WOW!!!!!

In today's NYT              May 26th 2015

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 ofwheat pennies (minted from 1909 to 1958), a buffalo nickel and other treasures.

Bobby and his best friend in the class, Lizardo Lozada, soon began reaching farther underneath the floorboards with the help of simple tools — pencils, scissors, untwisted coat hangers. “At first the other kids were like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Bobby said one recent afternoon while demonstrating his technique. “But then they saw we were finding old, cool stuff, so they started doing it and finding cool stuff, too. The fourth graders have unearthed old coins, ticket stubs, candy wrappers and a toy watch, among other items. 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.”

It is not clear exactly how the items ended up under the floorboards, or even when the floorboards themselves were installed. (They may not be original to the school, which was built in 1913.) But 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. The school has considered enlisting the custodial staff to remove some of the closet floorboards, which would provide easier access to whatever is still beneath them.

“Lately we’ve been studying Ellis Island,” Ms. Sicherman said. “And I explained to them how these things they’ve found could have been left by kids who’d been through Ellis Island. That makes it much more vivid for them.”

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). And as their excavations began to yield diminishing returns, they sought out new dig sites, receiving permission to explore

Some of the items the children have uncovered tie in directly with American history. One of Bobby’s finds was a gray penny from 1943. As he soon learned, that was the year that pennies were made from steel because of wartime copper shortages. Other finds offer intriguing glimpses into the school’s past incarnation as Public School 61, such as a tattered sheet of paper that appears to have been an assignment completed by Jane — or perhaps Janet — Capasso, a student in the 1940s.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the project is Ms. Sicherman’s support for it. Would most teachers let their students dig under old, dirty floorboards?  “Honestly, that never occurred to me, although maybe it should have,” she said. “History is my favorite thing to teach, and I always want to do stuff that’s not the standard curriculum. So I definitely hope it inspires an interest in history, but I hope it also makes them realize the world is full of interesting information waiting to be discovered.”

Ms. Sicherman has arranged for a professional archaeologist to visit the class, and there are plans for the artifacts to be displayed in some sort of exhibition, perhaps in the school’s library. The principal, Maria Velez-Clarke, said she had considered enlisting the custodial staff to remove some of the closet floorboards, which would provide easier access to whatever is still beneath them.

Not everyone likes that idea. “That might be a little too easy,” Bobby said. “We’d find something every five seconds.” Other students expressed similar reservations. The thrill of the hunt is apparently a big part of the project’s appeal.

That is not to say that Bobby is opposed to taking the hunt to the next level. He has asked his uncle, Robert Silver, for a metal detector. “But I told him it’s very expensive,” Mr. Silver said, “so he’ll have to wait until Christmas.”