worms in the apple...

picture this: trying to escape from school, but you're on the phone with the principal as you are being driven by your child over afton mountain on I-64 west. you are trying to remain calm due to the nature of the telephone conversation, but to vex you even more, the cell phone connection keeps dying. you cuss, you rant, and then you calm down, and call back later...

i am writing this in great hopes that the phone does NOT ring in the next few hours or even the next few days. no news to me is good news, which means my principal did not cave in on the ranting parent. at the end of the last phone call with him, i told him to just pass the kid. he was stating that they were already threatening to go above our heads, which meant school board office. at this point, it became obvious that no matter what the right ethical thing is, you just can't expect people to do the right thing. so the apple becames a not so beautiful thing.

i am sure there are worms in every corporate apple, but which one is crucial in this country: education. how sad it is that people don't care anymore about learning. all they care about is numbers, grades, false little monuments to nothing much. what about creativity, brilliance, ingenuity? when did those things suddenly became so random as to be looked at as if they were the anomaly? those qualities are no longer standards...they are weirdnesses in life. mediocre and getting whatever you need to "get ahead" is the new standard. i can't imagine how any parent could be so determined about a grade as to miss the whole point of why there was a grade...a measurement of learning. the latest on parent #1 was that she wanted to be able to come to school with the project not turned in and have it graded for "quality." of course, as i told the principal, how do you grade for quality on a project based upon a book never read by the student? anyone can turn SOMETHING in for points just to pass. i have washed my hands of the whole thing, period. and i feel better about having done it. i can look myself in the mirror and feel at peace about it. i don't flunk students...they fail themselves...and are in turn, in my opinion, failed by the parents and the system. nothing should encourage students to just settle for things.

as all of this was going on, austin was driving the car and i was ranting and raving about why it was that i have never tried to grease the wheels for him. he has accused me a few times of hampering his baseball standing with the coaches by not sucking up. i have done nothing to make it easier for him, but that was for a reason. any success he gets has to be because he got it. if that doesn't happen, he will have cheated himself and will never really know if he himself earned it. i know that feeling of having earned things because of my own efforts, and despite the tendency in the world to the opposite, i think it is still important to rest on your own EARNED laurels.