Teaching Methods

The new Baltimore City school board and interim chief executive officer have passed their first tests with high marks. The Transition Plan for systemwide reform adopted in August reflects energy, openness and a commanding vision that places top priority on early reading and math improvement.But now comes the hard part: translating change at the top into reform in the classroom. Historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban, in their proclaimed book "Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of School Reform," concluded, "Change where it counts the most - in the daily interactions of teachers and students - is the hardest to achieve and the most important."

Tango instructor Max Gonzalez watched as Peter Russell and his boyfriend crisscrossed their feet while gliding in a circular pattern. The gentle sound of their feet scuffing the wooden dance floor offset the funky new-age tango music playing from the speaker. Two years ago, the couple didn't know how to dance the tango at all. Now, the pair is among Gonzalez's best students. Russell even assists Gonzalez's gay tango class held every Monday at the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Baltimore in Mount Vernon.

LEARNING TO read is one of life's defining experiences. For many children, the skill comes as naturally as learning to ride a bicycle. For others, the process is fraught with frustration and failure. No responsible adult can turn a deaf ear to con- cerns about how reading is taught, especiallyconcerns that some teaching methods increase the chances that children will fail to become competent readers in the early elementary years.But the proper place for these discussions is at meetings of boards of education, in school administrative offices, in classrooms with principals or teachers, and especially in the colleges and universities where future teachers are being trained.

The last school bell Wednesday was a bittersweet moment for Jamia Jones and her classmates at Diggs-Johnson Middle School, marking the shuttering of the school and many farewells, a common scene in a city where schools are constantly moving, closing and starting up. "I feel sad, a little bit. I am writing them letters," Jamia, a rising seventh-grader, said of her goodbyes to administrators, teachers and friends. So many schools are shifting seats this year, hardly anyone but officials at North Avenue headquarters can keep track of the moves.

Next fall, all pupils in Baltimore elementary and middle schools will use new math textbooks approved last night by the school board.With the final vote to buy $9 million worth of math textbooks, the board is ending a multimillion-dollar book-buying spree as it tries to replace old math, science, reading and English textbooks throughout the school system.Officials hope the purchase will increase learning and raise test scores.Betty Morgan, chief academic officer, said she hopes schools can raise scores on the statewide tests given in third, fifth and eighth grade by 10 percentage points each year for three years.

National board certification is yet another bright color on the canvas that is Aberdeen Middle School art teacher Edith Smith's life. Smith recently found out that after three years of hard work, she had met the criteria required to be certified through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She has been teaching art for 27 years, 26 at Aberdeen. "I know every stone in this place," Smith said, laughing. For pupils to be successful in her art class, "they just have to be willing to put the time in," Smith said.

Children give views on teaching phonics and favorite booksMy class discussed your article "Two different teaching methods yield similarly low scores" (Oct. 3). Both schools should have spent their money more wisely.I think the schools should combine phonics and whole language because that might bring them up to at least a 2.0-grade reading level. Also, if you showed children different kinds of writing, they might look forward to reading and writing. The teachers could have visited other schools to look for more ideas.

Dig this cool rap from Cyrilla Hergenhan:The name of a person, place or thingis something we call a noun.The common ones are lower caselike . . . bus, bike and town.But the proper ones get a capitalwhen you go to write them downParts of speechp-p-p- parts of speechHergenhan's no rapper herself, but a fifth-grade teacher whose teaching methods aren't by the book. She recently has won national recognition -- and a free trip to California, appropriately, to zany Disneyland -- for the way she delivers her lessons.

Dorothy G. Hamilton, a noted educator who developed learning programs for teachers working with educationally disadvantaged children, died Monday of thymoma, a rare cancer of the thymus gland, at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Columbia resident was 77. She was born Dorothy Gettel in Baltimore and raised in Govans. She was exposed to nontraditional teaching methods at an early age when she attended Campus Elementary School - later Lida Lee Tall School - from 1934 to 1940, on the campus of what is now Towson University.

The last school bell Wednesday was a bittersweet moment for Jamia Jones and her classmates at Diggs-Johnson Middle School, marking the shuttering of the school and many farewells, a common scene in a city where schools are constantly moving, closing and starting up. "I feel sad, a little bit. I am writing them letters," Jamia, a rising seventh-grader, said of her goodbyes to administrators, teachers and friends. So many schools are shifting seats this year, hardly anyone but officials at North Avenue headquarters can keep track of the moves.

Dorothy G. Hamilton, a noted educator who developed learning programs for teachers working with educationally disadvantaged children, died Monday of thymoma, a rare cancer of the thymus gland, at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Columbia resident was 77. She was born Dorothy Gettel in Baltimore and raised in Govans. She was exposed to nontraditional teaching methods at an early age when she attended Campus Elementary School - later Lida Lee Tall School - from 1934 to 1940, on the campus of what is now Towson University.

National board certification is yet another bright color on the canvas that is Aberdeen Middle School art teacher Edith Smith's life. Smith recently found out that after three years of hard work, she had met the criteria required to be certified through the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She has been teaching art for 27 years, 26 at Aberdeen. "I know every stone in this place," Smith said, laughing. For pupils to be successful in her art class, "they just have to be willing to put the time in," Smith said.

If Diane Ravitch's The Language Police (Knopf, 255 pages, $24) gets the attention it deserves, it could do for the failures of education in the United States what Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin did for slavery. Subtitled "How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn," it is a brilliant revelation of an insidious national disease of public policy. This book may be the most important document about the future of the American mind in a generation or more. It should be obligatory reading for every citizen concerned with the intellectual, moral, and imaginative life of U.S. children and society as a whole.

Derek Dixon learned algebra last school year by filling out worksheets. This year, he must figure out his chemistry homework by surfing the Internet. A 10th-grader at Randallstown High School, Dixon said his education is marked these days by a lack of textbooks for homework, teachers who can't quiet noisy classmates, classwork that is uninteresting and crowded hallways where fights are common. Dixon was among a group of students from Randallstown High School and Milford Mill Academy who sat down recently to discuss the factors that they believe conspire against their academic achievement.

They might still be figuring out what a mean score means. They're not quite sure whether their students' raw scores are good or bad, or somewhere in between. And they don't yet know whether any of it means high-schoolers will succeed once passing the new high-stakes exams becomes a graduation requirement. But one thing school officials in Carroll County do know is that they'll be able to do a lot more with the High School Assessment results released last week than they ever could with the more nebulous scores of the state's now-defunct assessment examinations for elementary- and middle-schoolers.

BEIJING - The patient's heart was beating too fast. On that single fact the physicians in the emergency room of Chaoyang Hospital could agree. But the emergency room otherwise seemed a poor place for the patient, a 26-year-old hardware store clerk, to receive expert help. Doctors injected adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, but the medication failed to slow his heart. The physicians, who earn about $1.50 an hour, huddled around his electrocardiogram. They decided the best step was to ask Dr. Michael R. DiNapoli of Johns Hopkins Hospital's department of emergency medicine for advice.

The 12-member State Board of Education has put on hold a regulation that would grant temporary teaching certificates to college graduates with liberal arts degrees but who do not have the requisite education courses.The board adopted the rule Sept. 26, but yesterday it rescinded the regulation in order to seek more public comment on it.The board also acted after the Maryland State Teachers Association, which opposes the rule, threatened to sue the panel on a procedural issue. MSTA said that when the regulation was adopted last week, the board made some changes in the rule that required prior notice to the public.

THIS MORNING I tripped over the cat and spilled tea on my fuzzy slippers. Bad beginning. And then it got worse.By lunchtime, I had discovered that I was the victim of a male-dominated society and that my entire education had been based upon such "masculine techniques" as abstract argument, debate, logic and grades.No, I didn't figure this out on my own. I don't have time, what with earning a living and all. It was some university feminist types over at the University of Massachusetts who decided the current system was guilty of "overrepresentation" of males in the curriculum.

YOU LIKE what you read, and you read what you like. That, say the experts, is one reason why little girls read better than little boys from the time they set foot in school. And why the gender gap in reading scores widens as children grow older - from 8 percentage points statewide in the latest third-grade MSPAP results to 13.6 points in the eighth grade. And why a recent government study estimated that "the gap in reading deficiency [favoring girls] is ... equivalent to about 1 1/2 years of schooling" during a school career.

Dontray Colbert figures he can be an engineer, if only he masters math. So the 15-year-old Edmondson/ Westside High School freshman has enrolled in an after-school program designed to help him calculate with comfort. "Right now I'm making C's, and my goal is B's and A's," said Dontray, who is taking algebra at Edmondson. "I want to try to bring my grades up." Today, Dontray and about 35 other students from five Baltimore public schools will begin taking Kumon classes. Developed in 1954 by Japanese math instructor Toru Kumon, the discipline is designed to help children in prekindergarten through 12th grade improve reading and math skills.