7:30 A.M. English Class

By NANCY GIBBS

Minnie Phillips is bracing for her first-period 10th-grade English students. She always has them at 7:30 a.m., a launch time that is an insult to the teenage metabolism.

"Would you please turn to page 23 in your vocabulary workbook?"

A groan. "Can't we just sleep instead?" Phillips runs through some words--assuage, brandish, staid--before getting down to business, a discussion of Eugenia Collier's short story Sweet Potato Pie. "What's unusual about this title?" No one bites, so she answers her own question. "It has pie! Now how many of you have not had sweet-potato pie?"

Only a few raise their hands. "What's wrong with you all?" smirks Ebony Ingram. "Look, it's all the white boys." Two of the parents promised Phillips last week at parents' night that they would send in a pie for this morning's class; neither seems to have remembered.

Phillips tells the class of a restaurant she went to over the weekend that served the pie, as well as ham hocks, collard greens and smothered beef stew. "And what do all these things have in common?" The white students are still stumped when Robert Givens chimes in. "No offense to my Caucasian friends, but sounds to me like you were eating black foods," he says.

"Well, they're soul food," Phillips says. And with that the class starts spitting out associations, and she is at the board writing: tradition, culture, grandmother, filling, ample. Now everyone is paying attention.

Phillips, a sharecropper's daughter, is one of those magical teachers whom you could imagine in a hundred roles: talk- show host, prison warden, poet laureate, mayor of a midsize city. She teaches some of the best kids in the school and some of the worst, but like many teachers, it's the ones in the middle she is concerned about. "In trying to be something for everybody, we're not doing an intensive job for any group," she says. "There's something noble about this mission, but it doesn't always serve students well."

This class includes kids on the cusp. About half say they plan to go to college. One already knows he wants to join the Army, become an MP, then be a cop. "Better be a crooked cop," a classmate advises him. "That's where the money is." One is great with computers. One says beer is his life. Many have some trouble with their writing skills. They say their dream classroom would have no desks, just couches.

Like many teachers, Phillips has enormous control over what gets taught in her classroom and yet admits she is constrained when it comes to standards and expectations, like assigning homework. She guesses about 15% in her class actually do it, which means she can't base Tuesday's class on readings that no one did the night before. Bright kids get bored; slow kids get lost; the kids in the middle muddle through. Her colleague Bob Hutcheson puts it this way: "I wonder if among their peers, there isn't a certain norm of mediocrity. And if they shoot for the middle, they'll always settle for less."

The pressure to prevent kids from getting discouraged and dropping out seeps through the very bricks of Webster Groves. To graduate, a student must earn 22 credits, with a semester course typically counting as half a credit. Communications skills (known elsewhere as English) is the only subject that requires three full credits (communications includes classes like public speaking, journalism and even children's literature, a course with 30 students that involves close readings of Dr. Seuss). In history, science and math--the other "hard" subjects--students need only two full credits, the state minimum, to graduate. This means that responsible students can be finished with most of their core courses by the end of sophomore year.

It's no wonder that seniors fill their schedules with community campus (working a job for course credit), student assistant (run errands for your favorite teacher for course credit) and senior leadership seminar (a double-period, low-homework class, where the grade is based on showing up, having a positive attitude and participating in exercises ranging from rock climbing to community service at a homeless shelter.) "They don't care if you learn," says junior Steve Rois. "They only care if you pass."

The kids and the parents and the teachers all make the same case: there are superb teachers teaching challenging courses for talented kids. But if you are not highly motivated, it is easy to skate through school on a smile and a whim. "I have absolutely no homework. Just 10 minutes a night," boasts junior Ellen Williams. "None of my teachers believe in homework this year." Junior Adam Erickson says he does about 30 minutes a night. "I'd like to learn," he says, "and someday I want to be a teacher, but I don't want to learn right now." Instead, he works 30 hours a week at Einstein's Bros Bagels and is in the drama production. "I got a B+ on your test without even reading the book," he boasts to Phillips, "because I just got the gist of the book from class discussion."

"Look, I'm sure all our teachers would like to challenge kids more," argues assistant principal Jon Clark. "But if you give some of our lower-level kids a lot of homework, they aren't going to do it. And if they don't do it, they'll fail. And then they'll quit. We don't want that. We think these kids are better off in school than out on the streets. They're safe here, and they can learn in class even if they aren't doing homework." There is even a financial incentive. The school received an extra $150,000 last year from Missouri's "A-Plus Schools" program, whose primary goal is to reduce the dropout rate. Webster stands to receive the same amount for the next two years if it continues its progress.

The period is almost over, and Phillips is pressing the kids about the traditions around sweet-potato pie. And finally, just before the bell, she has the class precisely where she was heading all along: "There's a kind of sweetness surrounding it, and when I went to eat the other night in downtown St. Louis, what was I doing? I was returning to my roots, and I want you to remember about your roots when reading the story." The bell rings, and they all move on.

--N.G.