Beneath the old cottonwood tree there once stood a one-room school house. My mother went to school there as a girl, a short walk from home along the Iowa country road. Misty mornings on a road between cornfields and soybean fields can often conjure up ghosts.
I took this morning walk with the dog while I was visiting my old Iowegian home, and I was writing my fictional story Magical Miss Morgan in my head, not yet having had time to sit down and write. I was reflecting on times long past and a school long gone, though Miss Morgan’s story is really about my own teaching experience. Miss Morgan is in many ways me. But I am not a female teacher. I am a goofy old man. So, why am I writing the main character as a female?
Well, the ghosts from the old school house heard that and decided to send an answer.
Miss Mennenga was my third grade and fourth grade teacher from the Rowan school. The building I attended her classes in has been gone for thirty years. Miss M herself has long since passed to the other side. So when she appeared at the corner… Yes, I know… I have said countless times that I don’t believe in ghosts, but she had the same flower-patterned dress, the glasses, the large, magnified brown eyes that could look into your soul and see all your secrets, yet love you enough to not tell them to anyone else. Suddenly, I knew where the character of Miss Morgan had actually come from. I also realized why I was drawn to teaching in the first place. Teachers teach you more than just long division, lessons about the circulatory systems of frogs, and the Battle of Gettysburg… They shape your soul.
“You remember getting in trouble for doing jokes in class when you were supposed to be studying your spelling words?”
“Yes, Miss M, but I didn’t make any noise.. they were pantomime jokes that I stole from watching Red Skelton on TV.”
“But you pulled your heart out of your chest and made it beat in your hand. You had to know that was going to make the boys smirk and the girls giggle.”
“I did. But making them happy was part of the reason God put me there.”
“But not during spelling. I was trying to teach math to fourth graders. You interrupted.”
“You made that point. I still remember vividly. You let me read the story to the class out loud afterwords. You said I needed to use my talent for entertaining to help others learn, not distract them from learning.”
“I was very proud of the way you learned that lesson.”
“I tried very hard as a teacher to never miss a teachable moment like that. It was part of the reason that God put you there.”
“And I did love to hear you read aloud to the class. You were always such an expressive reader, Michael. Do you remember what book it was?”
“It was Ribsy, by Beverly Cleary. How could I have forgotten that until now? You made me love reading out loud so much that I always did it in my own classes, at every opportunity.”
I remembered the smile above all else as the lingering image faded from my view through the eyes of memory. She had a warm and loving smile. I can only hope my goofy grin didn’t scare too many kids throughout my career.
I needed a post for 1000 Voices that was about reconnecting with someone. I could’ve used any number of real life examples from everything that has happened to me since poor health forced me to retire from teaching I could’ve written any number of things that would not make me feel all sad and goopy about retiring and would not make me cry at my keyboard again like I am doing now… like I did all through that silly novel I wrote… even during the funny parts. But I had to choose this. A debt had to be paid. I love you, Miss M… and I had to pay it forward.
Catch a Falling Star 
Why School Should Be Cool
I was a school teacher for thirty-one years, and in spite of the immense amount of brain damage that builds up over time, especially as a middle-school teacher, I think I know what we’ve been doing wrong.
We need to take a look at an education system where things are working better than they are here.
Now, I know you probably didn’t click on the boring video about school. Heck, you probably aren’t even reading this sentence. But I can summarize it and put it in easy-to-understand words. Finland does not have to educate as many poor and disadvantaged kids as this country does. The video gives five ways that Finland does it better, but all of them boil down to the basic notion that the country is more homogeneous and uniformly middle-class than ours is. Still, we can learn things from them.
The first of the five ways that Finland does it better is a difference in government. While U.S. governmental safety-net programs blame people who need food stamps for being lazy (even though some of them work 40-hour work weeks in minimum-wage jobs), Finland gives a huge package to parents of everything they might need as soon as their child is born. As long as the child is in school, the government does many things to support the family’s efforts to educate them. Imagine what we could accomplish here if we invested some of the vast fortune we give to corporations in subsidies into educating poor black and Hispanic children instead. Children have a hard time learning in school when they come to school hungry. If we could only feed them better, the way the Fins do, we would revolutionize our classrooms.
The second point the video makes is the biggest suds-maker every time I get on my teacher’s soap box. They don’t give kids homework and they only give them one standardized test when they leave high school. I have recently covered this topic more thoroughly in a post in which I was able to ridicule Florida governor Rick “Skeletor” Scott. (Boy, did I enjoy doing that.) But I won’t go into all of that again here.
The third thing is respecting teachers. In Finland they treat teachers with the kind of respect that they give to doctors and lawyers. How cool is that? In Texas, calling someone a teacher is an epithet. If a teacher is liked or even loved by their students, administrators are encouraged to keep a closer eye on them to figure out what’s wrong. Students are supposed to hate their teachers and sit all day filling out mind-numbing test-preparation worksheets. Imagine what it could be like if teachers weren’t the scum of the earth. They might actually have students convinced that learning goes on in their classrooms.
The fourth point is that Finland does not try to cram more and more memorized details into young brains so they can spit it all back out on a test. They take students thoroughly into the subject of study, and at a slower, easier pace. They dive deep into the river of learning instead of wade through the wide and shallow parts. All questions get answered. And by that, I mean, student questions, not teacher questions. The learning is student-centered.
Finally, the video states that Finland simply has fewer social ills in their country to get in the way of good quality education. But even though the work is harder in this country, the potential is really there to go far beyond what Finland is capable of. We have a natural resource that is totally untapped in this nation. We don’t develop the minds of a majority of our children in any meaningful way. And I can tell you from having done it, you can teach a poor or disadvantaged child to think. You can give them the tools for academic, economic, and personal success. You can make them into valuable human beings. But you should never forget, they are already precious beyond measure. We just ignore and trash that inherent value. So, the information is out there about how to do a better job of educating our children. We need to follow through.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, education, humor, insight, teaching
Tagged as education, Finland's education system, humor, lessons learned, teaching, teaching better