It looks like a second-grade classroom. When young eyes wander from books and papers, they see an alphabet banner and a chart for recording lost teeth.

Teacher Crystal Bailey’s room at Garfield Elementary School isn’t much different from the classroom I had in second grade. Books are color-coded by reading levels. Desks are grouped into tables. In one corner, kids sit on a carpet and listen to the teacher’s lesson or a story.

Except for computers and the absence of a blackboard, the Everett class I visited Thursday reminded me of childhood — that is, the room did. The schoolwork? That’s something else entirely.

After an enlightening and exhausting day with Bailey and her pupils, I know for sure that second grade in 2008 bears little resemblance to my experience in 1961. Today, it’s a lot harder.

I’d been invited by Bailey to spend the day as a “guest educator.” She sent out multiple invitations for the school’s Educator for a Day event, held during American Education Week. Her invitation explained that the National Education Association program helps people see “school successes and challenges.” I was the only one to take her up on the offer.

Spending six hours with Bailey and 22 second-graders (she has 23; one was absent), I saw plenty.

Can you look at a picture of a tree or flower and draw a line of symmetry? The kids did much better than I could.

And how about this? I’m warning you, it’s a story problem: “Jake is building with blocks. He has a tower of five blue blocks, two red blocks and three yellow blocks. How many connecting blocks does he have?”

Hint: It’s simple addition, despite that tricky word “connecting.” But you need to show how you got the answer in several ways — one of them being something called a number string. Good luck.

My heart sank when one little boy looked up and asked, “Can you help me?” His plea came as I walked around watching them toil on Unit 3 in their math books. (When I was little, we called it arithmetic — because that’s what we did).

I couldn’t help him much at all with the verbal part of an addition problem with three numbers. You try: “When you change the order of the numbers, do you get the same answer? Why do you think so?”

Why? I tried several explanations, then had to call for Miss Bailey because none of my answers explained it quite right. What’s right? There are too many possible correct answers to share here.

Welcome to second-grade math, 2008. It’s an eye-opener. A tiny sampling goes a long way toward explaining why math remains a high hurdle for many kids taking the Washington Assessment of Student Learning.

“Expectations are so much higher now,” said Bailey, a 27-year-old graduate of Western Washington University now studying for a master’s degree in education.

With the federal No Child Left Behind law and WASL pressures even in the primary grades, Bailey has seen academic struggles even in kindergarten, which she taught several years ago. For some kids, she said, the curriculum “is not developmentally appropriate, I don’t think.”

That said, I saw children in Bailey’s class, most of them girls, reading as well or better than my fourth-grade son. During a reading period when each child could choose a book, one studious girl was zipping through “Charlotte’s Web,” even as a boy at a nearby desk needed help with some words in the picture book “Go, Dog, Go!”

In Bailey’s second grade, students reading more advanced “chapter books” seemed to evoke awe and envy from the others.

When I was in second grade, finger painting was a break from routine lessons. On Thursday, Bailey’s pupils had breaks when they visited the school library and had a lesson from Patti Salerno in the computer lab. Librarian Barbara Weber had a surprise, a free book for each child. The books came from a Page Ahead Children’s Literacy Program grant.

Several times during the day, the children evaluated their own behavior, assigning themselves points and offering up concerns about other kids. It’s part of Make Your Day, a self-management program adopted by schools around the country that revolves around the idea that “No one has the right to interfere with the learning or safety of others.”

In practice, the points system looked to me to be both time consuming and a time to tattle. But after just one day, I can’t say whether the classroom would have been a tougher place to teach without Make Your Day.

I left school after 3 p.m. with a newfound appreciation for teachers. During her 20-minute lunch, Bailey said she rarely gets time to use the restroom. From the kids come constant interruptions, from “I feel sick” to a student telling a long story about a pet in the middle of a lesson.

“We do a lot of work in here,” Bailey said before I left her class.

That’s truer than you know, unless you’ve been there.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.