The Channing Elementary School is tucked away on a quiet residential street in Hyde Park. I was pleasantly surprised by how many of the teachers were African American, as are the majority of students at the school.
In the lower grades students were busy with morning meetings, activity centers, literacy and math lessons. Kindergarteners were building with blocks, playing with puppets, and putting jigsaw puzzles together. A second grade class was exploring place value with math manipulatives. While her students worked on their reading assignments, Flo Charles gave me a big hug of welcome; she”d taken a class with me many years ago! I love these unexpected connections.
Our current national obsession with test scores and prescribed curriculum has sadly limited creative, interdisciplinary classroom practices, so I am especially delighted to see students engaged in any kind of kinesthetic learning. Wendy Vitarisi“s first graders showed me how they use aerobics to practice spelling vocabulary words. I also enjoyed watching the music teacher, Wayne Jones, work his magic “ leading a K1 class in rapping their ABCs with expressive hand/body movements. It was a beautiful fall day and the gym class was held outside, where children did warm-up exercises before practicing throwing and catching a ball.
Third, fourth and fifth graders were taking the Terra Nova exam all morning. Its sole purpose is to select students for AWC classes, regardless of substantial research showing that tracking serves nobody well. I think this is a huge waste of valuable learning time, considering that as many as a third of our students have special needs or are English Language Learners. Luckily, I was able to photograph a few upper elementary students doing something other than filling in circles on an answer sheet. A fourth grader in a substantially separate class for students with learning disabilities was enthusiastically responding to the story they had just read, and I was able to sit in on part of a Japanese lesson in the fifth grade AWC class.
The Channing feels like a calm and happy place, where students are learning something new every day. Fifth grade teacher Ezi Nwankwo, originally from Nigeria, mentioned that the entire school comes together monthly for a “Town Hall” meeting where students share what they”re learning. Now that”s an idea I”d like to see in more of our schools!
Wishing you all a happy holiday season,
Amika Kemmler-Ernst, Ed.D.
amika45@comcast.net