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CARTS full of SMARTS Photo by Jim Craven Math teacher Francine Bostwick maneuvers her cart of supplies down Talent Middle School's hallway Tuesday. Bostwick is one of three teachers at the school without a room to call her own -- a situation that will finally reach its end in a week or two. With no classrooms to call their own, three teachers in Talent go mobile By VICKI GUARINO TALENT -- Ready to roll, almost. Math teacher Mike Stiles checks his cart one more time. "Stuff to hand out, stuff to collect," Stiles muses as he thumbs through two racks of papers on the bottom self. "I've got to put the rulers on today," he says, shoving a small plastic bucket of rulers onto the middle shelf. "And the string, yeah, I've got the string already." The cart is Stiles' classroom on wheels. He is one of three Talent Middle School teachers who have to migrate from room to room as space opens up during the day. The school has run out of rooms for its 650 students and 37 teachers. A new, $360,000, three-classroom wing, due to open in a week or two, will put an end to a grueling routine for traveling teachers that began last year. But until construction crews finish, the trio of roomless teachers will continue sorting, packing and moving. "It's amazing what you can get on one of these things," Stiles says, standing back to appraise his wheeled classroom minutes before first period. "Round stuff," he suddenly remembers, and momentarily steps back into his office -- a cramped space that he and fellow migrating math teacher Francine Bostwick have filled with files and boxes. "And more round stuff. Need lots of round stuff." The lesson will be measuring diameters and circumferences, so Stiles needs round things for measuring and the tools to measure them. Nearby, Bostwick runs through a similar inventory. Down the hall, science teacher Dan Russo arranges one of six carts he uses daily. Six carts, six different classrooms, science for three grade levels. Russo packs books, calculators, beakers, test tubes, papers, charts, and assignments for 130 students. "All the things that would be involved in teaching science in and English classroom," Russo explains. "Yesterday it was chewing gum," English and social studies teacher Monte Killingsworth observes, eying the cart Russo has parked in his room for first period. "They were doing something with mass, chewing the gum and weighing it or something." The period is one that Killingsworth has free for lesson planning, so he moves out as Russo moves in. But a classroom is more than a room, Russo, Stiles and Bostwick have learned. Bostwick laments the loss of many of her teaching aids. She has had to leave at home tools that would help her make math concepts real. And her office is stuffed with aids that she can't fit on her cart. "So I've lost some creativity," she says. "I can't just grab stuff and be spontaneous." Teachers also say they've lost the minutes between classes when students look for extra help. Instead of going over a problem one more time, Russo has to stack books, pull the periodic table off the wall, roll out to the next room and set everything up again before the bell rings. "We've got to go faster than the kids do," says Russo. And more than once, the teachers have been too fast, leaving students to wonder were their next class is. "At first it was kind of confusing," says eighth-grader KC Cloyd, who showed up early in Killingsworth's English classroom for a science class. After more than a year on the roll, Russo says he can still be confused by his own schedule: "Some days I get up and I don't know for sure ..." Stiles has students who just follow him to find out where the class ends up. But in a week or so, everyone should know where they are going. Construction barriers began coming down Tuesday. "Only a few more days," a co-worker cheers as Stiles and Bostwick roll by. "You guys can handle it." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA