A Class Act : But the Cast Keeps Changing at Lincoln School as the Year Progresses

The school year is nearly half over, but in Mary Elsenbaumer’s class the cast of characters keeps changing.

A student teacher assigned to the fifth-grade classroom at Ventura’s Lincoln School one month into the year brought with her a teaching style sharply different from Elsenbaumer’s.

Then two students from the class were suspended for breaking into the school cafeteria and spraying a fire extinguisher, leaving the room--which doubles as a library--covered with a sticky white film.

Two children have moved away. A Ukrainian exchange student will not be returning after the Christmas holiday that begins next week. And two new students--Ruben Luna and Mallory Kawecki--each showed up one day needing books and a seat. They seem to be there to stay.

All of this tumult leaves Elsenbaumer unfazed.

The 32-year-old has taught for five years at Lincoln, a small downtown school known as much for the transience and troubles of some of its students as for the non-traditional teaching style of its staff.

One-quarter of the children on Lincoln’s rolls at the end of last school year had not been there at the beginning.

Of the 280 students there now, 14 are homeless. A fifth of them are from families on welfare. Others come from homes where parents are struggling to survive.

And Elsenbaumer, like other teachers, knows children come to her class bringing problems from their home lives in tow.

Some are frequently late. They drag into school five or 10 minutes after the first bell, their eyes still bleary from sleep. Others rarely turn in homework. And a few have trouble concentrating in class.

Asked about their families, some tell about fathers who are in prison, mothers who have suffered physical abuse. Their stories are disturbing and their openness disarming.

But as one teacher’s aide at Lincoln said, “You have to have compassion for these kids but not allow them to use (their problems) as an excuse.”

Excuses won’t work because the children from troubled homes have to work side by side and sometimes face to face with other students whose families appear stable, their parents emotionally and financially secure.

Such diversity among students is one of the chief challenges of teaching at Lincoln, Elsenbaumer said.

So she constantly looks for new ways to reach children. “You have to try a lot of different doors,” she said.

Known by both peers and parents for her innovative methods, Elsenbaumer thrives on devising hands-on assignments in math, science, reading and art that draw students in. For social studies, Elsenbaumer sends her students to another fifth-grade class and she takes that teacher’s class for science.

Elsenbaumer taught multiplication this fall by helping students put the times tables to music in “the multiples rap.” And to test a hypothesis that lung capacity increases as children get bigger, she sent Joey Madrid, Victoria Balestrero and other budding scientists around the school to time how long younger pupils could hold their breath.

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But even when lessons are fun, children who have learned to dislike school and distrust teachers may be wary of joining in.

“It has to be safe,” Elsenbaumer said. “They have to feel safe to take a risk.”

That sense of safety comes, Elsenbaumer said, by dignifying students and showing them respect.

So when on a recent afternoon a boy came in from the playground shaking and apparently on the verge of tears, Elsenbaumer walked to his seat and knelt by his side to speak with him quietly. Noticing that other students were staring, she quickly rose and told everyone to get busy.

Aware of the troubles many Lincoln students face, the school staff strives to help the youngsters feel comfortable and secure, Principal Paul Jablonowski said.

“We’re trying to make it a kind of safe harbor for kids, so no matter what’s going on out there they know they can come here and feel safe,” he said.

But even harbor waters can get rough.

One day in October, Elsenbaumer’s students found a new teacher settling in.

Eileen Sterling, a student at the Ventura campus of Cal State Northridge, needed a stint as a student teacher to cap off her 3 1/2 years of course work toward a teaching credential.

And Elsenbaumer, known to her students as Mrs. E, readily agreed to accept a student teacher in her class, although she admits she finds it difficult to hand over the teaching role to someone else.

“It’s really hard for me,” she said. “It’s hard for me to give up the classroom.”

For Sterling, whose two months at Lincoln ended last week, the experience was not what she had expected.

After years studying educational psychology and philosophy, Sterling came into Lincoln with the goal of putting some theories into practice: steering students through detailed lesson plans in a structured classroom setting.

But she walked into a class governed by what Elsenbaumer calls “structured freedom”--where students work mainly in groups and teaching is done without textbooks.

Gradually, Elsenbaumer surrendered control of the class to Sterling, allowing her to try out some of her own lesson plans.

And as Sterling took charge, she said, she was surprised to find that her training in education mattered far less than her personality.

“The hardest part of it was the fact that my success was really going to be based on who I am,” said Sterling, 49. “It would come down to my presence in the classroom.”

“It’s so personal,” she said. “It’s so overwhelming.”

The children also had trouble adjusting to the change.

Some differences between Mrs. Sterling and Mrs. E were obvious but minor.

Elsenbaumer allows children to perch on top of their desks for group work, such as when students huddled together dipping pH sticks in containers of sour milk, soda and dishwashing soap to test the liquids’ acidity.

But under Sterling, sitting on desks was not allowed.

Other differences between the teachers were more subtle, but perhaps more important.

Although Sterling adopted a practice Elsenbaumer established of getting the class quiet by clapping and having the children join in, she never liked it.

“I hate it,” she said. “It hurts my hands.”

The students picked up on her discomfort.

“She uses different signals,” 10-year-old Jordan Harris said. With “Mrs. E, we’ll clap and just keep on clapping until it gets quiet.” But Mrs. Sterling “will clap and then start talking.”

When Sterling taught a lesson on prime numbers, she stood mainly at the front of the class. Elsenbaumer, on the other hand, constantly moves around.

And for language arts, Elsenbaumer practices “jump-in reading,” where students take turns reading aloud without having to raise their hands.

Sterling led the class one afternoon through a reading of the tale of Paul Bunyan, asking them to read in unison, out loud. “We’ll do jump-in reading another day,” she said.

But only a handful of children even tried to take part. Some sat reading silently to themselves while others stared into space.

“We’ve got two teaching styles going on right now,” Elsenbaumer said. “We’ve got two different sets of expectations. . . . The inconsistencies are not only in policy. They’re in strategy, temperament.”

Even with such differences and difficulties, Sterling said she learned things from Elsenbaumer that “I’ll remember forever.”

“One of the really, really important things is to know what to overlook,” she said. “I’ve watched her do it, and it’s just beautiful where she will let certain things go and it will be OK.”

The child who speaks out of turn, the student who fidgets with a vibrating pen that buzzes incessantly--these are the types of things Elsenbaumer sometimes chooses to ignore. “There are some people who learn while they’re fidgeting,” Elsenbaumer said.

But sometimes students take bad behavior out of the classroom and sometimes they take it too far.

The two boys who vandalized the school lunchroom were found out only after one of them got into other trouble. A few days after the cafeteria incident, the boy and a student from another class took from the school office a plastic jug containing about $200 in coins and small bills, money the school had been collecting toward new playground equipment.

School officials got most of the money back. But before the two boys involved in the theft had returned from their suspensions, officials decided to send them to two other district schools.

Besides overlooking minor classroom disruptions, there are other areas where Elsenbaumer deliberately gives less than her full attention--like homework.

Every Monday, she sends parents a note listing the week’s homework. Attached is a form asking parents’ response to the assignments: What caught their interest? What did it tell them about their child’s skills?

“It forces parents to look at how their child is doing,” she said. “Homework’s important to connect the parents to the classroom, to keep them informed and just include them.”

But when she collects homework at the end of the week, only about half of the students turn anything in. Some do homework consistently, others sporadically, a few hardly at all.

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Even though it counts as part of students’ grades, Elsenbaumer declines to push the issue.

“You can only control so many things,” she said. “You have to pick and choose carefully the things you want to put energy into.”

After all, she said, students and parents have to take responsibility.

“It’s got to be a three-way thing,” she said. “I only have them when they’re here. If there’s not the level of concern at home, it doesn’t happen.”

Indeed, Elsenbaumer has her students only about six hours a day. After school, they may be busy or bored, active in athletics or glued to the TV, surrounded by family and friends or alone.

Many of the children, like Alicia Coenen, play sports.

During the summer and fall, 10-year-old Alicia competes in local soccer leagues, and this year made the all-star team. Her two younger sisters play too, and both of her parents are coaches.

When the games end about 5 p.m., the family heads home to a spacious two-story house with a view of the ocean.

Alicia’s father, Michael Coenen, is a technical specialist for a national manufacturer of copying machines. Her mother, Kate Sredl, is a computer programmer.

On a recent evening, Alicia and her sister and two of their girlfriends were upstairs in the Coenen house reading books and leafing through soccer magazines as Kate heated up ready-made pizzas downstairs.

Most nights go like this, Alicia said.

Her parents limit her television watching to half an hour a day. “I sometimes get frustrated with my mother,” the girl said matter-of-factly. “There’s a lot of shows I miss.”

And although she does well in school, her dreams for the future are in sports. A poster of runner Jackie Joyner-Kersee is taped to her bedroom closet door. Knee pads for soccer lie on the floor.

Alicia’s classmate Steven Tracy joined a soccer league last year.

But this year, when Steven’s mother, Theresa Tracy, inquired whether he wanted to play again, he responded by asking if she would be able to drive him.

An only child of a single parent, the 10-year-old has a habit of showing concern for his mother, said Tracy, who works as an administrative assistant for a medical research firm. “He’s pretty protective.”

Ultimately, Steven, a red-haired boy with a wide grin, chose not to sign up for soccer this year. So when school lets out, he walks two blocks from Lincoln to the apartment of his sitter.

And he usually goes from there to a friend’s house to play. One afternoon Steven met Frank Caro, who is also in Elsenbaumer’s class, and another boy for a game of dodge ball.

Playing in the narrow, grassy courtyard of an apartment building, the three boys jumped, ran and rolled on the ground as they took turns throwing a basketball-sized beanbag at whoever was in the middle.

Then it was time for Steven to head back to the sitter’s to meet his mother, who leaves work about 5 p.m.

And as soon as mother and son arrived home at their apartment, the boy stretched in front of the television in the living room to play Nintendo. “I know every move in this game,” he said, settling onto the carpeted floor.

His mother said the two of them usually don’t take time for an evening meal. Steven eats breakfast and lunch every day, she said, but “we’re not really dinner people.”

Tracy also said she rarely checks that Steven has done homework because “the sitter knows he cannot do anything or go anywhere until his schoolwork is done.”

Indeed, at the end of one recent week, Steven pulled from his folder an assignment that was ready to turn in. But on another Friday he had nothing to drop into the wicker basket where Elsenbaumer collects homework.

“I lose it sometimes, I guess,” Steven said. “I don’t know.”

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On that same morning, the school held its monthly awards assembly.

Alicia, Terri Tellez, Cody Griffith and Diego Rivera received certificates for outstanding effort in all areas.

Frank Caro won for social studies. And 10 other students in Mrs. E’s class were recognized for accomplishments ranging from perfect attendance to good citizenship.

Certificates in hand, the children ambled from the assembly back into class, and Elsenbaumer moved quickly to the front of the room.

As she began speaking, the students settled into their chairs and fell silent.

“When teachers choose students for awards it’s one of the hardest things we have to do,” she said. “I want you to know that everyone in here deserves an award for something. Everyone in here is good at at least one thing. If you get overlooked, I want to apologize right now because each and every one of us is important. I want to make sure you know that.”

Then Mrs. E leaned forward, motioning to the unfinished math quizzes that sat on each child’s desk.

“So show me how important you are.”