Rockland County Foundation Honors Innovative Teachers

Karen Czajkowski has a problem in her AP and 10th grade English classes where her students won’t stop reading. An unusual problem, but a problem nonetheless.

“I have to tell them, ‘Okay, put the books away we have to move on,’” said Czajkowski, who teaches at Clarksown High School North. 

The problem with it is that the books her students are reading aren’t technically on the curriculum. Last year, Czajkowski was discouraged with the lack of reading her students were doing. In hopes of sparking something, she enthusiastically started talking to them in class about the books she was reading at home, and even brought them into her class and put them on a shelf. Eventually, she said, a few students would come up to her after class and ask more about the books, and if they could borrow them.

In September of last year, that led to what Czajkowski called the Reading Rally, a program to get students to read out of the classroom. She formed a library in her class made up of her own books and books donated to her that she would lend out to students.

“It started with a lot of young adult fiction, and then I included some fantasy and [science fiction] for the boys because that’s what they wanted to read,” she said.

In class, students who read one of the books would get up in front of the class and talk about the book without spoiling it in case someone else wanted to read it. Czajkowski said the students talk for just a few minutes each and about what in the book they liked or didn’t. She said that if she had three or four students ready to talk in one class, she would devote maybe 10 minutes of the class to book discussions. The students also wrote a paragraph about the book as well.

For the Reading Rally, Czajkowski was given a 2011 Innovative Teaching Grant by the Rockland Community Foundation, a non-profit that helps connect donors with other non-profits in Rockland to ensure they can raise funds. On Tuesday night, the Foundation held a dinner at La Terrazza in New City to honor Czajkowski, as well as fellow 2011 Innovative Teaching Grant winners , fifth grade science teachers at A. MacArthur Barr Middle School.

“We want to make sure what teachers are doing in the classrooms are innovative,” said Rhea Vogel, the vice president and secretary of the Foundation.

They also gave out their 2011 Chazen Spirit of Rockland Scholarship to Danyel Semple, a Ramapo High School graduate who couldn’t be in attendance because she has already started her freshman year at Georgetown University. The Rockland County Foundation also collected food to donate to the Haverstraw Holiday Meals Fund.

“When we started [about five years ago], we raised funds to give back to the community,” said Patrick Byrne, president of the Rockland County Foundation. “The first two areas we wanted to give back in were education and food.”

The teachers get a $500 grant, and with theirs, Levy and Schucker bought a new chiller. They earned the grant for their program, where they raise trout from eggs to the fry stage and the release them into Mahwah River at Kakiat Park in Suffern.

“We have the first-graders come three times a year to see the fish, and its up to the fifth-graders to teach them,” Schucker said. “They teach them how to write a journal entry and about the fish. Then we have the AP environmental science students from high school come and help out a bit.”

They started the program, based on a national program of the same name, four years ago when they taught sixth grade. But when they started teaching fifth, they brought it there with them, because it involves curriculum from a lot of different levels, Levy said. The chiller they used the grant money to buy keeps the water around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, Schucker said, because trout need cold water to live.

The release day, which is scheduled for May this school year, has become a big day with a number of educational activities, including getting a few different measurements of the fish. Levy said the fish are usually between and inch and one-and-a-half inches long. They start out the year with about 100 eggs, provided by Trout In The Classroom, and end up releasing around 60-70 as not all eggs develop and some other unforeseen issues can pop up.

“Last year we had a cannibal trout,” Schucker said. “One trout kept eating the other ones, so we had to isolate that particular trout.”

But she said things like that or eggs not developing can be useful from an education standpoint because “it can show the kids how fragile life is.”

She said the program includes all of the roughly 200 fifth grade students, about 80-90 first grade students and around 15 AP students.

With her grant, Czajkowski increased the size and goal of the Reading Rally. This year, she wanted her students to read 30,000 pages combined out of the classroom. As of Monday, they had already completed about 17,000 pages. To get more books for the library, she used the grant money and took her students to Barnes & Noble, where she allowed them to pick out books they want to read. With the money, she bought 63 books, 36 of which were taken out of the library the next day.

“I just told them nothing inappropriate,” she said. “It was more trashy than inappropriate. Nothing trashy. They picked a lot of memoirs. Memoirs were huge.”

She said they picked memoirs of teens going through struggles, as well as a lot of series books, where the students had started a series but not completed it. Some of the series where Ranger’s Apprentice and Game of Thrones. Czajkowski added that some of the students donated their earlier books in the series to the library.

She said about 75 percent of students are participating, and they’ve read 48 books combined since the start of the school year. About 70 books are out her library right now, as well.

“When they talk about the books, and what they like, I also give them suggestions of similar books that they might like,” she said. “They say I know so much about books that they’ve started calling me the Book Whisperer.”