The World is Going Wrong,” Henry Burden III writes. This is what he wants to call his newspaper.

        The others are choosing names like The Courtney Star and Ronda's Life Times. Once a week, we meet for an hour at John G. Carlisle Elementary School in Covington. We have a newspaper club. Everyone gets to create their own paper.

        I kneel next to Henry, who is 9 and has deep brown eyes. I have never heard him laugh.

        “Usually newspaper names are a little more general,” I say. “Not all the articles will be about how the world is going wrong. Remember the one we're doing on our favorite cookies?”

        Henry doesn't say anything. I want to tell him he can still write about the world's wrongness. I want to know him better.

        But then the clamoring begins, the insistent chorus of “Ms. Samples! Ms. Samples!” Like a bumper car at Kings Island, I jerk away. Later I see that Henry has changed his newspaper name to The Henry News.

"I was mad what happen'

        The terrorist attacks are always present in our room.

        When I ask the children to identify the sections of the Enquirer, they call out their answers — Sports, Business, Tempo.

        “The tragedy section?” Ronda guesses, and I see she is flipping through the national news.

        James wants to know whether I was in New York after the towers crashed. Yes, I say.

        “Did you shake hands with the president?”

        “No, but his car passed where I was standing,” I say. “Only a few people got to shake his hand.”

        “They must have been the more experienced people,” James says.

        Henry is the quiet one. Sometimes I see him hunched over his paper, writing, while the rest of the gang competes for the honor of passing out papers or finding a working marker.

        “I like this to be a better country,” Henry writes, “until our country was destroyed by people who was the pilots tore down the towers. I was mad what happen. I felt sad.”

        I wish I had more time with Henry.

Encouraging words

        Newspaper club is a diversion for the kids and a psychological drama for me. Each child is a mystery, and I have mere seconds to gather clues. Sometimes I get as many as three minutes.

        Last week everyone wrote cookie articles. Courtney, a sprightly thing who likes to give hugs, used the word “categories” in hers.

        When club was over, she dashed off, leaving her article on the computer screen.

        “She's got a good mind on her,” said a sixth-grader named Kelly, looking at Courtney's work. “Where does she come up with all them big words?”

        I tell Kelly I'm sure she knows the word “categories,” too, and any word she knows, she can write. Kelly looks uncertain, but I'm celebrating inside; I think I just said something useful.

        Henry was absent today. Looking through his folder, I see the form he filled out to write a story about himself.

        His favorite movie is Spy Kids, and his favorite place is the Boys & Girls Club.

        He wants to be president when he grows up, although his special talents are “basketball skills and football skills.”

        I am hungry for more, but Henry isn't one to go on about himself.

        His goal, he writes, is to make the world better.

        E-mail ksamples@enquirer.com. Past columns at www.enquirer.com/columns/samples.

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