School’s Waning Days
By RICK LYMAN June 22, 2006
Pay attention, please.
Yes, it is warm. And school is almost out for the summer. But stop fidgeting. We have material to cover.
“You can feel it, as soon as the weather gets nice,” said Alicia Buzzi, a principal intern from the New York City Leadership Academy. “The tone of the whole school changes, the pace, everything.”
Parents feel it. Administrators feel it. The students and the teachers certainly feel it — something about the end of testing, the arrival of summer heat and the approaching final day of school in the city next Wednesday — once impossibly distant but suddenly tantalizingly close.
“There are this many days until school is over,” said Ramira Rivera, 9, a second grader at Public School 112 in East Harlem, holding up a few fingers and then pointing to one of them. “And this one is a barbecue.”
Fewer days are spent on traditional classroom instruction.
Instead, there are pageants, award ceremonies, pizza parties, talent shows and more activities outdoors — picnics and field trip after field trip.
“Of course, as the weather starts getting nice, the kids start getting real excited,” said Audra St. John, Ramira’s teacher. “The thing is to try to harness that excitement and turn it into learning.”
New York City school officials consider P.S. 112 particularly good at coping with the children’s June fever.
“I find that at the end of the school year, there is so much more energy and they can really be more motivated,” said Laurie Etienne, a second-grade teacher. “Certainly, they’re more excited.”
One challenge is keeping that energy manageable. “Some of our teachers will play Mozart or Beethoven to calm them down,” said Eileen Reiter, P.S. 112’s principal. “Or there are some who use yoga techniques, like breathing exercises.”
Ms. St. John said she tried playing classical music, but it did not work. “Something about the rhythm,” she said. “They got more excited.” Instead, she uses deep-breathing exercises and other yogalike focusing techniques.
“We do this one thing where they stand beside their desks, put their hands on the desktop and push down, like they’re trying to push the desk through the floor,” Ms. St. John said. “Usually, after that, they calm down.”
Such techniques are used now and then throughout the school year, she said, but more and more often as the end of school approaches.
Ms. Reiter said she forbids the removal of any artwork from the school’s hallways, so as not to send children the message that a little slacking off is in the air.
“We don’t give up,” she said. “There’s a lot of learning that goes on in June. You know, four weeks is a lot of time for kids.”
To some parents, it seems little is being accomplished in a school year’s closing weeks. Leslie R. Williams, a professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University, disagrees.
She said the year-end shift in tone is not only inevitable, but also beneficial. “Once the testing schedule is over, there is a great opportunity for doing things like field trips and more exploration of the community,” Professor Williams said. “It’s a way of consolidating learning.”
Too many parents have the notion that schooling consists solely of traditional classroom instruction, supplemented by homework and measured by testing, she said.
“But this is a time of looking back and a time of looking forward,” Professor Williams said. “And that’s a very important thing for the kids. It’s not doing nothing, as so many people believe.”
Pamela Wheaton, deputy director of the insideschools.org project for Advocates for Children of New York, which regularly visits and assesses the city’s public schools, said the field trips and other activities were appropriate for June.
“I’ve been to some classes,” she said, “where, when the tests are over, they just sit down the kids and put on a video. I can’t stand to see that.”
The issue of maintaining focus in a term’s final days is bigger in elementary schools, said Maria Dewald, president of the New York State Congress of Parents and Teachers. In higher grades, final exams and other year-end activities tend to keep attention from wavering too much.
“But for the young ones, when the weather gets nice, it can be difficult,” said Dolores Boston, the mother of a P.S. 112 first grader. “But it’s also nice, because the kids are happier. You can feel it around the school, a happier atmosphere.”
As a year-end activity, Ms. St. John and Ms. Etienne, the P.S. 112 teachers, encouraged students to pick a reading and writing project of special interest to them.
“We picked math because we like math,” said Azid Lloyd, 9, as he sprawled on the floor, finishing the making of a “math dictionary” with his 7-year-old partner, Maya Walker.
He glanced out the window. “On Friday, we have a picnic in Jefferson Park,” he said. “And then school is over and you know what?”
Maya widened her eyes excitedly and said, “What?”
Azid paused, casually brushing scraps of paper from his Yankees jersey. “Then,” he said, “I’m going to Florida.”
Across the room, Amiya Scott and Nathan Foster, both 8, were clipping photographs from magazines and pasting them into books about fashion. “We’re doing a magazine of our own,” Nathan said.
Ramira Rivera was with two other girls, huddled over a computer, writing their own story about Geronimo Stilton, a mouse journalist for The Rodent’s Gazette, who stars in a series of books they had read. In their story, he is fighting Lava Man.
“He’s evil,” explained Dazhane Bryant, 7. “That’s what makes it exciting.”
The poet T. S. Eliot once said that April was the cruelest month. How would he have felt as a second grader, stuck in a classroom while a spectacular summer blossomed? Might he have chosen June instead?
“I don’t know,” Ramira said. “I like June. It gets hot most of the time, and you can go to the park. And plus, you always know that school is almost over.”
Any final questions?
Very well, see you in September. Class dismissed.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
