Late Start
August 11, 2015
Business took me to Indianapolis for a meeting on Thursday, July 30. Of the eight other meeting participants, four lived in Indiana, three lived in Georgia and one in Montana.
I learned that school was already in session for many schools of both Indiana and Georgia, four weeks prior to the start of classes for most Montana schools ... and six weeks before state law allows public schools to commence classes for students in Michigan.
These dramatic differences undermine any seriousness or sense of urgency in this state’s efforts to improve public education.
The scene that replays in my memory is of an all-district in-service day at a Michigan school district where the staff was busy in the cafeteria, while the students lounged outside the school and milled about the school halls, bored.
“Our kids are already here and ready to be in class,” the school superintendent told me; “but state law penalizes us if we dare to begin teaching them.”
I think of this as school sports teams and marching bands and cheerleaders are already hard at work this week honing their skills in extracurricular activities. Wouldn’t it be great if lawmakers would allow our students to be doing the same in academic classrooms?
If our students are lagging behind academically, it might have something to do with the fact that they start each year two or three laps behind kids in other states.
News Unfiltered
July 12, 2017
During the first summer after my college graduation, I was the campaign advance man outside of the Milwaukee and Madison areas for a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin. A great job.
Sometime during that summer, I met the head of the campaign in a café. He was reading a newspaper as I arrived; and as I sat down at the table, I asked him what he was reading. I’ll always remember his response. He said, “I’m looking for what could go wrong today?”
It was the campaign manager’s job to think about worst-case scenarios and consider how the campaign might get taken off message by the news of the day.
I was young and impressionable, and I soon began to consume the daily news through the same filter.
It was not difficult to do so in the 1970s. The daily newspaper was printed and delivered to my door every day. Television had just three networks, and each provided brief news reports two or three times a day.
Today, what passes as news comes from hundreds or thousands or millions of sources and it is changing constantly, 24/7/365. Only a small portion of those sources is professionally operated with accountability for the substance and/or style of the so-called reporting.
Today it drives me nuts to consume news – that is, to really think about what I’m reading or hearing the way I did in the 1970s. Today, meaningful matters often get buried in trivia while the most inane and inaccurate stories and comments can go viral overnight.
I’ve always said you can get too much of a good thing – too much food; too much free time; and certainly, too much sports. And clearly, we have too much “news” about sports.