File this under not being able to leave the job at the office:

The kid slouched up to me at the Tohono Transit Center, all baggy basketball pants, spiked hair and pensive teenager face, asking to borrow my phone. I had already done my good deed for the day – giving $1 extra to the bus driver to pay for a middle-schooler who was lacking full fare – and, although I try hard to not judge a book by its cover, I get suspicious of the gangsta look. I didn’t want my phone to disappear.

“Why do you need my phone?”

“I don’t have one. I missed my bus. I didn’t have the fare. I wanna call my friend and have him pick me up.”

“OK, give me the number,” I said, pulling the phone out of my backpack.

“I won’t take your phone,” the kid – who I’d finally discerned was a girl doing her best to disguise her femaleness in her gigantically over-sized clothing choices – said.

“Maybe so, but I’ve seen things walk off around here. So, give me the number.”

She did and when someone answered (a small, sleepy voice), I handed her the phone, but stayed close. The conversation lasted three minutes while she made the same request for a ride multiple times. Finally, the person hung up on her and she sighed. “That was mean,” she said,  staring at the phone as though it, not her supposed friend, had done the deed. She handed the phone back to me and I did what I’ve been doing since I was 16 and got my first byline: I started asking questions.

Her answers were matter-of-fact, as if she were relaying nothing more important than the price of coffee at a 7-11. She dropped out of school as soon as she turned 18 because because she’d been “in CPS” and wanted out. She had six months left of her senior year in high school and walked away, looking for freedom and a job. Now, about nine months after that decision, she knew there was a price to freedom, and she couldn’t pay for it without at least a high school diploma. So she had applied at a charter school specializing in getting dropouts through the finish line, but hadn’t heard back. She said Our Family Services had gotten her off the streets and she figured the school would contact them. She said she wanted to get a diploma so she could go to college and be a film-maker “but like I know that’s impossible since they only hire one person a year in that industry.”

“Why’d you drop out?”

“I just figured I wouldn’t need it,” she said, shrugging. “I figured I could make it on the streets, make it on my own. Get a job. I was young. It was a bad idea.”

You still are young, I wanted to say, except she looked so old.

“You need to call the school again,” I said, launching into academic advising mode. “Don’t wait for them to call you. You’re one of dozens of kids applying. Advocate for yourself. Don’t give up because you know you won’t get anywhere without at least a high school diploma.”

“Yeah, I know. Maybe. Maybe I’ll call.”

“No maybes. You do it.”

My bus pulled up and the girl started walking away from me.

“Call the school,” I repeated.

“Ok,” she said, turning around for a nanosecond. “Thanks for the phone.”

She walked away, heading nowhere, and I got on my bus, fairly certain my mini-advising session made no difference at all, but hoping maybe it did.

Elena Kagan as Dean of Harvard Law School. Creative Commons License. Image via Wikipedia

Joel Stein tackles elitism in The Awesome Column in last week’s Time Magazine, and he comes off sounding – as was his goal, me thinks – elitist. From his lede:

I went to a better college than you did. That does not make me a better person than you. It does, however, make me smarter, more knowledgeable, more curious and more ambitious. So, in a lot of ways, better.

Since Stein has no idea where I went to college, this kind of irritates me, although, in the end, he is right: He did go to a better college than I did, unless he went to University of Oregon. If that’s the case, I definitely went to a better college than he did, because I went to Oregon State. (Motto: Joel Stein may be Ivy League, but our basketball coach is the President’s brother-in-law.)

Anyway, the column hit a nerve because, as a laid-off journalist running up the learning curve of becoming a high school English teacher, I’ve had copious concerns about what I’ve seen in classrooms during my training. One of the points Stein brings up in his piece is that the notion that all people are equal in talent and brains is a bunch of bunk. (We are, however, all equally valuable as humans, in spite of what he says in his ending salvo.)

Humans are all different in brains, ability and innate talent. My daughters both have a better eye for design than I do, and the one who has had formal art training is an amazing artist. I can’t even paint my toenails, much less a self portrait that actually looks like a person. We are all blessed (and cursed) in different ways and as Stein points out, when you’re in need of a great brain surgeon, you will absolutely look at where she went to school before agreeing to go under the scalpel.

Let me say it again: We are not all equal in talent and ability. That said, Stein’s veiled argument that Elena Kagan is qualified for the Supreme Court because she went to an Ivy League school lacks some merit since said education alone cannot make up for lack of judicial experience – at least not in my non-Ivy-League opinion.

But I digress. There’s this idea teachers have to fight against in classrooms, and that is that natural ability trumps effort. We work hard with students who say they “just can’t write” or “just can’t do math” to show them that indeed, if they put in the effort, they can do that writing or math. We tell them that Magic Johnson didn’t become Magic Johnson because he was born with great hand-eye coordination; rather, he practiced for hours and weeks and months and years to get as good as he was at his sport.

Still, while effort – lots of it – can make up for some lack of innate ability, someone with a 90 IQ will not be able to catch up with someone with a 140 IQ no matter how many books he reads or math problems he tries to solve. And, as Stein points out, we do children a disservice when we more or less tell them that there is no innate difference. It is simply not true that a person can become anything he wants to be if only he works hard enough. Success will not come at all without hard work, but you cannot become a brain surgeon if you are horrible at science and have hands that naturally shake. You can’t be an astronaut if you are claustrophobic. You cannot be a calculus teacher if you cannot master algebra.

What we need to be telling students is they can get to a good college if they work really hard in high school (and middle school, and elementary school) and that in getting to a good college (or excellent technical school), they will expand the choices of careers open to them. While certain talents and skills are innate, getting the best teachers in the best schools teaches you to do the best thinking – and sets you on a path you will not travel if you have lousy teachers in a lousy college (or high school, technical school, etc.).

Which is why, dear readers, we need to work a heck of a lot harder to get the best K-12 teachers into the worst schools to turn around more of the students who have been convinced they will never succeed. We need the best teachers with the most educationally needy students to help more students get into the best colleges so they can become snarky columnists like Stein or, better yet, brain surgeons.

I have a guest editorial in today’s Arizona Daily Star that describes a little of what I’ve learned on my journey from journalist to almost certified teacher – interested readers can find it here.

If I had not been limited by word count I would have added that the only way schools will ever be able to fix what ails them is if policy makers are required to spend two full weeks each as a classroom aide in an elementary, middle school and high school classroom before they ever make a decision about curriculum, textbooks or funding. (The fact that the head of Arizona’s Department of Education is a lawyer-politician, not an educator, still rankles.)

This Bring Your Legislator or Policy Wonk to School experience would mirror a student teaching internship: The policy makers would work the hours of the teacher in whose classroom they help, meaning they’d probably have to live with said educator so they could help with the lesson planning in the evenings and weekends. They would have to stay after school for the discipline committee meetings, learn how to average grades for the grade book, write tests and offer tutoring sessions. They would need to skip lunch with the teacher so the extra grading could be complete and they’d finally understand why many teachers and administrators think No Child Left Behind has actually resulted in dumber – not smarter – students, and, get this, lots of intellect left behind.

If policy makers actually saw what happens in a classroom – and not just through an occasional visit to a school play – they would be exposed to the classroom management problems teachers deal with daily, the ridiculous workload and get up close and personal with the problems so many students bring to school with them each day. (Example, true story: Kindergarten teacher asks the children in circle time to introduce themselves and tell about their parents. Things move smoothly until one little girl explains that her dad is in jail and she only sees him on the weekends. Other 5-year-olds have questions: What is jail? Why can’t you stay with him there? What did he do to get taken to jail?)

Thus enlightened, they’d think twice before consider cutting any educational funds, and they’d think three times before ever considering letting a politician decide what is best for Arizona’s classrooms.