Tara is a 5th grader at Waiau Elementary School in Pearl City. I met her in 1994 over the Internet through Connie, her teacher that year. They are a great examples of a teacher who finds creative ways to help her students learn in a time of limited resources and a student hungry to learn all she possibly can.
In mid-1994, I started to realize how much the Internet would change my business. I got an e-mail address and ran it in the newspaper.
The first e-mail I got was from Connie, a 25-year veteran teacher who was way ahead of me in thinking about how to use the Internet in her work. She planned to help her 4th-graders start a newspaper and wondered if I would answer their questions by e-mail.
I soon heard from Tara, who was managing editor of the class newspaper. It's lonely being a managing editor, she told me. She needed to talk to a peer.
"What's the hardest thing about being a managing editor?" she asked.
"Dealing with writers' egos can be a challenge," I replied.
"Tell me about it," she wrote back.
I loved this kid immediately.
I finagled an invitation to the school and for an hour Tara and her classmates gave me the most enthusiastic grilling I have ever received by students of any age.
They filmed the session for a project they were doing for Olelo. Tara ran the camera while taking notes for a story she planned for their newspaper and the Internet home page Connie was building.
They told me about their other projects. Connie set the kids up with weather equipment. Over the Internet, she met Washington, D.C., meteorologist Mike Mogil, who advised the kids by e-mail and ultimately visited the school. They also used e-mail to compare weather with students in Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina and Canada.
They tapped into a national Internet program called 'A Day in the Life of... ' in which they wrote about life at Waiau and shared experiences with students in Minnesota, Nevada and New York. When they were studying geology, they hooked up with a school in New York and traded pogs for rocks.
To help her students learn about Hawaii and other states, Connie started the States Multimedia Project, connecting with classes in other states to produce audio-visual slide shows.
The class later visited the Star-Bulletin and, along with Janet Okimoto's class, wrote articles and drew pictures for our special edition on the 50th anniversary of World War II.
I heard Tara was hopping mad that the pictures from Mrs. Okimoto's class ran in color while the pictures from her class ran in black and white. One day I received a "wanted" poster she had drawn on me warning other students not to let me publish their pictures.
This year, Tara is exercising her right brain by dancing hula and writing poetry that she modestly says moves grown men and women to cry. She has found time to badger the governor to help the homeless and is working with another student on a World Wide Web site.
So you say a kid can't get a decent education in Hawaii's public schools? Take a closer look.
A motivated student will find opportunities to learn no matter where he or she goes to school. And there are many dedicated and creative teachers in the public schools waiting to show the way. Tara Peris and Connie Mark are proof of that.
