Dave Badtke’s Blog

John Hope Franklin died on Wednesday at age 94. In today’s NY Times Brent Staples writes about an unfinished conversation he had with Franklin, who, on December 7, 1941, was on a long automobile trip with his wife, Aurelia, north from South to North Carolina, but didn’t hear about the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor until they arrived home because they didn’t dare stop:

Clearly, the car had no radio. But wouldn’t they have heard the news when they stopped to gas up and get something eat? No, he said; I had misunderstood the period. Black families motoring through the Jim Crow South packed box lunches to avoid the humiliation of being turned away from restaurants. They relieved themselves in roadside ditches because service-station restrooms were often closed to them. They worried incessantly about breakdowns and flat tires that could leave them stranded at the mercy of bigots who demeaned and wished them ill.

“You took your life into your hands every time you went out on the road,” he said. It was, of course, a relief to come upon a black-owned service station. But he said that you could drive from Charleston quite nearly to Baltimore before finding one.

Read Brent Staples’ column by following this link.

N.B.: The above photo of John Hope Franklin is from the Boston Globe. It gnawed on John Hope Franklin that racial segregation was replaced by class stratification in underfunded public schools. (Derrick Z. Jackson/Globe Staff).

I started this entry on the day of pink slips, March 15, the Ides of March, the day when Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC and also the day when thousands of teachers were laid off, in most cases because they were the most recently hired. Sure this will make classes bigger and decrease support for arts and athletics and other services that some have deemed less important than core subjects, but it will also reduce the chance that students will be taught by that one teacher with whom they might connect, that one teacher who’s a bit like Barack Obama’s Mom.

In the NY Times on March 13, David Brooks focuses on this point in “‘No Picnic For Me Either’”:

In his education speech this week, Barack Obama retold a by-now familiar story. When he was a boy, his mother would wake him up at 4:30 to tutor him for a few hours before he went off to school. When young Barry complained about getting up so early, his mother responded: “This is no picnic for me either, Buster.”

That experience was the perfect preparation for reforming American education because it underlines the two traits necessary for academic success: relationships and rigor. The young Obama had a loving relationship with an adult passionate about his future. He also had at least one teacher, his mom, disinclined to put up with any crap.

Even if many of us are not so lucky to have a parent as dedicated to education as Obama’s Mom, school can fill the void if students manage to connect on a fundamental level with at least one teacher who requires, also, that they perform academically. Unfortunately, if this doesn’t happen, it becomes so much more difficult for students to understand what education means:

We’ve spent years working on ways to restructure schools, but what matters most is the relationship between one student and one teacher. You ask a kid who has graduated from high school to list the teachers who mattered in his life, and he will reel off names. You ask a kid who dropped out, and he will not even understand the question. Relationships like that are beyond his experience.

The need for significant, educational connections between teachers and students is the reason it’s so important not to run a school like a business. While business efficiency may work for a school’s finances, our students are not consumers of education: for education to work, they must become partners in learning. Teachers are not selling education;students are not buying ideas. Instead, teachers and students are working together, when education works most effectively, to  improve skills and understand an increasingly complicated world.

And if teachers and students work together as partners in education, there’s a chance they’ll connect on a significant and fundamental level, changing them both in the process.