OPENING DAY
September 5, 2006
Jeffrey M. Young
Superintendent of Schools
Good morning
Thank you custodians
Thank you secretaries
One year ago I asked you to take a moment to reflect on the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast a week before the school year began. Today, let us pause again to recognize the many lives that were lost on September 11 five years ago as well as the lives that have been lost in the past five years in defense of our nation’s freedom. Please be thoughtful next Monday about the needs of your students. With our youngest children, questions may come out of nowhere. With our older elementary students, as well as those in our secondary schools, please take some time to help our kids process the magnitude of that sorry date in history. In all of our classrooms on that day, we should be sensitive to the developmental needs of students, making sure discussions are age-appropriate, motivated by a desire to educate and to foster feelings of safety within the schoolhouse.
Now, please picture a seventh-grader; any twelve year-old will do. This child today is just past the half-way point in his or her public education. Depending on the extent of post-secondary education and experiences this student has, it is pretty safe to say that this person will enter the workforce sometime around the year 2020. The little boy with the awkward gait and the young girl on the cusp of maturation will become important contributors to our society and economy before we know it. As someone who has watched his own children grow up too quickly, I want American public schools to prepare this year’s seventh graders for the world they will encounter.
Here is one glimpse of what that world will be. A few weeks ago, while my family was on vacation in Maine, my wife required medical care. Luckily, there was a friendly little hospital near the place we were staying. At around 2:00 in the morning, the doctor determined that she needed a CAT scan. They wheeled her down to the room for the test and when she returned the doctor told us we would have the results shortly. He also mentioned, in an almost casual way, that the radiologist reading my wife’s X-ray was located in Australia. This news alarmed me at first, but when the reading arrived just a few minutes later, I calmed down—first because the report was good news, and second, because I realized that the physical distance between Penobscot Bay and Sydney, Australia was irrelevant to her medical treatment.
I have since learned that this is the way it goes in many small and medium-sized hospitals in the United States. Most of this long-distance electronic diagnosis evidently occurs at night and on weekends when radiologists do not have sufficient staffing to provide in-hospital coverage. Since CAT images are in digital format and available on a network, it is no problem to view the images anywhere in the world. When it was 2:00 a.m. in Maine, it was 4:00 p.m. in Australia, and they had plenty of doctors sitting in front of their computers during normal work hours. It was easier to ship the images across the globe.
This, as one television commercial would have it, is not your father’s Oldsmobile. As we move ahead in the Newton Public Schools, we must think deeply about what it means to educate today’s students for tomorrow’s global economy and society. This will be our big goal in the coming years—we need to identify the knowledge and skills people will really need to succeed in the future and organize our schools and practices around providing the academic, social and personal assets that will be required. Thomas Friedman’s bestseller, The World is Flat, outlines these issues and presents the challenges our country will face in a world different from the one we think we live in today. Twenty years ago, would you have rather been a B-student in Newton, Massachusetts or an A-student in Bangalore, India? Tomorrow, the A-student in India will enjoy the competitive advantage.
To educate students for the global era, we need a world-class faculty and staff. Newton is about hiring and retaining the best people. In the end, it is all about the human interactions between teachers and kids that make the difference. Newton must be a place where educators want to work because they can expect support and encouragement, fair compensation and favorable working conditions, opportunities for professional growth, and connection to the system and the community through a set of shared values. The goal is to create the conditions in which teachers can do their best teaching and students can do their best learning.
So I think about this 12 year-old and wonder what the world will be like in the year 2020.
But at these annual Opening Day assemblies, my mind also invariably goes to the hands-on part of it all—the things you do with kids every day in your classrooms. It is one thing to plan strategically as we work to shape the schools of the future, but it is quite another to attend to the here and now.
So much of what you do I can feel in my bones. Although it has been a while since I have worked full-time as a classroom teacher, I certainly remember, in a visceral way, what it felt like to go to work every day. Like you, I wrestled with finding the right balance between teaching content and teaching kids. Finding the best way to cover all the material I was expected to teach in 180 days, yet doing it in a way that attended to the wildly diverse needs of the students in front of me posed a challenge that never ended. How can we be sure that we are not leaving some students behind when we speed up in teaching? Or that others are not growing bored when we slow down to explain and review? Or that the kids in the middle are not falling through the cracks, with neither pace of instruction being just right? This is a heavy burden that you carry every day—I understand that and respect you for your remarkable effort to differentiate instruction as the situation and the students dictate.
I remember how exhausting it is to be a good teacher. No matter what people out there in the so-called “real world” believe, we know what teachers invest of themselves every day—intellectually, physically, psychologically and socially. The school calendar, which some view as “cushy,” is actually a necessity, as teachers and kids need to stop and re-fuel every now and then.
I remember how proud I felt, and still feel, to be a member of this profession. You are history’s transmitters of culture and civilization. You are the keeper of hopes and dreams. Yes, it is true that now we are racing with India and China and Australia, but is also true, paradoxically, that we need to slow down. Not only do teachers need those extra moments to make the personal connection with students, you need some time to take stock of yourselves, where you have been and where you are going. Starting in a couple of days, you will have that sense of shifting from first gear directly into fourth gear. And it doesn’t really slow down until June. That is why our summers are so precious.
It is tempting to list all the things that are wrong or hard to accomplish in education today. Clearly, our national leaders like to do this for us. They view education’s glass as half-empty. Instead we must build on all that is positive in our schools, eschew the finger-pointing and blame game that too often characterizes our present day society, and focus on the rewards and pleasures that come from doing this most important work with today’s children, tomorrow’s adults.
Personally, I learned my lesson about seeing the glass as half-full at Fenway Park. This year, it was not due to a baseball magically landing in my son’s lap, nor did the lesson result from an unexpected interaction with a player. No, in the midst of this dismal season, my moment of illumination came from a different direction.
As luck would have it, a few weeks ago a friend of mine called the morning of the game to say two extra tickets for the final Red Sox-Yankees game had become available. This was the fifth game of that terrible weekend when the local nine’s hopes were essentially dashed. But at the time, it seemed like a gift from heaven—this would be the game where the Sox would regain their momentum and start to turn the tide against the New Yorkers. Or so we thought. I was doubly pleased when I calculated that if we got there early enough, for all the pre-game festivities, I would enhance my chances of something extraordinary happening on the field in my presence, something I could tell you about this morning.
My son and I left the house in great spirits, embarking on our usual route to Kenmore Square. My daughter was happy to have us both out of the house for a few hours as she wanted to work on her lines for an upcoming production at Newton South, and we were of no use to her as far as that was concerned. Jon, being a surfer, was feeling laid back, while I, on the other hand, had business to attend to, a speech to write, and wanted to get going into town.
Our usual route is to park at Brookline High School and take the MBTA a couple of stops from the Brookline Hills station. As we approached the T stop, I saw that the road there was closed due to construction, which got me irritated, as things were starting not to go my way. I drove to the Brookline Village stop, but the meters available were good for only two hours and therefore useless to me. Time was marching ahead. I tried Longwood, but hit gridlock on the way, and when we finally got there, there were no spaces. Game time was approaching, and as I saw my plans turn to dust before my eyes, I grew more and more upset, muttering under my breath, while Surfer Boy just played with the car radio. I drove to Kenmore where thousands of people were happily walking to the ballpark and millions were trying to park. I started to pound the dashboard with my fist, complaining about everything from the road construction schedule to over-population. We turned around and drove back to Brookline Hills, where the road crew was now on lunch break and I actually thought of moving the construction cones aside and parking where I wanted to park. Jon begged, “Don’t do it, Dad.” I thought I’d give the Chestnut Hill stop a try, but by now there had been a fender-bender on Route 9, and the traffic was backed up for a mile and I was stuck. One more trip back to Brookline Hills as we listened to the first pitch on the car radio, and I found a side street where I could park. We boarded the trolley, which was uncharacteristically empty because all the baseball fans had long ago completed their transportation requirements. My complete frustration at not being able to make the world comply with my needs got the better of me, as I wailed, moaned and ultimately apologized to my son, not only for making us late to the game, but also for my abominable behavior.
Then came the role reversal. Jon, who in truth is now at the age where he’d rather be on the beach in Santa Monica than in the stands watching baseball anyway, said, “Dad it’s okay. We only missed one inning. Just think about how lucky we are to even have tickets.”
I nearly wept—except that I was in too much of a rush to get to our seats. From the mouths of babes, as they say. He had it right. Things rarely go exactly as we wish they would, but we are all pretty lucky after all to be here. I am proud to be Superintendent of Schools in Newton and lucky to have you as colleagues. When times get tough during the budget season or in a crisis this year, I am going to remember this star-crossed day at the ballpark. This turned out to be the fifth straight loss for the Red Sox to the Yankees and probably the day that their plans for a pennant ended, yet it was the day I learned that my glass is half-full. How could I say that nothing special happened on that beautiful afternoon?