One year in a Las Vegas elementary school

"I said pupa, uh, huh, huh, huh," Pendry says, imitating the raunchy animated stars formerly on MTV.

The impression is good enough for a few laughs.

Later Pendry explains his teaching style. "I try to incorporate wedgies, boogers and underwear as much as possible," he says. "It keeps their attention."

Welcome to the fourth grade.

This school year the Sun has studied the lives of one teacher and his students in a Clark County School District classroom.

With the help of school officials the newspaper found a teacher who was willing to open his classroom to a reporter and photographer. Reporter Benjamin Grove spent more than 150 hours observing John Pendry and his fourth graders at Helen Jydstrup Elementary School in southwest Las Vegas.

The access provided an up-close look at the day-to-day process of teaching and learning.

The Sun chronicled classroom experiences in detail from August through late November. Since then we have closely monitored the students' progress. Their story will appear in the pages of the afternoon Sun for seven days: today, Monday through Friday and next Sunday.

Each day the series will feature a reporter's diary and a story on an issue relating to the diary.

The names of the students and their teacher and substitute teachers have been changed to protect the identities of the children. The names of other teachers at the school are real.

This fourth grade class faces challenges commonly found in other Las Vegas schools: high transiency rates, crowded classrooms, discipline problem students, disrupted routines, limited parent involvement.

But there is more to public education in Las Vegas than a laundry list of problems attached to the fastest-growing metropolitan district in the nation.

Ultimately, the Sun found the most interesting story did not center on school district controversies, grim statistics or scandals but on the obscure, sometimes tedious -- sometimes hilarious -- details of classroom life.

A math lesson. A spelling bee. A crying child. A funny voice.

Look closely and discover that the story of a classroom -- the story of education in Clark County -- is a human drama, marked day in and day out by tiny triumphs and tragedies that go largely unnoticed.

To better understand the problems that plague public schools, first understand the people behind them, officials say.

"It's a lot more complicated than you think," Superintendent Brian Cram said. "So many times I hear people out there -- politicians, others -- say there is a panacea. There's a silver bullet that will solve our problems. That fails to recognize how complicated our social problems are. There is no quick fix."

The daily lives and interactions of John Pendry and his students paint a picture not of policies and programs, but of people.

This is their story.

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