Our School System

A few days ago I was talking with one of the women whom I’ve worked with all summer and we got into a conversation about how she is losing one of her students for this upcoming school year.  Daisy is a teacher and as she spoke of the pride, compassion and effort she put into this one particular student, her story got sad because now, in a new school district, she doesn’t know if he will be guided in the same direction of greatness that he was headed toward. 

I asked her if she has an opportunity to have a meeting with the new teacher, or if there is any recommendation process that schools take when transferring a student, especially when that are handicapped such as this one, and she said, “no, there wasn’t”.  She just put a note in his file letting the new teacher know that they can call her whenever. 

This conversation got me thinking back to corporate America and how, in Starbuck for example, when I would transfer a partner from my store to a new store or vice versa, there was a complete step by step format that was done to make sure that this new employee was set up for success.  Maybe there is something there about looking at the direction in our public school system?

This morning when I was finished with my hike, I came across a wallet that was on the ground, lost, waiting to find it’s owner.  When I opened the wallet, I saw that the drivers license as well as the school identification card were local and belonged to a student at the Wisconsin Dells High School.  I figured I would just run by the school to drop it off being that it was close by.  Knowing that I haven’t been in a high school in almost a decade, I thought I would be highly shocked.  Surprisingly, I wasn’t.

When I walked in, I felt that I could have easily been placed in that same scene with the same understanding that I had at age sixteen.  Despite the look though, and the feeling that it hasn’t changed that much, it has drastically. Technology is now the most important part in an education and it is seeding into school districts more and more every day.  We can definitely see evidence of that after Apple donating Ipad 2s to all of those kindergarten classes this past year and into this fall.

Today, high school isn’t just in the school, it is online, at home or in charter schools that are growing quickly with popularity.  Just today in the New York Times, there are two different stories on public schools looking in how they run their schools and how they can foster better atmospheres for their students.  One article is how Houston public schools are mimicking their local charter schools and the other article is on how a New York schools are looking at changing their admissions policies.  As the documentary “Waiting for Superman” stated, we all want to make education better but we haven’t found the right equation. 

Despite all the options for school, and what level of education our new generations are receiving, and what they are doing with it once they are finished, the one fact remains that it needs to be one of our largest priorities.  So, the next time you happen to walk into a high school, or even an elementary school, take a close look to see how things are going. The initial feelings you have will be nostalgic, and you will momentarily remember your time at that age and smile, but remember it is nothing like it was when you were there.  That difference is the heavy weight that is on our youth and will determine the direction of our community called the United States of America. We Are All Involved!!!

One Fish, Two Fish, eBook, No Book

Have you noticed lately that your bookstores are disappearing?  A couple months ago Borders announced that it was going bankrupt and that there was a thirty/sixty/ninety day plan in place to close the majority of their stores.  Now that I am back in Los Angeles for a few days, I see the reality of this business’ demise. 

My entire twenties were spent in Border’s bookstores throughout the country.  At college in Eau Claire, WI, I would escape campus and go the twenty minutes to Borders to free myself of the academia atmosphere.  Once I moved to Los Vegas, I found refuge at the Borders at Rainbow and Lake Mead.  It was where I went to write, meet new people and take a moment to find my center. Here in L.A. it turned into my Saturday morning ritual: Coffee and then an early morning movie at the Arclight.  Now, I see, “everything must go” signs on its windows and that saddens me.

How did we get to the point where a predominant book store is closing?  One might say that it is the economy.  Others can scream technology and the introduction of the eBook.  For whatever reason, we are now in an age that grabbing your coffee, flipping through magazines while hanging out with a friend or finding a corner on the floor with a new book is becoming a fading memory.  To me, this is extreme sadness that deserves a little more pomp and circumstance than it is receiving.

Unfortunately though, this is the truth and the only thing that we can truly do is go forward with this knowledge.  What exactly does going forward look like though? Does it mean that we will all get our e-readers and when we finally finish a book, we can throw the hard copy onto the top of the fire?  Maybe, we can find some use to turning all these old books into a new energy source. “Coal is so out these days, our new natural resource is that old Encyclopedia Britannica we bought when the kids were eight in 1991”. Or possibly, there will be a huge fad of collecting books which will inspire the opening of Half Priced Books and used book stores all over the world.  Perhaps, Sally Struthers will ask us to donate our books to poor underprivileged children throughout the world?  I know I am being extremely sarcastic but really, what are we going to eventually do with all of these poor dead trees that will be lining book shelves that are also trees that had to die to hold their brothers and sisters together?

Again, I know I am coming off sarcastic, but space is a constant issue to all of us and conservancy is even more important than that.  EBooks, the internet and all of the virtual ways to do research are helping us to cut down on our paper usage and that puts smiles on almost all of our faces; well maybe except for people who work in publishing.  While we are cutting down though on that paper resource, what happens to all the resources that have been used to make what we already have?  My friends, we are on the road to the extinction of the book.  That means, in the next twenty years or so, we need to find good use to the books we have, and that also means, we will have to start being selective on the books that we save.  I know, I know, this sounds extremely farfetched, as well as further down the road than we think, but in the next five years, when the kindergartners that are currently using ipads are in fifth grade with only eBooks for their classes, what is going to happen to those books in that elementary library? 

My reasoning, which has no scientific background at all, is that there is greatness to being able to conserve the paper and resources with the evolution of technology.  While we are doing that though, we have to be conscious of what we already have literally on our shelves, making sure we do not just throw all these perfectly good books out to the curb.  This thought seems so far away but I would like to know the preparation for this because it will be an issue: Just ask the kindergartners.  So now I, even though fully supportive of the eBook, will now go back to reading my paperback.  Supportive doesn’t mean that I’m quite ready to give in just yet.

This article can also be found in DiGn2it Magazine