6-hour variety show

Friday, Aug. 21, 1998

School starts in three days at Helen Jydstrup Elementary School. A stream of parents flows in and out of the nondescript building, trying to register their children. A few are upset because they have come to the wrong school. Others are just impatient.

One mother says she is in a hurry to get to her "blood transfusion." The office staff patiently answers her manic requests.

The office workers have heard a lot of odd stories from parents. They get an interesting glimpse into the sometimes tumultuous lives of the students at Jydstrup Elementary.

Principal Nadine Nielsen, a district veteran with a kind voice and a wide smile, oversees the final preparations for next week.

Fourth grade teacher John Pendry is checking out the classroom where he will start the year.

This year Pendry is the designated rover in the school, which means he will be moving from room to room every three weeks or so. There are not enough rooms for Pendry to have his own. At the year-round school teachers rotate on three-week vacation breaks all year long. Pendry sets up wherever there's an empty space.

"I have no home," he says.

This is Pendry's eighth year of teaching. He earned his undergraduate degree at Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., his master's degree at the University of Phoenix campus in Las Vegas.

Pendry, 29, is a former high school wrestler who grew up in Riverside, R.I. "I was too small for football," he says.

The short and stocky teacher is stuffed into a golf shirt today. He's an avid golfer who moonlights in the golf department of a sporting goods store to supplement his $37,500 salary. His wife, a leasing agent for an apartment complex, just had a baby, their second child. She is staying home for a few months with the infant.

Pendry offers a first impression as an energetic spark plug of a teacher. He says he often nicknames his students. "Armpit" was one last year.

Pendry looks over his class list. Thirty-two names. He recognizes a few from the stories teachers swap in the faculty lounge over hurried lunches.

Pendry's class is about one-third black, one-third white and one-third Hispanic, with a few Asian students. Three students are designated gifted and talented, three others are designated special education.

"Should be a good group," Pendry says.

Monday, Aug. 24, 1998

First day of school. Pendry is the first teacher to arrive, a few minutes before 6. His blue Ford pickup is alone in the lot. The blurry orange sun seems huge just peeking over the mountains, promising a scorcher of a first day. Shock jock Howard Stern is on the radio, playing softly in the classroom.

Pendry is dressed in dark gray pinstripe suit pants, but has taken his jacket off already. He's wearing a starched white shirt and a tie with cartoon children on it.

Pendry can't decorate the room to his liking because it's not his. Another teacher has taped up life-sized paper children, colored in crayon. There are very few other decorations on the wall.

Pendry had a brainstorm over the weekend: string colored Christmas lights in the classroom window that looks out into the hallway. Pendry said his students can find the room by looking for the lights. Today he will explain to his students that they will have to move from classroom to classroom all year.

Pendry heads for the supply room, where he stocks up on pencils and paper. He will later send a note to parents explaining what supplies the children need.

"But I have this fear that some kids are not going to have anything," he says.

Pendry says he's not very nervous. After seven years of teaching, he knows generally what to expect.

But the first day of school carries a certain anxiety for both students and teachers. Both wonder what the other is like. He admits he didn't sleep well last night.

Pendry wants to nail his first impression like a gymnast off the vault.

"Everyone has a teacher they remember from school," Pendry says. "Maybe it's my ego, but I want to be that teacher."

He's ready, full of energy. He paces the room. Pendry sees himself as half entertainer.

"When I teach, it's like a six-hour variety show," Pendry says. "When that last bell rings, and I give that last high-five, I'm beat."

More than an hour before the bell rings and well before his students begin lining up for their first day of school, Pendry writes on the board, "Welcome to 4th grade."

The day goes quickly, strung together by awkward moments and anticipation. The students and the teacher slowly get to know each other. At one point students write letters to themselves, to be opened at the end of the year. Each writes about goals.

As the day winds down, Pendry wraps up some classroom get-to-know-you games. Pendry pairs students for an exercise that requires them to interview each other, then introduce each other to the class.

A complex child

Pendry later talks about one student, Amal, whom he expects will be his toughest behavior problem this year. The handsome boy is hyperactive, it's clear, and in the final minutes of the first day, he's all over the place.

At one point during the day, Pendry moved Amal to a desk away from the other students.

But Amal keeps jumping up and walking around. Every few minutes, sometimes every minute, Pendry tells Amal to sit down. Amal got kicked out of music class in the first eight minutes this morning, banished to the hall for doing somersaults.

Pendry has a talk with him in the hall shortly before school ends. It's fruitless. Amal is jumping around a few minutes later.

"You just want to explode on a kid like that," Pendry says. "But it would do no good. It wouldn't do a bit of good to yell at that kid."

Before the bell, Amal seems to be suffering the effects of one day in school after weeks of vacation freedom. He sucks on his shirt collar, soaking it. He rocks back and forth, burying his face in his hands in his lap, chanting something unintelligible.

Pendry calls him over and asks him if he was taking medication last year. Amal nods, looking around.

"Are you taking it now?" Pendry asks.

"No."

A few minutes later, as the other students are interviewing each other, Pendry sends Amal to the office with a note seeking information about the boy's behavior medication.

Amal brings the note back. A school office worker had scrawled, "Called mom. She said Amal is fine at home." Pendry rolls his eyes.

Hate the puppets

The teacher then plays a half-hour Spanish language lesson videotape, one in a series of tapes designed to teach pupils basic Spanish.

The tapes were created by Clark County curriculum specialists and are supposed to be a part of the curriculum for all elementary students.

Some teachers use the tapes, which feature Spanish-speaking puppets, more than others. Some teachers see the tapes as a waste of class time.

Pendry tells the students that it's important they pay attention and learn from the tape. He encourages them to repeat aloud what they hear on the tape. But some students are bored.

"They hate the puppets," Pendry says later. "They're fourth graders now. They're trying to be more grown-up."

The bell rings at 3:16 p.m. Pendry says he's not tired. But there is a trace of relief on his face. One day down.

Pendry packs up quickly and heads for Principal Nielsen's office a few minutes after the bell. He brought the principal a raincoat for golfing from the sporting goods store. In less than two hours, that's where he'll be for a four-hour shift.

Wednesday, Aug. 26, 1998

Recess. Pendry is on the playground. He's the only teacher playing with the children, although several are standing around supervising recess.

Pendry is throwing bullet spirals at 12 boys with a Nerf football. He's down to navy slacks and a long-sleeved dress shirt today, no tie. Sweat beads on his forehead in the 100-degree heat.

Mostly, the boys don't catch the hard passes. Some duck. But they seem to love it.

"C'mon, catch the ball, use your hands," Pendry yells. They laugh.

"I love the sound it makes when it bounces off their chest," Pendry jokes.

Several boys come up to Pendry and just stand there, waiting to see what he will say.

"How are you guys -- you married?" The children crack up. It's one of Pendry's favorite jokes.

A girl interrupts to say her hand hurts.

Pendry tells her to not swing so hard on the monkey bars. It's all the medicine she needs, and she strolls away.

Math time

Finally the bell rings. The children line up, boys in one, girls in another. That's the procedure for the year every time they leave or enter the school or classroom.

Pendry stands at the door barking an order to sit down and begin work immediately as the students file into class.

Most get to work. The students are paired for a math activity. Each pair has 100 blocks. Their task: arrange the blocks in groups that make it obvious at first glance that there are a total 100 blocks.

A few groups make 10 lines of 10. Others try two lines of 50, including the lively Nasser and his partner, Richard.

Pendry asks them how they could arrange the blocks to be more immediately recognizable as 100.

"How do I know there are 50 in that line?" Pendry asks. The two slowly realize that 10 groups of 10 would be more easily recognizable as 100.

Pendry lets them reach that conclusion on their own, gently prodding. "Can you make those groups of 50 any smaller?"

Pendry spends most of his time overseeing the assignment by standing over Ray and Amal, who continues to be a discipline problem.

"You should have seen the spit bubble Amal blew yesterday -- as big as a grapefruit," Pendry says.

Pendry struggles to get Ray and Amal to pay attention to the assignment, urging them to get started several times.

Finally the two choose to break up the blocks into 20 groups of five. Pendry praises Amal profusely, hoping the boy will respond and want to please his teacher more. But it fails. Amal spends the last hour of class leaping up to get a drink and making mouth noises as Pendry talks.

There are others who are emerging as troublemakers: Nasser, Nick, Ray, Orwell and Ramon.

They sometimes stray off task if Pendry doesn't stand over them, and seem easily distracted. Pendry shows off a trick he has developed with Ray, a tall boy for his age with a blond buzz cut and an earring in his left ear.

"What's this?" Pendry asks Ray, holding up a crooked index finger.

Ray reluctantly answers, "I know, dialing finger." (Pendry is threatening to call Ray's parents with the gesture.) Pendry smiles.

Points for creativity

It takes the class the full 20 minutes or so to do the math assignment. Several of the students already are distinguishing themselves as among the brightest in the class. Hannah and Shannon T. -- there are two Shannons and two Robertos in class -- finish the assignment in just a few minutes.

The bored girls arrange their blocks in groups of 10 but also by color and then in the shape of the numerals 1-0-0.

Pendry laughs. "Extra points for creativity," he says.

Later Pendry launches a language arts lesson: identifying declarative vs. interrogative sentences. "All you have to do is look at the end -- if it's a period that means ..."

"Declarative," a few students mutter in unison.

"A question mark ..."

"Interrogative," the students answer.

"This is the easiest homework you'll ever get from me," Pendry tells them. He gets immediate applause from the class.

Pendry bows, saying a sarcastic "Thank you."

Sick of school

New students are wandering into Pendry's class at a one-a-day rate.

Today it's Elizabeth, who wears glasses and seems pensive, distant and shy. Pendry suspects she should be in special-education classes, but has to wait for paperwork from her last school to catch up with her. Sometimes it takes a few weeks.

Elizabeth asks to go to the nurse with an earache.

"Is it one of those earaches caused by the first day of school?" Pendry asks softly. "How has your first day been? Don't lie ..."

He sends her to the office. Office staffers send her back a few minutes later, as Pendry had predicted.

Pendry has seen a lot of ailments already, real and imagined. Roberto L. has bandages on his forearm from ringworm. Pendry tells him to keep it covered.

Another student, Ronny, a pudgy boy who didn't wear his hearing aids the first day because he was embarrassed, now has them in.

An office worker on Monday told Pendry that the boy is supposed to wear hearing aids. Pendry had a quiet one-on-one talk with the boy about it and Ronny promised to wear them from now on.

After the final school bell Pendry has hall duty, monitoring the stream of students who flood out of their classrooms. A few pupils from last year's class come by.

"You married?" Pendry asks.

Later Pendry is thinking about Amal.

He's keeping a list to document Amal's behavior problems and how they affect the rest of the class. He may need it for future conversations with counselors, the principal, the boy's mother.

Amal is taking up a lot of his attention, Pendry says.

"I've got an Amal folder on my desktop," he says, gesturing to his computer. "The sick thing is he's smart. It's not that he's not intelligent."

Friday, Aug. 28, 1998

Finally, the last day of the week.

It's math time again. Pendry is running more math review games. Students are paired for a game in which they use cards -- each card with one digit -- to make two 2-digit numbers that add to 100.

Some pupils are quick to arrange numbers that have a sum of 100. Others students are slow to understand. LeAnthony has trouble adding single digits. He struggles with four plus five.

"Eight," the boy insists, before a classmate saves him with a whispered, "nine."

As Pendry asks for answers, students often shout them out. Pendry tells them to raise their hands. This year, it becomes one of his pet peeves.

"I'm thrilled you knew the answer, I'm disgusted you shouted it out," he tells them.

Some don't learn. They continue to belt out the answer, robbing other students who dutifully raise their hands.

Most seem to finish the math game. Several students take all of Pendry's time during the exercise. Amal is among them. At first he refuses to cut out his numbered cards. Then apparently jealous of the others, he cuts them out.

Pendry pairs Amal with Orwell. They begin arguing as soon as Pendry walks away.

Elizabeth, the recent class addition, never really gets started with the game. Her partner, Maria, seems frustrated.

"She doesn't get it," Maria tells Pendry right in front of Elizabeth.

Elizabeth is timid and completely distracted by the slightest noise or sound. Pendry tries to focus her on a double-digit addition problem, urging her to manipulate the digits so the numbers add up to something close to 100.

Elizabeth throws digits together in what seems like a random try. Pendry shows her how another combination would have been even better.

He asks Elizabeth if she has ever been on medication. She says yes, Ritalin and one other. But her mom has taken her off medication for a year, she says.

Pendry has several students who take medication to alter their behavior. Pendry is not sure how he feels about the trend toward using medication with behavior-problem students, but he has seen that it works for some.

Pendry keeps calm as the volume in the class rises.

Another teacher has sent one of her students into Pendry's class. The teachers sometimes send each other students who won't behave.

"Sit down by my desk, be quiet, do the work your teacher gave you, and you and I will get along fine," Pendry sternly tells the boy. Then he jokes, "Don't drink my Coke."

Later Pendry halts the math lesson. It's time for language arts. More review of the four common purposes of sentences: to declare, to command, to question or to exclaim.

No 'underwear'

Pendry tries humor, hamming it up, blasting from one point to another in a desperate attempt to keep their attention.

"Give me a declarative sentence -- don't use the word underwear again," he snaps at Ronny. Ronny laughs and conjures, "The frog jumped far."

Ramon somehow hurt his head and is wearing bandages, held to his close-cropped head with his baseball hat. He is chatty, as usual.

"Ramon, you're bugging me," Pendry tells him point-blank.

Darius' mom stops by in the middle of the afternoon today. She wants to know if Darius will remain in the class.

Darius' third grade teacher had considered holding the boy back for another year of third grade. Darius is in Pendry's class on a trial basis. Ultimately Pendry decides to keep him in fourth grade.

The sentence lesson continues.

Pendry is asking for examples of a declarative sentence. Amal several times says, "The frog farted."

Pendry initially ignores it but finally tells Amal to knock it off.

A few minutes later Amal makes loud mouth noises, which Pendry also ignores. But Amal persists and Pendry sends him into the hall.

There, Amal covers the window between the hall and the classroom with his saliva and rubs the glass hard enough to make a loud squeak reverberate in the room. He wets the glass with more spit. Pendry tells his students to ignore him, and they do for the most part.

Pendry makes it through a review of subject vs. predicate. But the class is restless. He pulls out some of his tricks to get their attention. He leaps on the students' desks, which are arranged in three clusters in the classroom.

The pupils smile, watching their teacher walk atop the furniture. They listen for the moment.

By 3 p.m., 16 minutes before dismissal, Pendry is having a hard time getting them to focus, although most seem to be grasping subject vs. predicate. But he knows he is losing them.

For the last 10 minutes of class they play Silent Ball, a game in which students sit on their desks in silence, tossing a beach ball back and forth. Students who miss a catch or utter a word are out.

Silence settles on the room, broken only by the sound of small hands catching an inflatable ball.

So ends the first week of school for the 33 pupils who have shown up in Pendry's fourth grade class.

Tuesday, Sept. 1, 1998

"In six days, I've added six kids," John Pendry says. His class is exploding. Grand total: 34.

"It's 33 or 34, I try not to count," Pendry said.

Still it's not as many as Pendry's biggest class ever: 41. He jokes about going for the record, like St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire, who is chasing the home run record.

Pendry has just two empty desks left in the room. Today he really notices that it's becoming a full house. It takes every bit of energy he has toward the end of the day to maintain order.

At one point, Pendry makes a five-minute speech about how the students need to cooperate with him. Keep the noise down, he lectures. He tells them that when they finish one assignment, they should move on to another.

"God, there's a lot of bodies in here," Pendry muses at one noisy point during the day.

Pendry is constantly surrounded by three or four students who have questions, are avoiding work or just want some attention.

As students encircle him, Pendry tells them to raise their hands at their desks if they need help.

"Every time I look around, it's like, God," Pendry says, sighing. "There are too many kids doing too many things."

The latest additions to the class: Jennifer, LaTasha, Teresa Lee, a special education student and the disheveled and sad-looking Lucy.

It's Lucy's first day today. She's wide-eyed, with pigtails and a purple T-shirt. Pendry pairs her with Maria.

Pendry knows Teresa Lee was a discipline problem at the school last year. So far she has been quiet. It's a fresh start, as far as Pendry is concerned.

"She's afraid of me so far, I think," Pendry says. "We'll see. The honeymoon doesn't usually last long."

Lunch time comes.

The students rush to form two lines so fast that they trample each other, stepping on each others' heels. Pendry has them sit down and do it again.

They head to the lunch room, what teachers call the "multipurpose" room that serves as cafeteria, auditorium and meeting hall. Pendry and several other teachers snake their classes through the hallway and then remember it's Election Day. They can't use the cafeteria because voters are filing in and out. So the teachers herd the noisy mass of children into the hallway outside the multipurpose room.

It's mass confusion. Pendry takes control, forming two lines marching toward the cashier, who is set up in the hall. All the while Pendry is trying to ask Amal about why his behavior is worse than usual today. Amal folds his arms, scowls and refuses to answer.

Earlier this morning Amal had refused to leave the room when Pendry asked, marking the first time he openly defied his teacher. Pendry had sent Amal to the hall for making rude noises. Pendry muses, "The funny thing is, he really thinks he invented the fart noise."

The pupils finally begin to filter through the makeshift lunch line, then outside to eat. Pendry has a breather.

He is troubled by Amal. He plans to talk to the school psychologist and Amal's mother.

"It's only the second week," Pendry says. "I feel for him, but at the same time, I have a classroom full of other kids I have to teach. I have to figure out what is best for Amal. That's my job."

During lunch, Pendry uses the principal's office to call Amal's mom. He leaves a message. It's the third time he has called her.

This morning she told Pendry she had to take a shower and hung up. He seeks out a teacher in the teacher's lounge who had Amal last year. The boy had spit on her and hit her once.

Later in the afternoon, Pendry lets the students run around outside for a few minutes. The recess isn't part of the official district school day. But the fourth graders need the "wiggle time," Pendry says. The boys play football, spending half the recess choosing up teams.

Pendry is more interested in watching Lucy, the new student who showed up today.

Lucy had asked if she could bring her bag of popcorn to recess. Pendry said sure. She munches contentedly through recess, standing in the scant shade offered by a 15-foot tree.

Pendry paired Lucy with Karen this morning, and the two seem to be getting along. Pendry is relieved that the transition may go smoothly. If Lucy has no friends, she'll be uncomfortable in class, and he'll have a tougher time teaching her.

"She's scared to death," Pendry says. "I look at her, and her eyes are so big. These first few days she's just trying to make a few friends and keep her head above water."

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MONDAY: A substitute teacher struggles to control the students. Later Pendry returns and welcomes another new student to his classroom.

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