Fred Bear
By Tommie Saylor
Kennedy High School Principal
Over Thanksgiving break I had the
pleasure of hunting in a magical place known as the Manistee National Forest,
near the Mason-Lake County line, just north of the Little Sable River. I
had the opportunity to enjoy nature’s splendor, to welcome the crisp November
morning and have the pleasure of walking through unspoiled snow covered woodlands,
to breath clean air and be at peace with one’s surroundings.
It was absolutely intoxicating, but
it was by far not the best part of my journeys. The best part of my
adventure into the big woods, was the time spent with my son and a “Silent
American Hero,” Stephen Larsen. Mr. Larsen, or more correctly I should say Dr.
Larsen. He had earned his PhD years ago when many of us were
still in diapers and never flaunted this achievement.
That was the nature of the man, honest
to a fault, genuine, altruistic, and not the least of which, an educator. Steve
is a 40-year high school teaching veteran who taught science to generations of
young Americans. Many times during Steve’s professional life he was given the opportunity
to leave the field of education for higher paying jobs at such reputable firms
as Dow Corning, but each time Steve respectfully declined the offers in favor
of his first love, his true calling, teaching.
I had the pleasure of serving with
Steve for eight and a half years where we didn’t always see eye to eye on every
subject, but always held each other in the highest of esteem. Several
times Steve would enter my office disgruntled with the current state of events,
or determined to let me know he disagreed with a
recent decision, but always respectfully, logically and with the
best interests of students in mind.
Simply, as an educator, Steve was an
inspiration to us all as he gave his students his absolute best.
While staying at Steve’s cabin in the
big woods, a cabin void of most modern amenities yet surprisingly filled with a
warm homey allure, we took the opportunity to do as most educators do when
gathered together: We started talking about students, the modern plight of the
field of education and teaching pedagogy.
It did not take long before our conversation
paralleled an article given to me by Nicholas Lauerman concerning the outdated
methodology of today’s classroom.
This article argues that today’s
classroom is fundamentally rooted in the “factory model” developed during the
days of the industrial revolution:
"When workplaces valued punctuality,
regularity, attention and silence above all else. In 1899,
William T. Harris, the U.S. commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that U.S.
schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that
teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own
place and not get in the way of others.
“We don’t openly profess those values
nowadays, but our educational system – which routinely tests kids on their
ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills
– doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed,
and quality-tested." (Jose’ Urbina Lopez Primary School sits next to
a dump, Joshua Davis.)
Essentially, in the guise of “fixing”
the field of education, our state and federal government has handed teachers
what essentially amounts to a pacing guide that tells teachers what
to teach, and in some cases, how to teach, and then later evaluates the
students to see how well the teachers taught their lessons.
With this, teachers are held accountable,
administrators are responsible, and districts are held hostage by their
students test scores on a test that is constantly changing without notice,
standards that are vast and vague, written in a way to intentionally confuse
and mislead, and evaluated in the harshest way possible. In other words,
the state creates the curriculum, the teachers deliver the curriculum, administrators
enforce the curriculum, the federal government evaluates the student’s
understanding of the curriculum and the district faces the consequences
thereof.
Essentially, everyone is responsible
for the students learning except for the students and their parents. Students
are treated like a possession, a “cog” that can be hammered, shaped, tooled
into what we believe they should be.
And how is this working out for us:
"Hundreds
of thousands of kids drop out of public high school every year. Of those
who do graduate from high school, almost a third are “not prepared academically
for first-year college courses”, according to a 2013 report from the testing
service ACT." (Jose’ Urbina Lopez Primary School sits next to a
dump, Joshua Davis.)
“The fundamental basis of the system
is fatally flawed,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at
Stanford and founding director of the National Commission
on Teaching and America’s Future.
“In 1970 the top three skills
required by the Fortune 500 were the
three Rs: reading, writing and
arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork,
problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are
developing these skills,” (Jose’ Urbina Lopez Primary School sits next to
a dump, Joshua Davis.)
So, one must ask, are we doing it
wrong?
Why haven’t schools changed with the
times? Are we stuck? What can we do? We are doing it wrong! But no,
we are not stuck and we can work within the framework handed to us by the state.
It’s about learning to let go.
As an educator, it is hard to allow
the students to self-discover, to sit back and watch them stumble
through idea after idea while you facilitate the process knowing the
correct path all along. It is hard to nudge them in the right direction
as opposed to grabbing them by the hand and dragging them to the correct
answer.
But the path of self-discovery is a
natural path, a path that we have been programmed to follow through thousands
of years of evolution. Simply, we learn better when we learn on our own
than when someone tells us what we need to know.
Hands-on is better than lecture,
experiencing the curriculum is better than hearing the curriculum, and teaching/explaining
what was learned is by far more powerful than being tested on what the state believes
one should have memorized.
"Peter Gray, a research professor
at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that
human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional
schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness,
teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach
school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed
curriculum." (Jose’ Urbina Lopez Primary School sits next to a dump,
Joshua Davis.)
To speak plainly, the answer is to
develop a teaching methodology that so sparks a student’s natural
curiosity that they want to learn, that they enjoy learning, and allows
students to discover information without the institutionalized oppressive “heavy
handedness” now experienced by most high school students today. Let’s
face it, the state may tell us what to teach, the federal government may tell
us that needs to be tested, but we control what takes place in our classrooms.
Stephen Larsen, like most of us who
enter into the profession, only had one goal in life, to make a
difference. With this I believe he was tremendously successful, forever
enhancing the lives of a countless number of students.
Now that the “torch” has been passed
to the rest of us, we must decide if this sacred trust passed to us from those
who came before. We need to do what is best for kids, or if we will “drop the
ball” condemning yet another generation of Americans to adjunct mediocrity.
Remember, their future is in our
hands. Making Kennedy the school of Choice. Excellence by design.
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