Rolf at P.S. 4

Rolf was back at work in New York this last Wednesday and Thursday while we were there. He is teaching mostly Dominican - American fourth graders (roughly ten years old) in Washington Heights, in Harlem. He teaches at PS 4, the Duke Ellington School, which you can see in the picture.

On Thursday afternoon, we went to his class to talk about what college is like, what the students are like, what we teach, and what the students do. It was fun to talk to his students, who were very excited about it, partly about the college part, partly about curiosity about Rolf and his family. He seems to have a pretty good bond with them and has developed good routines for keeping them focused, which can be hard with ten year olds.

It also made me think back to when we lived in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic in 1987, for four months. (I was on a Fulbright fellowship at the Universidad Catolica Madre e Maestra to help them start a communications grad program.) Several of our neighbors had lived in New York before. People would often go there, make some money and come back to the DR able to start a business or buy an apartment.

The area of Rolf's school is called Washington Heights because General George Washington had his headquarters there in an old mansion on the heights overlooking the rest of the city. The mansion and a little park around it are still there, a couple of blocks from the school. A nice island of green in the city.