EDUCATING TEACHER KELLI FUNK
September 12, 1993. "Inquirer." The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday magazine.
KELLI FUNK STANDS AT the front of Room 130 in West Philadelphia High School, bantering with students as they drift in for biology.
They slap their backpacks down on long black science tables grouped in a
horseshoe. She waits for them to settle down. Then her high-pitched "teacher voice" rings out.
"OK, Third Period!"
Kelli Funk is 22 years old, built solidly like the Lancaster County farmer and field hockey player that she is. She has two earrings in each ear, wavy blond hair, round red glasses and a guileless smile. She is training to be a teacher, and this class is her boot camp.
"We had a test yesterday," she says as the commotion subsides. "From what I can tell, things didn't go exactly as planned. Maybe as a group you thought the test wouldn't be difficult. Maybe the problem is we didn't communicate about it properly. I'd like you to write on a piece of paper your frustration about yesterday's test."
She wades into the center of the horseshoe, idly placing her hand on a shoulder or two. Seventeen faces stare back at her. All are black faces, which is typical in an inner-city high school. Only half the class has shown up, which is also typical.
The faces are perplexed. A teacher wants us to tell her what's wrong with a test? This isn't how they understand the game. Teachers never assume anything's wrong with a test, only with the students.
But Kelli is dead serious. It's December, and she has spent six weeks in Room 130, teaching this class of 33 and another right before it. And she is searching for a reason that - after all her carefully prepared lessons, after all her nights devising group projects, after all the days taking apart models of the human body to study its organs - most of these kids still failed a simple anatomy quiz.
Biology is a ninth-grade subject, but in this group, only one student is in ninth grade. Most are in 10th, five are in 11th and three are in 12th. At least half are trying to pass the course for the second or third time.
"Did you study? Did I need to review better? What can we do to improve the test?"
One boy slowly digs out a pencil, then stares at it as if it were a creeping insect. Others shift in their seats.
"You don't have to write your name," she adds quickly.
Still nothing.
Kelli is not much older than these teens. She likes most of them, loves them even. They are, after all, her first.
Danielle, who disrupts every class with her incessant need for attention, tugs at her conscience. Paul, who always lightens things up with a joke, makes her laugh. Malo, who usually stares out the window or talks loudly with his seatmate, is on a tear to make up his work. Antoine, who studiously ignores all assignments, surprises her with questions that send her scrambling to the encyclopedia.
Kelli knows these kids lead difficult lives - most without fathers, many without mothers, almost all in poverty in one of the city's roughest neighborhoods - and she tries to understand them. But most of all, she tries to understand why none of the education theories she learned at the University of Pennsylvania seem to work.
"Are you frustrated?"
Seventeen heads shake "no."
"Do you find the subject interesting?"
Again, the heads shake.
Kelli looks out at the impassive faces, and takes a deep breath. Her voice is urgent.
"This is very important to me," she pleads. "I'm learning how to be a teacher. You must help me."
EACH YEAR, 1,300 STUDENT TEACHERS from 70 colleges and universities - from Temple and Penn to Beaver and Chestnut Hill - fan out into the city's public schools, ready or not.
Teacher education has taken a hit lately in the nationwide breast-beating over the inadequacy of American schools. Critics argue that most teacher-prep curricula lack rigor and focus, rely on archaic theories of education and are full of simple-minded child-psychology courses far removed from the realities of any classroom. Teacher interns headed for big cities are at a particular disadvantage. Many colleges dispatch them with scant understanding of uniquely urban ills.
The University of Pennsylvania is different. It hardly can ignore the city surrounding it. Talk of poverty, race and their impact on schools was a constant in courses taken by Kelli and 42 others training to be secondary teachers in the Graduate School of Education.
Sure that little could shake her, Kelli set off for Room 130, West Philly High, last Oct. 16.
She remembers the journey, just 13 blocks on Walnut from 34th to 47th.
Leave the Ed School, head west past the copying centers and the bookstores and the fast-food joints that feed off the university, past the Penn president's mansion, and soon you will cross a palpable line into the inner city. From ivied halls training mostly privileged, young, white adults to be future leaders of society, to scarred halls filled with demoralized black adolescents who have trouble envisioning any future at all.
"I felt as though I needed to jump across a chasm," Kelli would later recall.
Staying in Lancaster County would have been easier. Her family owns a 240- acre farm in Millersville, where a greenhouse and market do a thriving business in watermelons, asparagus, raspberries and all sorts of homemade jellies.
Kelli had worked on the farm, now run by her father, all her life. She supervised the migrant raspberry pickers, oversaw the customers who pick their own luscious strawberries and did inventory on the computer.
"I am proud of my birthplace, its strong family values and work ethic," Kelli wrote in an autobiography for one of her courses at Penn, "and I am proud to be the fifth generation of my family to farm our land."
But now, she wants to teach.
That same urge also gripped her older sister, Kathy Kirk, who teaches learning disabled eighth graders at E.T. Richardson Middle School in Springfield, Delaware County. By choosing teaching, the two Funk girls presented their father with the possibility that the farm may pass out of the family's hands.
Fred Funk is disappointed, but proud. "She's so good with kids," he says of Kelli. "Even when she supervises the pickers, she knows all their names. They're all young kids, mostly Asians, but she relates to them."
Kelli went to Penn Manor High School, on a sprawling rural campus that draws nearly 1,200 students from both farms and suburbs in a 100-square-mile area around Millersville.
Punctuated as it was by normal childhood crises, Kelli's education was full of honors and affirmation. Even after her parents divorced when she was in eighth grade, their encouragement never flagged, and her autobiography overflows with tales of happy times at school.
A student-athlete, she starred at field hockey and just missed being valedictorian of the Class of '88 - because of a B in, of all things, biology lab in junior year.
About 65 percent of Penn Manor grads go on to some form of higher education, though rarely to the Ivies. But Kelli had big dreams and a strong need to open up her world. She chose Penn in part for its hockey team, in part for its "diversity," a thought that's laughable to some of her new urban friends who see only its exclusivity.
At Penn, "I met my very first Jewish person," Kelli wrote in her autobiography. ". . . I learned all the 'politically correct' terminology and had Afro-American students in my classes regularly. I learned about 'gay rights' and discovered my political voice.
"I go home and sometimes have to laugh at what people in my town believe and what they say and do, and all that they are not aware of in the world around them. I am afraid that I could have been this way too."
Still, Kelli's parents had taught her one basic truth: It's what is inside a person that counts, not race or religion. She wasn't afraid of what awaited her at West Philly High. Just full of unanswered questions.
She wondered how race would figure into classroom life, how the students would react to her. She wondered, too, whether she'd be able to explain complex concepts, whether she'd have enough supplies, whether she'd get along with her "cooperating teacher" - the person whose classroom she would invade for nearly six months.
It didn't take long for the race issue to elbow itself to the front of the line.
KELLI'S CO-OP TEACHER IS A WISE, REGAL-looking, 50ish veteran of the classroom named Kathleen Jones - Mrs. Jones to both her students and to Kelli.
On the very first day that Kelli is due to show up in Room 130, Mrs. Jones has arranged for the entire class to go on a field trip. They will see the movie Sarafina!, a musical about a young girl coming of age in apartheid South Africa and dreaming of theatrical stardom in the midst of bloody racial repression.
Whoopi Goldberg plays a black teacher who abandons the traditional Afrikaaner curriculum to teach her students about their heritage, and is tortured and killed for her pains. For all the upbeat music and joyful dancing, the movie mercilessly depicts the horrors of apartheid.
The students ride the bus to the Ritz and back, and the next school day, Mrs. Jones asks them how the movie made them feel. They talk about South Africa and race, about the music and dancing. Then one of the students speaks up.
"It made me hate white people more," she says.
Kelli gives a slight start. It suddenly comes out in full relief for her that she is the only white person in Room 130. The student realizes it, too.
"No, not you," the girl says, a little embarrassed.
Kelli replies evenly. "That's how you feel. Say what you feel. Don't not say something because I'm here."
ALL THE TROUBLES OF URBAN adolescence are bottled in West Philadelphia High, a red brick building that consumes the block between 47th and 48th, and Walnut and Locust.
Virtually all 1,500 students are black; three-fourths are poor. More than 350 are labeled "learning disabled" or "emotionally disturbed," with just 22 "mentally gifted." There are nearly five times as many special-ed teachers as guidance counselors. Any given day, three out of four students show up.
The average combined SAT score is 609, out of a possible 1600, and in the 1991-92 school year only 96 students even took the college-entrance test.
West's attrition rate is stratospheric. In 1988, 386 students started their freshman year. By 1992, senior year, only 169 were left. And of those, 23 failed to graduate on time.
The immediate reason for this attrition is obvious: Students don't pass their courses. For instance, in 1991-92, the failure rate for ninth-grade science - usually biology - was 40 percent. A mere 14 students managed A's in the subject.
The underlying reasons for the attrition are obvious, too.
West has a day-care center for students' babies and a clinic that distributes condoms.
It also has violence. In 1991-92, 13 knives, two guns and two other weapons were confiscated from students; there were six indecent assaults, two drug offenses and four assaults on teachers. Some argue that for a school so large and poor, that's not bad. Others point out that Bartram High, with twice as many students in a similarly troubled neighborhood, had only seven weapons and assault incidents.
Nearly six months after Kelli arrived, a student who was described as one of West's more promising minds was arrested with his 18-year-old brother for allegedly shooting a young father in his car in a church parking lot and stealing the 1991 Acura with the man's baby inside. The crime shocked the school. Why did it happen? Random violence? Cheap thrills? Who knew? The murder was the talk of the school for a day or two. Then people forgot.
But as Kelli settled into West, she wasn't scared to walk the halls. She didn't focus on low SAT scores or flunking grades.
All she saw were kids - kids who needed help, kids she liked, kids to whom she fervently wanted to teach biology.
She tried hard to get to know them. She learned about Danielle's tough shuttle between her parents, about Ayanna's baby and the day-care problems that were making her skip class, about Malo's stumbling attempts to get along with his stepmother. And the more she found out, the more resolved she was to become a teacher, full time, in the Philadelphia public schools.
In the lunchroom, some of the other teachers told her she was daft. "Why do you want to be a teacher?" "Get out when you can." "Make sure you get a job in the suburbs." "There's no money in it." A few veterans actually laughed at her zeal, dismissing her with a bless-your-heart condescension.
Kelli tried not to be judgmental. These were older teachers, perhaps burned out from decades of trying to buck the tide of social decline, tired of getting small raises and all the blame for what ailed the school, people who had forgotten how great the inner rewards could be.
Kelli was glad her co-op wasn't like that.
Kathleen Jones did everything she could to make her classroom a place where students wanted to be. She had plants in the windows, pictures of black scientists on the wall, constant reminders on the chalkboard of special events.
She freely admitted she was no innovator. She used multiple choice tests and other limited forms of student assessment that had fallen out of favor. She didn't claim to be a powerhouse of energy and creativity.
But she never lost control, never lost her temper. She felt for her students. And worried.
Teaching biology, she saw that many regarded science as either irrelevant or beyond them, and they didn't try.
Jones had reluctantly concluded that something wasn't working in the public schools. She had a personal policy of giving a gift to any student who got all A's in a marking period. In 12 years, she gave away three gifts. "Some students are doing well, but at our school, most are not doing well," she said. "There is no sense of shame about that. They're all in good company."
A former health inspector who decided in her 30s to become a teacher, Jones was rooted in West Philly. She'd lived there most of her life and sent her son and daughter to city public schools. That made her fairly rare among teachers in the inner city, many of whom, black and white, get in their cars and drive to the suburbs at day's end.
Some days, Kelli thought Mrs. Jones was the very sort of teacher that the program at Penn was trying to supplant - traditional to the core, resistant to change, rarely challenging students academically beyond the most basic stuff.
For her part, Jones, unlike some of the other co-ops, took advantage of workshops Penn provided for them. At the same time, she made it clear that she didn't cotton to some of the ideas about teaching that emanated from the Ivy halls.
"I think youngsters have to be groomed for what they will face in the world," Jones said. "In the world, they will be given few chances."
She never let students retake tests or gave extra credit for corrections they made to papers. That would have been a dangerous invitation to laxity. Her style was to press on, pulling out her worksheets, relying on lecturing and testing.
At first, Kelli followed the "lesson for the day," part of the standardized biology curriculum. It was easy: She could rehearse the night before, secure that she was doing her job.
But it wasn't long before she ditched it. It wasn't working.
She wanted to go more slowly, to study fewer topics in depth, which is what all the hot education gurus advocated. She decided that Third Period, with all its difficult students, needed to be taught in a different way.
And she started from scratch.
"WE'RE GOING TO TRY SOMETHING NEW today."
Kelli reaches for a stack of handmade flashcards on a lab table and turns one, with three rectangles, toward the class.
"This, my friends, is an ope."
Up comes another card, with three black triangles containing smaller colored triangles.
"This is a ving."
Next, a nole - two rectangles and a line. And a stir, with intersecting lines. Then a ranc, with parallel lines.
Kelli had spent all last evening devising this exercise, in which she made up words and assigned them properties. With this, she'd teach them a basic scientific task - classification.
"Now, what's this?" she asks, holding up a new card with what looks like a lower-case f.
"A stir," a few kids venture, recognizing the pattern of intersecting lines. "A ranc," says a lone voice.
Kelli holds up more cards. She gets a few shouted responses. But quickly, the students' interest sinks into sarcasm.
"Where'd you get these things, Girls High?" one boy cracks.
"What are you doing this for?" a girl wonders.
"You'll see," Kelli says, her voice still upbeat. "What makes an ope an ope?"
A few kids yell out answers.
"Thick lines?"
"Rectangles?"
Kelli is excited. Her teacher voice gets even more high-pitched.
"Do you understand what scientific means? You're classifying! I'm giving you characteristics to a word that has no meaning. You gave it a classification, you gave it characteristics!"
In her seat near the door, head resting on forearm, Danielle is visibly unimpressed.
"Did you make these words up?"
"Yes," answers Kelli.
"What a waste of time," Danielle says, disgusted. "We're sitting here answering questions for words that don't even exist."
MALO SCRUNCHES UP HIS nose. What's this all about? He'll never understand how plants reproduce.
It's a rainy winter Friday. The class is even smaller than usual, a dozen kids. Kelli is teaching from the textbook. Her frustration is growing by the minute.
Then she spots the plants Mrs. Jones keeps in the window. She grabs one, a lily, sets it down on the table and starts over.
Part by part, Kelli shows them the lily's reproductive system: the female part, the pistil; the male part, the stamen.
It's not that different from human reproduction, she says. The egg, or ovule, must be fertilized. Whereas humans are able to join the sperm and egg themselves, flowers need help.
Kelli gets theatrical. She imitates bees. She buzzes. She shows how the bee doesn't deliberately transmit the pollen, which contains the sperm, but simply rubs against the right parts of the flower in its search for nectar.
"The bee just sits on there," Kelli explains, "and the pollen gets stuck on it, and it goes on to another flower." The pollen grain contains the sperm and chemicals that cause the sperm to be released when the bee sits on the stigma, the tip of the stamen. The sperm travel down a tube into the lily's ovary, where they unite with the ovule to form an embryo.
Kelli really likes her punchline. "Fruit," she says, "like an apple - an apple is a swollen ovary protecting the seeds. . . ."
Malo's eyes widen. "Oh, I get it! So the bee is the one who takes the pollen!"
Other students start peppering Kelli with questions. Can more than one bee pollinate the same flower? Can birds and people pollinate?
Yes, yes, yes! Kelli literally jumps up and down.
The students laugh good-naturedly at her antics.
But so what? They understand! Kelli wants to shout.
At least for the moment, they understand.
TO CHALLENGE THEIR MINDS. That was Kelli's biggest goal, and her biggest disappointment. She was finding that, in all their years in public school, these students hadn't been exposed to the sort of teaching she had learned at Penn - teaching that leads them to think for themselves.
They believed their only source of information was the teacher's mouth. Their schooling had dulled their interest in finding other sources, and had conditioned them to immediate feedback on their progress. Did I pass? That was all that counted.
"I don't know how it got that way," said Kelli. "But because they're so far behind, they use it as an excuse not to go further. . . . They don't push themselves, and nobody pushes them."
In the 1990s - the age of interactive video and CD-ROM and integrated data bases that put knowledge at the literal touch of a finger - these students were clueless.
In February, Black History Month, she assigned both her classes a research project on black scientists. During that process, she made three upsetting discoveries: one, the students had no idea how to go about doing a research project; two, information on black scientists was sparse at area libraries; three, students didn't know how to use the library anyway.
The project was pure torture. Kelli spent the better part of a week simply teaching them what it meant to paraphrase. Many had thought that, to be correct, everything had to be copied exactly from a book.
Just getting all the permissions and figuring out the logistics to take them to the library at 52d and Chestnut Streets was a bureaucratic nightmare. Once there, the students complained about note-taking on index cards, about the need for a bibliography, about the rules for footnotes and citations.
A lot of them reminded her they weren't going to college. So why push this on them?
Of the more than 60 students on her rolls, only a third submitted papers.
By this point, Kelli thought that was pretty good. Many teachers at West didn't assign homework because so few kids would hand it in.
Kelli required the students to keep journals. "Miss Funk, this is science class, not English class!" they protested. Mostly she got one-sentence entries. And occasionally, they broke her heart:
"Getting high is not fun. It turns your brain blue. . . . but I don't care 'cause I'm failing anyway, so I guest I will do this with my life."
Then in red pen, the girl wrote: "Any comments?"
Another time, Kelli tried a new tack. She read to them from the novel Jurassic Park - to relax them, introduce some scientific concepts, entertain them.
"Miss Funk, why are you doing this?" some of them asked. "Will it be on the test?" They were bored, and Kelli concluded that they didn't understand the book anyway. She abandoned the project.
Kelli's classes never had adequate supplies. She went to the Italian Market and bought shad roe with her own money for them to dissect.
The students weren't allowed to take textbooks home - too much loss. Jones, beaten down by the bureaucracy whenever she tried to order and distribute a sufficient number of books, didn't push the issue. Instead, she photocopied worksheets and handed out books at the beginning of each class. At the end, the books went back into the metal cabinet.
The situation disturbed Kelli. "I feel like I can't hold them responsible," she said. "When I was in high school, the textbook was my bible."
Kelli tried mightily to be part of the solution. In no time, she felt like part of the problem.
Standards? What should her standards be? She knew that most of the class wasn't grasping the biology she was teaching. She knew many couldn't write a cogent paragraph.
Students in Second Period were more academically oriented than Third Period, more apt to do homework and pass tests. But neither class did very well.
Even as she worried that her standards had slipped over the months at West, in the first grading quarter Kelli gave out one B, six C's, five D's and 16 F's in Second Period; three D's and 24 F's in Third Period. In the second grading quarter, things got a little better - three B's, 11 C's, five D's and 10 F's in Second Period; four C's, six D's and 17 F's in Third.
Kelli never blamed the kids. "What they're lacking is, nobody expects anything of them," she said. "It's been done to them. Now they're doing it to themselves."
MARCEL DEFINITELY DOES not want to be here.
He follows his mother, Rosalind Gillis, into the little science office off Room 130, a pleasant space with a coffee pot, a skeleton in the corner and posters of human insides on the wall.
Gillis is carrying a thick book, a manual for the test to become a licensed practical nurse. She sits down at Kelli's breezy invitation. Marcel fidgets.
Kelli is the second teacher they've met with this morning. Gillis is leading Marcel around, almost literally by the hand, from teacher to teacher so she will know what her 15-year-old son has to do to pass his courses and move on to 11th grade.
Marcel takes good care of his body, much better than he does of his mind. His jeans can't quite hide his bulging quadriceps as he lowers himself onto a stool for this painful session.
His problem is simple: He misses a lot of school.
"I be going to the weight room," Marcel says. "I be tired, I can't get up."
"I'd rather you'd be into your academic studies than football," his mother says. "Football can't get you a job."
Marcel gets up, turns his back, puts his hands in his pockets. "Dag. I'm just thinking. Instead of playing basketball, I could have been doing homework."
Kelli has been trying to coax him through his research paper, although now it's April and Black History Month is history. Marcel doesn't see the point. He's in West's new automotive academy.
"These note cards and stuff, that's college work," Marcel says. "I'm going to be an auto mechanic."
Kelli is the soul of patience. She explains that the ability to organize research will serve him well in any career. She tries to explain the difference between copying and paraphrasing when taking notes.
Kelli carefully reviews what Marcel must complete - a take-home test, a quiz on plant reproduction, his paper. "We decided that as long as you hand in something, you pass," she says.
"I got to do a research paper?" Marcel says, exasperated. "God!" He sits on a metal stool with his back to his mother.
"I think he's upset with himself," his mom says. "He's failing."
"I am," says Marcel.
Marcel used to make the honor roll, Gillis says, at Blankenberg and Taylor elementary schools. But once he got to high school, something changed. Either the work got harder, or he lost interest.
Rosalind Gillis, as tough as she's trying to be, understands. Now 32, she dropped out of Bartram High when she got pregnant in sophomore year with Marcel's older brother.
"I was embarrassed," she says. "I was like him. I got left down."
When her son stayed out late and then complained he was too tired to go to school, Gillis didn't force him, but instead gave him chores to do at home. It may not have been the best strategy, she says, but it was the easiest: She was always rushing around, trying to study for the LPN exam and take care of her 3-year-old daughter.
She scans the curriculum Kelli handed her, about reproduction. "Sexual, asexual . . . I know this. I got stuff in library books at home. I can help you with this," she says to her son.
"Dag," he repeats.
"Everybody's reaching out to you," his mother implores. "Everybody's trying to help you."
"Marcel's a very intelligent young man," Kelli stresses.
"I know I'm not gonna get left down, because I'm gonna work," Marcel vows, in a surge of determination. The two walk out to meet another teacher.
The next day, Marcel doesn't show up for class.
SHORTLY AFTER KELLI started at West, Kathleen Jones told her, "Your main job is a counselor, and if they learn some biology along the way, that's great."
Kelli hadn't expected that advice. She wanted to be a mentor to her students. But above all, she wanted to teach them biology. She would, by God, make them understand mitosis and meiosis, plant reproduction and genetics. She'd give them tools for learning that would better their lives in the long run.
Mrs. Jones seemed focused on their survival, here and now.
Regularly she brought in counselors from such organizations as BEBASHI (Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues) to talk to the students about AIDS. She loved to organize field trips, even those that had little to do with biology, to take them outside their insular world.
Mrs. Jones worried that Kelli didn't understand that world.
Once, in a genetics lesson, Kelli asked the kids to trace characteristics through their family trees. Mrs. Jones saw the problem, but kept silent: Many of them had little or no knowledge of the paternal side.
Another time, she had to speak up when she overheard Kelli planning to take assignments to a student who had just had a baby. The girl, one of her most diligent pupils, lived in Tasker Homes, a public housing project in Southwest Philadelphia.
Mrs. Jones put the kibosh on the trip. "You can't go there at night by yourself!" she scolded.
Kelli laughed off her naivete. "What do I know about Philadelphia?"
Still, Kelli couldn't get it out of her mind: If the place was too dangerous for her to visit, what about the young mother who had to live there? No wonder the girl couldn't focus on biology.
As the end of Kelli's internship approached, some students began to confide in her that they were dreading going back to Mrs. Jones' old ways. She was too strict, they complained, and never cut them a break.
Kelli thought about that - and decided it was Mrs. Jones' strength and her own weakness. Kelli had noticed how many former students came back to visit strict Mrs. Jones, how they told her about their problems and imbibed her wisdom. Mrs. Jones was underappreciated by many students - and perhaps, Kelli thought, by herself as well.
She came to believe that Mrs. Jones hadn't really abandoned high academic expectations. It's just that she knew - from life, not Penn sociology courses - what was realistic. Did kids need to know meiosis, or did they need to know how to protect themselves against AIDS?
Mrs. Jones admired Kelli's diligence. She sometimes sat in her office while Kelli taught, and sometimes she sat with the students, chiming in with her ideas. What she liked, she appropriated for herself. She wasn't above that.
The two women - the black veteran of the neighborhood and the white neophyte from the farm - went through the year with deepening respect for each other, united in one immutable reality: They loved teaching.
When it came time to evaluate Kelli's work for Penn, Jones gave her the highest praise she could think of.
"She has effectively demonstrated that teaching is sharing, both experiences and information," Jones wrote. "The students were treated with compassion as well as infused with facts. Kelli has been careful to detect the concerns of the students without compromising her expectations. . . . Kelli has definitely been an educator in the truest sense of the word."
MALO CAN HARDLY CONTAIN himself.
He stands up at the science table and orders Mrs. Jones and Miss Funk out of the room. Then he confronts his classmates.
"We got to get this party together," he pleads.
Tomorrow, April 26, will be Kelli's last day of student teaching. Earlier in the week, a female classmate had taken charge of the party arrangements. She had made a list of what everybody was supposed to bring.
Except the girl hasn't shown up in school since.
Malo, frantic that Miss Funk will leave unappreciated, is trying to organize the party all over again. When he asks if anybody has a $2 gift donation, he gets blank stares. "If I got some money," one boys says, "I'll give it to you."
Then Malo corners Mrs. Jones in her office. Calmly, patiently, she helps him with a game plan.
The next morning, Malo sneaks a cake into the science office. Lacking enough money from the class to buy one, he persuaded his father, a cook at the American Diner on Chestnut Street, to bake one - a lemon cake with chocolate icing and "Farewell, Miss Funk" in cream letters.
It's Malo's moment of triumph. Except when he sees the remnants of the Second Period's cake. Second Period, the "academic" class, which got the single A and all but one of the B's that Kelli handed out all year.
"They got a nice cake," Malo says.
"Your cake is nice, too," Mrs. Jones reassures him.
Fearing that Third Period wouldn't be able to come up with a gift, Mrs. Jones had bought charming but inexpensive earrings to give to Kelli.
Now, as Kelli begins teaching, Malo and the others fidget through a puzzle exercise she had devised to keep them occupied on her last day.
Mrs. Jones cuts in. "Miss Funk, we have an activity of our own."
Out comes the food. Out come the cameras. Out come the tears.
The testimonials are tentative. Mrs. Jones has to prod the students to say something.
"I think all of us here are going to miss you," says Malo. "I guess we're hard for student teachers to deal with . . . but you dealt with us good."
Danielle: "The class did get kind of easier, it was boring, but then again it was nice."
Jawara: "When you first got here, I didn't really like you. You put me on the right track when you called my home when I got into trouble. I'm gonna miss you."
Marketa: "When you first got here, I didn't want a student teacher. But since the months went by, it got easier, I got better grades. I thank you for that."
Then Marketa presents the gift. "It's a little something from the whole class, and hopefully you'll keep it and cherish it."
Eyes glistening, Kelli opens the box.
"When you see the gift, it will have the significance of the Third Period," Mrs. Jones says.
"Definitely, they have personality," Paul interjects.
"Oh," Kelli exclaims, "they're beautiful!"
The earrings are two tiny silver clowns.
UNDER GRAY AND SODDEN skies this Friday morning, June 4, a handful of teachers picket West Philly High along Walnut, protesting budget cuts of faculty and supplies. Around the corner on 48th sits a yellow school bus. Lugging umbrellas and slickers, Miss Funk, Mrs. Jones and 25 Second and Third Period biology students pile inside.
Ever since October, Kelli had been planning this visit to the Funk family farm. She could really teach them there. They'd see fruit grow, learn the principles of reproduction firsthand. They could climb on the irrigation equipment and listen to her grandfather talk about the history of farming.
By the time the yellow bus turns into the parking lot of the Funk Farm and Greenhouse in Millersville, the sun is warming the strawberry fields.
Kelli is in her glory. She takes her crew on a tour of the fields, stopping to show them wild asparagus, budding cornstalks and a vast watermelon field under plastic. "The plastic works like greenhouses," she tells them. "We'll have watermelon before anybody else. What do you know about supply and demand?"
Many of the students aren't used to taking long walks to nowhere. Paul, with his unending cheerfulness and penchant for wisecracks, reflects on his life and how it will never be anything like this.
He travels every afternoon to the Northeast by several buses to work as a stockboy in a deli. "But I don't want people to know," he says. "If they know you have money, they ask you and get you in a stickup."
Kelli's 82-year-old grandfather, Amos Funk, holds court on the wide porch of the white clapboard farmhouse, while his wife Esta, 78, bustles around with cookies and iced tea.
"One thing about farm life you might not understand - how many of you have moved at least once?" he asks.
Most of the hands shoot up.
"I never moved," Amos Funk declares. "I was born in this house, I grew up, went to school, spent a little bit of time in Penn State. I was born here and I'll die here."
Rocking softly in his favorite chair, Amos Funk warms up to these students with whom he shares Kelli, and little else.
"I just love to grow things. That's my challenge. Some of you here might have a challenge, some of you may want to be tall and strong enough to play basketball like Michael Jordan. My goal is to grow things better and in new varieties."
"Grandpa," Kelli says, "tell them how you do that."
"I experiment," he says.
Kelli had prepped the students to ask plenty of questions. It takes a while, but they open up. "How old were you when you started?" "Why don't you have animals?" "What's the best climate for the fruit to grow in?" ''How do you get the strawberries to grow so big?"
Mrs. Jones, sitting crosslegged on the steps, chimes in. "I consider you a wealthy person. You have your farm and your happiness and your health."
Amos Funk sees an opening for a bit of moralizing. "My parents taught me to work. They taught me the value of producing something. They taught me to set goals. Best of all they allowed me to do what I wanted to do.
"Money, in my opinion, should not be a measurement of wealth. What makes you wealthy is the satisfaction in the job you're doing and trying to do better."
Paul has the final question: "Are you upset that Miss Funk didn't follow in your footsteps and farm?"
Amos Funk never loses his smile. "Upset is an interesting word," he says. And then, with a bigger grin, "If you kids give her too much trouble, she may wind up back here."
KELLI ENDED THE YEAR the way she started it: wanting to be a full-time teacher in the Philadelphia public schools.
In December, she put in her application. And then she waited for the bureaucratic wheels of the nation's fifth largest school district to turn.
She waited until February to find out when she could take the district's teacher-qualifying tests, written and oral, for general science and biology. She waited until March to take the written part in each subject. She waited until May to hear that she passed general science. On May 25, she took the oral in that subject.
She waited until June to hear that she had passed the written test in biology - the subject she most wanted to teach. With only two days' notice, she was told to report for her biology oral on June 14.
Several weeks later, she was informed that, based on her test scores, she ranked eighth on the hiring list for general science. Personnel officials said it probably would be September or October before she'd get a job offer.
By midsummer, she still hadn't heard where she ranked on the biology list.
With $50,000 in college loans to pay off, Kelli decided that she could wait no longer.
In July, she got a job offer from Springfield School District.
Although she later received a job offer from Philadelphia, she had already made a commitment; Sept. 2 would be Kelli Funk 's starting day as a sixth-grade science teacher in Room 20 at the E.T. Richardson Middle School, where her sister teaches. She'll also coach field hockey.
Used with permission of THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Copyright © 2007. All rights reserved.