Full Court Verse

North Carolina PE teacher Marty Mentzer's Basketball Poets club has helped her elementary school students shoot for a new level of achievement.

By Heidi Ernst

Seated at the back of the brightly lit cafeteria of Supply Elementary School in North Carolina, 11-year-old Jonathan Velez can hardly be heard over the din of his fellow students. Occupied with the food he’s hunched over, the shy 5th grader is answering questions—What’s your favorite subject? What kind of sneakers are you wearing?—in a quietly polite tone.

But when the subject of basketball comes up—specifically, the fact that one of his favorite basketball players grew up in the state, less than an hour’s drive away—everything changes. The boy’s eyes light up under his closely cropped hair, and he almost jumps out of his cafeteria seat. “I know!” he says exuberantly. “I went to Wilmington once, and when we were driving around, my aunt’s boyfriend told me, ‘There’s Michael Jordan’s high school!’” Then he’s up and out the door, leaving his half-eaten cheeseburger on its tray. Quickly shedding his hip-hop-style parka in the warm May sun, he reveals a red-and-blue basketball jersey—just the thing to wear while shooting baskets at recess.

This level of basketball obsession, especially in North Carolina, is hardly unique among schoolchildren. What is unusual is that Supply PE teacher Marty Mentzer has somehow transmuted Jonathan’s—and more than 50 other students’—obsession into an almost equal enthusiasm for poetry. Combining two seemingly diametric opposites—the love of literature and the love of sharp-elbowed lunges toward a suspended hoop—her four-year-old Basketball Poets club has managed to raise kids’ achievement levels and has become a model for movement-boosted learning at...