It” blares from the CD player, and half of the boys stand at their desks, jiggling and singing along to the music. Poke a piece of tissue paper on a gluey bottle. Dance a few moves. Poke a piece of paper. “Beat it, just beat it …” one boy sings.
“I can sing and work at the same time.” But as the boys finish, they grow
antsy. One group throws tissue pieces at each other; another group giggles as the boys paste tissue squares over the faces of politicians in the day’s newspaper, which covers their desks as a drop cloth; another group’s dance performance in the front of the room swells to ballet leaps and rowdy break-dancing. Ahmad, who had been gluing her
own bottle, suddenly stops, walks quick- ly to the front of the room and clicks off the tape recorder: “Okay, that’s it!” The kids freeze. They look up, startled. Half of their color-coded behavior clothespins are already on yellow (“Oops. Be Careful”) and orange (“Loss of recess or specials”). Two kids are on red (“Stop! Phone call home. Visit to principal’s office). One child, his clothespin already on
orange, freezes mid-dance and balances on one leg, teetering. Later, the same child lands in the principal’s office — a last-resort move. She at times struggles to maintain her students’ attention, and when the boys lose focus, she occasion- ally raises her voice. Ahmad said she recognizes that she
has much to learn. “As a teacher, you are always learning,” she mused. “And I learned something from each of my 16 students, who taught me to be a better teacher for next year.” She said she regularly gets advice
from her more experienced colleague, Pointer, who taught at mixed gender schools before joining Imagine. Point- er said many of the techniques she uses in her girls classroom — such as setting clear expectations and structure and gen- erously offering praise — worked well for boys, too, when she taught both genders. According to the DC Benchmark
Assessment System (DC BAS), which measures students’ progress annually in reading and math, 100 percent of Point- er’s girls scored “advanced” in reading, compared with 50 percent of Ahmad’s boys. Almost the same percentage of girls and boys scored “advanced” in
First-grade boys and girls at Imagine Southeast work together in the computer lab and have
math (40 percent and 38 percent, re- spectively), but 60 percent of the girls were “proficient” in math (the next step down from “advanced”), compared with 38 percent of the boys. The scores mirror national studies over the past several years, showing boys trailing the girls in literacy. Scott says Ahmad “did a fantas-
tic job for her first year.” The low math scores throughout the school are “more a schoolwide issue of instruction, rath- er than a single-gender issue,” she says. More professional development work- shops in math are scheduled for next year. A math also specialist has been hired to work with the teachers. Pointer is modest about her role. By
outperforming the boys in math, her girls are an exception to the nation- al trend. Pointer says she just enjoys finding ways to inspire them. “I was ba- sically a guide, leading them in the right direction,” she says, reflecting on the school year. “But they did all the work.”
A 20 The WaShIngTon PoST MagazIne | august 8, 2010
s the school year winds down, Pointer is circling the classroom one May after- noon, engaging her girls in math — a subject that many
educators say often intimidates girls and later causes them to turn away from careers in math and science. “Who can tell me what half of four
is?” the teacher asks. A girl named Camryn raises her
hand, waits to be recognized and rises beside her desk. “Two,” she says. “What?” Pointer asks. Camryn corrects herself into the re-
quired form of a complete sentence. “Half of four is two.” “Who agrees?” Pointer asks the class.
The girls all give a thumbs up. “And two plus two is what?” “Two plus two equals four,” Cam-
ryn says. “Who agrees?” The thumbs all go up
again. “All right, round of applause for Camryn.” The girls clap. Pointer moves the class smoothly up
“the doubles” until she gets to eight plus eight. “What is eight plus eight?” she asks a student named Kanyia. “I got to write it,” Kanyia says, scrib-
bling in her notebook so she can see eight objects plus eight objects. The other girls raise their hands, but Pointer ignores them. She waits. “12?” Kanyia asks. Pointer leans over her student’s
shoulder to look at the girl’s scratch marks. “We just did seven plus seven,” Pointer says. “Remember our doubles, plus one. What is seven plus seven?” Kanyia knows this is 14. “Plus one,” Pointer prompts. Kanyia knows this is 15. “So eight plus eight is what?” “Sixteen!” Kanyia says, triumphantly. “What?” Pointer asks.
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