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Class Notes
	Teaching without tools (Published April 8, 2002) By H. WELLS WULSIN

About 6,000 courageous souls congregated at the break of dawn on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge on March 24. As a gold sun rose above the Washington Monument, Mayor Anthony A. Williams made the starting command, cueing the swarm of bodies to migrate across the Potomac, shedding tights and sweatpants as they ran. After looping around the Lincoln Memorial, the Lycra-clad bodies charged east along Constitution Avenue for the first leg of the inaugural Washington, D.C., Marathon, a 26.2-mile tour of the capital city.

I was one of the 6,000 that morning, running to explore some historical neighborhoods by foot as well as to test the limits of my physical and mental endurance. With the busy schedule of a first-year teacher, I have had almost no time for jogging this year, but I finally decided to register for the marathon when I realized that I could use it to address one of the most pressing problems faced by myself and many other teachers across the District.

Before the marathon, I sent a letter to friends and relatives, explaining to them the dire need for basic science equipment in my classroom and asking them to sponsor me with donations. At the beginning of the school year, I found myself in a classroom suitable for teaching almost any academic subject except science.

Of five sinks, only two faucets worked, one with very low pressure, the other with very high pressure. The flammable gas valves have been permanently shut off, for fear of abuse by students. In the way of supplies, I found cabinets full of years-old junk, but almost nothing of value to teaching science. There are a couple boxes of old test tubes (most of which are broken), some goggles and some flasks, but basically nothing more. There are no aprons, no beakers, no meter sticks, no pipettes, no hot plates.

This spring I took a Saturday class at Howard University with other D.C. chemistry teachers on methods of high school science teaching. Our professor, from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, was routinely astounded that the resources in the District are often worse than in his home country.

Discussing the requirements for a limiting reactant lab, he told us, "Well, surely you have sodium hydroxide — things are bad in D.C., but not that bad."

Actually, they are that bad.

In my classroom there is no sodium hydroxide or any other chemical, except for a handful of bottles with yellowed labels.

Many experiments require only very basic materials. My physics students dropped eggs off the top of the stadium in protective containers they designed at home (only about 40 percent cracked). In chemistry, we have used 9-volt batteries to perform the electrolysis of water and have used birthday candles to investigate the process of combustion.

But there is only so much that can be done with supermarket supplies. Without thermometers, how do you measure the heat capacity of a metal? How do I convince my students of the Law of Conservation of Mass, since we have no scales to test it with? How can we study circuits without dry cells, wires and resistors?

Fortunately, many friends and family members generously responded to my letter and were able to meet my fundraising goal to cover essential materials needed for next year. But what about students in every other classroom in the District — where will their supplies come from?

Is this the kind of educational system we want to have in the capital of our nation? Do we think it is right for a student to spend an entire year in high school chemistry without ever seeing a beaker, a Bunsen burner, a scale or a pipette?

Students in the richest nation in the world deserve better. There are American students who have access to better resources: many public high schools are outfitted with state-of-the-art lab equipment. But that is not the case here, where the D.C. Public Schools system ran $98 million over budget last year and is currently under a spending freeze for a $22 million deficit this year.

The United States prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but here – in the nation’s capital and in many urban school districts across the country – children are not getting a fair chance at their dreams. They are being handicapped by an educational system that has failed to meet even basic minimum standards.

America should be a country grounded in the equality of all people, but in our schools — one of the places where it matters most — glaring iniquities in funding mean that divisions between racial and socioeconomic classes persist and are unlikely to change in the near future. To truly offer equal opportunity to all people, we must guarantee that every child has access to a decent education.

My experience this year makes me question whether our society has the resolve to make this level of fairness a reality.

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Send stories, advice, or questions to H. Wells Wulsin at wulsin@gwu.edu.

Copyright 2002, The Common Denominator