Published by Vickie on 05 Dec 2010 at 02:17 pm
Unleash the Baby Boomers
I’ve been spending a great deal of my time reading Jonathan Kozol and trying to rethink public education (I highly recommend the website Rethinking Schools). It comes down to money and control–how can we give our kids the best education possible as cheaply as possible, and how can we evaluate the effectiveness of the methods we use?
I’m going to skip right over the irony of “best” and “cheaply” being in the same part of the sentence, and instead focus on solutions.
I’m a Baby Boomer. We’re often portrayed as the giant lump moving through the anaconda of our social system. We’ve always attracted attention; we’ve been used as barometers and guinea pigs; we’ve protested wrongs and demanded rights; we’ve gotten things done and we’re retiring in droves.
We need to tap in to that power. My Introduction to Teaching students have been working with kids in the elementary school next door. I’ve let them go in on their own, observe, make decisions, get frustrated. As a student teacher, I was thrown in front of a class the first week of school with no preparation, and I still say that was the best experience I could have had. Lately, I’ve been dropping in to help my students with their students, and I find myself obsessed with a couple of children who are struggling at a very young age. My students need the practice, but I’m dying to help.
There are kids like this in every elementary school in every town in our country. What if the Baby Boomers would donate just one hour a day to work with a child who needs some extra attention and encouragement to get on track? In order to balance the budget, many districts have increased the class sizes in primary and elementary classrooms to a 30:1 ratio of students to teacher. I am in awe of anyone who can manage a group of fifteen first graders, much less double that size–these teachers are truly supermen and women. But they can always use help. And Baby Boomers are known for their desire to help.
Theoretically, I will retire in the next year or two, and I plan to walk to the nearest school and offer to work with a child who is behind. “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.” -Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941).
Sue on 03 Sep 2011 at 1:44 pm #
I’ve thought this would be a great idea for some time. I teach in a school that is not poor enough to be title 1, but should be. My previous school was title 1, in a city with hookers on one side of the school and dealers on the other. These kids need to have mentors who can model success for them, something that often doesn’t exist in their families.
This type of volunteerism would have a second benefit, that I feel is equally important. The voters who elect our local, state, and national leaders would have first hand knowledge of just how complex a teachers’ job is, and it would inform how they interact with those leaders and how they vote.