Learn Me Gooder - By John Pearson Page 0,1

portable classrooms outside didn’t have Internet access, but this year – wait for it – I’m inside the main building, baby!

I’m very pleased to report that the third grade will no longer be treated like steerage on the Titanic! No more sloshing through puddles when it rains just to get to the cafeteria. No more braving the freezing cold in February during restroom breaks. No more families of raccoons living (and sometimes dying) underneath the classroom floor.

Being inside will be fantastic. But I have so much more to talk about than just the new digs. Today was the first day of the brand new school year, and it’s amazing how I still get the first-day jitters, even with seven years of experience under my belt. I got into bed at ten o’clock last night, but I know I didn’t fall asleep before two. When I DID sleep, I had dreams where I was in class but couldn’t talk. When I opened my mouth, all that came out was a bleating trumpet sound, a la Charlie Brown’s generic adult. Not a very restful night, but I was up and at the school at seven anyway, ready and raring to go.

My morning started in the moshpit of our gymnasium, where all of the students and most of their parents had been packed in like sardines, waiting for the teachers to pick up their classes. I waded in to the gym, and it occurred to me that I must not be doing things right as a teacher because every year, they send me brand new kids and tell me to start over!

As I made my way through the maddening crowd, one lady stopped me and asked, “Excuse me, are you Mr. Woodson? Do you have Lakeisha Jefferson in your class?”

I consulted my class roster, and sure enough, there she was. Upon hearing the news, Ms. Jefferson seemed pleased that I would be teaching her daughter. A little TOO pleased. After witnessing a lengthy victory dance and the fourth violent hip thrust, I was starting to feel slightly uncomfortable with just HOW pleased she seemed to be.

She explained, “Lakeisha can be a handful sometimes, but I think she’ll behave better for a male teacher.”

Oh, joy! That’s a theory I can’t WAIT to test!

Once I had rounded up my students and taken them to my classroom, I was able to observe a few of the other kids. I have a boy named Jacob who is only 7 years old. Typically, third graders begin the year at age 8 and turn 9 at some point. Sure, we get our fair share of retainees who turn 10 (or, in one or two instances, 11) years old in the third grade. And I’m not even counting Alhambra, who turned 16, because he was clearly at the wrong school. But Jacob will only TURN 8 this year! He’s a baby among babies! He does seem relatively bright, though.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Nestor (already 9 years old), who can barely read or write. He already has me extremely worried.

This morning, I started the kids off with the usual first day activities – partial differential equations. Just kidding, they were doing the simple little “tell me about yourself” worksheets. Favorite color, favorite movies, names of family members, etc. I noticed Nestor following a pattern. He would ask his neighbor, “What does this say?” Then he would scribble something on his paper. “What does this say?” Scribble.

I wandered over and glanced at his paper. On every line, he had written the same thing, which was not even a real word.

“What is your favorite book?”

“OGO”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“OGO”

“What is your best friend’s name?”

“OGO”

Clearly, I was not going to glean any personal information from Nestor’s entrance questionnaire. So I decided to use an alternate assessment to gauge his number sense. I gave him a blank sheet of paper and asked him to write down the numbers in order, as high as he could count. I watched as he wrote 1, 2, and 3, then I walked away to see how some of the other kids were doing. After about three minutes, Nestor raised his hand and motioned me over.

He asked, “What comes after R?”

At that moment, I experienced an ice cream headache without having actually consumed any ice cream.

As you can see, I’ve got my work cut out for me here. Nestor’s counting woes already make me think back to Hernando from a few years