More English in a P.E. Class

Today, stereotypes were broken by a small statured first year teacher at Bret Harte Middle School in Los Angeles, CA. Harte is a very challenging school. There are lots of students that live in foster homes, fights are commonplace (I saw three within fiften minutes today), and academic achievement seems to be the farthest thing from some of the students minds. I was completing an observation on a physical education teacher. I was never a physical education teacher but was assigned a few this semester at CSUDH, where I am a professor. Today, I went to the blacktop and watched this first year teacher organize about forty kids and they completed an activity where they did what amounted to a letter relay race. There were a bunch of mock scrabble tiles face down about 50 meters from the students. They had to run down, grab a random tile and bring it to the group until the group had eight tiles. After this, the group had to generate words for points. It was PE Scrabble. They loved it. I have been in many English classes where kids aren't manipulating letters like they did today.

So, my message today is that sometimes beauty pops up where you least expect it...today it was in a middle school PE class in South Central L.A. Kids with lip piercings and troubles just manipulating letters and words and not even realizing the thinking they were engaged in...Ms. Hackett...top notch work today!