The practice today is exactly the same. My better judgment would suggest to take a day off now. My writing may even suffer some if done on successive days. There, that sets up my critics for some real wisecracks. I once wrote all the time with the newspaper. I was younger then.
Families are stretched as they weigh how their kids' education should proceed. Or maybe not? An article last week suggested that many parents are saying "oh to heck with it" in terms of homeschooling. In other words, they are attending to their most essential day-to-day needs, practical and emotional.
Perhaps there is another way to look at this. Maybe the idea of at-home learning under the watchful eye of the normal teachers is starting to seem impractical or even irritating. Maybe it seems intrusive. There's no real silver lining with what is happening now. But one outcome may be the realization we don't need to be so dependent on our legacy education systems, those systems planted in our bricks and mortar places.
This realization has been worthy of attention. Ditto with many new approaches to things brought about by the digital revolution. So, does every community in America need an array of teachers guiding students in all the topics? At enormous expense to us all of course?
I can make a parallel. I recently shared with a friend that checking various radio stations around the country can seem futile because upon tuning in, you hear the voice of Rush Limbaugh or others like him. The possibilities of the medium are blunted. So why can't fans of Limbaugh go to some central place via the web and gain their "enrichment" there (quotes being my way of belittling)?
My point is that the traditional system is full of redundancies. We used to have to turn to more locally based media for access to all kinds of things. By the same token, the local high school needed to have a specialized teacher for advanced physics. Naturally this kind of learning can be done from the world wide web, just like nearly everything can be done through the medium. Of course there's collateral damage. But what's inevitable is inevitable.
I read an analysis several years ago about redundancy on newspaper websites. The example given was the Somali pirates story. Every regional paper put up links to stories like that, redundant not only in that sense but also in the way Reuters was used as the source. Not just redundant, duplicative. So why can't people just find Reuters and read stories like this there?
Our public school teachers don't like to admit that kids can advance their knowledge in a self-motivated way. Naturally kids want to develop their communication skills. They have the incentive of using online platforms that may be silly in some ways, but productive and insightful in others. Teachers will scoff. But I look back to how I consumed comic books, which the education establishment railed against, backs of baseball cards and Hardy Boys mysteries. Oh, and books that I voluntarily checked out at the school library. All us kids did that. I devoured books by Jim Kjelgaard, self-motivated.
And the "fun" reading seemed to advance my learning better than required classroom assignments. The assignments seemed almost designed to frustrate, discourage and bore us. For example, Jack London's short story "A Piece of Steak." No one would voluntarily seek to read that. But stuff like this was stuffed down our throats. Frankly I think a lot of it had a political agenda. Our public school monopoly was a totally government-run thing then, with painfully little flexibility. The teachers owed their living to this vast bureaucratic system. They thus learned to promote the idea of collectivist institutions - it was in their interest.
There were so many fine historical novels we could have read, uplifting and wholesome stories. Instead we got swill that suggested the worst of human nature much of the time. Why read John Steinbeck? He's an important writer - well he was important for his time. Give him credit but times change.
The reading assignments I got in high school, I would present as examples of "don't make kids read this." Maybe the worst: "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." I might actually endorse some of the real political aims of the African-American activist. But high school kids did not have the maturity to read that book, to see it in its proper context. Just think of the Apostolic kids bringing that book home as an assignment. Here I'd agree fully with the stance of those folks. Still, I wish they would have allowed their kids to watch TV! They missed "The Virginian" starring James Drury.
So parents at present are wanting to put aside their homeschooling aims, in light of the urgent matters surrounding us with the looming pandemic. But maybe there's something deeper going on: parents are saying to heck with the teachers who feel they have to lord over kids and evaluate them in such an exacting way, or in a way that just makes the teachers feel important. Perhaps I'm nudging the latter conclusion.
An anecdote about Bill Krump: he was a driver's ed. teacher in summer. Did a fine job. Every time he saw a motorist who appeared a little impatient, going too fast, he'd say "that person is in a big hurry to get somewhere."
Remember the parallel parking instruction? Interesting that today some states are actually dropping that part. So many people were failing it, they had to come back and re-take and it was clogging the system. I personally never park close between two vehicles. I'd rather park several blocks further away.
Kids have their electronic devices and they'll be just fine as they build their literacy, just like me with my comic books. How would I have learned the word "doomed" without comic books? Which reminds me: Calvin Griffith, the late owner of the Minnesota Twins, once said of Jim Eisenreich that he was "doomed to be an all-star." (Destined of course.)
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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