Teaching in Unique Style : Fifth-Graders Get Course in Reading, Writing, Real Life

Time for math, and teacher Mary Elsenbaumer tells her fifth-grade class at Ventura’s Lincoln School that today they will calculate the size of an average family.

But to do that, she says, they need to define “family” and find each student’s family size.

Hands shoot up and voices rise.

“Do we count stepbrothers and stepsisters?” one boy asks.

“Only the people that live in your house?” another boy questions. When the teacher says yes, even if they live there only sometimes, he starts counting. “Let’s see, I have two moms, one stepmother . . ..”

Then a girl near the front says softly, “My mom and dad never married.” Is her father part of her family?

Welcome to the classroom of Mrs. Elsenbaumer, known to her students as Mrs. E. Here, lessons are drawn from life and a seemingly straightforward math problem can touch on a matter of national debate: What is a family?

But as Elsenbaumer frequently says to her 9-, 10- and 11-year-old students: “I think you can handle it.”

Something shifts in children between fourth and fifth grade, Elsenbaumer says. In their last year of elementary school, the boys and girls who come to her class are suddenly able to grasp abstract ideas, to relate concepts to reality, to reason.

But as they learn, they squirm. Even at their quietest, these children are constantly moving: twirling pencils under their nostrils, drumming fingers on classroom tables and sliding around in their chairs.

Elsenbaumer’s job this year is to help her 27 students not only learn but practice self-control, to prepare for the perilous transition from the cloistered world of elementary school to the more freewheeling universe of middle school.

“I want to keep them from being lost in the crowd,” she said. “I fear for the kids who are going to get lost in the shuffle.”

By June, the children in Elsenbaumer’s class should have mastered division, although some have not learned multiplication. They should be able to write a short essay, even though a few now have trouble composing a sentence.

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And they should be comfortable with scientific reasoning, from estimating the number of raisins in a box to calculating the size of an average family.

Fifth grade is not all drudgery. Every year, Lincoln’s two fifth-grade classes take a four-day field trip to Catalina Island to study marine ecology.

The trip is made each April, but in the first week of school the cry was already resounding through Elsenbaumer’s classroom: “When do we go to Catalina?”

Even the trip to Catalina, however, fits into Mrs. E’s overall scheme: to help children learn to think and work independently. And this goal has special urgency during students’ last year in the homey, tightknit atmosphere of Lincoln School.

Housed in a cozy, old white-and-blue building on Santa Clara Avenue, Lincoln School draws its students from a wide and diverse section of the city--from the poorer neighborhoods near Ventura Avenue to the upscale hillside homes above downtown. But the school is small, with only 280 children and nine teachers.

To many students, it feels like home.

Justin Flack, Dillon McCarthy, Diego Rivera and many other children in Elsenbaumer’s class this year have gone to Lincoln School since kindergarten.

Elsenbaumer has taught some of her students’ brothers and sisters. She has met their mothers and fathers. She knows or has heard whether the parents are together or divorced, working or jobless.

But Justin, Dillon, Diego and other fifth-graders will leave Lincoln at the end of this school year to attend either Cabrillo or DeAnza middle schools, which each have 2 1/2 times as many students as Lincoln.

The children will go from being the oldest and biggest students at school to the youngest and smallest, and from staying in one classroom most of the day to traveling from one room to another.

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Some children have the independence and confidence to make the transition easily.

Alicia Coenen, a pony-tailed 10-year-old who makes nearly all A’s, is quiet and attentive in class.

But her spirit bursts forth on the school playground, where Alicia, an avid player on youth soccer leagues, runs so fast during a game of sharks and minnows that she tears past all the boys. “She’s the fastest girl at the school,” Elsenbaumer observed.

Alicia’s mother, Kay Coenen, said she has no fears about her daughter’s upcoming move to middle school. “She’s a pretty well-adjusted kid,” she said.

Other children may have more trouble.

Chris Hale, a small, freckle-faced 10-year-old, reads below grade level. “I’m not into reading,” he said genially. “It makes my eyes hurt.”

He wants to catch up, Chris said, but sometimes his round blue eyes wander around the classroom while other children are bent over their work.

Besides the boy’s academic difficulties, Chris’ mother said she worries his small size may make it harder for him to fit in at middle school. “Chris is going to be a little tiny person next year,” Kari Hale said. “And he’s scared of eighth-graders.”

In elementary school, teachers take care of children, Elsenbaumer said.

“Like Frank,” she added, referring to her student Frank Caro, a quiet, sweet-tempered boy who struggles academically but who calls so little attention to himself that he could go unnoticed.

“Next year he’s a number,” Elsenbaumer said. “No one will know him as Frankie. He’s got to be more independent.”

To foster such independence, Elsenbaumer gives her young charges a degree of freedom that would give more conventional teachers the willies.

Well-versed in educational philosophy, Elsenbaumer calls her classroom environment “structured freedom.” But some may label it controlled chaos.

Mrs. E teaches without textbooks.

She arranges students’ desks in groups instead of straight rows, deliberately seating the brightest children next to those in danger of failing.

Youngsters in Mrs. E’s class work with each other as often as with the teacher and the more capable students serve as models to their less confident peers, Elsenbaumer said.

Students working in groups make noise, sometimes becoming downright loud.

But even Mrs. E’s manner of keeping discipline is unusual.

Many teachers use the first day of school to dispense a list of classroom rules: No gum. No speaking out of turn. No getting up to sharpen a pencil without permission.

Mrs. E gives no such list.

Instead, as soon as students had settled in their assigned seats this year the teacher walked to the front of the room, picked up a two-foot-long hollow stick resembling a tree branch and turned to face the class.

As she slowly twirled the stick, its contents rolled from side to side, pattering softly. One by one, children ceased chatting and turned toward the strange noise.

“If you’re really quiet, you can hear this,” Elsenbaumer said in a hushed voice. “What does it sound like?”

“Rain,” a few students called out.

“Rain,” Elsenbaumer said to the now-quiet class. “I always start my year with a rain stick.”

She uses the rain stick, Mrs. E continued quietly, to signal that the class is too noisy. When they see her twirl the stick, she said, they should get quiet enough to hear it.

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Later that day, Mrs. E taught the children another signal to get quiet and give her their attention--when they hear her say the three simple words “eyes on me.”

And by the end of the first week, Mrs. E had established a third routine for restoring classroom calm--clapping. Not a loud, angry smacking together of hands, but a rhythmic tapping that students can follow.

Clap, clap . . . clap, clap, clap, sounds the teacher. Faces turn to the front and pencils drop to the tables as students hurry to jump in: Clap, clap . . . clap, clap, clap, they respond. And suddenly the room is quiet.

“Now,” Mrs. E says, and moves the class on to their next lesson.

Sometimes Mrs. E tells students who are having trouble with their work or bothering a classmate to move to a front table. At other times, she pulls misbehaving children aside to talk.

But she occasionally responds to disruptive behavior by refusing to confront it.

On the second day of school, a boy came to class wearing a T-shirt that bore a joke advertisement for “Saddam’s Condoms.” Although Mrs. E said nothing to the boy, she informed Principal Paul Jablonowski--known as Mr. J to students.

Immediately after lunch, Mrs. E sent the boy to Mr. J. Later the boy returned to class wearing his T-shirt inside out.

The difference between Elsenbaumer’s disciplinary style and that of some other teachers was starkly apparent one day during the second week of school when she had to miss school to teach a workshop and the class got a substitute.

Things did not go well.

At one point in the afternoon, the substitute got upset when the children called out greetings to an adult visitor coming into the classroom.

“Class!” the teacher yelled. “If you can’t act like fifth-graders, put your heads on your desks and act like first-graders!”

Chris Hale, Alicia Coenen and all the other students followed the directions. Unaccustomed to such treatment, however, they did not keep their heads bowed for long.

“I’m bored,” Sandra Jenkins called out to no one in particular. “I want to go to the office.”

Later that afternoon, the substitute allegedly tried to gain control of the class by touching students in a threatening way, according to students. One parent called the principal after school to complain that the teacher had put a hand over a student’s mouth. Another parent said the substitute had placed her palm on a child’s cheek in a mock slap.

Jablonowski said he reported the incidents to the school district office and requested that the substitute not be assigned again to Lincoln School.

Some children who are starved for attention do things they know are wrong to get noticed, Elsenbaumer said. But she tries to pay attention only to what they do right. Problems that call for punishing a child or notifying parents she often refers to Jablonowski.

“The most important thing is getting that rapport across and setting the climate” in the classroom, Elsenbaumer said. “I feel I’m very non-threatening. It’s very intentional. I want this to be a place that they look forward to coming to every day.”

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As she told students the first day: “I’m not a policeman. I’m not a classroom discipline monitor. That’s not what I’m here for.”

What she is there for is to teach. And teaching, for Elsenbaumer, has less to do with lectures and drills than stimulating children’s natural curiosity so that they pursue knowledge on their own.

Putting students in noisy groups rather than quiet rows, drawing lessons from life instead of textbooks and emphasizing hands-on classroom projects instead of rote learning are all goals of the state and national school reform movement. Lincoln School as a whole has a reputation for a nontraditional approach to teaching.

But Mrs. E goes further with these techniques than many of her colleagues, school officials said.

And a key to her success, they said, is her ability to capture and hold children’s attention.

“She has a great deal of energy and enthusiasm,” Ventura Assistant Supt. Pat Chandler said. “This is infectious for children. If your teacher is excited about learning, you’re more apt to be.”

As Kari Hale said: “She teaches kids in a real fun way.”

In one corner of Elsenbaumer’s classroom, she has taped a blown-up aerial photo of Ventura with a sign inviting children to pinpoint where they live. Across the room, three plump rats scurry in a large wire cage and a worn recliner beckons students to curl up to read or to play with the pets.

Other teachers may consider wriggling rats or comfortable chairs as dangerous distractions from the business of learning. But Elsenbaumer is less concerned about children becoming distracted than getting bored.

“Kids are normally really happy to be in here and I think it’s because of the creature comforts,” Elsenbaumer said. “I have to compete with their every sense. I’m competing with MTV and cable television to captivate their minds. If they’re bored, I don’t have them. I have to reach them.”

Elsenbaumer knows firsthand about the consequences of failing to reach a child. It happened to her.

At school in her native Oklahoma City, Elsenbaumer performed poorly, she said. Although she was creative and had a natural aptitude for science, she nevertheless felt unnoticed and unappreciated by teachers.

Later, while attending Oklahoma State University, Elsenbaumer at first majored in biology.

But she switched to education after spending a summer working with children at a Catalina Island marine institute, the same one where she now makes a yearly trip with students. She moved to California after graduation.

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Now in her sixth year teaching, the 32-year-old Elsenbaumer has her master’s in education from Cal Lutheran University and is one of the Ventura Unified School District’s three science mentor teachers.

As a mentor teacher, Elsenbaumer receives a $4,000 yearly stipend on top of her $31,594 salary to show other teachers new ways to teach science.

She is married to Bill Elsenbaumer, a plumbing contractor. Their daughter, Tawney, is now a third-grader at Lincoln School in the classroom next to Elsenbaumer’s. Son Teddy is 3.

Tanned and pretty, with a quick smile and long, wavy hair streaked blond by the sun, she has a penchant for wearing dangling earrings and flowing skirts and for sometimes going barefoot in her classroom when the children are gone.

And her exuberance often seems to match that of her students. “I still relate to what they’re going through,” she said.