Young Minds a Frenzy of Contradictions

Students Devour Advanced Work but Maintain the Precocious Playfulness of Younger Grades

One in an occasional series about the grades that provide the building blocks of a child's education.

F ifth-grader Rick Glidden's science project sits on a back table in Room 4 at Bond Mill Elementary School in Laurel. It has carefully arranged photos of books stacked on balsa wood bridge models. Its colored bar graphs show that a bridge supported by trusses held 20 pounds before collapsing, while a bridge supported by posts bore 37 pounds of weight.

There is this sober conclusion by the young scientist: "My hypothesis was invalid. I thought that the Truss Bridge would hold the most weight."

But if visitors inspect the exhibit closely, they will notice that there is something else in each photo, right next to the model bridges and books. It is a toy, a green Incredible Hulk action figure, glowering at the experiment.

And that, to experts on fifth grade, is a good example of the delightful contradictions of this age group. Fifth-graders often learn rapidly and are capable of advanced academic work, and yet they are also as fun-loving and genuine as when school was new and they were just learning to read.

"The fifth-grader is a rare and wonderful creature, old enough to have mature conversations and get into sophisticated learning, but young enough to still cry and care when told someone is disappointed in their actions and choices," said Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the Knowledge Is Power Program, a national network of middle schools that began in Houston in 1994 with a program for fifth-graders.

Perhaps no one appreciates the advantages of the duality of 10-year-olds more than Kathleen Hass, 52, Kathleen Jacobs, 50, and Tracey Roussin-Lally, 37, the three fifth-grade teachers at Bond Mill. School administrators say they are among the best fifth-grade teams in the region, and their work indicates that imaginative teaching is possible even in a grade with much standardized testing.

On the 2004 Maryland School Assessment tests, 76.7 percent of the fifth-graders at Bond Mill were proficient or advanced in reading, and 81.7 percent were proficient or advanced in mathematics. The achievement rates were among the highest in Prince George's County and higher than most schools whose percentage of low-income students is similar to Bond Mill's, 16 percent.

"The fifth-graders are at a level where you can kid around with them, you can give and take with them, and they enjoy it," said Hass, who has been teaching for 10 years. "If they have fun, they want to be here, and if they want to be here, they are going to learn."

The three teachers have forged a partnership based on a mutual love of imagination and exploration, Principal Justin Fitzgerald said. On one recent morning, they stuffed all 89 of their students into a makeshift meeting room to discuss upcoming assignments and kept the group engaged -- without a single bit of mischief -- for an hour.

Roussin-Lally, taking a couple of steps forward and spreading her hands like a Broadway star, opened the discussion: "As promised, ta-da! We are here to start our research projects."

"This is going to be lots of fun, boys and girls, because you are going to get to pick out what you want to learn about," Hass said as each teacher set up an easel of large sheets of paper and began to write down research topics suggested by the students.