Leave a comment Posted on fathers, parents, Public Education

Saying goodbye to your child and his childhood is hard to do

Just a few weeks ago Dads Take Your Child to School day occurred in New York City. Another one of those head-scratching official proclamations that makes one wonder: do we really need to remind parents to do parent-like things?

For me, taking my youngest son to school is a pleasure, especially since I rarely do it due to my work schedule; my wife usually drops him off.

Whenever my wife can’t, I get to take my little 5th grader to his elementary school.   Only it is not a drop off.

After we get out of the car, we walk to the school gate, the closest point outside school grounds where parents are allowed to congregate.   Past the gate, parents must remain behind as their children walk on alone.

While most kids carry their backpacks as they walk to school, I willingly carry my son’s; after all, the backpack is much too heavy for his still growing spine.

When I hand off the bundle that would be charged extra if checked onto an airplane, I give him a tight hug, encourage him to do well on that day’s assignments, remind him that “Daddy loves you,” stand away from the small group of guardians in order to be better seen, make eye contact with him through the apertures of the chain link fence, and wave both of my arms as if I’m doing jumping jacks.   Looking ridiculous to others around me is the last thing on my mind.

My son is at an age where a full blown wave might make him look too much like daddy’s little boy to his peers so he settles for a half-wave with his left hand, arm bent at the elbow. He turns towards where his classmates line up, and every 10 seconds repeats his turning back with the half-wave as he maintains his forward march.

This dance of ours continues until he blends in with a sea of other blue/green backpacks 40 yards away.

Not until I am secure that he can no longer see me do I walk away.

What races through my mind is a mosaic of memories from my own childhood and from his, of saying goodbye to parents and children.

How quickly they outgrow the cute sailor suit in the window of the children’s clothing store, the swings on the playground, the annual trip to Legoland.

The next transformation will occur when the little boy skin symbolically falls away replaced with an adolescent armor, impenetrable by hugs and kisses.

With my oldest boy, I’m lucky if I get in a pat on the back goodbye.

What a shame that childhood can’t be twice as long, shielding them from the ugliness of the world that seems to worsen with each tomorrow, from Ebola epidemics to ISIS beheadings, before their enchantment of life evaporates.

Only 145 days remain of the current school year.   Hopefully I get to take my son to school a few more times before his wave turns into a shrug, his glance back is no more when he moves on to middle school. If only every day was a Dads Take Your Child day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a comment Posted on parents, Public Education, students, teaching

Teachers, the ultimate DIYers

Years ago doctors took blood pressure, drew blood, and administered medicine. Today, medical assistants perform these duties.

Years ago teachers took attendance, collected parent forms, and tutored students. Today, teachers still perform these duties.

The teacher remains the sole adult in the classroom working with students even though the job has grown increasingly more challenging over the decades.

Oh sure, there are adult aides in special education classes, and up until a few years ago GUSD used to provide ed assistants in English Language Development classes, but for the vast majority of the country’s three million public school teachers, they go it alone.

Ideally, a new para-educator position should be created, an aide who would assist teachers with the tasks that don’t necessitate five years of college. One para-educator could serve several teachers, so while it would cost additional money to pay them, it wouldn’t be astronomical.

A less expensive and more realistic alternative would be to restructure the clerks already in place at a school, assigning one to be the sole teacher secretary.

Administrators, the smallest employee group on campus, usually have at least two secretaries, the counselors, the next smallest, have one, yet teachers, the largest group of workers with the most student contact, have none.

Here are some things that a clerk could do for teachers that would go a long way towards making the profession more efficient.

Taking attendance, uploading homework and grades. Nowadays parents expect their children’s assignments and grades to be posted online.   Such a task requires hours of work, time outside the teaching day. How helpful it would be to email a secretary this information.

Arranging field trips.   Teachers are required to do all the work involved with organizing field trips, including filling out forms, calling the bus company, collecting money from students to pay for the bus, and beseeching parents to go as chaperones.   With a dedicated teacher secretary, more kids would have enriching experiences beyond the four-walled classroom.

Making photocopies. Up until two years ago, my workplace had a clerk who would make photocopies for teachers. Now, teachers are on their own to take paper to a copy machine, punch in a code, and then remove the paper.   Think of the time wasted for a teacher to do this instead of helping a student in his classroom.

The other day I needed to make 24 copies, an amount that normally would take a few minutes at most.   However, by the time I went downstairs to the copy machine, inputted my code (yes, we have a quota) and loaded my paper, a misfeed occurred.   After removing the crumbled piece of paper, the machine never reset.

Not wanting to leave the machine in that condition, I told a secretary nearest the room about the misfeed.   She told me she wasn’t the correct person to contact and for me to find the clerk in charge of photocopying.

Meanwhile, my 15-minute morning break was now down to 8—and I still hadn’t used the restroom. Sometimes those who don’t work in classrooms forget that those of us who do cannot leave our rooms while students are in them.

Dejected, I returned upstairs without a single copy made. Imagine a school principal or a district administrator using his time in this fashion.

With creative restructuring of the current clerks on hand, even a single employee that serves only teachers would relieve the burden upon educators’ shoulders.   However for this to happen would require a rethinking of the teacher’s placement on the education hierarchy, more of a challenge than assigning a secretary to help teachers.

In the meantime, teachers continue to be the ultimate DIYers in the professional world.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Common Core, Public Education, standardized testing, students, teaching, Uncategorized

Teachers Need to be involved in Decision-Making

In the game of education, there are many players: students, parents, teachers, administrators, district officials, state and federal politicians.   Too often, the group that has the most contact with the students, the teachers, is not part of policy decision-making.

For example, sometime beginning in the late spring, the Glendale Unified School District went ahead with a major endeavor, signing a five-year contract worth $3.4 million with Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates to use their i-Ready diagnostic testing program, evaluating each kindergartner through 12 grader three times a year.

What was quite startling about all this was how few of the major stakeholders were in the loop, including some administrators.

Glendale Teachers Association President Phyllis Miller said that GTA was not part of any discussions about this program as well.

Just as the Common Core standards seemingly came out of nowhere, so too has i-Ready that no one knows with certainty will benefit students.

The difference between the rollout of Common Core and i-Ready was that GUSD carefully involved teachers in introducing the new standards over a three-year period; the systematic testing came like a “Bam!” a la celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse.   In the past, the district has piloted new programs before committing to them.   Not this time.

Product Marketing Director for Curriculum Associates Susan Arcuri claims that there have been positive results in Glendale.   It’s a mystery how she came to that conclusion considering testing has just begun.

Miller said that many teachers who have used i-Ready say that the test itself is taking much longer than what was expected.

Where I work, the reading test is currently being administered, taking two class periods to complete. If that holds true for the math test, that would translate to a loss of 12 hours of direct instruction in arguably the most important subject classes.

And don’t forget the time it takes school administrators to organize the computer labs and monitor the testing, time better spent elsewhere.

It’s understandable the district wants to do something to help students perform well on the new Common Core based assessments.   The idea of providing teachers with individualized data to help shape future lesson planning sounds ideal.   The problem is that it is not practical.

Any teacher watching an i-Ready presentation espousing its benefits could inform upper management of this.   How are teachers going to find the time needed to analyze the data and then to modify lessons to meet the needs of each student? If a teacher were at the decision-making table, these legitimately difficult questions would have arisen.

One would have to make quite a convincing argument that spreadsheets of colored graphs is preferable to lessons taught by a qualified teacher.

Often overlooked is the analysis already occurring in the classroom on a daily basis facilitated by the expert in that field, the teacher.   Teachers don’t need third party testing results to understand that a student has difficulty understanding a Shakespearean passage.   They discover it through their lessons and assessments.

I have had the privilege of having thousands of students spend time in my classroom. I’d like to make an impact.   But the effect I could have on a child gets further diminished with each hour of standardized testing.

Teachers are very possessive of the time they have with their students so there needs to be a strong reason to justify taking that time away.

Leave a comment Posted on Ferguson, Harper Lee, Michael Brown, Missouri, racism, students, teaching, To Kill a Mockingbird

Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson makes To Kill a Mockingbird Relevant Again

One of the charges of the high school English teacher is to help teenagers see the relevancy of literature to their lives. I’m always on the lookout on how to win over the students to read, in their minds, very old books from long, long ago.

For example, with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that focuses on racism against African Americans in 1930s Alabama, it can be a challenging task to involve Glendale adolescents who reside in a community with only 1.3% black citizens as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.   How do you get them to understand that there are people living today who dealt with segregation, blacks and whites with separate drinking fountains, bathrooms, and schools?

That’s why in a strange way, the killing of Michael Brown on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri, with a 67.4% African American population, can have a salutary effect on making the issue of racism relevant today in the here and now, not just vague stories from a history book.

When I was in grade school, World War Two ended only 20 years earlier, yet it might as well have taken place in the 1920’s for all I fathomed.   Only until I grew older did I realize how close my lifespan was to that major event.

So when I’m teaching Mockingbird and providing the background to the 1960 novel, namely the Civil Rights movement, I’m aware that for the average 15-year-old I might as well be talking about the Civil War.

In the past I’ve exposed students to the 1955 killing of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old from Chicago who while visiting his great-uncle in Money, Mississippi was killed in the middle of the night for reportedly whistling at a white woman, thinking that at least the fact that they have already outlived Till would raise an eyebrow.  

We make connections from real life to the novel.   It took less than an hour for the all-white jury to declare the defendants accused of Till’s murder not guilty, similar to Mockingbird’s all-white jury who took a few hours to reach the guilty verdict of rape against innocent Tom Robinson. In both cases, justice was not served.

We’ve listened to Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin (41 Shots)” inspired by the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo who was shot 19 times by NYPD officers for reaching for his wallet (the police shot 41 bullets but over 20 missed). Likewise in Mockingbird, Robinson is shot 17 times when he tries to escape from jail.

The 2012 death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida made the book relevant again.   Even though the vast majority of my students are not African-American, here was a kid about their age with a bag of Skittles.

When I asked students to research what was happening in Ferguson, suggesting various newspaper and television websites, several came back excitedly reporting eyewitness videos they viewed on YouTube. One, in particular, showed a protester being carted off like a pig on a spit eerily reminiscent of black and white footage from the 1960s, another connection.

As we study Mockingbird this year, it may not be possible to know for sure how many students will connect with the 54-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner as a result of Ms. Lee’s brilliant prose or Michael Brown’s tragic death.  

All that is known is that what happened in Ferguson should never have happened in 2014, and hope that it leaves a lasting impression on today’s young people who will inherit this society from us very soon.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Common Core, influential teacher, parents, Public Education, students, teaching

What’s Better for Students: Dynamic Teachers or Diagnostic Testing?

This summer has not been kind to California educators with increased deductions from their paychecks to pay for the pension fund, and tenure and job protection ruled illegal by a Superior Court judge.

So it was refreshing to hear good things said about teachers at last week’s district kickoff meeting from keynote speaker Rebecca Mieliwocki, the 2012 National Teacher of the Year who still teaches 7th grade English teacher at Luther Burbank Middle School.

Ms. Mieliwocki spoke about her experiences traveling around the world as the U.S. teacher ambassador. Since so much attention in recent years has centered on how students from other nations score higher on tests than American children, she wanted to find what magic was being performed in other countries’ classrooms.

Ironically, Ms. Mieliwocki discovered that it was the American teachers who “were the envy of every teacher I met.”   The foreign instructors queried her about the methods of her homeland colleagues.

She went on to tell stories about the importance of teachers accepting students for who they are.  

One young girl in her class always wore the same cowboy boots with flowers on them every day to school.   Some students wondered why she didn’t have another pair of shoes to wear.   It turned out that her father had passed away and the boots were the last item they had bought together. When she wore the boots, she felt close to her dad.

Once her powerful message had been delivered, and teachers were inspired, on came the next speaker, a representative from a testing company called i-Ready.   Too bad the district didn’t seem ready to properly unroll this new program of testing all K-12 students three times a year beginning in a couple of weeks.

When Rebecca spoke, she had the full attention of the teacher throng. When the spokesperson for the new i-Ready testing program presented, a sea of LED lanterns erupted as teachers got out their phones, quickly feeling disconnected including one male teacher sitting in front of me shopping for a thong.

I had to go to i-Ready’s website to get basic information of what was behind the new diagnostic testing: “i-Ready provides data-driven insights and support for successful implementation of the new standards.”  

On top of new Common Core standards that teachers are still adjusting to, now we have this intrusive testing schedule that will devour at least 2 hours for each test.

It’s sad, really, that the district folks don’t get it.   Teachers don’t need more information on kids because we are not provided the necessary time to analyze the data we already have. Students march in and out of classrooms day after day.   Except for an hour long meeting here and there, teachers have no regularly scheduled full work days to examine data with their colleagues.

The kickoff meeting was a clash of two conflicting approaches to education: the inspiration of a dynamic teacher versus the top-down implementation of mandatory testing. The latter presentation quashed the excitement of the one that preceded it.

If only the district brass had the foresight to end the all-staff meeting immediately following Ms. Mieliwocki’s speech, releasing them to use the rest of the day to set up their classrooms for the students.

It reminds one of Charles Dickens’ powerful opening to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

As Ms. Mieliwocki said, people “have to be brave to take on the work of an educator.”

Leave a comment Posted on Guardians of the Galaxy, Obscenity

“Guardians of the Galaxy” is not THAT good

When a movie earns a 92% from Rotten Tomatoes, it gets your attention.

So I cheerfully took my wife and 10-year-old son to see “Guardians of the Galaxy.”   Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times gave positive reviews. 

Sometimes when you see a movie trailer that does not impress you, yet see the film anyway, it is surprising better than the coming attractions.   This is not the case with this film.

The trailer looked bad and the move, while not b-a-d, is just another run-of-the-mill, Marvel Comic Empire franchise product, with the obligatory Stan Lee cameo in the first 10 minutes.

We have another two-hour commercial for the advanced special effects $170 million can buy you these days. As the few negative reviews point out, there is no real suspense in the hard to follow narrative.

My wife and I both end up nodding off during parts of films like these because the action sequences are so derivative of one another—apocalyptic battles depicting utter destruction of cityscapes and outer space explosions—that the monotony of it all produces a somnambulant effect. I challenge anybody to watch a one-minute scene taken from any of these summer blockbusters and correctly figure out which film it is.

What also bothers me about a lot of the PG and PG-13 films these days is that the word “shit” and “bitch” have become quite common.   Despite a talking raccoon and tree, characters one would assume pander to children, the film blurs the line of entertainment that is supposed to serve both adults and kids.   It’s like a Mexican restaurant that has hamburgers on the menu in order to appease families with children who need their burger fix.

Hey producers:   Either make a film for kids or for adults—don’t be so greedy.

 

Leave a comment Posted on drivers education, Public Education, students, teaching

Make Drivers Education Classes Mandatory in High School

Knowing that the leading cause of death among teenagers is fatal car crashes, one would think that teaching adolescents how to safely drive would be a national priority—or at least a high school graduation requirement.

Not so.

California Department of Education Public Information Officer Giorgos Kazanis said that out of the 1,100 school districts in the state, only 171 still offer a driving education course

despite California Education Code Section 51220(j) stating that “grades 7-12 . . . shall offer courses in . . . automobile driver education.”

Schools nowadays have plenty of bullying and drug prevention programs, but nothing on car accident prevention.

 Drivers education classes fell victim to budget cuts a quarter of a century ago when money from the Victims Compensation Fund (an explanation that would consume another column) which paid for in-car training was redirected for other purposes, leading schools to stop offering the courses as well. That funding has never been replenished.

Maybe that explains why fewer 16-year-olds have a driver’s license these days.

If you are old enough you may recall taking a class in high school called Safety that focused on the state’s Vehicle Code.   In addition to learning about the rules of the road, films were shown depicting staged and real car accidents. For a nominal fee, students could sign up for in-car driving lessons after school, usually taught by coaches or counselors. Some schools actually had driving simulators.  

One of the enigmas of public education is the dearth of important life skills not taught in classrooms. Part of the state’s secondary curriculum should include knowledge on how to open a bank account, how to apply for a credit card and a loan, and how to drive a motor vehicle.   And all students should be taught how to properly use electronic devices such as smart phones and tablets.

Oh sure, young people can quickly figure out how to text using abbreviations and emoticons, but how many know how to intelligently navigate the Internet or specify their Google searches, important lifelong abilities?

Some teachers on their own may give a lesson or two on life skills, but there is nothing that mandates it.

It’s too bad for what better way to make use of the regular school day than to have at least one hour devoted to things most people need to know when they grow up.  

Now that my son is 15 ½ I am going through the experience of paying hundreds of dollars for a driver’s ed course along with personal in-car training.   The 30 hours of classroom instruction is in addition to his normal school workload. It’s as if the driving class is an extracurricular like a sport.  

Of course Advanced Placement courses are important, but honor students get in accidents, too.

Sometimes those in education have tunnel vision when it comes to what students need to know.   It sounds good to require a student to take academic classes. However, beware: the word “academic” can mean something that is educational as well as something irrelevant. You would have a hard time convincing my son that geometry is more practical than driving.  

Instead of Common Core dominating the education conversation we need more of a Common Sense approach to what kids should know in order to survive in the real world.

 

 

Leave a comment Posted on Chicago, Wrigley Field

Our Kind of Town, Chicago is

This summer my 15-year-old son and I traveled to Chicago in order to see Wrigley Field’s 100th anniversary before major renovations change the baseball stadium.

We decided to make the whole trip “Vintage Chicago” by visiting not just the 2nd oldest ballpark in the nation but the longest standing eateries and shops as well.

As soon as we arrived at Midway Airport, we stopped for a traditional Chicago hot dog at Gold Coast Dogs.  I had the traditional char dog with neon green relish, tomato, pickle, and mustard on a poppy seed bun.   My son had his usual ketchup and onions even though a satirical sign posted read that anyone using ketchup on a dog would be arrested (he wasn’t, just kidded a lot by the server).

We stayed at the boutique Talbott Hotel which has been in the city since 1927.   It is a wonderful establishment with friendly staff from the doorman to the concierge.

Luckliy, we met a wonderful old timey cab driver, Phil, a citizen of 50 years and a cabbie for 25.   He took us to two special doughnut shops:    Do-Rite Doughnuts and Doughnut Vault.

When planning our trip, I researched the 25 best doughnuts places in the U.S., and Chicago happened to have 4 of those places (the other 2 were too far away from our hotel). The doughnuts at Do-Rite rank among the best I’ve ever eaten.  I can’t comment on the Vault’s doughnuts because is was still closed at 7:30 a.m.

Our first dinner was at Pizzeria Uno which originated the famous Chicago deep dish pizza in 1943.   This was the only disappointing eatery.    I found the crust over done, and my son could barely eat his.    This is an example of a place that may have originated a particular meal that doesn’t necessarily make the best version of that meal.

When I was last in Chicago nearly 30 years ago, breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s make an impression. At that time, Mr. Mitchell was still alive personally handing out small boxes of Milk Duds to the ladies, “Sweets for the Sweet!”

The best part of Lou Mitchell’s, established in 1923, is the atmosphere including the seasoned waitresses.   When our server found out we were headed to the original location of Margie’s Candies, she got very excited.

After breakfast, we walked across the street to the historic Union Station building.    Then we took the El train 15 minutes north to Margie’s Candies.

Margie’s has two locations but we wanted to visit the original location.   Clearly, the neighborhood around the small establishment had changed over the decades since the store opened in 1933.   Inside the cramped store was an authentic soda fountain in addition to its chocolate candy counter.   As a lifetime Los Angeles resident I’ve gotten spoiled by See’s Candies, still the box of chocolates around.   Still, Margie’s was good.

Then it was time to go to Wrigley Field.   The dixieland band playing outside the ballpark got added to the festive atmosphere.   One of the most wonderful things about Wrigley besides the obvious 100 years of its history is the minimum amount of visual and aural noise that has become epidemic at nearly all professional sports complexes.   What a pleasure to mainly hear an organ playing and to have giant video screens with commercials between innings.   

Throwing out the ceremonial first pitch were members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (made famous in the film “A League of Their Own”).   Also present was the granddaughter of the man who planted the famous ivy against the outfield wall.

For dinner we headed out a 20-minute cab ride to the White Palace Grill, opened since 1939.   As far as diners go, it was pretty average, nothing special.    The crunchy hash browns were delicious.

Our final day in the Windy City was a whirlwind tour of city highlights.   We began with a morning architectural Chicago River cruise.   It was very informative; even my son recalled specific architectural styles when we walked city streets later on.

For lunch we went to the Billy Goat Tavern, serving burgers since 1934.  Those of you old enough to remember the early seasons of Saturday Night Live may recall the “cheezburger, cheezburger” skit which was based on the long-standing eatery.  Sure enough, the man at the cashier sounded just like John Belushi, “You want a double-cheeseburger, double-cheeseburger for you.”   Just getting to the Billy Goat Tavern is an adventure.   Good luck with GPS helping you to locate the right staircase off Michigan Avenue to go subterranean.   

We then headed over to the Willis Tower (formerly Sears).   Since my son had been to the top of the Empire State Building, the Space Needle, and the Eiffel Tower, we had to add this to his repertoire.   At the top of the building, they have a clear cubicle that extends a few feet out so that you can look beneath you at 1,353 feet.

Finally we visited the Museum of Science and Industry which opened in 1933.   My son is not a museum kid.   He’d rather watch a PBS special on the brain than look at art.   I knew my choice was a success when he unsolicitedly said “I like this museum” twice.   We went into the real coal mine, an original exhibit dating to the museum’s origin.   We also enjoyed looking at the German U-505 sub that was captured in World War Two.

Our best meal was our last dinner at Gene and Georgetti, the oldest traditional steakhouse in town founded in 1941.   The food and the service were topnotch.

I’d highly recommend a Vintage Chicago trip.   Nowadays there are so many of the same restaurants and stores that it is worth an effort to research some of the less trendy destinations that were responsible for putting bustling cities such as Chicago on the map.

 

 

1 Comment Posted on Public Education, students, teaching

Teachers Have Time Off?

“Teachers have so much time off” is an often repeated sentiment among non-educators.

True, teachers have vacation time that rivals workers in European nations.   For example, Portugal provides for 35 paid days off.   Never mind that the teacher summer leave is unpaid.

In Glendale, those who do teach in the summer end up with 4 weeks off compared to 9 for those who don’t.   I’m fortunate to be in the minority of teachers who don’t teach summer school, though that wasn’t the case for my first 20 years.

It was a nice coincidence that when I finally did settle down, get married, and have children (in that order, by the way), I had the extra time off to spend with my kids who were also at home.

“Time off” is something that is quite relative.   It reminds one of the saying “time off for good behavior” which of course refers to prisoners not teachers (though there may be a few similarities).

As a teacher, my mind remains “on,” receptive to ideas I absorb through reading material and watching content.   I’ll print out a well written op-ed piece to share with my journalism students or I’ll draft a new way to help kids edit their writing.

Hours are invested in organizing files, lessons, thoughts before the school engine revs up.

What I’ve discovered is that it takes a few weeks to decompress from the rush-rush-rush nature of teaching five classes a day.   Once my mind ebbs and flows at a more natural clip, then I can relax.

Even if a teacher is able to not think about work, days out of the classroom may help those who feel the dreaded teacher disease—teacher burnout.

When I was a rookie teacher, many a veteran colleague spoke of teacher burnout as a coal miner would of black lung disease, an ailment that inevitably gets to all educators.

Old, bitter people holding court in the faculty cafeteria sharing their war stories and exit strategies were not going to burst my enthusiastic bubble.

I learned quite early on to pace myself. Teaching requires a level of mental and physical vitality that is hard to sustain if school were in session year round. Teachers don’t have solar panels on their bodies that store energy from the summer ready for dispersion throughout the rest of the year.

What is asked of and demanded of teachers nowadays is an impossible expectation.   How can you meet the Common Core standards, keep up with the ever changing pedagogy, accurately account for the whereabouts for 150 students, handle the emotional needs of dozens of diverse students from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and still connect to kids so that they will receive instruction that will improve their skills?

Each start of school I have to brace myself for the first month until things finally settle into a routine.

Those initial weeks more than pays for all the time off during the summer.

Well, I can confidently say that as I enter my 26th year of teaching I have yet to catch teacher burnout (maybe it’s the Omega-3 fish oil supplements).

Quite frankly, I’ve grown to enjoy teaching the more I do it. What I still relish about it is that no matter the increasing encroachment of federal and state mandates, I still control and create much of the work I do with children.

Perhaps when I retire I’ll grasp the meaning of “time off” means. Until then an idea just came to me on how to get kids jazzed about using subordinating conjunctions.

 

Leave a comment Posted on children's TV programs, Jerry Mathers, Leave it to Beaver

A Conversation With “Leave it to Beaver” Star Jerry Mathers

Bringing up decent children in a sometimes indecent world is challenging to both parents and teachers.

So as Americans celebrate this country’s 238th birthday, what better time to visit with one of the most iconic stars in television history, Jerry Mathers, who played Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver on the classic “Leave it to Beaver” series that aired from 1957-1963, and find out what he has to say about the changes that he has seen in an acting career that began when he was two and continues to this day (see jerrymathers.com).

“Leave it to Beaver” has continuously been on the air since 1957.  What accounts for the enduring quality of the show?

“The show airs all over the world and people still enjoy watching it in many different languages,” Mathers said.  “Obviously there’s a broad market for quality television.  Not only do I have fans of my generation and older, but also their children and grandchildren.

“The life experiences of children growing up in the 1950’s are still relevant and understood by people today. If you watch the show as a child you relate to Beaver, if you’re an adolescent you relate to Wally, and as parents you see the situations from June and Ward’s point of view.”

Considering how permissive TV standards are today, it’s hard to believe that the very first episode of “Leave it to Beaver” almost didn’t air because there was a scene showing a toilet used as an aquarium for the boys’ pet alligator.   The compromise was to only show the toilet’s tank.  Looking at what passes as family entertainment today, what goes through your mind?

“When I watch many shows today they are written as joke shows; it’s set-up, set-up, joke; endlessly without much of a story.  In ‘Leave it to Beaver,’ the humor comes from the situation, not just jokes that a writer thinks everyone should laugh at.”

How do you answer critics that “Leave it to Beaver” depicted a family that never really existed in this country?

“Some people criticize the show saying that it does not depict real life of the 1950’s, but it wasn’t supposed to be real life; it was a situation comedy about a child growing up.”

Do you think the crassness in today’s media has a negative influence on today’s youth?

“I think it is very possible that many young people could be influenced when they watch so many shows on television that popularize rude and offensive behavior as normal and acceptable human discourse.”

What motivated you to get involved with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Summer Cybercop Challenge for Kids that focuses on the dangers of cyberbullying?

“I have law enforcement officers in my family, a family that gives a lot back to the community.  The Internet has linked us to everything good and bad in ways we couldn’t have imagined when I was a kid so it’s important that parents and children understand how they can help prevent themselves from becoming victims.”

Any thoughts about the demise in decency these days?

“The mores of culture ebb and flow and we as individuals are responsible to judge what is right for us.  It is important that we set positive examples with the hope and belief others will follow.”

Sound advice from a man who not only represents wholesomeness in his career, but in his life as well.

So once you’ve eaten some barbeque, grab a slice of pie and watch an episode of “Leave it to Beaver” and ponder if we are that much more civilized today now that the whole toilet can be shown on television.