It will create a new age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.
If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the nonathletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.
This law has been revised from A Teacher’s Calendar—Didactic Pensive Musings, Satire, and Oxymorons on Education Issues.
Where is it said that everything worth learning is on a test?
David A. Hancock
Chester
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
WIT AND WISDOM TO PONDER
Dave Lange’s perspicacious column and uninvited commencement address, “Graduates Get Words of Wisdom,” of June 4–5, “I’m Going to Tell You What Not to Do,” reminded me of my commencement address as senior class adviser to the class of 1987 at Cleveland Heights High School.
Ruminating on the event at the Front Row Theatre with approximately 2,500 in attendance, my introduction was, “I have a gift to the graduating class of 1987. My speech will be short.” Laughter. “As all of you know, being a science educator, I do not want to add excess carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and damage ozone.”
The title of my commencement address should have been “I’m Going to Tell You What You Should Do.”
“Please refer to the additional supplemental references in your program for future reference. Refer to it frequently. So you don’t have to take notes now and take a test on Monday.” Laughter.
Thank your inspiring teachers. Verbally and written.
Overcome your miseducation. By this, I mean what was educationally significant and hard to measure seems to be replaced by what is educationally insignificant and easy to measure—multiple guess-memory tests. So now we measure how well we’re taught what isn’t worth learning.
Remember the following wit and wisdom:
• “I never let schooling interfere with my education” (Mark Twain).
• “You can get all As and still flunk life” (Marian Wright Edelman).
• “Fame-celebrity is a mask that eats into the face” (John Updike).
Avoid the lethal habits of criticizing, blaming, complaining, nagging, bullying, threatening, punishing, bribing, and controlling.
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. Read Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson.
Avoid the lethal need to judge, to keep score, to get even, to control.
Practice the caring habits of supporting, encouraging, listening (listen and silent have the same letters), accepting, trusting, respecting, and negotiating differences. Avoid being a misanthrope.
Do not be odious, petulant, or a boss-dictator. Be a leader who does not fix blame but fixes mistakes.
Read and implement The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton.
The quality of our life is determined by the quality of our thinking.
Avoid the mistakes of humans recommended by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), which are the illusion that personal gain is made up of crushing others, neglecting development and refinement of the mind and not acquiring the habit of reading and study, and attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
Read and study the following ASAP:
• 30 Days to Better Thinking and Better Living through Critical Thinking: A Guide for Improving Every Aspect of Your Life by Linda Elder and Richard Paul
• Wisdom of the Ages: A Modern Master Brings Eternal Truths into Everyday Life by Wayne Dyer
• Any Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff books by Richard Carlson
• Any book by Rabbi Harold Kushner, especially Living a Life that Matters and Overcoming Life’s Disappointments: Learning from Moses How To Cope With Frustration
• Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now by Gordon Livingston, MD
• Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole by Stephen Law
• The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die by John Izzo
• The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell You by Mike Dooley
David A. Hancock
Chester
Final Reflections
“If Hancock elicits anger, he should at least make you think, and that is always a good precedent for action.”
The Problem
School is the first place where children learn how to fail. School culture (physical and psychological environments) tends to elicit and are antecedents to student oppositional defiant disorder (especially if you are a boss-dictator who manages and teaches with coercion.
The Solution
As Kirsten Olson reports in her book Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture:
We all have to start by actually noticing, in a clear and relatively objective way, the things that are dysfunctional about school: how it’s organized, how it makes learners feel day to day, how it achieves its “results” and whether those results are the ones we actually want and intend. Lots of us involved with school teachers, students, parents, administrators, support staff, policymakers—complain about educational systems, but don’t take action to join together with others to actually do something about them. The Giant Step in standing up is forming groups to begin talking to others about school practices, policies, and procedures that don’t work—groups that help us understand why schools are as they are, and what we can do about them. Standing up often involves starting with small acts of protest, asking hard questions, supporting others in objecting, refusing to accept “Because that’s the way we do it” answers. Seemingly insignificant little changes can lead to big transformations. It’s a matter of getting started. Otherwise, it’s an oxymoron; “It is essential to the triumph of Reform that it should never succeed.”
William Hazlitt, English writer
My intentions are to be a provocateur who uses words to fulminate discussion, debate, deliberation, and introspection in reference to teaching, learning, schooling, and education.
I recall one of my colleagues saying that we should evaluate a book
