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Lloyd Grove of the Reliable Source
Laura Bush, Wise Guide Through the Blackboard Jungle

The Reliable Source can be reached at grovel@washpost.com, or c/o The Washington Post, 1150 15th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., 20071.

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By Beth Berselli
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 25, 2001; Page C03

Today is my last day as a reporter for The Reliable Source. It has been fun ・how many jobs pay you to read the National Enquirer? ・but after two years of toiling in the gossip mills of Hollywood and Washington, I've decided to do something really worthwhile: teaching elementary schoolchildren in inner-city Phoenix as part of Teach for America, an idealistic program that recruits recent college grads like me to spend two years working in public schools.


Beth Berselli and Laura Bush talk teaching at the White House. (Courtesy the White House)

I'm a complete novice at the blackboard and pretty nervous about my career change. More than anything, I need practical advice. So who better to consult than the former schoolteacher who gives pointers to the president of the United States? First lady Laura Bush is one of the biggest boosters of Teach for America, which has sponsored 1,500 teachers a year for the past decade. She sat down with me recently in the White House Map Room and gave me the benefit of her wisdom.

I asked her: How do I keep my students' attention? And how do I deal with that one kid who just won't shut up?

"I might be married to one of those," she told me. "There will always be the wise guy who's funny and the class clown who gets everyone laughing. That's good. I think there are ways to direct your class so those students get the attention they're seeking."

She continued: "I had students who were fidgety . . . and I would try to make jobs for them. For instance, I would let them go fill my water glass a lot. It gave them a chance to get up and move and go somewhere. And I think it's a good idea to move during the day, literally get up and get everybody to stand up and stretch."

I told Mrs. Bush that veteran teachers keep warning me not to smile for the first few weeks; as with those pesky Democrats, you can't be too nice to your pupils initially or they'll walk all over you. Does the first lady agree?

"I think really what people mean by that is what you want to do at the very first is establish the sort of discipline you want in class," she explained. "All of us had teachers who yelled at us, and we also walked down the the hall really in terror of teachers who were loud. I think the teachers who get the most respect from their students are the ones who can keep a low voice."

Mrs. Bush, who was a librarian as well as a second-, third- and fourth-grade teacher in Texas public schools from 1968 to 1977, told me that I wasn't alone in feeling apprehensive. "When I started teaching, I realized I wasn't really prepared. I didn't really know how to teach somebody to read," she said. "Teaching is much harder, I think, than people really realize."

She added: "Those first few weeks, you're tired, they're tired. The children get tired. It's a long day. You get into the habit of it, so you don't notice it after awhile. But those first weeks, I think you'll feel like taking a nap."

In her early years as a teacher, she said, "I would have this list of activities, and we'd finish them at about 10:30, and then you'd think, 'Oh no, what are we going to do for the rest of the day?' " Her solution: Read aloud. "If you sit down with a good book, it makes a huge difference. . . . I remember the books that we read and how the characters that were in those books almost became members of the class. You know, we really liked Charlotte," she said, referring to E.B. White's classic "Charlotte's Web."

I saved my most important question for last. Teachers are paid a pittance, I told the first lady, pointing out that my new career comes with a 50 percent salary cut. Can't your husband fix that?

"I don't know," Mrs. Bush said. "It is generally a local issue. Only about 7 percent of the funding for public schools comes from the federal government. . . . Money's tight in a lot of communities. . . . But I also think it's very important to raise teachers' salaries."

Amen to that.

Could It Be Love?

・While disaffected congregants stood outside Archbishop George A. Stallings Jr.'s Imani Temple Wednesday night holding signs protesting the sudden influence of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, The Post's Hamil R. Harris was on the inside talking with Stallings's 24-year-old handpicked Japanese bride-to-be.

Okinawa native Soyami Kamimoto is a woman of few words and a spotty command of English, Harris reports. As her future husband listened, Harris asked how she felt about the mass wedding ceremony in New York this Sunday when she and her 53-year-old fiance tie the knot. "I am getting married, yes of course it is my marriage," she replied. What does her intended mean to her? "He means everything. He is God. God sent him to me, I believe." And how will she handle being first lady of Stallings's church on Capitol Hill? "I would like to be part of congregation rather than first lady," she said.

She was more expressive when it came to public displays of affection. In the church coat room where the interview took place, she hugged Stallings. She kissed him. She made him blush. She took him by the hands and gazed into his eyes. Stallings, meanwhile, told Harris: "Jesus was an Asiatic Jew with black blood flowing through his veins. Look at me, a man of African descent about to marry a woman of Asian descent. We are about to have some new Jesuses."

THIS JUST IN . . .

・Sleepless in Chicago? We hear that Oprah Winfrey stopped into Georgetown's Baldaquin store yesterday to buy a $6,000 queen-size French canopy bed featuring a beechwood frame upholstered with special patterned accents ordered up by her personal designer.

Al and Tipper Gore have been stepping out on the town this week, hosting a Gore staff reunion last night at the Capital City Brewing Company and attending tonight's cocktail party at the Italian Embassy followed by a "Pearl Harbor" screening at the Uptown Theater to benefit Woodley House.

・Liberals and Democrats often accuse the Wall Street Journal -- or at least its editorial page -- of publishing fiction. But now Journal editor Robert Bartley is happy to admit it. "This is a first," Bartley said yesterday about Washington essayist Danielle Crittenden, a self-styled "feminist conservative" who today begins serializing her political novel, "Amanda.Bright@home," with the first chapter published in the Weekend Journal to be followed by 15 more chapters in the online OpinionJournal.com. "This is my summer writing project," said the 38-year-old Crittenden, wife of President Bush's economics speechwriter, David Frum, and stay-at-home mom of their two young children.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company