Monday, April 30, 2007
Ron's rules rule!
| Last Thursday was a good day. Obviously it was Krystal day, but there was more to it. I had the opportunity to meet someone I had wanted to meet for quite a while. You may have heard of Ron Clark before. He's been on Oprah a few times, his book has been a national bestseller for a while, and he's had a movie made based on him (with Mathew Perry of Friends fame playing Ron). I had heard of Ron before, but little else about him. I knew he had more or less revolutionized elementary school education, but you always hear of people who "revolutionize" education and within a year they disappear. Ron's story, however, is quite different. And oddly enough. Ron's story intersects with mine. You see, Ron is from a tiny town in NC called Aurora. It's not too terribly far from where my parents live. When i say it is tiny, I am not kidding. Roughly 600 people. Ron never wanted to teach, but more or less got pushed into it by his mother. And he's never looked back since. After completely turning around children at a school in NC, he decided (without really understanding what he was gettign into) to go and "fix" a school in Harlem, NY. Yes, Harlem. White kid from eastern North Carolina teaching at a school in Harlem with no white students. The fact he took the WORST class of students and brought their test scores up in one year even above the top tier students is enough to make a movie out of. And in fact they did. It is really a good movie, but only a fraction of his story. You see, last Thursday Ron was in Macon at our local Barnes and Noble. How we lucked out to get him is beyond me. But I wasn't going to miss this opportunity.  Two changes of majors later, plus a masters degree, and 3 years at a painfully boring desk job, I am now a teacher. The difference is that I teach college, where thinking outside the box is accepted, and even encouraged. For some the outside the box thinking turns into a thesis or dissertation. For some the outside the box thinking allows them to connect with their students in a new and revolutionary way, opening the world while opening minds. At first Ron thought outside the box, but just never bothered to tell school administrators about it. He did it his way. And look at where he is now. (Again, what does this tell us about public education today.) Ron thinks outside the box and so do I. And the gems we find outside the box we do not GIVE to the students, we encourage them to break out of the box and find their own gems themselves. I think we rob our children when we toss knowledge to them and never make them find it themselves. Robert Heinlein once said "Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy." Ron has been so successful that this fall he is opening a school, The Ron Clark Academy. The school will serve two purposes. First, it will obviously be a place of great learning for its students. But even more important, it will be a learning lab for educators who will come and observe Ron and his amazing faculty at work at the academy. I think it is very very fitting that the people who were once telling Ron he could not think outside the box but must follow the rules are now climbing over each other to come to Ron's school and see education using Ron's Essential 55 Rules. In talking to Ron I told him that I have found that some of the adults I teach are in need of his rules, too. If you haven't read his book it is more a book on manners than a true "education" book. But I have noticed over the years a decline in the manners of children and young adults, and sadly they're now to the age of being in college, and joining the working world. We are now living and working with the products of years of "making their lives easy." On more than one occasion on the base I have had a student come through my class who quite simply could not read. It makes me very sad and very angry. It is sad because being illiterate is perhaps one of the worst handicaps there is. Society is less tolerant of illiteracy than blindness, deafness, or immobility. But more importantly, I am angry because it took a series of teachers to work together to screw these people. By simply overlooking and ignoring the problem and passing them on along, teacher have doomed them to a life of struggle. The TO's (the maintanence manuals) for the Air Force are written to the 9th grade level, despite a requirement that you be a high school graduate to get a job. The 9th grade reading level is to reduce any confusion on complicated instructions. If someone cannot even read to the 3rd grade level what does that tell you? I wish Ron the greatest of success. He and I have a handshake agreement. He'll do his best to produce well educated, well mannered students at his level, and I'll do my best to catch the ones that got away, and turn them around. We both know it is too big a job to handle ourselves, but it has to start somewhere. And thank goodness for guys like Ron with the courage to stand up to anyone and everyone for what is good, and right. And to defend children from public education, if that is what it takes.   |
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