TERRE HAUTE —
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution. I am proud to call myself a teacher, and I am proud that I am a product of public schools.
That being said, I will also say this: Public school teachers want school reform. Any teacher worth much knows that change is a vital part of the job of helping children learn. But true school reform doesn’t throw the baby out with the bath water; it doesn’t suggest that things are so broken that they can’t be fixed either. School vouchers and ending teachers’ rights to negotiate for working conditions, as attractive as they may sound to some, are not going to help public schools be better places to learn, and no one and no data will convince me otherwise. Perhaps you’ve heard Mark Twain’s words: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” All three are at work in painting a picture as to how easy it would be to clean up the “school mess.” Well, it’s not simple, and in many instances, it’s not a mess, either.
Our citizenry doesn’t appreciate the value of education as it once did, and until it does, I’m not sure we will ever see schools be as effective as we’d like them to be. We’re teaching children, not producing drainpipe. I wish more people understood that. If I could suggest a few changes that would help schools be better right now, this is what they would be:
• First, I’d like to see our youngest students go to kindergarten all day. I know that sounds simplistic, but it makes sense to me. Kids who are in school all day learn more, and that certainly has to prove true for 5 and 6-year-olds. It will take money — state money — but it’s a great investment in the future of our children, particularly for those whose first schools — their homes — are not education friendly. Personally, I don’t see how kindergarten teachers survive. I can deal with a classroom of surly, groggy seniors any day, but give me one 5-year-old who’s wet his pants or is crying for his mom or has a death grip on my leg, and I’d be lost.
• Second, if going to school for an entire day helps the youngest of our students, why wouldn’t that be true for the rest of them? Hoosier kids miss too much school, and they are absent too often without consequences. Schools should have rigorous attendance policies in place, and it will take money — again, state money — to see that those policies can be enforced. Teachers and administrators are not responsible for getting children out of bed and ready for school (or in bed the night before at a decent hour either). Every school system in the state should have the funding it needs to employ truancy and attendance officers and extra hours at school for students who need to make up for lost time. Ronald Reagan popularized the phrase, “Trust but verify.” That should apply to student absences, because whether they like it or not, many of these chronically absent kids will actually have to show up to jobs some day.
• Third, we should be expanding the arts in public schools, not hacking away at them with the budget axe. I know, that’ll take money too, but the arts — music and philosophy and painting and cooking and sewing and woodworking — all help make our kids better people, not just better students; they help equip our kids for a future of enlightening and entertaining themselves, and they help them think more creatively, which I believe helps anyone headed to the factory, the boardroom, or into parenthood. The testing mantra has been chanted long enough; take a look at how much time and money is being spent on that agenda. The arts are subjects that can’t be evaluated through ISTEP or End-of-Course Assessments, and that irritates those who advocate for and profit from such things. We are not creating worker drones; we are helping prepare people for a life in which they can think — or guess — in terms past a multiple choice exam.
Our kids need to read more and they need to read better. Reading will help them in every phase of their lives. Reading and comprehending good books and essays and poetry and short stories can, in the long run, help make our children more compassionate, more caring people. That may sound naïve, but it is true. So they can teach to the assessment tests, more and more teachers have to pass on teaching what our children should be reading and discussing. Money is needed right now for more reading specialists, and more teachers in all disciplines need training so they can teach children with reading difficulties how to read and comprehend what they read. And for goodness sake, please keep funding libraries so they’ll have a place to get a book, even an electronic one.
• Fourth, fund alternative schools. That may sound a lot like a charter school proposal, but it isn’t. Every public school corporation, and I mean even the smallest and most rural, should have at least one alternative school program going. They can even be shared between neighboring school systems. The one-size fits-all concept of education has never worked very well. Some students take more time to earn a diploma, more time to pass a standards-based performance test, or they may have one or more of myriad personal issues to deal with. Students should have an option within their own local school corporations. It will take money — state money — but right now there is an inequity in who can offer alternative education, and the state should help fix the problem, not by suggesting that new charter schools will take these students in, because I doubt that most will.
• Fifth, schools should be offering classes in civics and citizenship again. Another idea that has no immediate pay off? Maybe, but we are graduating more and more students who have little idea of what it is to be a citizen, and that puts us all in peril. When I look at old civics texts, which emphasized responsibility and manners and punctuality, I can’t help but think that there’s no less need for those now than 40 years ago. American Government — taught mostly in the senior year — is a fine course, but for most of our kids, that single semester class is all they’ll ever really have that is primarily concerned with how our governments are supposed to work. I hardly think reading accounts about the doings at the Statehouse will help them much.
And, while we’re at it, let’s have our kids take consumer economics before they graduate. Learning about the gross national product and stock portfolios is great, but if they have no understanding as to how to manage a credit card or balance a checkbook, they’re in trouble. As terrible as it sounds, that means we may actually have to hire teachers, and if we did, I sure would hope they hold valid teaching licenses. The idea that we should be sending more and more of our students off to college campuses after their junior year sounds a bit nutty to me too. They should be using their senior years to go to proms and play sports and take extra course work and to grow up.
• Finally — and I mean for now — let kids take trips to places away from their schools, to museums and symphonies and planetariums and places of business, and, yes, even to Indianapolis to watch our General Assembly at work. Field trips have gotten a bad rap for years as being lost days and playtime, and they’re dropping from curriculums like dead flies. I can still remember the trip my fourth grade class took to Vincennes; the bullet holes in William Henry Harrison’s house remain burned into my impressionable little mind even now. I learned more about Indiana history in one day than any book ever taught me, and I had fun learning it. If we’re going to invest money into maintaining historic sites — or, in the case of the Ernie Pyle birthplace, abandoning them — how about canceling one measly standardized test a year to send kids on a trip to one of them? A school trip may be their only exposure to such places.
I have mentioned money — state money — on every one of these points, and I know that the easy thing to say right now is that throwing money at education won’t work.
Throwing it probably won’t work, but putting it where it will do the most good just might.
Mike Lunsford can be reached by e-mail at hickory913@aol.com or by writing to him c/o The Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Read more of Mike’s stories at tribstar.com/mike_lunsford, and visit his website at www.mikelunsford.com. He is currently working on his third collection of stories.
Mike Lunsford
MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Taking a road less traveled in this illogical life
If you can still recall reading the poetry of Robert Frost in your high school English class years ago, I imagine that you can conjure up a line or two from his “The Road Not Taken.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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NJ Man Charged With Murder in Death of Patz
50 Years Later, Underground Fire Still Burning
Dragon Arrives at Space Station in Historic 1st
Police: Gunman Has Hostages in Realty Office
Passenger Restrained on Flight to Miami Arrested
Support, Fun for Kids of Fallen Soldiers at Camp
Beer Here!: An Historic Exhibit
Raw Video: Unruly Passenger Restrained in Miami
Fugitive Penguin Caught, Returned to Aquarium
Light Show Transforms Sydney Opera House
Raw Video: Robber Uses Drive-thru Window
Raw Video: Dragon Arrives at Space Station
Calif.'s Coronado Named Nation's Best Beach
Raw Video: SpaceX Capsule's Docking Delayed
Texan Ranchers Remain Wary of Drought
Vegas Grocer Deported to Face War Crimes Charges
Raw Video: Toddler Trapped in Washing Machine
CEO Salaries Become Sore Issue in Labor Disputes
Raw Video: Wildfire Burns 110 Square Miles
Raw Video: Soldiers Plant Flags at Arlington
80-Year-Old Skydiver's Nightmare Jump
JWoww Sizzles in a Black Bikini
Sliders on the Grill
Cruise ship crunch
Backstage With Beyonce
Ultimate Creamy Potato Salad
Pope's Personal Butler Under Arrest
Jenny McCarthy's New Man
Tyler's Classic Coleslaw
Britney Spears Under X Factor Fire
Flesh-Eating Bacteria Victim Hits Milestone
Hurricanes and Heat Waves Across America
Kristen Stewart Is Red Hot
Shark Attacks Australian Fishing Boat
Bradley out for playoffs
Kayaker Survives Trip Over Washington Waterfall
Alison Brie Likes To Jog Naked
Heidi Klum Goes Sheer
Alton's Best Burger Ever
