Mixing it up in Montana

Shelby Larsen brushes a loose strand of hair from her forehand with the back of her hand. The sixth-grader is on the verge of breaking a sweat as she pulls linoleum from the floor of a four- by six-foot cubicle in the practical technology laboratory at Hellgate Middle School near Missoula, Montana. Larsen is part of a three-student team that is deep into the construction of a bathroom. That's right: Larsen and all other sixth-graders at Hellgate build a bathroom from scratch. That includes the framing, sheetrocking (even the dreaded mudding and taping), painting, wiring, plumbing, and installing fixtures, floor covering, and other accessories. The students mix their own paint, use building tools like old pros, troubleshoot problems, and have a good time learning along the way.

"You get to learn a lot about plumbing and how to paint and texture walls," Larsen says. "It's funner than reading about it in a book. I like to do things and not just read about them."

Do things. Do things. Do things. It might as well be the mantra among students and teachers at Hellgate. "These kids need a lot of understanding about where they are emotionally and intellectually," says Sally Tibbs, an eighth-grade science teacher. "They need to learn basic skills, but there needs to be connections between what they see in the classroom and what goes on in the real world. It's best when these students can apply what they learn, when things are not so abstract. For these kids, that's really important."

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