1-Track Minds Multiply

When you’re a squirmy third-grader, it’s hard to think about school when stockings are hanging in the auditorium, wreaths bearing bright red bows are gracing the doors and even the crossing guard is wearing a Santa hat.

It’s harder still when your older sister is on vacation and you’re not.

“It’s not fair,” complained 8-year-old Kekoa Tassillio, who is among the students at year-round Coldwater Canyon Elementary School struggling to concentrate with a holiday break just days away.

Because the school is on a multitrack schedule, vacation comes a week or more later than at many other schools and challenges its teachers to keep their distracted charges on task.

“This is a very difficult time,” said Assistant Principal Shari Moelter, who on Wednesday was wearing shiny red and green ribbons in her hair, a festive sweatshirt and red socks adorned with snowmen.

Keeping Coldwater students’ attention was multiplication--that super-fast addition used to figure holiday credit-card interest and cookie recipe doubling.

Third-, fourth- and fifth-graders cheered on the top multipliers in their classes in “Who Wants to be a Master Mathematician?” a game show that probably won’t get picked up by a network but sufficed as a pre-holiday attention-holder.

“Six times three,” barked Principal Marvin Silver, the Regis of ‘rithmetic.

“Twelve,” answered one student. “No!--14.”

Ding! Have a seat, please. It’s 18.

So the game went, up to and including the timetable of terror: 12. For fifth-graders, there was even some rapid-fire division thrown in.

And like any game show, there was banter between the smooth host, Silver, and the nervous contestants.

SILVER: “Are you going to go anywhere on your vacation?”

SPIKY-HAIRED STUDENT: “Yes.”

SILVER: “Where are you going?”

STUDENT: “Nowhere.”

The North Hollywood campus is among 172 multitrack elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The two tracks in session at Coldwater will be dismissed Friday for the holidays--one track for a single week and the other for two months.

Attendance dips this time of year, Moelter said, particularly in families whose older children are already on vacation because their schools are on traditional schedules.

But at Coldwater, where almost three-quarters of students are still learning English and almost as many have below-average math scores, there is no time to waste.

“We’re an underachieving school, and we’re really working hard,” Moelter said.

One trophy winner Wednesday spoke no English six months ago, her teacher said.

The district pushes particularly hard for improvement in reading, but Silver said, “We recognize that we’ve got to turn up the heat on math also.”

Andre Sarkisyan, 8, is just getting into division--and enjoying it.

“It’s not really hard. It’s something new,” he said. “It’s the opposite of multiplication.”

Still, Andre envies his vacationing neighbor.

“I have to go do my homework, and he has no homework because he has a three-week vacation,” Andre said, adding that his friend “already knows his division and his multiplication--all of them.”