Published: October 02, 2008 09:26 pm         

Dedicated educators a must for strong national economy

Point Blank

Help wanted — millions of young people, equipped with problem-solving skills and the ability to learn, needed for entry-level jobs in the American economy. Others need not apply.

The problem is, the companies that place the want ads say they are having a hard time finding enough workers with the kind of skills needed for today’s highly automated and computerized offices and factories — even the mining industry.

Few problems have the potential of being more damaging to the nation’s prosperity. Without the workers to remain technologically competitive, business can shrink in the marketplace and erode job opportunities.

Without the skills to remain competitive as jobs require ever more expertise and proficiency, workers can wither in the workplace and watch their incomes and job security erode.

In the worst-case scenario, the overall American economy will dry up in the face of global competition and lose out to countries whose young people come equipped with problem-solving skills and the ability to learn — and learn quickly.

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At the same time, schools represent the only hope many poor people have for getting their children on a path out of poverty, but the statistics on dropouts, illiteracy, minority youth unemployment and delinquency are a sad litany on how hollow their hopes often are.

In brief, there is a lot to overcome. Curriculums must be improved, and that takes time.

For new curriculums to be effective, teachers must be retrained to use them, and that takes money.

Even a looming shortage of teachers, for the moment, threatens to undermine the whole effort.

So we have to admit: Teaching is a serious business. But it has a lighter side for educators who don’t take themselves too seriously.

How many of us can say with certainty that our work directly affects the lives of hundreds or even thousands of others? For teachers, there is little doubt they have a profound effect on their students, nearly always in a positive manner.

Perhaps the gravity of this knowledge is a source of pressure teachers feel at the beginning of every school year, yet it is also the source of pride and motivation.

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Why teach?

Why butt your head against a brick wall (bureaucracy gone amuck) day after day, or become the scapegoat for the inability of parents to properly rear their children in an age that encourages body piercing, tattoos, junk food, risqué clothing, vulgar music and profanity?

An age when youth are permitted to stay up until after midnight, work long hours after school to pay for automobiles and insurance, stay on the phone all hours, watch TV incessantly and take their meals undisturbed — in their rooms instead of dining with mom and dad at the supper table.

So why teach?

An old educator’s joke says there are only three good reasons: June, July and August.

But the real reason is that some of us are born to teach — we do it because we have to. Teaching isn’t just a job. It’s a calling for those who like to engage young people in an intelligent manner.

You cannot measure a teacher’s success by checking his lesson plans any more than you can gauge the effectiveness of a physician by observing his stethoscope. As the poet William Butler Yeats once said: “Education is not filling a pail but lighting a fire.”

A teacher’s main purpose in the classroom is to instill in his students a hunger for learning. He or she must inspire pupils in ways that go far beyond the literary terms or math equations on the blackboard — in ways that students themselves likely won’t realize until well after their school days are over.

And just as good teachers inspire students, the noble and sometimes nutty profession itself inspires insightful, witty and wry comments from writers and humorists.

After all, if you cannot laugh with your students (one venerable old teacher once told me), you’ll never make it in the classroom.

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Pay close attention, teachers, and you just might learn something from the following quips and comments:

You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there — Yogi Berra

Nothing grieves a child more than to study the wrong lesson and learn something he wasn’t supposed to — E.C. McKenzie.

Some kids want to know why the teachers get paid when it’s the kids who have to do all the work — Milton Berle.

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep — W.H. Auden.

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater — Gail Godwin.

Schools aren’t what they used to be and never were — Will Rogers.

I’m not rushing into being in love. I’m finding fourth grade hard enough — Regina, age 10.

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A mountaineer took his son to a school to enroll him. “My boy’s after larnin’, what d’ya have?” he asked the teacher.

“We offer English, trigonometry, spelling, geography,” she replied.

“Well, give him some of that thar trigernometry; he’s the worst shot in the family.”

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Top o’ the morning!

— Blankenship is a columnist for The Register-Herald.

E-mail: jabbb@suddenlink.net