Archive for the ‘education’ Category
I made the first cut
Smith’s Dairy and a Walk Down Memory Lane
Yesterday, I read the Plain Dealer article about Smith’s Dairy going “green” and remembered a field trip from my elementary school years. Today, the same article shows up in the day’s roundup over on Crain’s so I took it as a sign to blog about that field trip.
Every school had a few-the “special” kids. In the 1950’s, there were no special education classes that separated anyone from the “mainstream”. We were just all in it together. Field trips were always a challenge for our teachers with ALL the kids because we were a “rowdy” bunch. The “buddy system” back then was a “must”.
For purposes of this story, “Jimmy” had not one buddy but two buddies. Basically because two of the boys had a disagreement on whose turn it was to team up with Jimmy. By now, you know the lead character’s name in this story is not really Jimmy, but the name is inconsequential, and, it is better to protect the “innocent”.
At our elementary school, there was a traditional sequence of field trips. Kindergarten was a walk through the picturesque town of Shreve and our first trip to the Town Library which was located in the Town Hall topped off with a picnic on school grounds. First grade was a trip to the train depot, boarding a passenger train for our trip to picturesque Wooster followed by a picnic and afternoon of play at Wooster Park.
Second grade was one of the FAVORITES handed down from class to class-Smith’s Dairy in ORRVILLE followed by a picnic and an afternoon of play at Orrville Park. Needless to say at seven years-old as fascinating as watching bottles being washed, placed on a conveyer belt system and filled with milk, capped, and then, boxed would be– the making of the ice cream was the piece d’ resistance. Each of us would be receiving an individual cup of ice cream to be consumed at the park with our brown bag lunches. Before we received this treat, we were told that we would need to find our “buddies” and walk through the HUGE walk in freezer where the ice cream was stored for distribution of our ice cream treats
To this day, I believe that I remember How VERY, VERY cold that walk-in freezer was. No one tarried in that place! Later, as we sat at the picnic tables eating our lunches and ice cream. Someone noticed that “Jimmy” was missing. Everyone immediately looked at the two boys that were assigned to be his buddies. Both of them thought the other one was responsible for being his buddy, and therefore, NO ONE had been his buddy. Obviously, a classic example of miscommunication between teacher and student.
The last time anyone remembered seeing him was right before we walked into that big freezer. Miss Plantain (another alias) screamed and went to wake up the bus driver for the long drive back to the dairy. Twenty minutes later, they returned with a nearly frozen Jimmy in tow. He had been found sitting on a tub of ice cream patiently waiting for rescue by one of the Smith Dairy truck drivers.
We all had to sit through a lecture on responsibility and how when given a task we should follow through. To this day, I do not how our teachers thought we shouldered more responsibility than they did for Jimmy sitting on a block of frozen ice cream waiting for rescue.
Why Do We Demonize Poor People?
Having read the comments on this Plain Dealer article and this one, I couldn’t help but wonder why the commenters attack the very people that need help more than any of us. How do the borrowers who are victims of predatory lending become the cause of the problem? I believe that the statistics show that at least 80% of the loans are being paid. And are we ignoring the fact that at this point in time 10% of conventional loans are 60 days past due? What are the causes of THAT statistic? How have the women, children, and chronically ill who rely on Medicaid become the reason that an HMO contract is seen by a hospital as too restrictive and not sustainable?
The poor in this country are our children who certainly are not perpatrators but victims and our elderly that live longer lives without resources. I grant that there is a group of people who have made poor choices that end up the recipient of public assistance, but how large a percentage? And when we focus on that segment do we diminish our ability to solve the social issues that cause extreme poverty?
For the majority of us, I think that the underlying emotion that fuels this animosity is fear. After all, many of us in this country are just a heartbeat away from that which we fear. And if not a heartbeat, just a phrase away. Downsizing will certainly start rolling off the lips of employers for many reasons.
Now is not the time to be fearful and attack the victims of what has occurred. Now is the time to be bold, to invent new ways of dealing with runaway healthcare costs, to innovate new ways to create jobs and to educate our children so that they will be prepared to compete in the world. A sure way of losing what we have is to jealously guard it from unseen “foes”.
I believe that the opportunity here in NEO to reverse twenty years of poverty has never been better. We have the talent, the resources and the capabilities to become very prosperous here if we don’t forget that inclusiveness serves a better purpose than exclusivity. The possibilities for innovation are almost endless-new ways of educating our youth, creating jobs through new industries, approaching healthcare from the viewpoint of wellness instead of sickness, collaboration among businesses to create an enterprise mind set….
I believe that if we heed these words of Hubert Humphrey:
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.
when moving forward that we indeed will be prosperous. We as a society–forget government– cannot forget the children, the elderly, the sick, the needy and the disabled. We should not be looking elsewhere for the answers on how to transform our region. It is not up to the government. It is our task. We must be fearless.
Support the Artists of All Ages in NEO
I just read over on RealNeo that Alenka Banco is opening Josaphat Arts Hall and her Convivium 33 gallery to artists this weekend so that the can sell there wears/wares during the Sparx in the City Gallery Hop this Saturday Sepember 20 and Sunday September 21 from 10 a.m. til 5 p.m.
The really cool thing about this wears/wares sale is that you can arrive early at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday pay $5.00 and be part of an exclusive dealer/public preview. You ask me why should I get up early and pay money when I can arrive at 10 and pay nothing? I’ll tell you why because ALL of the admission fees will benefit the Max S. Hayes art students (CMSD) where my friend Mary Beth Matthews is chair of the Art Department.
Mary Beth is an amazing woman who has also found the time to be a founding member of the Women’s Enterprise Network. We are a group of women dedicated to empowering women of all ages to do what they want to do.
Tim and I have a busy weekend but I am going to be there at 8:30 a.m. Saturday “with bells on” as they say.
Autumn Solar Energy Tour Includes Familiar Faces
I just received an email from our friend Bill McDermott. If you have attended one of the Midtown Brews events, you probably have had the pleasure of making Bill’s acquaintance. A chemist by trade, he is extremely knowledgeable about alternative energy especially, solar and shares his research freely with the Brews crowd and at RealNeo where he has a blog. He reads extensively and freely shares what he learns with the rest of us. In essence, he is my newspaper clipper on all things green.
The email was to promote the upcoming Ohio Solar Energy Tour coming our way this October. Here are the specifics for the Northeast Ohio Solar Energy Tour. Notice that Bills’ house is one of the featured sites. His wife and he are also hosting an all day Open house during the tour. Note that the Kious Straw House is also on the tour. Next year will probably feature the Shaker Lakes straw structure.
I noticed that there is a combined Wayne/Holmes Tour scheduled for that weekend. Since those are my old stomping grounds, I must check out the particulars for that tour as well. I grew up outside the quaint village of Shreve located in Wayne County but as close to the border as possible. County Road 1 was the delineation between the two counties.
Who says exciting things aren’t happening in NEO and Ohio? I beg to differ.
Food For Thought
Conversations enhance knowledge, provoke analysis and strenghten beliefs as well as cause discomfort when met with a challenge to tried and true axioms that don’t appear to fit any more. The conversations that I have had lately have underscored many of the things I have read, heard, and believe but many of these conversations have provided a chance to revisit many topics as well as make me see that sometimes my vision has been not quite where it should be.
On Saturday, Tim and I had two friends from North Broadway for dinner. Two tidbits of conversation stuck with me and later, were enhanced by what I read. The first conversation covered the internet and online communities. Our friend says that one of the greatest things about the internet is the ability to communicate with people all over the globe about subjects that intrigue us. The flip side, he says, is very troubling to him because more and more we are becoming isolated from the people next door, down the street, and the day to day community is suffering because we do not see a responsibility to our fellow man. The next day, I picked up this book Time For Truth by Os Guinness.
This quote took me right back to the conversation of the night before;
“The discipline of living in truth is urgent today because modern life reduces community and accountability to its thinnest, thereby tempting us to live in a shadow world of anonymity and nonresponsibility where all cats are gray. In such a world, becoming people of truth is the deepest secret of integrity and the highest form of taking responsibililty for ourselves and our own lives.”
I can’t help but think that community is going to be more important rather than less important in our combined futures. I wonder will we be prepared?
The second tidbit had its roots in education. It is strange that no matter who I have a conversation with here in Cleveland Ohio eventually there is a thread that talks about education-early childhood, the special challenges for middle school learning, high school drop out rates, and/or higher education. The story our friends’ related is hard to imagine but nonetheless I am sure is quite accurate. A few days before, they had attended bible study in their neighborhood. A young man had struggled to read the verses of scripture he had been assigned. He stuck to it, and got through it, but our friend said he was almost certain that this young man’s reading level was probably at third grade. He was a young man in his 20’s and my friend said that the young man had determination and desire but where was he going to find a good paying job with such a dismal ability to read? And then, Ed Morrison posted this, at Brewed Fresh Daily. How do we indeed go forward as a community if we do not see that the education level of our community as a whole defines who we are and what we hold dear.
If we do not strive to educate every child in our community regardless of where or how he or she was born, what does that say about us as a community. And this question came to mind, as we look for ways to attain “brain gain” instead of “brain drain” are we forgetting that gaining brains is directly related to the overall brainpower of the existing community? How comfortable and safe will highly educated people be in a community with a 61% dropout rate? Should we be fostering an educated community rather than looking outside ourselves for new blood? In the seventies, when I taught in the Cleveland Public Schools the beginning of the migration out of Fortune 500 companies began. One of the top reasons for leaving was a sustainable workforce. Almost forty years later, we are still talking about the gap between workforce development and skills training and the needs of the business community. How when we were told so many years before are we still debating whether education is important?
Should we ask the college students in our midst how we should improve education at the elementary and secondary level? How would they have changed their early years so that they would be better prepared for college? When I was a junior at BGSU, one of my classes-reading development, I believe, required that we spend x number of hours tutoring students in reading. Since I was a student in the college of education, I had a lot of interaction with school children from the BG City School System. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the library at 9 a.m. on a Saturday and the student I was tutoring was a college freshman. This young man struggled mightily trying to read his textbook, and I tried to show him how to try to read for content rather than words, but he just wasn’t there.
As I walked back to my dorm very slowly, I wondered where we were going when we were teaching remedial courses at the University level. Now, forty years later, we still have remedial classes, tutoring, and additional help at the University level. Should we be doing things differently? Should we accept that not everyone needs a fullblown four year college education? Should we be stressing workforce and skills training? Should there be different tracks in high schools? Are traditional schools not what is needed in the 21st century? Educational change has moved ever so slowly at the grade school and high school level. Is it time for change? There are glimmers of hope in spots throughout Northeast Ohio, but how could we work together to make it work better and faster so that our children become part of the new knowledge economy and prosper. How do we make it so being born in Ohio is an advantage?
something called The HOPE Gap is alive and well in Cleveland, Ohio
Usually when you hear the phrase “hope gap” it refers to the gap that exists between those in extreme poverty from the others who live in Third World countries. I believe that we are experiencing our own brand of the hope gap, here in Northeast Ohio. And again, it coincides oftentimes to socioeconomic conditions, just like in the Third World countries, but sometimes I think it is also a manifestation of the dysfunctionality we are experiencing as a society. Major shifts in wealth, economies, and opportunities are occurring each and every day, and cracks and fissures are widening.
Two tragedies here in Cleveland have shown me that this gap is occurring here in Cleveland. The first was the tragedy at SuccessTech where a young man reacted violently to a suspension and possibly an expulsion by shooting others and ending it by killing himself. The governmental answer was to provide metal detectors for heightened security, but very little was said about the circumstances that led the young man to that fateful day. Although the tragedy occurred in a CMSD building, the silence of our school board members was deafening. At the time, I thought to myself, which streets will get metal detectors so that our children will be “safe”. At the time, my husband said that that boy needed someone to take him under his or her wing and hold him very, very close. But for this boy, there was no one. And we are left to wonder what despair and hopelessness led a young boy to such disastrous decisions.
And then, one week later a young girl was stabbed to death by another teenage girl while her mother, grandmother, and cousin held off the crowd who came to help the victim. What a chilling condemnation of where are society is going. A young girl given to her grandmother to raise because her mother was seen as unfit is now a killer. You see, the metal detectors to make our kids safe on the streets haven’t been installed, but luckily the mothers in that neighborhood took it upon themselves to tell their offspring, you will give these people up. Our community is our safety net. There is hope. A group of community leaders joined together to talk about the problems but did more than that–they offered solutions that basically were the “take them under our wing” approach.
Have you ever watched a young child in action? The world holds an endless abundance of possibilities and opportunities, but then the child begins to grow and change and life’s challenges begin to take their toll. Some children thrive because they have the nurturing support system needed to protect them and to guide them through the pitfalls of everyday life. Children learn by example and by imitation so that when the examples are dysfunctional, their learned behavior perpetuates the dysfunctional lifestyle.
Young people are not stupid. They are often very astute. Many kids with unique gifts are often pushed aside, and eventually they drop out of the mainstream because they realize that the industrialized school system will not help them achieve in the 21st century. In our MTB conversation with C.J. Prentiss, she told us that 4th grade achievement scores are used to calculate the future need for prison beds. These kinds of statistical uses for achievement scores should be appalling to a civilized society like ours, but are they?
Back to the child with light dancing in his or her eyes: As that child grows, the light becomes dimmer, and eventually, when the hope gap widens, the light goes out. How many times can we allow those lights to go out before the hope gap becomes so wide that we turn on ourselves and destroy our land of opportunity? How do you intend to lessen “the hope gap” here in Northeast Ohio? Remember, actions, not words, speak volumes.
WOW! The Ingenuity Crew Does “IT” Again!
What a show! The Drums drumming down Euclid Avenue led by Marcos Santos were incredible. Who knew that those drummers would exorcise the “rain demon” that plagued last year’s festival. A whirlwind flew down Euclid Avenue accompanied by its own drummers of pelting rain. Canopies flew and people ran but it was gone as quickly as it descended. Everyone ventured back out on to the street, quickly setting things right, and going on with the show. What an incredible group of people-the vendors, the volunteers, the restauraters and their staffs and even festivalgoers pitched in to straighten out the street so that the show could go on. Amazing!
But that was only a small part of it, the NASA Glenn Exhibits, the photos inserting my own face inside of the space suit of an astronaut standing on the moon, Sarah Morrisson’s Dance Troupe, The Audio TuTus, The Breuer Tower exhibit up at 12th Street, “The Fire Inside” the extended hours of the delis, coffeeshops, and restaurants along Euclid, the smell of the fried veggies, the fat, juicy sausages, the incredible gyros, the $4.00 GLB brews, the people dancing and drumming up Euclid, the spectators joing in the celebration, and then, and then…
There were the incredible smiles on the faces of the children who attended yesterday’s festival. To me, those smiles were the crown jewel of this festival. Family after family strolled past our Meet.The.Bloggers booth in the anteroom between the State and Palace Theatres. I engaged quite a few of them in conversation as they stopped to see what the spaceships on the table were all about and how did they work. Many of them lost their curiosity when told they were microphones and not spaceships, but I didn’t lose mine. Without hesitation, I would ask them what they had seen and what they like best. One little girl said dancing down the street with the drummers. A little boy who played chess with a man dressed like a robot. It was someone dressed like a robot, wasn’t it? I’ll never tell. The other young man who had decided that he wanted to go to the moon because he wouldn’t weigh anything at all. There was a little girl fascinated with the audio tutus. She wanted to know where she could buy a skirt just like it.
But maybe, the best thing about it was the thankful demeanor of the parents who could not believe their good luck. Each one of them paid $5 to see everything, and every child 12 and under was free. By far, the best deal for family entertainment in Cleveland for the summer. They all were amazed at how there was so much for everyone in the family. The little ones were as engrossed as the older ones. And there was plenty for them to do as well. And the kids weren’t bored.
I guess in a nutshell this festival appeals to the child in all of us. There is so much to learn, to experience, and to dream about right here in the middle of a construction zone. That it isn’t hard to believe in Cleveland! A big “hats off” to the Ingenuity Festival!
My apologies for not providing links to each and every one of the incredible contributors to this festival, but I am very slow at that and I would be here until midnight, only a slight exaggeration, and I would miss one whole incredible day of this festival, See you there!
just like downtown
What do a librarian, a magician and a Broadway playwright have in common? They all lived in Cleveland and they’re all featured in this year’s Brooklyn Centre Garden Party—“Magic, Mystery, and Millionaires.” Come and see famous characters in Cleveland’s past portrayed by costumed narrators. Stroll through the grounds and see who’s who in our history. Enjoy musical entertainment in the Victorian Chapel, and relax in the shade with a glass of lemonade. Find out about Ohio’s native plants, make a mask with local artists, hear the latest about the Ohio and Erie Canal project, visit with our friends from the Zoo, and see what makes Riverside Cemetery one of Cleveland’s must-see places.
Ticket prices are as follows: Advance, $5 senior, $8 adult, $20 family of four; Day of Tour, $7 senior, $10 adult, $25 family of four. Call 216-351-0254 to reserve your tickets or for more information.
And here is another version as it appeared in CoolCleveland this week: Sunday, June 10th, 1:00-5:00 p.m., Brooklyn Centre Garden Party, Riverside Cemetery, 3607 PearlRoad, at I-71. Costumed narrators will tell the stories of famous “residents” of the cemetery. Musical entertainment, light refreshments, and kids’ activities. Learn the history of this beautiful resting place and stroll through the landscaped grounds. Local organizations will have booths featuring various gardening techniques, plus adoptable animals.Call 216-351-0254 for details and advance tickets, or get tickets at the door.
A group of friends and neighbors have been working very diligently on this project since the cold winter months. And now, this Sunday where it is predicted that we will have one of the beautiful late spring days that keep us all here, the show will be unveiled. This project has taken on a character all its own. We have received much free publicity, help from all kinds of sources, and a lot of good will. We have had such a good time putting this event together that if those of you who attend have half the fun, it will have been well worth it.
So it’s my phone number on the banner at the gates of the cemetery and everywhere else our advance publicity has appeared—the Plain Dealer, Cool Cleveland, The Sun News, doctor’s offices, websites, coffee shops and more places than I am aware. So if you haven’t made plans for the weekend or even if you have, consider doing something just a bit different and come to a garden party. Oh, did I tell you that kids are more than welcome. Art House will be there making masks with the kids, one of our Cleveland Public Library librarians will be there to read to the young ones, and there will be a virtual scavenger hunt that they can play alongside their parents while taking the tour.
And as I told someone on the phone yesterday, reserve your tickets now, and pick them up at will call just like downtown, at the Playhouse.
A Senior Prank From Long Ago Becomes a Tradition
I had to chuckle when I read about the kids in Gahanna placing a Big Boy likeness on the roof of their school. When reading about the forklift and manpower needed to rescue Big Boy from his perch and return him to his rightful place, I couldn’t help but wonder how those kids got him up there. They certainly didn’t have access to the equipment that took him down.
And then, I remembered the senior prank of 1968 and how the adults in our lives hadn’t a clue as to how a bunch of us plunked down a boulder that easily weighed who knows how much in the middle of the grassy oval encircled by our high school drive. I wasn’t involved in the placing of the rock, but my best friend Beth and I had a ringside seat as to what transpired later.
When we arrived at school that day, we were greeted by this purple behemoth outside the school doors. Everyone was wondering how in the world it got there and who had put it there. We, in the senior class, of course, suspected the usual gang of players, Mike, Barney, Charlie, Zarlengo, and a girl named Stan. Our class was always into equal opportunity. But, back to my ringside seat to the unfolding show. Beth and I had a class on the first floor at eye level with the oval. It was called Home Management or something like that and was for students that had all the credits they needed to graduate but wanted another “A’ under their belts. Needless to say, boredom was the word of the day.
So when Beth nudged me, I immediately turned my head to see what had caught her attention. Lo and behold, there was our esteemed principal, “Howie” as we so affectionately called him when he was not in earshot, circling the huge boulder warily. To this day, I can see him gingerly eyeing that rock up and down, but I still have no clue as to why he would up and kick something so hard and with such vehemence. It was like he wanted it to sail into the sky, so he wouldn’t have to deal with it any more. Obviously, he thought it was one of the papier mache “rocks” that had been showing up everywhere inside the school.
Each year, the junior class sponsors the Junior Senior prom. This year’s class theme was “Subterranean Gardens” Hence, the dayglo “rock” garden throughout the school. I always wondered if the sophomore class was irreparably harmed by having to wear those caveman outfits. The junior class sponsored and paid for the prom and banquet, the sophomores served as the waitstaff for the banquet and the seniors reaped the rewards of having done it the year before for that senior class. It fostered a sense of community and collaboration that I think is missing today with these “over the top” expensive things we call “proms” . But, I digress. Maybe some day I will relate how the banner from “Riverboat Rhapsody” showed up at our tenth year reunion and how it has made it to every class reunion since that one. But, right now, back to the school prinicipal hopping around the oval holding his foot and howling in pain. By this time, everyone in our class had abandoned their seats and stood looking out onto the scene aghast knowing that our class will again know his wrath.
We realized that there was no sense in denying that members of the senior class had been involved because scrawled across the face of the rock was the phrase “Class of ‘68″. What we didn’t know was Barney had taken care of damage control. We had had a love-hate relationship with our principal since we were freshmen and it had only been getting worse as graduation loomed closer. He would be glad to see the doors close on our class, but no more than we would be glad to be shed of him and his arcane rules and regulations that we never seemed to be able to get right. For instance, what is so wrong with adding a rock in a grassy oval that earlier that week had nothing but grass and a mud hole where the rock now sat. A lot of schools have rocks that rival schools paint and classes paint, and back and forth and on and on.
But, no. Not for our school. Nothing new and different and certainly not something that our class would leave behind as a gift. Not fifteen minutes later, he was on the PA system vowing to find those responsible and demanding others to turn them or the senior class would pay for the damage done. As far as we could see there was no damage except to his ego, and that was his own fault. Barney was the only one of us who kept his cool during this tirade. Apparantly, he had known we would need some press about the event if they were going to stay in school and the rest of us were not going to have to pay for the removal of the rock, essentially, cancelling our Senior Party. The press heeded Barney’s call and The Daily Record photographer arrived in the nick of time.
Each year the senior class gives a gift to the school in appreciation of our education and years at the institution. Our class had given our “senior” gift when we were freshman along with the other three classes that year. We bought the sign that sits in front of the school. Each year, the principal suggested we buy something else for the school. I had been the class treasurer our freshman year and was the one who always piped up at class meetings that we had already given our “senior” gift. One year we gave in and bought “lounge” furniture for the lobby hoping to keep the rest of our money for a Senior Class Party. Who knew that the rock that had nestled quite comfortably in a creek bed would serve as probably the greatest gift we could have given to our school.
Nearly forty years later, “grunk” still sits where he was placed in 1968. Over the years, benches and a brick paths have joined him as well as trees, shrubs, and flowers. And, periodically, another school sneaks in and splashes him with their colors, but it isn’t long before he returns to his bright purple color. And so, he stands as a reminder to adults who deal with teenagers that sometimes it is okay to reconsider the “rules” and the “order” that is needed because you may just create a bond that survives across the years, and what some considered a “prank” just might be come a “tradition”.