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It's a crisp early fall morning in Columbus, Ohio, and inside the Northgate Center-a former elementary school now used as a staff training facility by the city school system-about 30 teachers are munching bagels and sipping coffee, waiting for a professional-development workshop to begin. They don't know it yet, but Harriett Ball, today's presenter, is about to rock their world.
Ako Kambon, president of the Visionary Leaders Institute, a Columbus-based education foundation that is sponsoring Ball's visit to several of the city's schools, offers the teachers a hint of things to come when he warns, "This is not your typical workshop." By way of introducing Ball, Kambon explains that, thanks to television, students today have much shorter attention spans than they used to. Consequently, old methods of teaching simply won't work anymore. "But television entertains," he says, "and it maintains the interest of children. So we've got to learn how to use that strategy and bring it into the classroom to reach today's young people. And with that, I want to bring on the master in using this skill. . . . I give you Miss Harriett Ball, of Houston, Texas."
Ball, a tall African American woman dressed in a black-and-white pinstripe suit and outrageously accessorized with five large gold rings, several gold bracelets, gold-colored high heels, and rhinestone-encrusted designer glasses, stands up and starts clapping her hands to a four-beat rhythm:...
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