Missteps in the American education system?

Okay, so I got a little ticked off when I heard posters on mediabistro.com berating the American education system.

As the wife of an educator and a sometime education writer for Texas School Business and The Dallas Morning News among others, I'd have to say most American schools and educators are doing a great job of educating a very socioeconomically diverse generation. In the U.S., everyone gets an education. Granted it's better in some places -- your tax dollars at work, higher concentrations of literate parents raising kids in print-rich environments, parents whose incomes enable their kids to go to school on a full belly in the morning and in decent clothes. Those are huge advantages, right there.

Someone protested on the same board about school efforts to teach morals. I say they're a sign of the times, perhaps, and maybe a response to some of the terrible news about bullies and kids without scruples. And if parents are falling down on the job or too busy to do it, the schools do need to step in.

Complaints about renewed emphasis on phys ed? Surely, reviving PE curriculum is a response, and not a kneejerk one, to American homes turning out chunky latchkey kids who sit in front of the TV/computer/video game in lieu of family involvement or good babysitter. And afterschool programs that keep kids active and supervised would be a big step in the right direction.

With all this, a protest that in some schools economics is being phased out or made an elective? While I'd definitely say economics is an essential, I'd also like to see SAT/standardized test prep courses essential for kids who are passing, and tutoring courses essential for those who are not.

For people with as much education as they have, teachers are not lavishly paid, as some retorted. And with an increased emphasis on accountability, administrators are under a lot of pressure and their salaries are modest for their doctoral-level educations, compared the huge amounts lavished upon their counterparts in industry.

That said, there are some real dud educators out there, and if school systems weren't so desperate for educators, those bad apples wouldn't find a place at the chalkboard, living proof that good teachers couldn't possibly be overpaid because they're in short supply.

Education aside, it is certainly the parents' role to teach checkbook management, morals, ethics, reproductive essentials, faith, love of reading, early literacy, and to help their child develop their gifts.

I had someone tell me recently that it wasn't normal for parents to do all those things, that is the school's responsibility.

I don't think so.

Here's the thread on mediabistro I'm ranting about: http://mediabistro.com/bbs/cache/t38970_1.asp

The Very Mean Big Sister, or How I Learned to Read

I still believe it was sheer bossiness that prompted my sister to play school with me. It was the only thing she’d let me play with her.
Laurel wouldn’t let me in the tree house; instead, she sat up in that massive cedar tree with my cousin Debbie, making up an imaginary language they could make fun of me. "Ishnakishnahaky Jackie," would be followed by gales of laughter. To this day, Laurel asserts that it was a genuine language. I'd say the test of a language is its usefulness, and ridicule isn't enough to recommend it.
She wouldn’t let me be in the Dog Club. I watched with longing from a distance. as she and her school friends pointed to the life-size chart of a dog and learned all its parts. She was that mean, I told my dad tearfully.
Laurel always pointed out in return, without much tact whatsoever, that I was a whiny brat. Okay, so I did give her doll Jane a haircut, exposing the secret place Laurel had written the doll's name in case she got lost. Jane, right there in neat printing, on her forehead. Touche. How was I to know it wouldn’t grow back?
But she let me play school – no, she MADE me play school, sitting me down in a chair and relentlessly learning me my alphabets until I could read. "I'm the teacher, you're the pupil," she ordered.
Secretly, the game pleased me, but I couldn't let her know that, or for sure she'd have suspended me from "school." I was displeased when my mother, for some reason, decided not to send me to kindergarten;I drew a large schoolhouse mural on the yellow wall of my bedroom.
The first two books I ever owned I got at about the same time. I’d had hand-me-downs, of course – my siblings’ vintage Winnie The Pooh books among them.
But my first two books, brought home by my mother from an out of town trip, were Easy Reader’s Barney Beagle and The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. I read them over and over and dreamed of going off to school where there would be many, many more books to read.
When I had clearly mastered that material, my mother moved on to more challenging books. There was Robert Louis Stephenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, and an odd satirical cartoon book she brought back from Expo 67.
By the time I did get to go to school in grade 1, I was eagerly snapping up every book I could find, and the teacher would have me read to the other children.
Books, I was to learn, were not just my best friends; they were my transit papers to other worlds.

Tell Your Teen: This Too Shall Pass

On the last day of vacation, we stayed with my sister and her family in Washington state. We'd had a splendid time with family and friends, showing our kids the beauty of Vancouver Island, reintroducing my family to my kids -- and showing off the new baby, Patrick.

Invited by their cousin, the strong silent type, for a ride on a go-cart, Ryan took the challenge. He'd never ridden a go-cart. Didn't know how to start or stop it. But after a vague permission from me as I yakked with my sister, he got on, fired her up, and pretty much took off screaming. Everything he did seemed to make it go faster, and in a matter of moments he had careened into the neighbor's garage at full tilt. He knocked over their motorbike, and sent a stationary loaded boat trailer skidding 4 feet.

But not before the go-cart -- and his femur -- buckled.

As we rode in the ambulance to the hospital in Port Angeles, he moaned, "Why did this have to happen to me?" Tactfully, I refrained from mentioning his decision to get behind the wheel of a vehicle he knew not how to steer or even stop.

By the time he got out of the hospital, he looked like a human Y. He was bound in a horrendous fluourescent green, orange and white striped body cast -- the surgeon joked that it was a tribute to Mexico, since Ryan lived on the border. His broken elbow was healing -- as was the scrape on his cheek that revealed the truth: he might have been totally toast if he hadn't at least had the forethought to wear a helmet.

I made do as best I could. I bought a used gurney from an ambulance service for $50. On that gurney, we went to a tractor pull, a county fair, movies, the library, fishing, a Randy Travis concert.

And we had to get home somehow, which ended up being a handicapped berth on Amtrak, Seattle to Chicago to San Antone. We were late getting into Chicago after the train hit a cow in Montana, which slowed us down. Didn't do much for the cow, either. Ryan's Grandma U.C. and cousin Jen came aboard in Minneapolis and rode with us to Chicago.

It is a beautiful train trip -- but hot tip? don't do it on a gurney, you won't see a thing.

The upshot? Six home-bound months of total dependence. And a heckuva time just getting a South Texas doc to cut a growing boy out of his cast -- all were too worried about lawsuits. After learning to walk again, he walked funny for a year or so, much to his chagrin.

When Ryan asked me, in the ambulance, why this had to happen to him, I told him all I knew: everyone had one worst day, and maybe he was getting his over with now. Like Annie sang: The sun will come out tomorrow, so you've got to hang on til tomorrow, come what may. This too shall pass.

I will tell you this much: for all that kid went through growing up, to see his success and happiness today, I can truly say it couldn't happen to a nicer kid.

Some 15 years later, he's in the catbird seat. Cushy job, masters degree from an Ivy League school, cool car, wonderful fiancee.

More important, I know the empathy and the character his trials gave him -- how he is a great alpha dog in the family pack, a wonderful big brother, and how he will be a better husband and father for all he has been through.

What Ryan couldn't imagine in adolescence -- recovering from pain and disaster -- because of his limited experience, I had to envision for him.

And when anyone asks what one message today's youth need to hear, tell them: everyone has one worst day, or worst year, and maybe you're getting yours over with now.

Disappointed in love? Boyfriends/girlfriends are like buses, another one will be along soon.

and like Annie sang: The sun will come out tomorrow, so you've got to hang on til tomorrow, come what may. This too shall pass.

The oldest Big Sister in the world

How old is too old to do some good?

Well, there's a nine-decade gap between Iva Broadus and DeAngela Williams. Other than making Ms. Broadus – who will turn 99 in two weeks – the oldest Big Sister in the nation, according to the organization's records, that little fact doesn't seem to matter much.

At Cockrell Hill Elementary School in DeSoto, 10-year-old DeAngela enjoys social studies and science. But the highlight of her week is the school bus ride to Grace Presbyterian Village, where she visits her Big Sister.

In the gentle give-and-take over cards or lunch, there are other kinds of teaching and learning between Ms. Broadus and DeAngela. Social protocols, manners that are best passed from older to younger – the same things Ms. Broadus learned, in turn, as a little girl from her Aunt Edna.

"People are going to like people who like them," Ms. Broadus told her young charge in a recent discussion. "That's why I'm here, to tell you little things you don't know."

Read more in the Dallas Morning News story that also ran in the Denton Record Chronicle: http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/011308dnmetbigsister.23183b6.html

Grandma Laura: What love looks like when it's busy

So I was laying in bed thinking about how cold my feet were -- I'd been working in the draft, oblivious to my chilling tootsies -- and thinking I should really find my pink fuzzy slippers my kids got me for Christmas three years ago.

They're big and hairy (the slippers, not the kids) and you'd think they'd be really warm, for being so plush, but it occurred to me that no slippers could possibly get my feet as warm as the red woolen ones my Grandma used to knit for us every winter.

She was skilled in all sorts of fancy handwork, abilities learned at the knee of her Norwegian mother and aunts even before she sailed into New York harbor as a blue-eyed girl of 8, destined first for Ellis Island and then for a farming life in North Dakota.

The slippers she made us (and mittens too, for that matter) had to be red, as Grandma knew what most grandmothers seem to know -- that you will always lose just one, so the remaining slippers and mittens will need mates. She kept a drawer of singlet slippers and mittens by the door, hospitably ready for any visitor to come in and politely take their shoes off and warm up chilled toes in two little nearly-matched bits of hand-knitted heaven.

It's a scientific fact, her red mittens and slippers were the warmest, just as her sheets were the whitest and crispest and an education in and of themselves as outside their linen folds I had no understanding that sheets could be either crisp or white.

The truth is, my grandmother was the mother of all superlatives for me. Her laugh would charm the most hardened criminal; her look of disapproval from a flash of blue eyes the color of Norwegian seas under arched eyebrows, if incurred, weighed like an anvil on the shoulders of the mind.

Her pork chops were the most delicately seasoned I have ever consumed, the raspberries from her garden the sweetest, her roses the rosiest and her many species of African violets the violetest.

She served me grape Hi-C in glasses etched so pristinely it was like drinking from tiny chandeliers, quite a heady nectar it was, too. When I was more grown-up, there was hot tea with milk, and always her Scottish shortbread that melted at tongue temperature. Every piece of shortbread I've had since has failed to live up to the Grandmother standard.

With her clip-on mabe pearl earrings, true red lipstick perfectly applied and a light blue scarf at her throat, she was a picture of elegance each Saturday as we went to grocery shop, where I was assured a mint from her big clasped leather handbag.

My dad sent me all her handbags after she died, mailed me a big box of them because he didn't know what else to do with them, he said.

At the time, I was nonplussed at his gift of the ancient but still immaculate purses that had once been repositories for all that Grandma needed for our big weekly outing. I regret to say I could do what he couldn't -- I threw them out. I'd love to have just one of them now to put my cold memories in and warm them up.

But since my dad died I have her songbook from the Sons of Norway lodge, and I have her bean pot and the afghan and pillowcase that softened her gleaming maple rocker.

I know my grandma had her human side, but I never really saw it, or perhaps a glimpse when I exasperated or disappointed her -- which had to be often, but she was a patient woman.

She was something of a rock for family and neighbors, a legendary example of what love looked like when it was busy.

And she was the reason that every Christmas I searched for that perfect light blue scarf to give her, maybe one the color of the eyes of the morning glories on the vines that climbed over the trellis against her white storybook cottage that I now realize must have been just 600 square feet in size. She would always be surprised and delighted with each and have some nice remark about the fabric or the color.

When she died, she had a whole drawer full of light blue scarves because, of course, she couldn't throw them out.

My theory, and I could be wrong, is that when Grandma got to Heaven, she put a drawer full of nearly-matched hand-knitted red slippers by the pearly gates, waiting hospitably to welcome guests and take the chill of the journey off, and come in and have some and Scottish shortbread that melts at tongue temperature.

At least, that's my idea of Heaven.

I wasn't able to be there when my grandmother died; I couldn't go to her funeral or see her peers come to mourn her. Perhaps that's why I sometimes feel like she's still with me.

Call me sentimental, but sometimes I almost think I can hear -- more likely feel -- the sound of her chuckle as we cut up salmon filets for canning in the August sunshine or her voice warbling the last Norwegian she could recall -- the national anthem -- or calling me in from hiding under the all-enveloping green canopy of her weeping willow.

And it's almost like I'm in her warm and creaking kitchen once again and she's tucking me into snowy sheets on the rollaway cot and I think if I ever get a chance to be that memorable and meaningful to some child I would be honored beyond belief, and if I ever get a chance to live up to her gene pool and exhibit even a fifth of that old-fashioned hospitality and graciousness -- even in the face of grave circumstances -- I would have achieved true character. By the Grandmother standard, by which all truly good things -- from pork chops to sheets -- are measured.

And maybe I'll start by taking up knitting. I'm thinking ... slippers.

Do you have good memories of a beloved grandparent, or an idea of what Heaven must be like? Leave me a note -- I'd love to hear about them.