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Enjolique, now 17, has emerged a luminous, perceptive teenager who excels at debate, ranks in the top 15% of her class and served last year as class vice president and co-captain of the majorettes. She radiates enthusiasm for school and is one of a small number of African-American students in the advanced-placement classes at Grady High School. "There are others that could do it," she says, "but they get caught up in the stereotypical, 'AP, that's nerdy.'" Physics teacher Delphia Bryant admires Enjolique's can-do spirit: "She's one of those people who will rule the world."
Her mother, a divorced truck driver, was herself a good student before dropping out of all-black Spelman College. She took to "opening the window" with gusto. When teaching her kids the difference between hot and cold, for instance, she made learning fun by steaming up the sink with hot water, rather than waiting to scold a child for venturing too near a hot stove. "It's all in the presentation," she says with a twinkle.
What Cheryl Aytch did for her daughter--what the best preschool teachers all do--was to incorporate learning into everyday life and make it lively. "This means that instead of telling a five-year-old about apples or reading about them in a book, you go pick apples, you peel apples and make apple sauce and apple pies," says Wendy Derrow, a family therapist in Orlando, Fla. "It's that pure, healthy, aren't-we-lucky-to-be-together environment that grows great learners."
Good students tend to have what teachers call a broad "fund of knowledge." They've been taken places; they've seen a bit of the world. If the family resources are slim, it might only be to the city park, a train yard or the kitchen of a restaurant. But the experience has been brought to life for them. "I find the students I love will often say to me, 'My mom took me here' or 'My dad and I did this.' You know these parents are in their lives," says Carol Klavins, who's been teaching middle-school science in central Florida for 31 years. "So many kids never mention their parents!"
THE BEST SAT PREP
Teachers lucky enough to be part of the pre-International Baccalaureate program at Robinson Middle School in Wichita, Kans., are used to classes full of bright, motivated kids. But even in this heady environment, Tyler Emerson stands out. Tyler's 12-year-old mind runs deep, notes one of his sixth-grade teachers, Lura Atherly. "He questions things, but not with surface questions. He asks extending questions: Why? What if...?" When the class studied the Russian Revolution, Tyler wanted to discuss what would have happened if the Romanovs had escaped: What if they had come back after the fall of communism? His writing also reflects an uncommon mix of the imaginative and the methodical. He prefers to write on deadline: "It feels like a deadline unlocks a chest where all my creativity is locked," he explains.