Some fourth graders in New York are experiencing a real archaeological dig: under the floor of the classroom closet.
Paul Lukus reports at the NY Times, “Bobby Scotto, a fourth grader at the Children’s Workshop School on 12th Street in the East Village, wants to be an archaeologist when he grows up, and he is already off to a good start. In the past few months he has excavated dozens of old coins, a toy watch and other artifacts, all from an unlikely dig site: his classroom’s closet.
“Bobby, an earnest 10-year-old with a mop of dark hair and saucerlike brown eyes, was bitten by the archaeology bug four or five months ago, when his class read a book about a migrant farmworker who found old coins in a field. Bobby decided he wanted to collect old coins of his own, and he had noticed a small gap between the floorboards in the closet. So he reached into that gap as far as he could and, voilà, out came a bunch of wheat pennies (minted from 1909 to 1958), a buffalo nickel and other treasures. …
“And so began an improbable exercise in hands-on archaeology that soon attracted all 21 students in the class. ‘There’s something about the degree of difficulty that’s just perfect,’ said the class’s teacher, Miriam Sicherman, 43, who has been teaching at the school for 15 years. ‘You can’t just reach in and grab something, but it is possible to get something. There’s just enough gratification.’ …
“The variety of finds, including candy wrappers, ticket stubs, an old baseball card and a 1921 Red Cross service pin, has made the students more curious about the previous occupants of their classroom, and about history in general. …
“Along the way, the students have also become adept at research (when they find something, they try to learn more about it on the web); cataloging (each object is logged on a sheet that Ms. Sicherman helped the students design); preservation (the artifacts are kept in plastic bags); and documentation (Ms. Sicherman posts photos of the artifacts on an Instagram account).” More here.
That’s a smart teacher, adapting to her students’ interests. I can imagine some long-ago teachers or some of today’s stressed-out teachers putting a stop to the exploration. Like the policemen in comic books who stop kids trying to salvage a quarter in a grate using chewing gum on the end of a stick. (Such stories of city life always intrigued me as a comic-reading child who grew up in the country.)
Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Bobby Scotto, 10, left, a student at the Children’s Workshop School in the East Village, mining his classroom’s closet for treasures. 
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