A Rhode Island Education

A Rhode Island Education

The autumn sun was still low in the sky, adding depth of colour to the thick blanket of red and yellow leaves that lay in front of the long low, grey single story building of my penpal school in Rhode Island USA. An Elementary School consisting of 250 students from Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8 (Year 9) run by 12 teaching staff and a number of ancillaries.

For the past four years we had been exchanging project work with the first and fourth year pupils here, and at last I was about to meet the staff and children who up to now had only been names on drawings, essays and emails. As Beverly - my contact in Rhode Island whom I had just met for the first time the day before - drove us up to the school it could easily have been the start of any academic day in the UK. Parents arrived in cars and four-wheel drives, children bundled out carrying all their paraphernalia for the day, and shouts of '..don't forget to..' and '..picking you up at..' rang across the forecourt. Only the fact that the vehicles were on the 'wrong' side of the road and carried colourful Rhode Island number plates gave the game away, that we were in fact 3000 miles from home. And the school would never need to worry about attracting more pupils every year as Rhode Island state law gave it a strictly defined clientele that was dictated by geography and statute rather than parental choice.

Pumpkins and Such Like

We parked in front of the building and passed through a double set of glass doors which would soon be locked behind us as the teaching day began. Security of the pupils was of the utmost importance to the school and the front door bell rang at regular intervals during our visit as someone or other tried to deliver a parcel or package. Immediately to our left as we entered the entrance hall we saw a scarecrow and a collection of figures made out of football sized pumpkins - the Americans take Halloween very seriously. Next to that was a framed copy of the school's mission statement and directly in front of us was a wall display of small apples each one extolling a desirable personal quality - kindness, thoughtfulness, respect for others and so on. To the right was the school secretary's office next door to the Principal who sat in a capacious room with an unenviable view over the car park!

If you could imagine the capital letter 'L', we had entered the building at the lower left hand corner, the school hall was next up the vertical, followed the staff room and then a series of classrooms for the younger end of the school. Our first port of call was about half way along the top edge of the horizontal bar opposite a wall frieze of Harry Potter characters - more of that later. The first thing that struck me as I entered the class was how big and empty it felt, around 30' x 40' of open floor, very little on the walls, negligible equipment, with islands of tables and chairs grouped in the middle. The whole of the opposite wall was glazed giving a very bright airy feeling, but on this relatively warm autumn day it merely produced a greenhouse effect - there was no air conditioning - which forced us to have the door open onto the often busy corridor throughout the day. Beverly's desk was in the far right hand corner, and at the opposite end of the window wall was an open area where the children would later sit to hear their visitor from England read to them. Apart from the impact of space the other feature that emphasised our presence within a foreign education system was the presence of the American flag and oath of allegiance pinned high on the wall of every classroom. Whilst morning assembly was not practised here, every child was nevertheless reminded at the beginning of each school day that they were part of one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Not a religious event but better suited to America's highly diverse, multi-cultural society where the world's creeds could easily be represented within a relatively small gathering of pupils.

Just Like The Tape

As well as making the acquaintance of the children who had so far known me only as 'the teacher from England' I had also been asked to read a chapter from one of the Harry Potter books. In addition, as we were nearing Guy Fawkes Day in England, I had brought along some information about the gunpowder plot, and had made a book containing material provided by members of my class at Cheam. I had asked my children to give me essays and pictures on whatever part of their lives that were most important to them. As a momentary diversion, the collation of this book met with as much enthusiasm from the children's parents as it did from the children themselves. The result was a thick document on A2 paper covering everything from the stunning views out of a holiday cottage window to a child's pride at living in a house dating from the Tudor period. The readings and the book went down extremely well but the story of Guy Fawkes and his gang met with less enthusiasm as the American children found it difficult to relate to a plot against a political system that was so different from their own. Emphasised to some extent by the fact that none of the children I asked had any concept of where Great Britain was or even how small it is compared to the United States. You may be pleased to know that we are located somewhere between Canada and New Zealand, though nobody actually placed us in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

My first reading was with Beverly's class - Grade 4 - and it proved to be a two way learning experience but not in the way I had anticipated. One of the mistakes that we make as Britons when visiting America is to assume that because we appear to understand each other there is no need for any kind of translation, whether verbal or literal. I was therefore surprised to find myself reading words such as trunk, windshield and highway instead of boot, windscreen and road. This book that I thought would be so familiar to me as I opened the page to chapter two suddenly took on the dimensions of a foreign translation. As I read it struck me that perhaps we could turn this into a mutual awareness session so I began to change some of the words into their British English forms. I paused from time to time whenever one of these 'foreign' translations arose to show the children that we are indeed two nations separated by a common language. We even raised the important difference in the use of 'pavement' which in the UK is something we walk on whereas in America it is their word for road. Could you imagine the disastrous consequences of an English teacher telling an American child to always walk on the pavement between home and school? The readings went well and one of the more amusing pieces of feedback was that my characterisations were 'just like the tape' where the characters 'sounded as they should', i.e. with an English accent. The teacher agreed with the class that they would try harder to make their readings of the book more authentic - unfortunately we didn't hear the results of their linguistic quest.

Up Front

A major feature of their approach to education was the emphasis on feelings, respect for others, and being responsible for your actions. There was even a responsibility chart where each child could colour in a square whenever they demonstrated the appropriate behaviour. This was a good balancing factor as the children were very lively in class and not backward in making observations which, in general, though sometimes intrusive, were nevertheless directly relevant to the proceedings. The teachers constantly responded to good behaviour by making comments such as "I liked the way you showed respect for Kenny then" or "I appreciated that you showed concern for my feelings". While we would express our awareness with a "Thank you" or perhaps mentally note a child's behaviour, here every encounter was commented on and rewarded by an oral reaction. While there was little homework at any stage the children were expected to read every night from a book of their own choice for twenty minutes and then respond to the book for ten. I understood this to mean that they were to write about their opinions, feelings and responses to the author and story. The idea of "responding" to a book for ten minutes would terrify me, although once one gets past the vocabulary I suppose it is only a summary and book review, but I can see how they get into training for the "Shrink" and the self improvement books in later life. None of your English reserve here!

The children actually did remarkably well given that in the upper part of the school they had no scheduled play times during the day, just short snack breaks in the classroom at the discretion of each individual teacher. Lower down the school they were allowed fifteen to twenty minutes outside in the mornings. Their day started at 09:00, lunch lasted only half an hour - this was tough on the staff, little preparation time - and finished at 15:00, perhaps bearable for the older children but certainly very difficult for the younger ones. We so often blame poor behaviour on wet playtime and not being able to get outside but here, even in the heat of a non air-conditioned Rhode Island school, the older children got into the grounds at most twice a week for twenty minutes on a rota system. The school hall provided the venue for a class of special needs pupils who had behavioural, emotional or learning difficulties. Each child was given an exercise which would help them re-learn some of the fundamentals of child development - e.g. crawling - make them aware of their bodies and where each part of their body was located in space. For example the children were each given a drink and told to suck them through the kind of narrow bore straws that are usually reserved for stirring drinks. Some specialists feel that children with learning or behavioural difficulties have sometimes missed important stages of physical development or are physically under sensitive or hypersensitive. For this reason the children are taken through a programme to reteach these stages and are asked to perform a number of activities to stimulate reflexes such as the sucking reflex in this case. A small group of children were placed between two floor mats like the filling in a sandwich, and another child was made to roll over the top of them in the manner of a human rolling pin. This exercise made the children in the 'filling' aware of the sensory feedback their were getting from the different parts of their bodies as they were each 'squashed' in turn. At the same time the child on top had to maintain control of its rolling movement to keep it moving along the mat and not off to one side or the other. In other scenarios the children were pulled along on trollies, made to drag punch bags, and taught to make basketball style net shots. They had crawling boards to develop the crawling pattern in children who perhaps had been "bottom shufflers" or otherwise not for some reason developed the sense of laterality that comes with crawling with alternate leg and arm. While I have heard about these sorts of treatments at Conferences and currently we currently have a pupil undergoing "Brushing Therapy" by an alternative therapist, I was amazed to see it going on in a normal state Primary School. The "special" class had nine children in it who had been selected from the kindergarten grade because they had learning or behavioural problems and would be expected to go back into the mainstream after their year in this class. I was extremely impressed by what I saw, and because such work with special needs pupils of this kind is a complete topic in its own right it will be the subject of a separate article.

After the proceedings were over and all the equipment was put away, I noticed that there were still some mats fixed around the perimeter of the hall/gym up to about adult shoulder height. When I asked why these mats were still out I was told this was a permanent arrangement to stop the children - all of them, not just special needs - from hurting themselves should they bump into the walls during gym or meal times! I shudder to think what they would make of our school halls where climbing bars and other pieces of equipment are out and on full display all the time!

As an interesting contrast to the excellent work I saw going on with the special needs children, there was one child who had learning difficulties and was often found wandering around the corridors. He did not have any idea of place or presence and it was a matter of daily routine for anyone passing to lead him off to wherever he had to go, or at least thought he had to go. The school did not have facilities or resource for this child and the staff were left to do their best for the child in amongst their normal teaching duties.

The Deal

The school is managed by a school board, elected every two years, consisting of eight or nine people who wielded absolute power over hiring, firing and funding. We were told that at best only one person on the board would be an educationalist, and that recruitment decisions sometimes seemed to result in the hiring of a friend of one of the board members - no doubt merely pure coincidence. To overcome such a situation would need a very strong Principal to resist the dictates of such a closely knit board. The current Principal had taught at the school for twenty/thirty years and followed another Head who, for financial reasons, had held tenure until she was 72! In the States you have to keep on working until your pension fund is paid up or death whichever comes the sooner! I really cannot imagine maintaining my enthusiasm working in the same school all my working life and beyond. However, the power of the school board is so great when it comes to hiring and firing that I imagine that you would have to be pretty good to maintain your position. It would be interesting to know how much movement there is from school to school over there.

The purchase of learning schemes and materials came within the remit of the District level management, for example the District Superintendent. There are 37 districts in Rhode Island, all 'doing their own thing' and from what I saw this has resulted in buying decisions being made on the basis of the 'best deal' rather than academic suitability. For example we saw work books which were far too thick for little hands to manipulate and way too heavy to put in a child's back pack. The content and layout of these books were also questionable and obviously not selected on the basis of educational need or grade requirements. The teacher who was showing us these books could not believe that in my school the staff decide what is needed under the overall umbrella of a teaching policy and agreed curriculum. Another interesting feature of the school is that when they attempted to introduce uniforms the parents objected on the grounds that uniforms denied their children the right to choose what to wear - only in America!

Overall

I found a school of contrasts, between the highly committed teachers who wanted to do everything they possibly could for the children day in day out right down to the staff who arrived five minutes before classes started in the morning and left shortly after school finished in the afternoon. I observed a philosophy of mass production - catchment area dictated by statute, materials defined by District - balanced by an individualised teaching approach which believes that 'just because one person is hurt it doesn't need everyone to have a band aid'. I saw excellent work in the hall with the special needs children, and yet a child with specific learning difficulties was allowed to roam the corridors on his way between classrooms. Nevertheless what I did see consistently was a commitment at all levels to ensure that the children received the education expected by the parents and the State. I saw a willingness to continue working with my school to help our respective children better understand the world first hand instead of just from pictures in a text book.

Although exhausted by the day, I was fortunate enough to be invited back for a "Pot Luck Supper" with the parents in the evening. I found it hard to believe that this was real life and that I was not in the middle of an American 'sit-com' with the Principal sitting behind a solid wood raised lectern backed by the Stars and Stripes and addressing the parents through a microphone. It was a familiar scene from television but I had not appreciated that it depicted real life! I was amazed that the parents sat separately from the staff although the staff were introduced and stood up individually to make themselves known and I was thrilled at the welcome that I received from the body of the school. Only one in nine Americans has a passport so foreign travel is not so much of an everyday experience for them as for us. The close proximity of other European countries means that we can visit them as easily as the average American visits the next State while for many of them, the cost of transatlantic travel makes visiting abroad a dream. None of the children in this middle class school had been to England although I am sure that many children of equivalent social backgrounds in England would have been to Florida as well as France and Spain.

Like the children, the parents were full of questions and very appreciative of the new dimension that our pen pal scheme had added to their children's education. They poured over our book as avidly as the children had done and were full of questions. After a delicious supper that revealed what cosmopolitan backgrounds these children came from we went to the classroom for a sort of Open Evening. There was very little work displayed- none of the weeks of preparation and wall mounting that we would have put in, and although the parents were at liberty to look in the children's desks they had not been specially tidied for the occasion. The parents asked questions about their children's progress quite informally in front of any other parents who were in the room. There were no five minute appointments here. Because my visit was so short and I had so much that I wanted to do, I did far more teaching than observing and I have returned with more questions than answers about the contrasts in our systems. I saw a lot that was good but also a great deal that made me really appreciate the respect that my school has for my skills and professional judgement. I had not expected to find so much that was totally different in a country where so much of the research we value and quote from takes place. I am anxious to spend longer there to observe rather than teach and to share experiences and opinions with the staff there. Beverly and I talked far into the night for two nights that we stayed and I left feeling that we were really "kindred spirits" (Anne of Green Gables) with so much to share and learn from each other. And hopefully this is the start of many trips in both directions for us.

It was wonderful visit and I would encourage you to do the same if you can possibly flange up a relationship with a school abroad - thank you Beverly!



	The autumn sun was still low in the sky, adding depth of colour to the thick blanket of red and yellow leaves that lay in front of the long low, grey single story building of my penpal school in Rhode Island USA. An Elementary School consisting of 250 students from Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 8 (Year 9) run by 12 teaching staff and a number of ancillaries. For the past four years we had been exchanging project work with the first and fourth year pupils here, and at last I was about to meet the staff and children who up to now had only been names on drawings, essays and emails. As Beverly - my contact in Rhode Island whom I had just met for the first time the day before - drove us up to the school it could easily have been the start of any academic day in the UK. Parents arrived in cars and four-wheel drives, children bundled out carrying all their paraphernalia for the day, and shouts of '..don't forget to..' and '..picking you up at..' rang across the forecourt. Only the fact that the vehicles were on the 'wrong' side of the road and carried colourful Rhode Island number plates gave the game away, that we were in fact 3000 miles from home. And the school would never need to worry about attracting more pupils every year as Rhode Island state law gave it a strictly defined clientele that was dictated by geography and statute rather than parental choice. Pumpkins and Such Like We parked in front of the building and passed through a double set of glass doors which would soon be locked behind us as the teaching day began. Security of the pupils was of the utmost importance to the school and the front door bell rang at regular intervals during our visit as someone or other tried to deliver a parcel or package. Immediately to our left as we entered the entrance hall we saw a scarecrow and a collection of figures made out of football sized pumpkins - the Americans take Halloween very seriously. Next to that was a framed copy of the school's mission statement and directly in front of us was a wall display of small apples each one extolling a desirable personal quality - kindness, thoughtfulness, respect for others and so on. To the right was the school secretary's office next door to the Principal who sat in a capacious room with an unenviable view over the car park! If you could imagine the capital letter 'L', we had entered the building at the lower left hand corner, the school hall was next up the vertical, followed the staff room and then a series of classrooms for the younger end of the school. Our first port of call was about half way along the top edge of the horizontal bar opposite a wall frieze of Harry Potter characters - more of that later. The first thing that struck me as I entered the class was how big and empty it felt, around 30' x 40' of open floor, very little on the walls, negligible equipment, with islands of tables and chairs grouped in the middle. The whole of the opposite wall was glazed giving a very bright airy feeling, but on this relatively warm autumn day it merely produced a greenhouse effect - there was no air conditioning - which forced us to have the door open onto the often busy corridor throughout the day. Beverly's desk was in the far right hand corner, and at the opposite end of the window wall was an open area where the children would later sit to hear their visitor from England read to them. Apart from the impact of space the other feature that emphasised our presence within a foreign education system was the presence of the American flag and oath of allegiance pinned high on the wall of every classroom. Whilst morning assembly was not practised here, every child was nevertheless reminded at the beginning of each school day that they were part of one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Not a religious event but better suited to America's highly diverse, multi-cultural society where the world's creeds could easily be represented within a relatively small gathering of pupils. Just Like The Tape As well as making the acquaintance of the children who had so far known me only as 'the teacher from England' I had also been asked to read a chapter from one of the Harry Potter books. In addition, as we were nearing Guy Fawkes Day in England, I had brought along some information about the gunpowder plot, and had made a book containing material provided by members of my class at Cheam. I had asked my children to give me essays and pictures on whatever part of their lives that were most important to them. As a momentary diversion, the collation of this book met with as much enthusiasm from the children's parents as it did from the children themselves. The result was a thick document on A2 paper covering everything from the stunning views out of a holiday cottage window to a child's pride at living in a house dating from the Tudor period. The readings and the book went down extremely well but the story of Guy Fawkes and his gang met with less enthusiasm as the American children found it difficult to relate to a plot against a political system that was so different from their own. Emphasised to some extent by the fact that none of the children I asked had any concept of where Great Britain was or even how small it is compared to the United States. You may be pleased to know that we are located somewhere between Canada and New Zealand, though nobody actually placed us in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My first reading was with Beverly's class - Grade 4 - and it proved to be a two way learning experience but not in the way I had anticipated. One of the mistakes that we make as Britons when visiting America is to assume that because we appear to understand each other there is no need for any kind of translation, whether verbal or literal. I was therefore surprised to find myself reading words such as trunk, windshield and highway instead of boot, windscreen and road. This book that I thought would be so familiar to me as I opened the page to chapter two suddenly took on the dimensions of a foreign translation. As I read it struck me that perhaps we could turn this into a mutual awareness session so I began to change some of the words into their British English forms. I paused from time to time whenever one of these 'foreign' translations arose to show the children that we are indeed two nations separated by a common language. We even raised the important difference in the use of 'pavement' which in the UK is something we walk on whereas in America it is their word for road. Could you imagine the disastrous consequences of an English teacher telling an American child to always walk on the pavement between home and school? The readings went well and one of the more amusing pieces of feedback was that my characterisations were 'just like the tape' where the characters 'sounded as they should', i.e. with an English accent. The teacher agreed with the class that they would try harder to make their readings of the book more authentic - unfortunately we didn't hear the results of their linguistic quest. Up Front A major feature of their approach to education was the emphasis on feelings, respect for others, and being responsible for your actions. There was even a responsibility chart where each child could colour in a square whenever they demonstrated the appropriate behaviour. This was a good balancing factor as the children were very lively in class and not backward in making observations which, in general, though sometimes intrusive, were nevertheless directly relevant to the proceedings. The teachers constantly responded to good behaviour by making comments such as "I liked the way you showed respect for Kenny then" or "I appreciated that you showed concern for my feelings". While we would express our awareness with a "Thank you" or perhaps mentally note a child's behaviour, here every encounter was commented on and rewarded by an oral reaction. While there was little homework at any stage the children were expected to read every night from a book of their own choice for twenty minutes and then respond to the book for ten. I understood this to mean that they were to write about their opinions, feelings and responses to the author and story. The idea of "responding" to a book for ten minutes would terrify me, although once one gets past the vocabulary I suppose it is only a summary and book review, but I can see how they get into training for the "Shrink" and the self improvement books in later life. None of your English reserve here! The children actually did remarkably well given that in the upper part of the school they had no scheduled play times during the day, just short snack breaks in the classroom at the discretion of each individual teacher. Lower down the school they were allowed fifteen to twenty minutes outside in the mornings. Their day started at 09:00, lunch lasted only half an hour - this was tough on the staff, little preparation time - and finished at 15:00, perhaps bearable for the older children but certainly very difficult for the younger ones. We so often blame poor behaviour on wet playtime and not being able to get outside but here, even in the heat of a non air-conditioned Rhode Island school, the older children got into the grounds at most twice a week for twenty minutes on a rota system. The school hall provided the venue for a class of special needs pupils who had behavioural, emotional or learning difficulties. Each child was given an exercise which would help them re-learn some of the fundamentals of child development - e.g. crawling - make them aware of their bodies and where each part of their body was located in space. For example the children were each given a drink and told to suck them through the kind of narrow bore straws that are usually reserved for stirring drinks. Some specialists feel that children with learning or behavioural difficulties have sometimes missed important stages of physical development or are physically under sensitive or hypersensitive. For this reason the children are taken through a programme to reteach these stages and are asked to perform a number of activities to stimulate reflexes such as the sucking reflex in this case. A small group of children were placed between two floor mats like the filling in a sandwich, and another child was made to roll over the top of them in the manner of a human rolling pin. This exercise made the children in the 'filling' aware of the sensory feedback their were getting from the different parts of their bodies as they were each 'squashed' in turn. At the same time the child on top had to maintain control of its rolling movement to keep it moving along the mat and not off to one side or the other. In other scenarios the children were pulled along on trollies, made to drag punch bags, and taught to make basketball style net shots. They had crawling boards to develop the crawling pattern in children who perhaps had been "bottom shufflers" or otherwise not for some reason developed the sense of laterality that comes with crawling with alternate leg and arm. While I have heard about these sorts of treatments at Conferences and currently we currently have a pupil undergoing "Brushing Therapy" by an alternative therapist, I was amazed to see it going on in a normal state Primary School. The "special" class had nine children in it who had been selected from the kindergarten grade because they had learning or behavioural problems and would be expected to go back into the mainstream after their year in this class. I was extremely impressed by what I saw, and because such work with special needs pupils of this kind is a complete topic in its own right it will be the subject of a separate article. After the proceedings were over and all the equipment was put away, I noticed that there were still some mats fixed around the perimeter of the hall/gym up to about adult shoulder height. When I asked why these mats were still out I was told this was a permanent arrangement to stop the children - all of them, not just special needs - from hurting themselves should they bump into the walls during gym or meal times! I shudder to think what they would make of our school halls where climbing bars and other pieces of equipment are out and on full display all the time! As an interesting contrast to the excellent work I saw going on with the special needs children, there was one child who had learning difficulties and was often found wandering around the corridors. He did not have any idea of place or presence and it was a matter of daily routine for anyone passing to lead him off to wherever he had to go, or at least thought he had to go. The school did not have facilities or resource for this child and the staff were left to do their best for the child in amongst their normal teaching duties. The Deal The school is managed by a school board, elected every two years, consisting of eight or nine people who wielded absolute power over hiring, firing and funding. We were told that at best only one person on the board would be an educationalist, and that recruitment decisions sometimes seemed to result in the hiring of a friend of one of the board members - no doubt merely pure coincidence. To overcome such a situation would need a very strong Principal to resist the dictates of such a closely knit board. The current Principal had taught at the school for twenty/thirty years and followed another Head who, for financial reasons, had held tenure until she was 72! In the States you have to keep on working until your pension fund is paid up or death whichever comes the sooner! I really cannot imagine maintaining my enthusiasm working in the same school all my working life and beyond. However, the power of the school board is so great when it comes to hiring and firing that I imagine that you would have to be pretty good to maintain your position. It would be interesting to know how much movement there is from school to school over there. The purchase of learning schemes and materials came within the remit of the District level management, for example the District Superintendent. There are 37 districts in Rhode Island, all 'doing their own thing' and from what I saw this has resulted in buying decisions being made on the basis of the 'best deal' rather than academic suitability. For example we saw work books which were far too thick for little hands to manipulate and way too heavy to put in a child's back pack. The content and layout of these books were also questionable and obviously not selected on the basis of educational need or grade requirements. The teacher who was showing us these books could not believe that in my school the staff decide what is needed under the overall umbrella of a teaching policy and agreed curriculum. Another interesting feature of the school is that when they attempted to introduce uniforms the parents objected on the grounds that uniforms denied their children the right to choose what to wear - only in America! Overall I found a school of contrasts, between the highly committed teachers who wanted to do everything they possibly could for the children day in day out right down to the staff who arrived five minutes before classes started in the morning and left shortly after school finished in the afternoon. I observed a philosophy of mass production - catchment area dictated by statute, materials defined by District - balanced by an individualised teaching approach which believes that 'just because one person is hurt it doesn't need everyone to have a band aid'. I saw excellent work in the hall with the special needs children, and yet a child with specific learning difficulties was allowed to roam the corridors on his way between classrooms. Nevertheless what I did see consistently was a commitment at all levels to ensure that the children received the education expected by the parents and the State. I saw a willingness to continue working with my school to help our respective children better understand the world first hand instead of just from pictures in a text book. Although exhausted by the day, I was fortunate enough to be invited back for a "Pot Luck Supper" with the parents in the evening. I found it hard to believe that this was real life and that I was not in the middle of an American 'sit-com' with the Principal sitting behind a solid wood raised lectern backed by the Stars and Stripes and addressing the parents through a microphone. It was a familiar scene from television but I had not appreciated that it depicted real life! I was amazed that the parents sat separately from the staff although the staff were introduced and stood up individually to make themselves known and I was thrilled at the welcome that I received from the body of the school. Only one in nine Americans has a passport so foreign travel is not so much of an everyday experience for them as for us. The close proximity of other European countries means that we can visit them as easily as the average American visits the next State while for many of them, the cost of transatlantic travel makes visiting abroad a dream. None of the children in this middle class school had been to England although I am sure that many children of equivalent social backgrounds in England would have been to Florida as well as France and Spain. Like the children, the parents were full of questions and very appreciative of the new dimension that our pen pal scheme had added to their children's education. They poured over our book as avidly as the children had done and were full of questions. After a delicious supper that revealed what cosmopolitan backgrounds these children came from we went to the classroom for a sort of Open Evening. There was very little work displayed- none of the weeks of preparation and wall mounting that we would have put in, and although the parents were at liberty to look in the children's desks they had not been specially tidied for the occasion. The parents asked questions about their children's progress quite informally in front of any other parents who were in the room. There were no five minute appointments here. Because my visit was so short and I had so much that I wanted to do, I did far more teaching than observing and I have returned with more questions than answers about the contrasts in our systems. I saw a lot that was good but also a great deal that made me really appreciate the respect that my school has for my skills and professional judgement. I had not expected to find so much that was totally different in a country where so much of the research we value and quote from takes place. I am anxious to spend longer there to observe rather than teach and to share experiences and opinions with the staff there. Beverly and I talked far into the night for two nights that we stayed and I left feeling that we were really "kindred spirits" (Anne of Green Gables) with so much to share and learn from each other. And hopefully this is the start of many trips in both directions for us. It was wonderful visit and I would encourage you to do the same if you can possibly flange up a relationship with a school abroad - thank you Beverly!