Schools: Classroom Communiqu

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A child's riddle has it that the room no one can enter is the mushroom, but sometimes it seems just as hard for ordinary citizens to enter and observe the U.S. classroom. One man who does go to school, and reports what he sees in readable books, is David Mallery, 39. Long, a teacher of English, at Philadelphia's crack Germantown Friends School), Mallery now works for the Boston-based National Association of Independent Schools, which sends his reports to public and private schools, teachers, parents and school boards. The effect is to inspire them with the wide range of classroom experimentation, comfort them by showing the similarity of their problems, and warn them away from false goals.

Who's Cute & Dirty? From California to Connecticut. Mallery has scouted scores of schools to publicize pioneering ventures in everything from astronautics to paleontology. At the Miquon School near Philadelphia, for example, he found a remarkable math program in which expert teachers set up "actual experiences of discovery" and math becomes almost a spoken language. In one rapid-fire dialogue. Mallery records a class of fourth-graders wildly multiplying not just numbers, but numbers that stand for adjectives in a code. Teacher: "Someone is cute and dirty—who is it?" Cute is 5. dirty 13; multiplied they are 65, the digits of which add up to 11. Sarah, who has been assigned the number 11 leaps to her feet: "Sarah is cute and dirty!" The class roars. The game grows in complexity, until at length one boy is able to make the rolling pronouncement: "I am very, very, very, very, very eccentric, cute, well-liked, nice, bald and 47!"

At the Cabot School in Newtonville, Mass., Mallery found a successful system of providing individualized reading for second graders. Banning graded readers. Teacher Dorothy L. White provides hundreds of regular books at all levels of difficulty. After a child reads a book, he is "checked out" on new words and story meanings: "Did the bunny really want to run away?" "What do you call it when a crew seizes a ship?" The kids write little resumes of "what the story told you." get so interested in reading that one year 29 of them polished off 1,500 books, including high school books, on everything from the Alps to the Civil War.

The Trouble with Harry. Mallery's classroom anecdotes say more about children than pages of generalized psychology.

He tells, for example, of Harry. 7. who seemed to go off in all directions, understanding but never completing an assignment. One Halloween a teacher offered him a sheet. "You can come as a ghost, Harry." the teacher said. "No. 1 think I'd rather go as the circulatory system." said Harry. Without help, he covered the sheet with a good diagram of the veins and arteries for his costume. The moral: Harry—and lots of chaotic-appearing kids—are good learners but rather impatient of proving their scholarship by doing routine assignments.