Ms. Beitler Goes Back to Chicago, Part 2

Students in Ms. Gluckman's class color the layers of the earth.

The emphasis in science is on the dynamic earth.

Students performed an experiment with food coloring to see how heat energy causes motion.

The library in Ms. Gluckman's classroom.

In my previous post I wrote about how I spent my Monday morning, visiting the Ancona School and seeing two Montessori classrooms.  After I left Ancona I got on the 55 bus and rode west for about forty minutes to the Gage Park neighborhood to visit my friend Laura Gluckman's sixth-grade science classroom at Sawyer elementary.  My neighborhood is relatively diverse, primarily white and African-American.  As I rode the bus to the west I passed through neighborhoods that are all African-American and then into Mexican-American neighborhoods even further west.  Chicago's racial segregation is striking - cross Western Avenue and the neighborhood demographics shift suddenly.

The building that houses Sawyer Elementary is one of many in Chicago that were built around the turn of the 20th century.  They tend to be large and echo-y, with high ceilings and wide hallways.  I have taught in two such buildings and the space is more imposing than friendly, although teachers do their best to make a welcoming environment with displays of student work and bulletin boards in the halls.  Sawyer has about 1,900 students.

I climbed many stairs to the third floor and found Ms. Gluckman's room as lunch was ending.  Students eat in classrooms because the cafeteria is not large enough to accommodate all of them together.  Lunch is delivered to each room in large plastic bins.  Students were noisy but it was a cheerful buzz.

Students transitioned to their next class and a group came in for science.  I counted twenty-seven students, far more than the fifteen I had seen in Sylvia's room.  Students collaborated in groups just as they had in Sylvia's classroom, but they needed to stay in their assigned seats.  The classroom was too crowded to allow much moving around.  They started class with a warm-up that asked them to name the layers of the earth in order and tell which was the thickest.  All of Ms. Gluckman's students are english-language-learners, and some of them did not at first understand the directions.  Ms. Gluckman explained to a few students one-on-one, and others solicited help from their classmates.  One boy sat with a blank paper until I sat next to him and helped him.

Most of class time was spent coloring posters showing a scale model of the layers of the earth.  Students used proportions to figure out how thick each layer should be.  I asked students questions about the layers of the earth and found they had a lot to say.  They knew the center of the earth was hot and had high pressure and they knew there would be no air to breath if one tried to journey below the surface.  During an activity reading from the textbook, which I expected to be dry and dull, students asked many lively questions, speculated on answers to each other's questions, and were generally very engaged.  Ms. Gluckman wrote down questions that students raised in a notebook if they could not yet be answered.  Many were about earthquakes - can the Earth's crust crumble?  Can it break?  Ms. Gluckman took their questions very seriously and I could tell this encouraged them to keep asking more.  Despite the fact that many students in the class had limited English, they were all eager to speak.

A second class came in and did an experiment about the movement of heat using hot and cold water and food coloring.  Unlike my Amandla kiddos, who would have needed careful supervision so as to avoid turning food coloring into a weapon, these students were independent and respectful of one another.

The last part of the last class involved students getting up to talk to partners around the room about heat.  At the end of the activity, Ms. Gluckman asked students if moving around made the room warmer.  I had noticed the cold in the room but I thought it might be due to a broken heating system, but Ms. Gluckman told me that because of budget cuts, the heat had been turned off.  Lucky for us it was a warmish day for November, but no amount of kinetic energy on the part of the children could really offset the cold.  This was one of those moments when I felt angry.