12/26/08

Plain Dealer

Janet Okoben

Iintervention specialist and English teacher for the Building Trades Academy at Lorain County Joint Vocational School, laughs with student Jose Ramos as she helps him identify suffixes and prefixes during a class.

OBERLIN — Just after lunchtime on a dreary Monday, Lisa Zane is animated as she pulls answers out of her 11th-grade English class.

“Come on, you gotta help me out, we’re going slow today,” she says as she cajoles the four boys in attendance, moving nonstop around the room and gesturing with the tools for her electronic blackboard. Zane is eager to get through the task of finding prefixes and suffixes in paragraphs illuminated on the board at the front of the room.

Her delivery is peppy and comes with constant praise. The 90-minute class whizzes by so fast that she starts to scold students for packing up –before she realizes the bell is about to ring. She’s got so much she still wants to say.

Zane teaches boys almost exclusively in the building-trades division of the Lorain County Joint Vocational School. Her title is “intervention specialist,” to reflect her training in special education. She has taught for more than 20 years in Virginia, Alaska and her native Ohio.

The reading level of her students this year ranges from second grade to eighth grade, but that won’t deter her from getting them all to read novels. One mother cried during a recent parent-teacher conference, overwhelmed with pride that her son recently finished reading a novel for the first time.

While some teachers believe in being strict with students at the start of the year and easing up only after setting a tone for the classroom, Zane’s goal is to win students over from the outset.

One student, a Spanish speaker still new to English, teaches Zane a Spanish word each day he is in her class, and they both laugh at her bungled pronunciation on this particular Monday.

She uses grant money to buy novels that appeal to teenage boys. “Bucking the Sarge,” by Christopher Paul Curtis, and “Tears of a Tiger,” by Sharon Draper, are popular.

Zane awards raffle tickets to students who read the novels, participate in class or do something else noteworthy. The tickets go into a plastic container from which she pulls the name of someone who will get a piece of candy that day or a gift certificate to a local business.

“Everybody likes Ms. Zane,” said student Matt Casper, an aspiring plumber.

Her laid-back demeanor and her approachability make Zane a favorite among students. Not an easy feat for an English teacher facing boys who often don’t like to read and don’t see how English relates to their future careers.

“It’s getting the kids to believe at this age, to know success a lot at the beginning,” she said. “Then they’ll read for me.”