I Was Just Thinking…

In his book, Raw Materials for the Mind, author David Warlick says,

Perhaps a useful looking glass through which to examine this time of change and its impact on our schools is to examine the evolution of our economic systems.  It is largely economic systems that determine how people spend their time — what they do from hour to hour and day to day and what skills they need to contribute to their system — and preparing students for these activities is what education is all about.

At first reading, this really goes against my basic beliefs about education.  I call preparing a student for a job, training.  Education is about so much more than that.  Education is about analyzing problems, finding solutions, producing, preventing big problems, but not just on the assembly line.  Education deals with deciding if whatever is being produced should be, if raw materials should be gathered or not, if that much more carbon needs to be sent into the atmosphere, or if it comes to a question of profit versus morality, education is needed to see the difference.

No one seems to be sure what we should be preparing students for. In this week’s report “Diplomas Count: Ready for What?” which can be found in the online version of Education Week  for June 6, 2007, we are told, “There is plenty of confusion about what it means to fully prepare students for life after high school.”  This report contains statistics on jobs and wages in every state in the nation.  According to the article,      ”Eleven states report that they have adopted a definition of ‘college readiness’ , …Twenty-one states report they have a definition of ‘work readiness’….”  I see no evidence that any two of these states agree.

  The first  report released by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce in 1990 was America’s Choice:  high skills or low wages!  The report indicated that because of globalization, we would have to go for the high skills jobs if Americans wanted to maitain our standard of living.  That commission did not foresee that we would be competing with countries that would offer highly skilled workers at  low wages.  Consequently the new report by this commission, Tough choices or tough Times, advocates a complete overhaul of the American educational system .  This report describes the “most competent” employee of the twenty-first century–the one for which employers all over the world will be seeking as someone having “strong skills in English, mathematics, technology, and science, as well as literature, history, and the arts…[C]andidates will have to be comfortable with ideas and abstractions, good at both analysis and synthesis, creative and innovative…” etc. etc. etc. 

It seems to me that the requirements for “real” education have not changed so much as the fact that if America is to be a financial or any other kind of power in the twenty-first century, we must stop allowing our educational system remain at the bottom of our list of priorities.  A reading of Tough choices or tough Times will cause many educators to dream and dismiss it with an “Oh, but it will never happen.”  What we must realize is that if this does not happen, our grandchildren may well be the citizens of a poor, third world country. 

In conclusion, Warlick is only partially correct.  We cannot, however, be successful by teaching only some students more technology.  All the educational requirements for twenty-first century success must become our national passion!

When someone asks you to finish the statement: “a teacher is”…, you probably recall those men and women hired by various school boards or college boards during that period of time that you were officially labeled student .  However when you do that, you are leaving out a host of candidates who might deserve to be called teacher even more than one of those who was a product of a teacher training course.

A teacher is someone who teaches.  There only needs to be a teacher and a learner.  The teacher might teach you how to put a worm on a hook; my father did such a good job of teaching me that that for years I amazed my friends by cooly working various types of worms and insects securely on to  hooks as observers eeked and yucked off to the side.

A teacher might teach you to bake Grandma’s special applesauce cake.  My mom did that so well that when my brothers invite me to any family dinner, they always remind me to bake “Grandma Ramsey’s Applesauce Cake.”  Their wives just never caught on even though my mother gave them the recipe several times. 

That teacher might teach you scales and arpeggios and even lend you books from her personal library:  Elsie Dinsmore, Grace Livingston Hill, and many others.  Esther Dykema moved to Matewan, West Virginia, with her engineer husband Leonard, who worked at the local radio station until he moved on to Florida to work for NASA.  She made being a talented pianist and working hard at it desirable to an eight year old girl.

There were teachers in the school system who stand out to me also.  Anne Roberson, my seventh grade science teacher, conveyed her love of learning to her students through her enthusiasm for all kinds of learning.  She taught us why soap washes our hands clean.  She explained about emulsifiers. She even taught us to be patient with our daddies who might leave the bathroom sink a mess after hurriedly shaving before leaving for work in the morning. I remember these lessons because she made them seem worth knowing.

There was Mrs. Vinciguerra who made me feel worthwhile as a writer.  Mrs. Talbert who taught me to revise what I had written.  Mr. O’Dell who opened up some of those mysteries of biology and made me student of the week so often that I felt talented.  There were others, on the other hand, who only taught me that life is not always fair, who were uninterested and uninteresting, so a better question to answer might be “an intentional teacher is…”,and I could reply “someone who intentionally uncovers some previously unknown thing that the student wants to know as compared to those teachers who just cover materials and teach not at all what they intended but place the blame on those “uninterested” students.

  I am nearing the end of my second day at the 2007 Summer Institute at the Logan satellite site.  I have not had a day off in ages;  I need to buy two new tires for my car.  I had to rush my car to Tire City yesterday to find out what was causing the loud banging noise when my speed reached 60 mph. I had a meeting yesterday evening that stretched into the late evening.  I have two cats at home who apparently spend the day cruising  the Internet and trying to get into my food.  I forgot to cut back my rose bushes last fall, and my roses are sparse and skinny. In spite of all that, I feel completely unstressed and happy.  I have spent the last two days doing two of the things I enjoy most:  writing and listening to people who are writing.

The people in SI are just as accepting, welcoming, and affirming as I remember them from my first SI more than ten years ago.  I am happy to get home and prepare for tomorrow, and I will be excited to jump out of bed in the morning to drive the thirty minutes to do this again.  Yes!  Life is good.