By Robert Samuels
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 13, 2006; DZ05
Jason Kamras quickly discovered that the national audience wasn't like his classroom in Southeast Washington.
He had enjoyed a successful run with his students in Room 219 at Sousa Middle School, near Fort DuPont Park.
They laughed at his corny jokes, learned his lessons and watched their test scores rise. Then last April, he became the District's first National Teacher of the Year.
"I wasn't sure what to expect," Kamras said. "I joked that I was kind of like Miss America."
As the nation's premier pedagogue, he visited more than 40 states and two continents to encourage teachers to work beyond inequalities in urban public schools. But it was a tough audience.
At first, he said, he felt disconnected from the crowds he was supposed to inspire. Jokes he thought were knee-slapping received faint chuckles. Messages he thought would get standing ovations got pitter-patters of applause.
Between speeches, in his hotel room, he'd grade his performance on a scale of 1 to 5. In the beginning, he gave himself lots of 3s. But he worked to improve.
By June 1 this year, at event No. 130, his words routinely brought people to tears. He even inspired retired teachers to return to the classroom, said Ernest Fleishman, senior vice president of Scholastic Inc., the educational publishing company that sponsors the award.
This fall, Kamras returns to his classroom with a redefined purpose, a new magic trick and a maxim that resonates with youths and adults alike: Even a teacher never stops learning.
Fresh from Princeton University, Kamras started teaching at Sousa in 1996. He came as a member of Teach for America, a program placing college graduates in schools in low-income communities for two years.
Kamras loved teaching math at Sousa. He's been there ever since, except for a year's leave in 1999 to get a master's degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Education.
What made Kamras stand out was his innovation in the classroom, said Suriya Douglas Williams, who taught reading at Sousa between 2001 and 2003.
"Kids in his class were always deeply engaged in high-level thinking," said Douglas Williams, who is now training to be a school administrator. "I was able to look to him as a role model and as an inspiration."
At Sousa, Kamras successfully lobbied to double the time students spent in math class each week. Afterward, the number of children rated as having "below basic" levels on the Stanford 9 math exams was halved, from 80 percent to 40 percent.
Kamras's success led him from Sousa to the White House Rose Garden, where President Bush announced that he was America's top teacher.
He received the honor at 31, an unusually young age for the distinction, Fleishman said.
Scholastic shipped him to gatherings of 15 in Peoria, Ill., and crowds of 10,000 in Los Angeles. It sent him to Japan, where children were eager to get his autograph. Fleishman said Kamras was "superb" from the beginning, much more so than some previous teachers.
Kamras was harder on himself.
"I really wanted to hit it out of the ballpark every time," Kamras said. "I didn't want to waste an incredible opportunity. So it motivated me to try and make changes to be effective."
The more he shared about his teaching, Kamras said, the more members of his audience would share about themselves. And the more he learned.
In Virginia, a middle school principal pulled him aside. He told Kamras that before No Child Left Behind, he used to assign "a warm body" to teach his low-performing classes.
Now, the principal said, he puts his best teachers with his lowest-performing students so they can meet testing standards. It changed Kamras's opinion of the legislation.
"Like many teachers, I had thought NCLB was an attack on public education," Kamras said. "Now I have a much more positive view, because it's forcing everyone to pay attention to the achievement of children who'd been ignored."
The anecdote became a part of his talks. If the story made a difference in Kamras's philosophy, he said, maybe it could inspire other teachers to embrace some parts of the act.
Making a difference in education policy began to pique his interest. Kamras is now considering taking a more political role to continue bringing issues of inequality to public attention.
But first, he wants to help Sousa's math scores continue their climb. Touring the country, he picked up a trick to impress his students. Using addition and multiplication, in four steps he can tell how many siblings and pets a student has.
"It's like magic," Kamras said. "And it's how I'm going to introduce algebra."