For Class Helper, 3rd Grade Was an Education

Next week, my 9-year-old daughter will head back to school and I won’t be far behind. I just hope I learn as much this year as I did last year, although third grade will be a tough act to follow.

Thanks to the kids in Mrs. Lamb’s third-grade classroom at Saticoy Elementary School, I now know that a silkworm eats two maple leaves a day, while third-graders never eat anything their parents pack for lunch.

I know how to write a letter to a pen pal across town that won’t sound too dumb or too boring. And I know how confusing it can be to tell time, when wristwatches sort the hours and minutes with digital precision, not big hands and little hands.

Last school year, I volunteered a couple hours a week in my daughter’s east Ventura classroom. Let me tell you, you get a different view of public school from down on the classroom carpet.

Mrs. Lamb--an energetic, kindhearted woman whose first name is Candy and who has been teaching for 32 years--taught fractions and long division and even a bit of geometry. Her third-graders read every day, wrote journals about the moon and mastered verbs and nouns, subjects and predicates.

They learned about Chumash Indians and desert life. They heard that lemons are Ventura County’s most valuable cash crop and that Pluto is the farthest planet from the sun.

But third grade, I quickly learned, is about more than reciting basic facts.

Even with new initiatives that limit class size to 20 students in the lower grades, it’s impossible for any teacher to cater to the range of talents and abilities found in the modern-day classroom.

In Room 4, there were kids with behavior problems and others who received no help at home. There were kids who went to sleep too late and arrived at school tired and hungry.

There were also plenty of smart kids who regularly brought in their homework, chalked up high test scores and performed well above grade level. But they weren’t the ones I spent time with.

I was matched with youngsters in need of one-on-one attention.

I listened to kids read, pushing them along even as they stumbled over the simplest words. I corrected spelling and punctuation as they cobbled together short stories. I helped them compose pen pal letters, pressing them to dig deep and write about their lives beyond what games they played at recess or what they watched the night before on television.

Mrs. Lamb always thanked me for showing up and told me how glad she was to have me around. Once she even suggested I would make a good teacher. I told her I couldn’t afford the pay cut.

Truth is, I was primarily interested in spending more time with my daughter, Apple, when I showed up in Mrs. Lamb’s class last September.

Her mother and I had divorced the year before, and I was looking for any way possible to squeeze a few extra hours out of each week with her.

Apple always looked forward to my Thursday visits, peppering me with questions the night before to make sure nothing would get in the way. I spent little time directly with her in the classroom--she’s a good student so she didn’t need the kind of remedial help I offered--but I think she was glad just to have me around.

The way I figure it, that’s likely to change in a year or two so I had better put in my time while I’m still wanted.

Even so, there were days I didn’t want to show up, when the demands of work and the energy I had to pour into getting these kids to work overwhelmed me.

But I showed up anyway, and I was always glad that I did. It meant some kid got a little extra attention. And on the best days, it was the best thing I accomplished.

There was a kid named Fernando who arrived in Room 4 a few months into the school year. He didn’t read as fast as most of his classmates and didn’t write very well. But he was a good kid and tried hard.

So we would sit in the back of the room, taking spelling tests at our own pace or working through math problems together. One day he tugged at my shirt sleeve, beaming with excitement about a science fair project he had spent days putting together. He wanted me to help him deliver it to the cafeteria and set it up. I was proud he asked me and proud of him.

As the year went on, I saw improvement in all the kids I worked with. Students who could barely string together a sentence at the start of the school year wrote full-page essays by year’s end. Youngsters who had little interest in education early on nearly burst with excitement when it came time to visit the computer lab or the school library.

And I saw 8- and 9-year-olds run and play like only grade school kids can, burning a brand of schoolyard energy I remember with affection and wish I still had available to me.

For those reasons, and so many more, I hope to return to the classroom this year, if they’ll have me. I suspect they might.

Fourth grade signals the end of class-size reduction. That means my daughter, who will attend Ventura’s newly constructed Citrus Glen Elementary School, could end up with 30 classmates or more.

Come to think of it, maybe I’d better spend the next couple of days resting up.