All Potential

The empty table in my studio and the flats of emerging seeds are all potential, both awaiting development. The plant starts will eventually go into the prepared garden beds and, hopefully, bring an abundance of food for us and friends. The table will soon be spread with the many colored fabrics that will be another graduation quilt for a young person heading off to college, and who has given me his requests for the theme, the color palette and permission for me to add what I want. I love the beginnings of new projects.

Today I began the hardest project going on now. I inadvertently fell in love with teaching kids so many years ago when, as an art history intern at a museum, I was called upon to lead those school groups. I have never looked back. Over the years of teaching various ages in various places I have always had the energy to think about what it means to teach, read everything I can, try different approaches, seek opinions, and rejoice in the collegiality of the profession.

As a retiree, of course I do not want to get down to the gritty stuff each day. Been there and done that. (I have my quilts and my garden!) But I find it compellingly interesting to be a part of the current educational scene. As most of you know, this happens for me right now in one of the poorest schools in the nation; poor in income, but not in spirit.

Our new governor is cutting the per pupil funding, with more cuts for next year. He wants to grow jobs. I wonder how we in this state, in this nation, can grow jobs with the youth able to fill them, if we downsize our already lacking public education system? My vision is to have our president, our governors, our so-called statesmen put forth a HUGE program to get every citizen behind making U.S. education the best in the world. I think we could do it, but it doesn't include big cuts in education.

I am a frugal person by nature. I don't waste stuff, neither human nor material. Public schools waste so much! (One could save millions on this alone!) For example, today as I was volunteering to straighten up the classroom in which I work each week, I carefully sorted out huge clots of valuable math manipulatives, never used. Reams of copy paper are left splaying about. Many kits of this and that are shoved in back of stuff and others are lying fallow on the floor of the supply closet. There are no shelves of inviting art paper, and the only paints and clay are what I have personally provided. Books are everywhere, under tables, stuffed into nooks, crumpled up.

Is this the outfall of what the Big Publishing companies have wrought? They send all these FCAT materials and they keep coming and coming like The Sorcerers Apprentice. They aren't valuable because the teachers did not have the responsibility for them, did not order them, and I certainly see that they have no intention of using them. They are useless. (How I would have died for the chance to have some of these materials in the bare bones school I taught in for so many years!)

As I was starting in to make some sort of order in this room, several teachers gathered and all of them were dispirited by the marching orders they had been given to increase the numerical reading scores of their students. Interestingly, their task did not actually include real reading, fun reading, compelling reading. One teacher told me that he was not allowed to let kids (during reading time) to go to the school library to get books! None of these teachers 'have the time' to read aloud to their classes! These teachers could not tell me where I could look to see how each individual child was doing in reading. They knew, however, that the kids can't read well.

If those young folks in Egypt can make a revolution, why can't American teachers revolt? Let them teach, let them learn! All Americans, young and old, need to rise up and say NO to the grip of the publishing companies who for the last several years have dictated what happens in the classrooms across the country. This has effectively cut down our teachers at the knees.

I say, STOP! Kids are all about potential just as my plant starts and quilts are. And they are incredibly the most important.