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