School Thoughts
I spend about a hundred twenty odd days each year working in local public schools as a substitute teacher. This blog started out titled "The Northwest Sub Teacher", and was intended as a way to break the isolation of a job in which one has virtually no contact with colleagues in the field. On a typical day I check in with the school secretary, read written instructions, shuck and jive the students for a few hours, and skulk home after the final bell without a word of adult human contact. No meetings, no bull with the boys around the coffee machine, no office banter of any kind. For me, this isn't necessarily bad. I have never fit into conventional social situations very well anyway, and the freedom that goes along with a solitary occupation comes as a relief.
The job of the sub does not include very much actual teaching. Especially in the middle and high school grades kids have a long established tradition in their culture that a sub day equals free time. Even when the sub happens to know something about the class work for the day it rarely registers as anything more than a faint distraction at he shadowy edges of the students cell phone - i Pod saturated heads. Penetrating the haze of pocket electronics in school is like sweeping sand off the ocean beach. No way to win. Even students who are the most supportive in any class room can turn ugly when they smell the blood in the water from a sub who tries to crack down on the distractions. Text conversations going from room to room throughout the school are so thick that it seems like I can see the streams of data sweeping between buildings like dry leaves on a windy November afternoon. Miniature video games glow in boys laps, and the i Pod ear buds simmer like over heated coffee at the back of a camp stove. Aside from the likelihood of hearing loss at an early age from the high decibel level blasted out from those miniature loud speakers, the music often helps with concentration in that minority of students who do spend their school time on academic work, which is good.....maybe.
Stark contrast to my school years. World Series 1959, when Mel MacArthur, a tenth grader in our tiny country school, carefully hollowed out the center of an old book, gluing all the pages together with the front cover free to open as a lid revealing a small plastic transistor radio hidden inside. A small hole in the cover let out sound enough so that he could pass along reports on our heroes, Mantle and Clemente, Yogi and Maris during breaks between classes. The teachers probably knew, wanted to be following the games as much as the rest of us, but official school policy would have dictated immediate confiscation of the contraband radio and disciplinary action taken against the miscreant who dared violate the rules of the day.
On the one hand, it is easy to say what's the harm in the kids having a little entertainment at school. On the other, our kids are in desperate competition with students in China and India, many of whom would not dare waste the precious moments of their lives that are devoted to studies, and if our kids don't wake up they will be crushed in a race the existence of which they are as yet unaware.
I'm only an observer in the schools. Actual teachers and administrators spend their lives trying to figure out how to teach and motivate young people. Occasionally I draw an assignment that gives me hope for the future, but most of the time I sit there with the cold feeling that the next generation doesn't have a chance in hell of competing with the world, and our country will be rolled under by other cultural groups like a paper bag in front of a semi. Taking a longer view of history, it is all inevitable. No empire has not crumbled, no nation has remained at the top of the pile very long before being replaced. There is no reason to believe that the empire in which we live can be exempt from the law. It has been a good ride for a while, looks like rough road ahead.
The job of the sub does not include very much actual teaching. Especially in the middle and high school grades kids have a long established tradition in their culture that a sub day equals free time. Even when the sub happens to know something about the class work for the day it rarely registers as anything more than a faint distraction at he shadowy edges of the students cell phone - i Pod saturated heads. Penetrating the haze of pocket electronics in school is like sweeping sand off the ocean beach. No way to win. Even students who are the most supportive in any class room can turn ugly when they smell the blood in the water from a sub who tries to crack down on the distractions. Text conversations going from room to room throughout the school are so thick that it seems like I can see the streams of data sweeping between buildings like dry leaves on a windy November afternoon. Miniature video games glow in boys laps, and the i Pod ear buds simmer like over heated coffee at the back of a camp stove. Aside from the likelihood of hearing loss at an early age from the high decibel level blasted out from those miniature loud speakers, the music often helps with concentration in that minority of students who do spend their school time on academic work, which is good.....maybe.
Stark contrast to my school years. World Series 1959, when Mel MacArthur, a tenth grader in our tiny country school, carefully hollowed out the center of an old book, gluing all the pages together with the front cover free to open as a lid revealing a small plastic transistor radio hidden inside. A small hole in the cover let out sound enough so that he could pass along reports on our heroes, Mantle and Clemente, Yogi and Maris during breaks between classes. The teachers probably knew, wanted to be following the games as much as the rest of us, but official school policy would have dictated immediate confiscation of the contraband radio and disciplinary action taken against the miscreant who dared violate the rules of the day.
On the one hand, it is easy to say what's the harm in the kids having a little entertainment at school. On the other, our kids are in desperate competition with students in China and India, many of whom would not dare waste the precious moments of their lives that are devoted to studies, and if our kids don't wake up they will be crushed in a race the existence of which they are as yet unaware.
I'm only an observer in the schools. Actual teachers and administrators spend their lives trying to figure out how to teach and motivate young people. Occasionally I draw an assignment that gives me hope for the future, but most of the time I sit there with the cold feeling that the next generation doesn't have a chance in hell of competing with the world, and our country will be rolled under by other cultural groups like a paper bag in front of a semi. Taking a longer view of history, it is all inevitable. No empire has not crumbled, no nation has remained at the top of the pile very long before being replaced. There is no reason to believe that the empire in which we live can be exempt from the law. It has been a good ride for a while, looks like rough road ahead.
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