that kids DANCING are universally ADORABLE!!! (Don't miss the video.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/nyregion/14educ.html?em&ex=1205726400&en=7fbe849c8e1da086&ei=5087%0ATaja Garnett’s parents are from Belize, but her nickname is “Irish girl.”
Ever since Taja, 10, joined the Keltic Dreams, the Irish dance troupe that is the unlikely pride of her Bronx elementary school, she has been so consumed by high kicks, heel clicks and treble hop backs that she practices “on the street, at the bus stop, sometimes at the train station, in the living room, on the bus when I’m standing up and there’s no seats.”
Oh, and also in class. In class? That’s right, with her fingers, she explained, demonstrating the way her index finger acts as the left foot and her middle finger as the right.
“I look at the teacher,” Taja chirped, her eyes gleaming mischievously behind wire-rimmed glasses, “and do it at the same time.”
With a student body that is 71 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black, Public School 59 does not seem an obvious home for a thriving Irish dance troupe. And when Caroline Duggan first arrived from Dublin at age 23 to try her hand as a New York City public school music teacher, it wasn’t. Many of her students had never heard of Ireland. Why, they wanted to know, did she talk funny?
SNIP