Project SEED

The 19 children in the fifth-grade class at Walnut Hill Elementary School are jumping up and down in their seats and shaking both fists at their teacher, Hamid Ebrahimi. Ebrahimi, who is dressed expensively and speaks with a slight Iranian accent, looks like he should be the owner of a posh continental restaurant instead of a teacher in an elementary classroom.

Ebrahimi, however, has been in classrooms for most of the last 15 years as director of the National Resource & Development division of Project SEED, a mathematics enrichment program brought into DISD last year (originally, SEED stood for “Special Elementary Education for the Disadvantaged” – although this name has since been dropped). Ebrahimi is obviously a master at what he is doing: teasing and prodding the children with questions until they can hardly contain their enthusiasm for doing mathematics.

He deliberately makes a mistake, and the children immediately start waving their hands sideways in front of their chests, which means “I disagree.” Shaking fists above the head means “I agree.” Together, the gestures enable the teacher to keep track of which students understand what he’s trying to teach and which students don’t. The hand signals are a trademark of Project SEED.

One child in the multiracial class is called upon and corrects Ebrahimi. The others agree with the affirmative hand signal – a bit too jubilantly. “Be careful,” Ebrahimi warns. “These people may think we like class. Heaven forbid.”

Ebrahimi writes another problem on the blackboard. Unless you happened to be a math or science major in college, you probably couldn’t even read the problem – it’s one of the early steps in building the foundation of calculus. But these fifth-graders read the problem without a hitch and proceed to solve it.

Ebrahimi slyly takes the children through the problem using an endless grab bag of techniques. If a student can’t answer a question, he can save face by calling on someone else he thinks can answer it. The students answer questions by holding up fingers, by writing answers on their papers, by going up to the blackboard. A born showman, Ebrahimi occasionally shifts the whole class into silence and teaches for five or 10 minutes without a word either from him or from the students.

Ebrahimi teaches the class four days a week. It is scheduled in addition to the group’s “regular” math class, and the regular DISD teacher observes the class while Ebrahimi fires up the fifth-graders with erudite algebra. But before he turns them over to the regular teacher, he can’t resist throwing out some extra questions about cultural trivia. He hums a melody; half the class knows that it’s by Mendelssohn.

When the class is over, the students follow Ebrahimi to the front of the room – some even follow him out into the hall. A boy named Stephen pleads with Ebrahimi not to go before responding to one final question, but Ebrahimi challenges him with a way to find out the answer for himself. Only then can he get loose from the excitement he has inspired.

Last year, Project SEED conducted classes in 15 DISD schools. SEED is the brainchild of a math teacher named William F. Johntz from Berkeley, California, who started the program during the Sixties to prove that students who had been consigned to the bottom of the academic heap could learn to achieve. What it would take, Johntz was convinced, was an initial success in a prestigious subject such as mathematics, which also had the advantage of relying little on existing linguistic skills or cultural background. SEED was set up by an outside contractor, who was hired by school districts to provide a package-enrichment program. Over the years, SEED acquired substantial Health, Education and Welfare backing and was implemented in as many as 17 school districts (mostly innercity) across the country at a time.

During the federal cutbacks of 1981, SEED lost its government funding and all but a few of its locations. The program survived only in places where it could drum up support from local industry or foundations. Last year, Dallas businessman Jim Lee observed SEED in action and mentioned the program to Alex Bickley, former city attorney and an officer of the Dallas Citizens Council. Together they secured the support of Texas Instruments, whose employees were allowed to volunteer as part-time teachers in the program, and DISD Superintendent Linus Wright, who was impressed enough to offer SEED a first-year contract for $500,000.

Ebrahimi was enlisted to return to SEED as the National Resource and Development director and head of the Dallas project. He was one of the core personnel of SEED for 12 years, but left to be a partner in two San Diego restaurants and to pursue other business interests. When the Dallas offer came up, he couldn’t resist getting involved again. SEED, he says, is, for him, “the academic equivalent of the call of the South Pacific.”

An ex-paratrooper who has taught math at every level from first grade through college, Ebrahimi assembled a staff for Dallas that is equally diverse. Some are old hands who had taught SEED in other parts of the country – such as Ivan Shkurko, a bearded mathematician whose parents fled the Ukraine; and James Vade-boncoeur, a 6-foot-4-inch mountain man who had to return to northwestern Montana at the end of the school year to finish building a barn he had been contracted to raise. Among the local recruits is Joanna Robinson, a Polish-born woman with a doctorate who was a part-time teacher at UT-Dallas.

Ebrahimi and his coordinator, Caroline Iremonger (a 10-year veteran of SEED in the Los Angeles area), advertised in the Dallas newspapers for mathematicians last August. The 150 candidates were told they would have to be trained intensively and would not be paid until they were ready to go into a classroom on their own. About 30 went through training; only nine were hired. Didn’t it make the other applicants angry to work for several months with no pay? “No,” says Ebrahimi. “Most of them told us that they would have paid us for the training they received.” What is special enough about SEED to make it worth half a million dollars a year to the DISD? Thanks to the SEED training program, the SEED classes – despite the diversity of the instructors – all get pretty much the same results from the students. Every SEED class is planned to the last detail: the complex mathematical proof that’s to be taught the class; the questions that lead the students to discover the proof for themselves; the fancy techniques used to keep the kids involved.

It takes a minimum of two months for a new SEED teacher to absorb these techniques. Even then, getting a class of one’s own can be scary. Nine part-time volunteers from Texas Instruments taught in the program last year. One of them, John Gaudet, remembers that the first time he got up in front of his SEED class, it stopped dead in its tracks after five minutes-a typical first try. The complex methodology of Project SEED requires regular visits and critiques by colleagues, as well as daily workshops on classroom techniques and seminars on advanced mathematical topics such as topology just to keep from getting intellectually rusty. It’s no wonder that most of the SEED staff is single; the teachers have little time to devote to their private lives.

Each SEED instructor, including three DISD math teachers assigned to the program full time, has classes in several different schools each day and must drive as much as 100 miles to meet them all. The Texas Instruments volunteers teach only one class a day, but devote an evening a week to critiques and workshops. The role that corporations play in keeping Project SEED in Dallas schools will grow larger. This year, other companies – including Southwestern Bell – plan to have employees teaching SEED classes, and there is talk of funding the whole program through corporate gift money.

Mary Lester, director of mathematics in the DISD, explains why the district is so strongly behind SEED: “The greatest thing about it is that it makes the students feel that they are good at mathematics.”