Spring fever is contagious
Nicer weather distracting to students and teachers

 

Yorktown High School freshmen Tricia Cacace, Jordana Condon and Casey Culligan, pictured from left to right, catch some rays last Friday.

Story and photos by Adam Stone
Crompond Elementary School fifth-grader Ida Dhanuka laid on dewy grass for two hours with friends after school, accepting sun kisses, examining the shapes of fluffy white clouds.

Frank G. Lindsey first-grade reading teacher Carol Lynn Schulman walked the nearby high school track on her lunch break, losing herself in the gentle breeze, basking in the midday rays.

Croton-Harmon High School senior John Mayer gazed out a classroom window, listening to the birds chirp, day-dreaming about after-school fun.

Spring, and along with it spring fever, has arrived.

"In spring you feel a whole lot perkier after school," observed 10-year-old Dhanuka. "You feel a lot sillier. It gets harder to concentrate. You have other things on your mind."

That feeling holds true for educators.

"I'm out here on the track, breaking up my day," Schulman said with a smile last Thursday as she took a brief respite from her walk to chat with a visitor.

And if you're a high school senior, already wrestling in the winter months with the distractions of parties, prom and the future, the arrival of last week's warm weather only heightens the challenge of maintaining focus before the day's final bell rings.

"It's so hot in the classroom you just want to be outside having fun with your buddies," Mayer, 17, said last Thursday as he stood with a group of friends outside the high school.

As students are reintroduced each school year with the familiar and annual onset of spring fever, teachers, administrators and parents, who themselves are infused with similar springtime stimulants, must develop strategies to combat wondering minds.

Marianne Skelly and Nicky Narsing, both parents of children who attend Brookside Elementary in Yorktown, sat comfortably on benches outside the school last week and discussed the issue while enjoying the weather.

"It's a little more of a challenge, balancing fresh air and homework," Skelly remarked.

The Yorktown mother of three, ages six, nine and 11, said the teacher of her fourth-grader at Brookside recently threw her an assist: a homework assignment required the children to play outside for 20 minutes and then write about their experience.

"It was a very creative idea," the appreciative Skelly commented.

Narsing and Skelly allow their kids to do homework outside on the porch when the weather warms up.

In her household, Narsing noted, the rules allow for "playing outside for a while and then homework. If homework is done, there can be a couple more minutes of play time."

For teenage boys, the sun doesn't always translate into fun, explained Agron Palevic, a 16-year-old junior at Fox Meadow, an alternative school in Yorktown.

"Tension starts to build," Palevic said as the sun beamed down on him at Yorktown's Railroad Park, where he was shooting hoops last Thursday afternoon. "There are more fights, verbal arguments and graffiti. It gets hot and sticky and people are cramped together and they don't want to be in school. They don't want to be in that place. We just had a fight…earlier this week."

But the major benefit when the weather warms up, Palevic remarked with a smile, is the skimpier clothes.

"I look forward to go to the pool and see some girls," he said.

Though hormones are raging and all those who inhabit area schools are not comforted on hot days by air conditioning, it is time for educators to redouble their efforts, not ease up, theorized Joel Adelberg, the principal at Croton-Harmon High School.

"There's no secret answer. The best thing a school can do is keep as regular a schedule as possible," Adelberg believes, pointing to the late-year pressures of standardized testing. "You can't lighten up. You have to keep your eye on the prize. If you start to give in it gives license for students to not do what they're supposed to do…It's the time (of year) you can least afford to go off task."

Having said that, Adelberg added, "Some classes go outside and I never oppose that if they're not disruptive."

Students at the high school might be surprised to learn, however, that Principal Adelberg's mind can drift too during the work day.

Adelberg showed a reporter on a sunny day last week the sprawling views from his office windows that look out to the grassy front lawn of the high school where cheerful students like Mayer gathered with friends.

Spending time with his family after school at a youth soccer or baseball game can dominate Adelberg's thoughts when spring is in the air.

"It's just like the kids," Adelberg said of the similar distractions both educators and students face. "But as an administrator there is a major amount of paperwork and end-of-the-year reports to work on."

Tricia Cacace, a freshman at Yorktown High School, sat on a campus bench last Friday, relishing the sun along with two friends, Jordana Condon and Casey Culligan. Cacace's math class was treated to a release from the classroom, with the only numbers students could focus on being the digits in the weather forecast, including that afternoon's 66 degrees of clear sunshine.

"I'm there when I'm in class physically, but not really there," said Cacace, her pals giggling in agreement.

"I pretty much don't look at the teacher anymore," Culligan interjected. "I look (out the window) at the ducks."

"Today in…class everyone was sticking their heads out the window," Condon reported.

This is why, a number of area teachers said, educators must retool when spring arrives.

For Crompond's Adelle Kivel, a fourth-grade teacher, that meant framing instruction about colonial times around the outdoors. More specifically, her students last week planted assorted items outside their classroom that would have been found in different regions of the country in late 17th-century America.

"You try to take your class outdoors a bit more," she said. "They are ready to get outside after a long winter."
With that, everyone can agree.