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EDUCATION ISSUES: Matters regarding education in America are of great concern to me and hopefully everyone. Therefore I'm creating this page for the sole purpose of offering information about both the good and bad in American education. Your contributions and comments are always welcomed.

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Does History Repeat Itself, or What?

Most of us are familiar with the phrase, "History repeats itself." In college, as a history student, I was required to take a class called Historiography, or roughly defined, how to go about studying history. Among the items discussed were the various theories attempting to explain the nature of history.

Does history repeat itself? Is the future affected by the past? Does each historical event stand on its own? Is there anything to be gained from studying history other than its inherent interest? Well, I just perused the last page of a recent Newsweek and I think I discovered the definitive proof of what I have long held, history does repeat itself.

In my many discussions and arguments over the years I've often attempted to explain that even as bad as we think things are today, there is little unique about our situation. Politics in America has always been bloody, we have always had religious difficulties, social injustice is nothing new, protest over our involvement in war has many examples, none of our presidents were perfect, the Founding Fathers weren't always what we think they were.

In other words, there isn't much new under the sun. Just take a good look at the Newsweek page below and, without looking at the dates, determine whether these headlines are from today's newspapers or some era gone by.

Then feel free to spend your dime by submitting a comment.

Larry Chapman, March 5, 2010: Submit Comments

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Classroom Lessons

Mr. Chapman’s blog about how teachers see the outcome of students as they pass through the system awakened a memory of an unusual character in the city school system I attended.

 Miss Goodrich was an unusual person.  My first experience with her was as a student and a part of the English department herd in junior high school.  She walked to school every day, but no one had any idea where she lived. 

 Miss Goodrich was a presence to avoid.   In what we called her “old lady” shoes, she would march forcefully through the halls, head down and her pace never fluctuating.  We were to get out of her way – period. New class sessions always started the same… a fake smile pasted on her face and a very formal “Good morning” or “How do you do” acknowledgement of our presence as she strode into the room. She still styled her hair in the Marcel wave in the ‘60’s and her dresses reached almost to her ankles. 

 Her daily technique never varied.  Miss Goodrich would enter the classroom and shut the door.  She would then go to her storage closet – all the classrooms had one – for reasons we were never clear about.  This act would cause us to quiet with curiosity.  If it did not, she would exit it, slamming the door behind her.  This definitely got our attention. She would then add her smile and greeting.

Miss Goodrich had a few quirks, and unpleasant, perhaps even destructive, habits.  A new boy was admitted to our class mid-year.  The young man was from the South, with the accent and speech patterns intact.  “Ain’t” was a big part of his vocabulary.  This irritated the instructor.  The young man had the misfortune of having to sit directly in front of her desk.  When he would say the banned word, instead of correcting his mistake gently, she would ridicule him.  Eventually she began to make fun of all of his speech, mimicking his accent. The class was embarrassed for him, and angry with her.

Occasionally Miss Goodrich's frustration peaked and she would go to her closet and scream. This would relieve her stress, but eventually became a laughing point for the students. We wondered why she was teaching if she was so miserable. Eventually we found out.

 Miss Goodrich volunteered at the local hospital a block away.  She had never wanted to be a teacher.  Her heart’s desire was to be a nurse.  The woman had no control over her life’s work; her father dictated that she was to be a teacher if she expected him to pay for her education.  Period.  So a teacher, she became.  An unhappy teacher whose joy came in the work she was not paid to do.  Teaching us was her bread and butter only.

 I saw Miss Goodrich one more time when I was in high school.  She was walking in my neighborhood, more than three miles from that junior high school.  She recognized my face, but could not give me a name.  She never learned names.  Her smile was genuine, perhaps because she was not in the classroom.

 Teachers affect us daily, throughout our lives, either negatively or positively.  I will admit I learned little in the two years I had her for English.  A greater lesson came from that classroom.  Follow your heart’s desire to happiness, not someone else’s idea of what can make you happy.

Linda Terwilliger-Fugate, October 5, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com

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The Failure of Education in Today's America

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the world's largest philanthropic organization. Amongst its many projects is helping to find solutions to many of the problems facing public education in today's America.

New York Times columnist, Bob Herbert, writes about the failure of American education and efforts being personally made by the Gateses to deal with it. The archived link to Herbert's column is:

 www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/opinion/29herbert.html   

Bob Herbert, New York Times, September 29, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com 

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Teaching is a Wonderful Profession

You know, teaching may be the best of all the professions. There aren’t many jobs that permit you to observe and communicate with the finished product and walk away believing you had a hand in helping to make them the valued person they became.

In recent months, via the social website Facebook, I’ve been able to reestablish contact with several hundred students from the 70s, 80s and 1990s. If they are a representative sampling of the over four-thousand students who went through the classrooms in the Greenfield school system, we did a pretty good job.

Most have become what we want everyone to become, hard working, loving, giving, caring, tolerant, and contributing members of our greater society. And, what they have become is, to some degree, the product of everyone who touched their lives, parents, family, teachers, ministers, doctors, friends, scout leaders, 4-H leaders, and tooth fairies.  

But, next to parents and family, these former students probably spent more time under the guidance of their teachers than anyone else. And if they turn out good we in education can take a little credit. If they fail in life we have to accept a little of the blame for that, as well. In a perfect world, no one would fail and if we were perfect educators we would find a means to see that every child received what they needed to succeed.   

Well, this is not a perfect world and we are not perfect teachers. Nor is every parent, minister, scout master or tooth fairy perfect. We all do what we can and hope in time what we gave takes hold and the seeds of success blossom.  

In the past week I have had encounters with both a student who we failed and one who is succeeding. I received a communication from a student from the 1980s, it was bitter, accusatory, nasty, extremely vulgar, very hateful, and obviously the product of an individual with real emotional and societal problems.  

I don’t feel responsible for how this person’s life evolved because I know they entered the school system with the seeds of anti-social behavior deeply implanted. Any attempt by the school to discipline, mold and educate only deepened or reinforced the behavior. It probably was never a winnable situation, and this is a regrettable occurrence.  

But, to offset that, today I spend an hour, or so, with a former student from the 1990s who is working on her degree in communications. This person entered the same system as the first but with a very different result. She excelled as a student but flunked out of her first year of college, falling victim to too much freedom coupled with too many opportunities to exercise that freedom.  

The wonderful part though is that fifteen years later, she decided to take charge of her life and pick up where she left off. She is back in college, loving every moment of it, motivated and not content to earn anything other than a place on the Dean’s List.  

While one case presents you with sadness and regret, the other fills you with joy and a hope that you were somehow a part of it. Fortunately, for the sake of society, most people’s stories are of the ladder and that’s what makes teaching such a wonderful way to earn a paycheck.

Larry Chapman, September 28, 2009, comments to greenfieldohio@gmail.com  

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