when they are caught, "But you never said we couldn't ... " After all, teen-agers have an abundance of time and energy to think up new ways to flabbergast us. So what is it that we say to our kids that will prevent them from, say, videotaping sex with a 15-year-old girl and showing it to friends?

AMID the debate over society's response to the problem of homelessness, something has been lost. While we as individuals have been wrestling with the moral and practical dilemma of what to do when we come face to face with a homeless person, a.k.a. panhandler, a.k.a. beggar, something has been forgotten: human dignity. When a person is reduced to a state of such abject poverty that he or she must sleep in public or beg on the street, how can dignity be an issue? But a recent experience that I shared with my 12-year-old son brought the reality home to us very poignantly.

You know it isn't an ordinary high school classroom when the sign on the front door welcomes: "Mr. Turner. Journalism Rm 329. Safe Streets. Stop the shooting." Philip Turner, a native of Wisconsin, fresh from grad school at Northwestern, is teaching a lesson on crime reporting to high school seniors at Baltimore's Walbrook Homeland Security Academy. Crime here is neither a concept nor a statistic. It's real. These kids are victims and suspects, relatives and friends of addicts and dealers.

WASHINGTON -- For someone who has watched the career of Lebanese publisher-politician Gebran Tueni, the real shock of his death in a car bombing yesterday at age 48 was that he had survived for so long. In the spring of 2000, when few Lebanese dared criticize Syria's virtual control of their country and even fewer openly campaigned against it, Mr. Tueni published a front-page editorial in his family-owned newspaper, An-Nahar, calling for Syria to end its 10-year domination of its neighbor and begin withdrawing its troops.