If you want to bake cookies, you gotta sift the flour, explains teacher Beverly Espuga to her students. Keelen offers her a challenge of combining two addition problems, and she accepts. He lines up two plastic strips of addition problems for Paloma to add together. Keelen does the same thing with two other addition problems, and Paloma again figures out the correct answers. Keelen, a math major, and Rogers, a psychology major, are both studying to become teachers.
Today is the last of their four visits to observe the suburban district.
Cookies are baking in the convection oven in the back of the classroom for the children's snack. Rutgers junior Bill Bodmer is up at the front of the room bending to listen as students come up to read their journal entries. They get to write about anything they want, and those active imaginations are let loose on the paper. One girl reads her entry about shark teeth and big sunglasses. They want to learn to spell.