The Few, and Hope

There is hope, it seems, for the future leaders of America and the world. The hope, however, resides in a precious few who, despite everything the public schools are doing to prevent them from achieving, are on their own gaining the knowledge they need to excel in the future years in high school and beyond.

But only those precious few, and even they don't recognize themselves most of the time. Their peers try to bury them in the sea of mediocrity that has become American schools. What is today considered "high performance" is the past's average, or even low performance. What I would have given a "C" or "D" for five years ago is actually earning "B" and even "A" today. Grade Inflation dad called it, and that was twenty years ago! It has only gotten worse.

So where is the hope?

Some students get it. Some actually don't care much about grades, and get into the material, want to learn. One student filled her notebook full of almost everything I said in class, with tabs to cross-index information. Every web page I ever pulled up in class was documented in her journal. She was going for the knowledge. She earned an A++.

There are others. They are the ones that will hopefully get scholarships to MIT and Yale, get the law degrees, run for high office, negotiate with foreign powers. These are the children that can grow up to adults that will keep us out of wars, that will balance our Federal budget.

And all I can do it encourage these few is talk. Yack-yack-yack-yack. The schools have no programs that I can offer them outside the standard curriculum, other than a club that I would be willing to take on under my own time. And there is the rub...

When does the society stop supporting the individuals that make up the defining structures of the future for that society? Teachers teach, but they also lead by example, they provide a maturation ground for young wills to develop and to grow strong or weak, to succeed or to fail, all in the shelter of a caring adult familiar to and supportive of the child. However, the teachers cannot do all that on their own dime, even though they often do; its part of what makes people good teachers, and administrations and school boards tend to take advantage of that.

But one day it goes away. The very wonderful math teacher in the room next to me, a veteran teacher of many, many years, has taken her last year I think. She cannot continue long, she is beginning to hate what she does, and no one can long do a job they hate. Many young people will lose out when she stops teaching, and many other teachers, myself included, will lose by not having her example to follow.

I have done some very difficult and fulfilling things in my working career, including military and nuclear industry careers that were incredible. However, I have never had as fulfilling and as varied or as important a career as that I have now, a middle school teacher. And I feel the weight of its importance every day, but I also feel, through the adolescent bravado and peer pressure, the respect and love of my students.

There is the hope for all of us. As long as there is respect and love on both sides, we should get through just fine.

MMG

McAcademia

I asked my students to evaluate their beliefs concerning Global Warming, and to record what information they needed to make a final determination in their minds, one way or another, that global warming does or does not present a problem that must be addressed by humanity and science.

Most students remarked that they needed information that is and has been readily available in academic reports for years. Hmmm. 'If this information is available, then why do you still have questions concerning global warming,' I asked? 'That isn't available, it is hidden! Only certain people can read it, so They keep it away from the public. Its part of the Government Conspiracy to hide information from people that need to have it to make good voting decisions.'

And how do we know it is part of the vast Government Conspiracy? Because it doesn't come up on Google!

While I was under water all those years, a shift occurred in how our society receives its information: if you need to know something, you simply Google it. Just type the required information in the search area of the Google search engine, and press the enter key (also called 'hit enter'), and the required information, and more, much, much more, come up on the screen at your fingertips. The user now has to discriminate between the info he or she needs, and the info that is stray or misleading.

And what about concepts? What about subject areas, or matters that take up more than a few webpages to explain or report on? Well, they are either condensed into those precious few pages, or they just doesn't make it to Google! Face it, you don't need to know the basis behind a Carnot engine, and heat rejection in the thermodynamic cycle to know how an internal combustion engine operates... do you? You can get a good one-page graphic on how the pistons go up and down, even some type on how much energy (about 8000 btu/lbm) gasoline releases in the engine. Who cares about the physics behind it?

I was a bit cynical (can you tell?) until I took a test for a course on Physics in preparation for taking a certification exam. The test itself was horrible, the questions assumed I had conversion tables and specific heat tables and property tables right at my fingertips... and then I realized that I did! Just Google it! How long does it take 500 grams of ice to melt when placed in a styrofoam cup with 300 ml of water at 30 degrees C? Google it! How long will an aluminum rod elongate when heated from 100 degrees C to 600 degrees C? Google it?

In the old days, we would look up the material properties, do some math, and come up with our answers. It depended on our knowing the basics of the subject matter. Now, even the tests, courses, and subject matter itself is set up to make use of Google.

But then, when the information doesn't appear on Google because it is too complex, or too voluminous, it has become part of the Other, which all too often the popular culture vilifies as a Government Conspiracy to hide important information. If that's the case, it's being hidden in broad daylight!

Next week my students are going to learn how to look up, find, read, and interpret a formal scientific report. We are going to pick one on a topic that many of them chose as information they would need to make a decision on global warming, just to show them the information is already here, and to show them that the Internet is a tool, but Google is mostly for entertainment. If you use Google to be informed, then you will be fully informed on entertainment matters, but not so much on things that really matter to you and your family.

Learn to treat the Internet like television: people want to sell you things. The more they get things in front of you, the more chance they have of selling something. So everything on the Internet is going to be fed to you in small, short chunks designed to keep you on-line: entertainment.

Crow

What Children Are For

When I was a young man, a century a go (actually, a millennium ago!), the ideal for the American Family was something a little different than the one today. I got married to my high school sweetheart, the only girl I had loved at that point in my life, and we did what we thought everyone was supposed to do: get a job (or two, or three), get a place to live, have a child. Notice something missing here? Yep - no goal in life. No matter, we had love, and that was supposed to be enough to start on, the rest was to follow. I guess for me, children were part of the American Life, not a fixture exactly, but part of the contract if you will.

"Hi, I'm here for the American Dream Special? You know, the Prosperity, Happiness, and Economic Security Package?"
"Certainly, Sir! Come right up! Now, lets see what you have here. Do you have a job?"
"Yes, sir. I work at Moore-Rounetree VW, and at night I stock the shelves at Kroger."
"Very ambitious! How about a spouse? An Apartment? A car?"
"I have a very beautiful wife, and we live in our own apartment, away from either of our parents. We just replaced our car, which set me back a bit, but we survived it."
"Well, good sir, I am impressed! Just one more thing, then... do you have 2.54 children?"
"2.54...what? How does one have .54 children?
"That's stat talk, of course. You either have 2, or 3. You could have more or less, which would let more off the hook for the 2 or 3, depending on how many more or less you have. But the fact is, you have to have children in order to participate."
"Really?"

And so a son was born, and six years later to a different mother, a daughter, then eight years on, another daughter, my sweet youngest, to yet another mother. It wasn't planned out that way, I never set out to be a "playa," to have 2.54 children by as many women as possible. All of my children were conceived in love, and not one could ever be called a "mistake" or ill-thought out. They are all beautiful creations, half my genes and half another persons, themselves a continuation of two other family traditions, names, cultures, DNAs, histories. What a wonder! What a miracle!

Now I am temporarily alone, my partner has to spend six months in Canada to maintain her status. As I still work, that leaves me with a couple of months here before my summer vacation, when I can rejoin her. In the mean time, I am learning about myself.

I am leaning that in my later years I am finding it harder to self-regulate my daily schedule. I once had a dog, Hallmark, that would help tell me when it was time to eat, when it was time to go to bed. When my SO is here, she helps me. Now, there is no one, and I startle myself to look up from whatever I am doing on a Wednesday night to see the clock, and realize it says 3:00am. I never had that problem when there were children in the house. Children are great fans of the routine, and even when they are breaking it, they want to make sure you are following it.

I also tend to let the kitchen go when I am alone, and the sink/dishwasher, or both at the same time, fill up with dirty dishes, and nothing happens to them; or dishes in the dishwasher will get washed, then will remain in storage for a week or more. Then my youngest will call, wanting to come over to watch a hockey game. And almost imperceptibly, I will start to clean. Dishes get put away, food gets put in cupboards, pans get stored. I guess I want my News to see her Dad's home as a place close to that one she grew up in. I hope she never sees me unglued, and that drive helps me keep it together.

So now I think I know what children are for. They are for us to admire, to love, and to keep us from getting too old to take care of ourselves. And my children, at least, are doing a great job.

Crow