It is responses like this that keep Elana Haviv 94 teaching and fundraising 12 to 14 hours a day, as she has for the past six years. CMCE instructors visit classrooms for an hour and a half each week, staying with the same class for two to four years. They collaborate with classroom teachers, altering the curriculum so that students relate more effectively to it while fulfilling state and district requirements. Thus students learn history through painting, spelling through poetry, nutrition through dance, geometry through architecture. By answering provocative questions and making books, art, videos or model cities, children take an active role in their own education.
Teachers benefit too.
This system also disregarded the role of self-expression in the learning process. A sociology and anthropology major, Haviv didn t expect to be teaching during her last two semesters. But she took a year off from classes and wrote an elementary school curricula that encompassed the arts and embraced the thoughts and ideas of students. Returning for her senior year, Haviv approached teachers at G. W. Childs School in South Philadelphia for their cooperation in running an experimental pull-out program, when students are taken out of their normal classrooms a few afternoons a week. At first, teachers at the school selected only bright, well-behaved students to participate in Haviv s experiment.