Sometimes A Shining Moment… (Part 2)

Continued from last week….

[To read Sometimes A Shining Moment...Part 1, click here]

I sighed. “How can I teach you without a whiteboard? We don’t have a whiteboard. How can I teach you Chapter 2 without a whiteboard?”

“Hold on a second….” I had a thought. “There’s an old rollaway chalkboard in the storage room where my office is. Maybe…”

Before I finished my sentence, two male students were on their feet. Five minutes later, the old beat-up, dusty blackboard was being half rolled, half dragged (only 2 of 4 wheels remained on it) to the corner of the Media Center as the rest of the class looked on, smiling and cheering.

But there was no chalk. Another few minutes passed when a third student was at the Media Center front desk requesting tape of the slightly curious, slightly amused librarian. Moments later, the same student was soliciting blank notebook paper of her classmates and proceeding to tape them together to cover the old blackboard with a writable surface. Another girl returned from the dark classroom with a handful of dry erase markers. These kids were serious. How could I let them down?

I ordered the class to take out their notebooks and, just as I managed to write Chapter 2: The Derivative and Slope of a Curve at the top of the quilted notebook paper, my impending lesson was interrupted by a student who had been missing. Skipping into the room like a 10 year old, she returned from the art teacher with two pieces of large sidewalk chalk held high in her extended arm. The class cheered so loudly that I thought we were going to get kicked out of the Media Center. Students from other classes who were herded into various spots in the Media Center were looking on. Something very unusual was happening and we all felt it. We all were a part of something unforgettable that was unfolding without stop.

For the remaining 60 minutes of the 90-minute period I taught them my best lesson on Slope of a Curve. I had taught this very lesson, in some form or another, eighteen times before. But this one was the best. It trumped all the others. Here we were huddled together in the back of the dimly lit Media Center, doing calculus with loud and clumsy sidewalk chalk. I was amazed. They were amazed. The other kids in the Media Center were dumbfounded, as was the Media Center specialists, now glued to goings-on of this class.

By the end of the period, the calc students had their cell phones out – a clear violation of school policy – taking pictures of that old beat-up chalkboard, now filled with calculus written in the thick sidewalk chalk. I only regret not taking a picture myself.

In the end, I’m not aware of how many kids from the class passed the AP Calculus Exam in May. But it did not matter. What mattered is that a single class of underprivileged kids wanted to learn. That memory will never leave any of us. It was teaching and learning at its absolute best. dven.