High School Dayz

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:52:09 +0000

Life is an opportunity for endless discovery of purpose. The continuity of life freezes peculiar moments in time and catches your heart wide open in unexpected ways.

I recently watched High School Musical 3, The Graduation with my children and father-in-law. While I leaned back to enjoy the flick, I didn’t realize I was a sitting duck waiting for the bullet of time to knock me into a pivotal moment. The Disney series deals with students, musical plays, proms, friendship, and burgeoning love; this latest one in the series focused on coming-of-age, purpose and life after graduation. The characters came face-to-face with destiny, purpose and choices as their high school days came to a close. But first, they decided to produce one grander musical play as outgoing high school graduates.

As the music played and the scenes raced across the screen, something unusual happened. Time transported my mind back to my high school days at Walbrook Senior High. Out of the blue, like a spring shower, I began tearing up. Trying to disguise my tears in an inconspicuous fashion, I shifted in my chair and adjusted my glasses while wiping tears from my eyes and forced my mind back to the screen. But as soon as the tears stopped, the movie presented another memory-thumping scene. Faced with a choice between pursuing basketball or theater, one of the students agonized over his decision. The director of the musical sat in the dark auditorium unnoticed, watching the student sing about his choice. When he sang the last note of the musical number, the director told him the stage was a good place to discover oneself, and ten years from now, opportunity and choice may not be there. She then admitted she had submitted his name to the Juliet School of Arts.

Again, uncontrollable tears flowed down my cheeks like a river. I recalled being a high school student with hopes of a career on the stage. As the movie flickered on the silver screen in front of me, another one played within my head. The movie had found the combination to the locks on the gates of my heart, opened them, and unleashed my buried memories of lost opportunity and choice long forgotten.

The acting bug bit me in elementary school when I performed my first play as a king presenting his royal crown as a gift to Jesus, the newborn King of Kings. Memories of my acting days and my opportunity to go to Hollywood for a screen test rushed to the forefront. Dreams of wanting to be like my Tennis hero, Arthur Ashe, flooded my thoughts. Dreams of football stardom, a singing career, conducting an orchestra, modeling, becoming an astronaut and acting were the music of my opportunity. The promise of greatness in these fields slipped through my fingers. Time and opportunity passed by and none of these dreams materialized. I had thought memories of them would never resurface from the depths of my gated past. Watching High School Musical 3 proved otherwise.

Opportunity and choice had presented me many roads to follow, but I did not seize the moment; time moved forward and took opportunity and choice with it. I examined the movie and my life and almost descended into the dungeon of sadness and regret. But just as suddenly as the movie had snatched me to the past, life snatched me forward and I realized opportunity had not died for me, but had only changed.

Another dream that I’d once had was to write and publish a book. In the heat of failure, disappointment, and divorce, my life went into an extended hiatus of obscurity and lackluster existence. But in the midst of this chaos, opportunity and choice changed, leading me back to the desire to write. This time, I accepted and pursued this dream without hesitation, and I succeeded when I published my first book, False Roads To Manhood, What Women Need To Know; What Men Need To Understand.

Though High School Musical 3 served as a key to unlock the inner core of my mind’s memory, I’m the better for watching the movie. In a way, the movie shook buried skeletons of unfulfilled dreams and extracted unsettled regret from my psyche, ultimately turning my high school musical dreams of the past into an article of purpose. As I stood on the precipice of regret, regret said time is past, it’s over! But, opportunity spoke out in resistance to say, “The time is now!” I choose now to release these words on paper in hopes that someone believes opportunity does not die.

The pinnacle lesson here is that we must not blink an eye at opportunity. We must not hesitate to pursue every God-given purpose and dream with everything we have. If something pursued does not pan out, remember that opportunity and choice changes and resurfaces. When it does, don’t let regret steal it; instead, grab it with gusto and never look back. Looking in the rearview mirror of life too long causes us to wreck our futures by not paying attention to what awaits us now.

The young man in High School Musical 3 did not let opportunity slip by and chose to purse both theater and basketball by selecting a college offering both programs. Isn’t it strange how a movie can dissect the heart of life and help us realize that even though high school ends, opportunity remains? Because we didn’t reach our goals then is no reason to throw in the towel now. As my son once said, “There is no towel to throw in.” Right now is an opportunity. Right now we can rediscover life and rediscover our life’s goals. Within every person is a dream, and for every dream, opportunity knocks at the door. Will you take this opportunity and open the door? Will you harness opportunity with effort so tenacious it negates all obstacles?
God is a God of opportunity and he wants you to know that He knows the thoughts He thinks towards you, thoughts of peace and not evil, to give you an expected end (Jeremiah 29:11).
High school days are past, but opportunity still knocks, waiting for you to say yes.

Teach Your Teachers

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:50:00 +0000

I know that a number of the readers of this blog are professors who teach future teachers. I know a bunch of them, and they are really good at what they do. They are enthusiastic and dedicated to their students and those children whom their students will be teaching. But the way we train teachers is suddenly in the news- big time. I suspect that the following comments don’t pertain so much to the institutions where my friends work, but a national debate has begun and we need to discuss it here.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently unleashed a firestorm when he suggested that the overall quality of teacher preparation programs in America is ‘mediocre.” Citing studies that over 60% of new teachers feel unprepared and his own discussions with teachers who feel that they did not receive enough practical classroom training and that they were not ready for behavior issues and dealing with poor children, Duncan stated his case. He called for revolutionary change in our methods of teacher preparation and stated that one million new teachers will be neede

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d in the next five years. Here is the New York Times story on Duncan’s speech.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Susan Engel, director of the teaching program at Williams College, took this point a step further. Here is the article. She suggests that teachers should be trained much like surgeons; working side by side with a very skilled mentor, getting plenty of feedback and taking on more and more responsibility as they improve as a teacher. She also suggests that student teachers and their mentors review videotapes of themselves in action to help them improve. She argues that student teachers should continue to study the subject that they will be teaching as well as education techniques; she strongly emphasizes the need for more training on the developmental needs of children. Finally she argues that school districts should be given the resources to hire new teachers in groups of seven to help develop more camaraderie.

These are some intriguing thoughts. I really like the surgeon-method idea. Teachers are important. Special education teachers are included within this group of important people. I think that one could easily make an argument that teachers, of general or special ed, are at least as important to our society and its future as surgeons. But if we train them like surgeons, shouldn’t we also pay them like surgeons?

Also making recommendations for changes in teacher preparation and recruitment, as well as radical changes in teacher pay and evaluation methods, is the report issued Tuesday by the think tank called the Strategic Management of Human Capital. Scrolling down this link will lead you to the full report. I understand that the teacher unions fell that the committee that prepared their report ignored their input.

One of the problems that I have with the whole No Child Left Behind analysis is that it seems to blame the entire education problem on bad teachers. There are bad teachers; as a public school system product, I can say without equivocation that there are bad teachers. But really, there have always also been plenty of great teachers. I have a hard time believing that some bad teachers are the only thing wrong with the education system. Also the merit pay concept sounds like a good idea, but only if the evaluation system can be designed fairly- so that it truly identifies good teachers and not just the principal’s pet or the popular kid!

What are your ideas on this topic? Do we need to make changes in the teacher preparation system? Are there other reasons that the education system is having problems?

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High School Dayz

Teach Your Teachers