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When you introduce yourself to your child’s new teacher this week and she (or he) seems exhausted, you might want to give her a break. If you find yourself in Wal-Mart gathering school supplies, you might want to take a breath before lighting into the teacher who wrote the list. If you see the signup list for room mother/father or see a wish list of school supplies for your child’s room, you might want to reconsider the giving of your time or money.
You might want to give your child’s teacher a break because she is probably at the school supply store right now putting another $400 on her Visa card so your child will have a more perfect learning environment.
She’s spending her own money because her 200 dollars worth of room money ran out about $3,200 dollars ago. In addition to making purchases for your child which she will be paying off around Christmas, she has worked 16 hour days for the last two or three weeks arranging your child’s room and starting on a part of the overwhelming paperwork which will be required to prove she taught your child. Believe me, “No Child Left Behind” only exacerbated the paperwork. In many systems, part of those days were spent moving all of her stuff back in place classroom because many systems move it all into the hall in the summer. The stuff in the halls includes rugs. Teachers, not custodial staff, usually rent steam cleaners and clean the rugs during the two or three weeks of preparation before school starts.
It’s not that schools don’t have janitors, copiers or laminators. The problem is school boards would prefer to hire their friends to be the Assistant Superintendent for External Affairs than buy laminator film, copier paper or hire enough custodians to assist teachers at a critical time before school. Some of these positions are due to unfunded mandates from Washington, but many are due to good ole homespun politics. Most teachers use up their allotment of 200 copies and four feet of lamination before they get your child’s name on their desk. Those same friends of the school board also conduct the performance evaluation on your child’s teacher. Many of the evaluators were ineffective teachers and were promoted due to politics, nepotism and meddling of school boards. Many evaluators don’t really understand the modern classroom, so evaluation usually begins with how the teacher’s room looks. Those ABC’s which performed their job brilliantly last year may have to go. Your child’s teacher has replaced many of the visuals you will see next week.
Teachers have been forced to participate in a kind of arms race which does absolutely nothing to improve your child’s education. Moreover, politically appointed administrations often seem to go out of their way to make your child’s teacher spend time doing things and spending their own money on items which will not help your child. By the way, those political hacks also control the teacher’s ability to get tenure.
So, if you see dark circles under the eyes of the teacher who will be in charge of your child’s education for the next nine months, just remember she has gone through a gauntlet over the last several weeks and survived. In most cases, she has moved furniture, ripped everything off the walls, spent thousands of her own money to replace it and written a new lesson plan because some bureaucrat changed the rules. Around midnight she began her final and arguably most important task. She printed your child’s name on labels she bought, with inkjet cartridges she bought and put it on a folder she got on sale at Wal-Mart. She wrote a note to you about the next nine months of your child’s life and how she planed to make your child smarter, more socialized and generally a better person. Each time she stuck a new name on a folder she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and wondered for just a minute what kind of student this child would be and if she might be able to inspire him or her. With the anticipation of child on Christmas morning, she wondered if she could help this child change the world. When she gives you this folder, you might try to share with her the promise and hope it represents.
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You might have heard. The 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong being the first man on the moon is coming up in a few days. Living so close to Huntsville, Alabama, I have seen a good bit of hype about the anniversary in the local press. I saw an article in the magazine section of my paper and I am sure there will be a few national news stories on the actual anniversary date. The story in the USA TODAY Sunday magazine insert caught my eye.
The story caught my eye because several people including Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sally Ride and John McCain were asked how the event impacted their lives. Tyson, the college professor turned PBS Nova Science Now host, seemed to have an experience similar to mine. I remember watching the landing on a small 19-inch black and white TV with my father, mother and infant sister in Nashville, Tennessee. I remember how awed my father was when NASA actually pulled off the feat. My dad should not have been surprised because he worked, for a time, for a space contractor, doing computer test simulations for the Saturn V launch vehicle. Perhaps his excitement rubbed off on me because adults had trouble making out the fuzzy image on the small TV. I am sure my six year-old mind did not comprehend what actually happened that day.
What happened that day was repeated six times in my young impressionable life and I am sure I probably said more than once I wanted to be an astronaut. I was never to slip the surly bonds of earth, except for a few flight lessons and a few commercial flights but, I did become an engineer.
What’s your point Joe?
If you feel technology is the way out of our economic mess. If you feel having more scientists and engineers are the way to get there. Then, you should understand the value of a manned space program. Let’s call it the Air Force method of recruiting.
Have you ever seen airmen greasing fittings on the tractor which pulls airplanes on a recruiting commercial? Have you ever seen an airman cleaning out the porta-potties on transport planes in a recruiting commercial? Well, of course they don’t show any of those critical tasks being performed on an Air Force recruiting commercial. What do they show a young 18 year-old when they want him to join the Air Force? They show the sexiest part of the mission. They show pilots breaking formation in F-22 Raptors. They show pilots flying simulators which make a kid’s X-Box at home look like Pong. How many Raptor pilots do you think are recruited each year as a percentage? I would bet it is a very small percentage.
For a large percentage of us, calculus is not really fun. I personally learned the math so I could do the fun stuff like science. My dad taught math and I still hated it. I did however, see the thrill in his eyes when he explained where Neil Armstrong happened to be on that hot July day in 1969. He and Neil inspired a love of science that would only be reinforced later by my high school science teacher. At the end of the day, like most kids, I would have never learned math for math’s sake. Like the Air Force, I was shown the Raptor and not the hard work required to make the Raptor fly.
My point in this article flies in the face of what another celebrated spokesman scientist, Doctor Carl Sagan, preached. He and many other scientists called the manned space program a waste of money. They would tell us a thousand robots like the famed rovers spirit and opportunity could be launched for the cost of one Shuttle mission. However true it may be, most kid’s eyes glaze over when they see a little six-wheeled rover digging in red dirt. You need a real person hopping in a big tall rocket and blasting into space to capture the mind of a twelve year-old. You may think twelve is a little early but, in today’s education system, twelve is when a kid begins to decide which math to take. To be able to take calculus in high school you have to take algebra in the seventh or eighth grade.
So when we talk about seventh and eighth graders making poor math scores on achievement tests, I submit the best way to fix the problem is to inspire them. Inspire a new generation of Joes, Neils and Sallys. It’s easy to talk about a manned program and hard to fund it in an ongoing meaningful way. It is especially hard when we consider manned space flight a luxury. If you think about space flight in terms of a recruiting tool to help our country regain it’s technical edge, it begins to look more like a necessity.