Tag Archives: causing learning

Non-Academic Attributes of a K-12 Education Last Longer. We Prioritize the Wrong Data.

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The correlations of a child’s ability to read by grade 3 and proficiency in Algebra by grade 8 to late life success are well documented. These attributes cause a variety of midlife advantages. But are those the later life qualities that really matter? Instead, evaluate each child on the non-academic attributes of education. The correlates of non-academic traits with later adult life quality are far more important than we acknowledge. It is time to re-center our priorities of what constitutes a quality K-12 education and begin looking at core life values. Forget academic assessments, grade point averages, and class rankings.

What don’t we know? – Core life values

I usually open with “what do we know?” but that is the wrong question today. We know about the predictive value of a child’s academic achievements, or lack of achievement, on adults’ early and career-long earning power, incarceration rates, and socio-cultural status. Learning to read early and to think algebraically have predictive earning power. Yet we do not discuss the reality that these academic assets fade out over time. Early advantage does not translate into later life satisfaction. Early abilities to read and do algebra are not the attributes we use to measure a high-quality adult life.

What we do not measure and know much about, or at least we do not discuss, are the core life values that sustain a person throughout their life span. Ironically, these values are developmental, we see them early in childhood, and they continue throughout life. Also, they are measurable throughout the K-12 grade span, but not with tests. These values often are recorded in teacher notes and comments, but are eliminated from transcripts, the record that counts. They are lost to us because of our stubborn reliance on the numbers of test scores. Americans love hard data.

What are core life qualities? They are:

  • Self-regulation, the capacity to monitor, manage, and adapt your internal mindset to meet new challenges, changing demands, and long-term goals. It is the ability to adjust to your life.
  • Conscientiousness, a fundamental personality trait noted for orderliness, thoroughness, strong impulse control, goal-directed, and feeling a deep responsibility for one’s commitments.
  • Perseverance, the ability to sustain a purposeful effort to achieve long-term and high-value goals over time, to weather setbacks, fatigue, and repeated failures.
  • Self-control, the ability favors deferred gratification over immediate, the override of impulses, immediate urges, and temptations, and not follow others away from your priorities.
  • Emotional stability, the psychological ability to keep a steady temperament, not dissolve under pressure, and control stress and anxiety.
  • Empathy, the mental and emotional ability to perceive, understand, and share another person’s life experiences.
  • Conflict resolution, the mental and emotional skills to navigate competing interests and to cause others to accept mutual agreements.
  • Collaborative problem solving, the ability to be synergistic by causing others to consider a complex problem from different perspectives, use unanticipated skills, and reach solutions they could not reach individually.

These were labeled were labeled “soft skills” in the industrial age of America when the rugged individualist was a national hero. That era’s “hard skills” the time-proven academics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. In this century, core life qualities are the organizational skills that move people, production, and society from point A to point B.

One who believes that humankind walked on the moon because of the science of rocketry alone is ignorant of human work using all eight of the above core life qualities that put an astronaut there.

What should we know and value?

Core life values are not just an academic discussion; they correlate with the quality-of-life people feel and know after they have forgotten their high school gpa and class rank. The self-regulation and conscientiousness children learn and display in their K-12 years are among the most reliable psychometric predictors of adult physical health and lifespan.

Adults with developed qualities of self-control present lower rates of substance abuse, stress-related illness, midlife problems of high blood pressure, abnormal blood sugar, and obesity.

Adults who learned conscientiousness, perseverance, and emotional stability as a child have higher rates of financial security and career stability. They have lower rates of underemployment, longer job tenure, and steady financial growth, no matter their high school gpa or test scores.

Adults who have stronger K-12 school connections show greater emotional resilience during life’s ups and downs. They report increased later life satisfaction and lower issues with psychiatric distress.

And adults with developed qualities of empathy, conflict resolution, and cooperative problem solving also have fewer court appearances, lower rates of family break-ups, and are more civically involved.

The Big Duh!

The valedictorian/salutatorians, and honor roll students are typically honored at every high school graduation. Not mentioned are the graduates whose pictures in the class yearbook list them as the

  • Friendliest
  • Most likely to succeed
  • Most school spirited
  • Did the most for the class
  • Most well-adjusted

and all the other “soft qualities” that distinguish classmates.

When the class gathers for its 50th anniversary reunion, what will matter most – a classmates K-12 academic status or the high core life values that sustained them for half a century of living? I am betting on high core values.

We measure and honor the wrong attributes of an education.

Build Self-Reliance Not Conformity

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Ralph Waldo Emerson was the consummate influencer of his time. “Say, who?” Emerson is not a name that many children know today. To paraphrase people of my age, Emerson is a white, intellectual dead man, and was among the writers and poets whose works dominated academic study from the 1840s to the 1970s. Yes, but – what he wrote and talked about is more important today than it was in antebellum America. If students do not know Emerson, they should and we must teach them.

In the face of today’s 24/7 social media and insidious mind-bending noise of self-announced prophets who want to tell children what to think, how to think, and who to believe, Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance” is an eye-opener for a person who will take the time to think and reject being talked “at.”

What do we know?

Ask a child this foundational question. “Who do you trust to tell you what you should know?”  The answers surprise because research in the question tells us that children’s trust is very contextual – trust depends upon the topic. As a group, children trust

  • Their parents for questions of personal well-being and safety,
  • Teachers and academic text for formal facts, knowledge, and scientific information,
  • Research organizations like Pew and Common Sense for large, global issues,
  • Google and Wikipedia for quick, non-depth answers,
  • Peers and friends for social and cultural ideas like music, clothing, entertainment, and peer dynamics. They do not trust friends for facts, yet commonly misconstrue opinions for facts, and like many adults, “go along to get along” with their peers.
  • Do not trust mass media organizations – television, radio, and print – for the factual and unbiased news.

As children move into middle and high school, peer pressure, social dynamics, and school environments begin to change and refine how they perceive their parent and family views.

The answers also surprise because very seldom does a child say, “I trust my own judgements and intuitions. I trust me.” Where are children on their self-reliance? Is self-reliance relevant today?

What should we know?

This is where Emerson and his essay, “Self Reliance,” become highly relevant today. First, understand that “Self Reliance” was an essay written in 1841. Whereas Emerson used “Self Reliance” to extol his generation to separate itself from copying European perspectives and Eurocentric thinking, his essay is a primer for every generation of young Americans beginning their own era of adulthood.

These are the key points Emerson made about the self-reliant man.

  • Be an original not an imitator. A person who only repeats what he is told prevents his own intellectual growth. Instead, listen and watch, consider and think, compare and contrast, and then give your thoughts your own informed interpretation and personalization. A self-reliant person does not repeat slogans to make himself resemble another person and what that person says. Blind imitation of what others think is intellectual suicide and too many kill their personal thinking by imitating

America in the 1840s was rapidly moving west, receiving millions of immigrants every year, prospering with new inventions and pre-industrial energy. “New” was happening all the time and the increased opportunity for being new begged for originality, invention, and reinvention.

  • Resist social conformity. Society wants to narrow the range and diversity of thinking and behavior to make communities of people more manageable. And to make them more compliant. Political and social leaders use subconscious encouragement that shape speech and attitudes around policies and rules that restrict non-conformity. Emerson believed in non-violent protests, and he talked of personal and community resistance to public policies, laws, and rules that constrained individualism. Though educated as a New England minister with the region’s conservative traditions, her resisted dogmatic thinking and a prescribed life.
  • Growth requires change and adjustment not blind consistency. Emerson’s generation was on the move, and the multi-sides of dynamic change needed new economic, political, and social models. New territories, new businesses and industries, new populations, and unfamiliar problems needed innovative solutions. Old answers did not solve new problems. Emerson urged America to shed traditionalism in favor of contextual adjustment and change. In all questions, he did not hold with “blind” repetition of familiar and safe responses but urged innovative experimentation and thinking.
  • Trust your internal intuitions and convictions. As a transcendentalist, Emerson spoke of the laws of nature that humans cannot break or bend. He watched migratory birds and animals that knew when and where to make an annual migration necessary for their survival. As extension, each person has an immutable intuitive power, an inner voice that tells him what to do and how to do it. Emerson told his generation to believe in their intuitions and their convictions based upon an inner voice.

Consider the writing and thinking of Thoreau, a friend and student of Emerson’s, who moved to Walden Pond into nature, to contemplate the social, economic, political conditions of his time. His writings and personal lifestyle were shaped by his intuitive power and self-determinism.

With strong beliefs in originality, non-conformity, change, and self-determinism, Emerson was not a revolutionary. He did not espouse recklessness or selfish behavior or a rejection of community and social mores. The core of Emerson’s image of a healthy society is based on self-directed, critical thinking, innovative individuals who rely on their natural intuitions and convictions rather than unconscious repetitive habits.

Finally, Emerson and his peers, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, authors and poets, became the gold standards of American literature. Their names and their writings were known, and read, and quoted. Emerson and this group were the influencers of their times.

What does Emerson tell young adults today?

The Bible’s Solomon tells us, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Young adults in the 1840s and young adults in the 2020s face many of the same fundamental problems of how to confront sociocultural, politico-economic, and moral questions. A different prophet, Bob Dylan, tells us that “The times, they always a-changing,” and each generation must find its fresh solutions for Solomon’s recurring problems.

How interesting it would be if those annoying pop-ups on our smartphone, tablet, and laptop screens told young people today –

  • Be original not a copycat of the self-serving slogans of today’s leaders.
  • Do not conform for conformity’s sake; do not be a human clone of other’s ideas and lifestyles.
  • Be contextually innovative and create original changes; inconsistency can break bonds to tradition.
  • Be intuitive and follow your internal convictions that comport with the laws of nature.

Compare and contrast these four Emersonian ideas with the messages of our political, economic, technological, and cultural leaders today. As Emerson urged a new day in America in the 1840s, his ideas urge a new day for young adults today.

The Big Duh!

Parents are correctly alarmed at the power of social media to influence, distort, and misdirect the thinking and behaviors of their children. While most influencers are driven by the monetary rewards and status of their follower count, we could substitute Emersonian ideals that would build the inner selves of children and prevent their blind conformity with others’ external subservience.

This is not just the work of parents and educators. It is a messaging from conscientious and thinking adults to help the next generation to be conscientious and thinking adults. Young people need our role modeling not just our words.

It starts with us.

The August Itch of Preparing to Teach

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Every day I notice, read, and often print out a featured recipe in the New York Times. Today it was an amended recipe for no knead bread. One of the first things I look at is the prescribed preparation steps and the time it takes to prepare a recipe for serving at the table. Prep steps and time are non-negotiable.

It is August and for public school classroom teachers the August itch has begun. The itch is the realization that the number of days until the first day of school is decreasing and it is time to prepare to teach. As the days pass, the itch becomes more severe. For some, there is remorse over the end of the summer vacation and a return-to-work life. Others appreciate the natural cycle of classroom teaching – teach for nine months, not teach for two months – and prepare to teach for the first month of school. For all teachers, there is a tipping day, the day they awake and know it is time to prepare.

What do we know?

For the uninformed, on the first day of school when a teacher and children begin their teaching and learning year, teachers do not walk into a classroom and begin teaching. They prep. The August itch is all about being prepared for the first day and week of teaching. Or being ready to teach the first unit instruction. To be clear, for an elementary teacher readiness means preparing a unit in ELA/reading, a unit in mathematics, a unit in social studies, and a unit in science. For a secondary subject area teacher this means a content and skills rich unit for each course they teach; secondary teachers often teach two or three different courses every day. Every teacher has a lot to prepare.

Using the analogy to the prep steps and time for baking bread, research tells us a teacher spends 30 hours to create 1 hour of aligned direct instruction. Like bread baking, the creation of a lesson from scratch ingredients takes considerable time. The ingredients are the learning needs of each student taught, the curricular standards students need to learn, the curricular materials that support the standards, and the learning environment. Only beginning teachers and teachers given completely new teaching assignments begin from scratch ingredients. Veteran teachers have prior knowledge that shortens the planning process. But aligning preparation still takes critical time. Alignment is the key word because it means that teaching meets student learning needs and specific curricular standards. Unaligned teaching is like teaching to the desks in a classroom without students; it is meaningless.

Prep time for one hour of instruction is still a lot of hours, if teachers taught for full, uninterrupted hours at a time. They do not. In practice, most elementary teachers spend 15-17 minutes of each class hour directly teaching. Secondary grade level subject area teachers spend 20-25 minutes of each class period directly teaching. Parsed out, teachers commit about three to four hours of prep for each teaching day. This planning and teaching cycle, 3-4 hours for each teaching day, continues every week for the 36-week school year.

The August itch is the transformation of a teacher out of the classroom for the summer to a teacher back in the classroom for a school year. The itch, like a person awakening from a long nap, requires predicted scratching that prepare a teacher to do what a teacher knows how to do – cause children to learn.

Digging deeper – prepping the unprepared.

The August itch has a deeper meaning for school principals who will employ people who are not fully licensed to instruct children in their school. The predictions for the 2026-27 school year are that almost 400,000 classrooms in September will NOT have licensed teachers. Students in those classrooms will be taught by people on emergency licenses, long-term substitute status, or who are prepared to teach but not the subjects or the children in their new classroom. That is 1 in every 8 classrooms. Worse, almost 40,000 classrooms will not have any teacher because none could be found. Children assigned to these classrooms will be bundled into other classrooms.

Principals scratch their itch twice. The first scratch is finding someone to be a classroom teacher. The second scratch is helping that emergency teacher to be “trouble free.” Trouble free means managing a classroom of children so there are few disciplinary problems, communicating satisfactorily with parents, collaborating satisfactorily with other teachers, and meeting the school’s calendared timelines for grade reports and staff meetings. If an unprepared teacher satisfies these two scratches, the principal will consider the teaching assignment to be successful!

The itch for the unprepared teachers in these classrooms is completely different. Most of these teachers will be hired on emergency licenses. Their most valid knowledge of a school classroom will be their memories of when they were students. They will try to instruct children just like they were taught when they were children. They will mirror their memories of teacher personalities and teaching strategies. They “fake it until they make it.”

Some of these emergency teachers will be enrolled in state approved teacher preparation programs and will complete foundational education courses during the school year. They will learn to teach while simultaneously instructing children. Miraculously, this works. In fact, after two years teaching with an emergency license those enrolled in educator preparation courses will complete a valid licensing program and receive a professional teaching license. By their third year of employment, newly licensed teachers readily slip into the cadre of veteran teachers.

The Big Duh!

Preparation for the 2026-27 school year will make 3.2 million public school classrooms ready for 49 million children. In numbers only, this annual migration of teachers into school classrooms is ginormous. But it also is usual business for public school professionals. The public is completely oblivious to the August itch. Teachers actually go about prepping like any pre-season professional. Prepping takes time and effort, and it all happens invisibly.

Thank you, teachers for scratching your August itch. Thank you, principals for scratching your school’s itch to put a teacher in every classroom. Thank you, emergency teachers for answering the call to be a teacher.

Next August, we will do it all again.

Teachers Teach Doers

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George Bernard Shaw wrote in Man and Superman (1903), “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.” And since that time, an errant yet common belief is that teaching is for those who lack the capacity to succeed at more substantial work. Shaw did it consider teaching to be an esteemed profession.

We need to dig deeper into Shaw to understand his quote. Shaw attended four Dublin schools before dropping out in his early teens and engaging is self-education. Interestingly, one of the world’s great authors hated school. He learned instead from broad reading and constant visits to Dublin museums where he studied the art collection. Shaw learned from literary and artistic exemplars, often declaring that he was the greatest English writer since Shakespeare. He considered himself self-taught by his study of the best examples of what he wanted to learn.

There is such fallacy in Shaw’s statement. A stronger argument for teaching lies in “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Educating children grows people and teaching changes the world.

What do we know?

When Shaw was school-age and until the early 2000s, classroom teachers were the primary source of information for learning children. A teacher not only managed classrooms, but a teacher also constructed curriculum, determined the content and skills children learn, and designed the pedagogy of teaching. The teacher, school texts, and the school library were the sources of student information. To use a common analogy, teachers were perceived as the expert in the front of the classroom.

We live in a new age. The teaching Shaw experienced ended in the last century. The Internet provides instant access to worlds of information, and tools of technology put that information at every student’s fingertips. Further, AI gives learners a tool for displaying information, if not answers, to any question a learner thinks to ask. Teachers no longer are, or are considered to be, the information expert in a classroom.

The role of teacher has changed, if not improved, and has become more important than ever. Today’s teachers are not the source of classroom information; teachers are navigators, curators, and elucidators helping children find, understand, and learn from the information they read, hear, watch, and experience. Each of these functions – navigation, curation, and elucidation – is essential for learning children in the digital Information Age.

With ubiquitous AI, children need teachers to help them navigate the world of information. Navigation has been an essential skill in Googling Internet information for decades. Left on their own, children are adrift in an ocean of information, especially information spread in social media. Navigator-teachers help children shape what they want to find out into questions. Questions are structurally worded into prompts. Prompts help AI focus its search so that the information displayed meets the student’s inquiry.

Navigation is an increasingly sophisticated skill set that children in their grade levels and various courses. Inquiries in science use the lens of a student-biologist, chemist, physicist, and earth scientist. The lens is different in the social studies where lenses taken on the inquiries of economists, geographers, historians, political scientists, and behavioral scientists. Each academic discipline presents a lens for how to navigate in the world’s information systems. Successful navigation is knowing and being faithful to your lens.

Teachers help children curate the information they obtain. Curation starts with helping children understand that AI searches are fallible and 15-20% of the information provided by a search is wrong, incorrect, or unsubstantiated. One of the great eye-openers is when children learn that AI hallucinates and often just makes up information. The deeper and more complicated the search, the greater the need for curation.

Curator-teachers work beside and behind children in their information searches. A curator is not like a parent on Halloween unwrapping every piece of candy a child brings home for hidden threats. Curators are information-whisperers helping children create their own filters for deciding the reliability and validity of information. Curation is not just a school skill set, but a function children need to exercise 24/7 in the real world.

Finally, teachers are elucidators. Information derived from an Internet search opens many opportunities for “teachable moments.” Teachers start by asking children, “What does this mean?” And “How does this connect to what you already know?” And “What new questions do you have now?” Elucidators also ask children “So, what?” Elucidation helps children find meaning and teaches them be independent finders of informational meaning.

The Big Duh!

This is my “so, what” moment. I modify Shaw’s quote to “teachers teach doers.” Every great invention and break-through event in our history stands on the shoulders of someone who taught an inventor or exploring person foundational knowledge and skills, who posed a “so, what” challenge, and stood aside to help the doing.

Shakespeare did not learn to write in school. He learned Latin and classical literature at King’s New School in Stratford. More to the point, he learned to write poetry and plays in the reality of his day – on-the-job writing and editing and performance. People in the theaters and local printers critiqued and commented on Shakespeare’s work and he refined his writing into the work we know today. The greatest English writer pre-Shaw used navigators, curators, and elucidators of his day, albeit they were not classroom teachers, to learn and perfect his craft. He could do and learned to become a doer. Shaw was a Shakespeare – he learned from others who indirectly helped him navigate, curate, and elucidate what he learned.

Teachers teach AND create doers.

School Friendships and Life

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In my eighth decade, I increasingly reminisce about the people it has been a privilege to know. I refer to myself as a public educator with almost 60 years working in schools, curriculum, and instruction. My world revolves around schools and teaching. I estimate that I have known 1,000+ teachers and 12,000+ school children. In quiet moments, they all come back to mind. So many and so varied. Pictures in yearbooks ignite memories and the events of years ago are as clear as my yesterday. Yet, there are two people who form my schoolhouse book ends. Completely different from each other, they touched and shaped my sense of friendships for all time.

Carol personified intelligence and Bobby the epitome of sincerity. People seldom get better than Carol and Bobby and I see these two clearly when I start trekking back in time.

As the saying implies, Carol was born put together. Tall for her age, she was blonde and blue eyed and pretty. She was not overtly outgoing. Carol carefully selected what she did, who she did it with, and how she did it, and then excelled at all she did. She was aloof if all you wanted was pretty. And she was your friend if you invested in knowing her. Somewhat prim, her shy smile was a gift that lasted weeks. I always knew Carol and she always knew me.

Kids form their own groups in grade school. No adult lined us up and assigned us to groups that would become our friends. We kind of looked at each other, got to know each other, and to use a phrase from today, leaned in towards each other. It was not a neighborhood thing; our group was spread out and lived blocks apart. It was not a family status thing; fathers in our group were doctors, businessmen, and tradesmen. All mothers were homemakers. It was a magnetic kind of thing; we were drawn together and stayed together.

We were Baby Boomer kids and there were a lot of us. In our three-section, K-6 elementary school with 30+ in each section, Carol and I were in the same section from kindergarten through 6th grade. Later as a teacher, I would observe principals and teachers use test scores to balance classes. They assured a range of student abilities in each class. I think that is what happened to us. Carol and I were informally tracked from kindergarten through sixth grade. I give my belated thanks to Miss Phillips, our principal.

It was the early 1950s and girls wore dresses with white ankle socks to school. Boys wore blue jeans and Keds. Young girls stayed neat and clean while boys ran and played hard. It also was decades ahead of equity in education issues and in that paternalistic time boys were expected to be school leaders in all things. Yet when grades were posted and honors given, girls did well and Carol always was at the top of the lists. And even we boys knew who to team up with in class. When group work was assigned in class, every student wanted to work with Carol. They wanted her because she helped everyone in her group “get it right.”

There were kids in school who were really smart. Smart as in they knew things. In fact, they knew a lot about the thing they knew best. We had kids who were a whiz in geography or science, and kids who were artistic and could draw and make beautiful works. However, those kids were not the full package of smarts. They were selectively smart. Intelligence and smart are not the same thing. Carol was supremely intelligent. She saw the kernel of a problem, seemed to understand all of its facets, and could explain it so that it made sense to others.

I remember her Carol in kindergarten. She sat with a straight back and head held high and saw and heard everything and everybody. When our teacher told us to form a large circle, we circled up a lot in kindergarten, all eyes went to where Carol stood or sat and that was where the circle formed. We knew she was special from the get-go.

Early on I knew that Carol would be the star student in our class, so I weaseled my way to sit near her in our checkerboard of student desks. I thought that proximity would to the best student might rub off on me and it seemed to; for a while it did. What I really did was copy her traits. When given an assignment, she got right to it. She did not raise her hand often and never waved an arm when our teacher asked for volunteers. When called upon, she hesitated for an instance, formed her answer, and spoke by restating the question in her response. Of course, her penmanship was perfect because she wrote slowly and efficiently. She knew what to write, unlike most of us who started writing trying to find an answer before we ran out of paper or time.

I could keep up with her in language arts and social studies, but not in math and science. She processed information quickly and correctly. I think Carol saw answers where I saw confusion. Third through sixth grade are a sweet spot in my memory. As I became a Cub and then Boy Scout, swam on the YMCA swim team, and played baseball spring, summer, and fall, Carol was my in-school constant. We talked every day. We shared stories. Knowing and being near her made me a better student and a better classmate. I trusted Carol explicitly and knew she would tell me the truth of things without exception. A friend like Carol is an exceptional friend.

Junior high and high school changed us, as I think they were designed to do. I was in Carol’s language arts and social studies classes but not in her math or science classes. The same was true in high school. We saw each other, talked, and shared stories every day. She developed boyfriends and had a girlfriend. She was a musician and I was a jock. But we stayed close friends in class. While her intelligence expanded and her academic honors increased, she stayed the same best “put together person” I knew. If my parents placed their confidence in Walter Cronkite and his reporting of the evening news, I placed all my confidence in Carol and her explanation of our world.

For each of our thirteen years in K-12 classrooms and activities, Carol and I were the same friends we always had been. She was best student I would ever know and she always will be.

College and distance ended our time. She went to a small, private, out-of-state college and I went to a state university. Carol majored in economics and later earned a master’s degree in Russian literature. She founded an insurance consultant company and wrote a highly regarded book. We did not speak again and the fault of that is mine to bear. Carol died in 2002 at the age of 54 years.

My junior high class schedule card told me Room 410 was my new Home Room. I was to report there on my first day in junior high and then every day for three years. There were 650 students in my K-6 elementary school. There were more than 1,200 students in my grade 7-9 junior high school.

In Room 410 I sat at four-student table next to Bobby, a large black kid in jeans and a T-shirt. Bobby was the first black I met in a school classroom. Black kids played on teams from the neighborhoods closer to downtown in our summer baseball league. That was the extent of my knowledge of black people. We played against each other but never spoke, played but never shared, and played and went our separate ways.

Bobby said “Hi” and I said “Hi” back to him. Home room was the beginning place for students in our school every day. It was a school and grade level organizational time not instructional. Our home room teacher told us to introduce ourselves to the other three students at our table. I do not remember the other two. I shared that I was one of five boys in our family – no sisters – and that I lived one mile from our new school and would either ride my bike or walk to school every day. I was looking forward to playing sports in junior high. Bobby seemed reluctant to share. He quietly said he was the oldest of seven brothers and sisters. Then he was quiet.

When we were handed school forms to fill out, Bobby did not have a pencil. I gave him one of mine. When he did not understand the question, I explained it. We were assigned hallway lockers and given school padlocks to secure our locker. My locker was next to Bobby’s, and I helped him with the combination. He had nothing to put in his locker.

Bobby and I did not share any classes. And Bobby did not go out for the seventh-grade football team. I thought he would, partly because he was a big kid, and I just hoped he would. When I asked him to meet me after school and I would take him to the locker room to talk with our coach, Bobby said he needed to go home right after school.

Bobby and I talked every morning during the first month of school. In early October, Bobby was absent from home room. I was not worried about his absence on the first day or the second but after the third day I asked our teacher if she knew if Bobby was okay. I thought he must be sick at home. She told me that Bobby was fine and was in a new home room. Strange, I thought, but what did I know.

Our junior high had a large cafeteria and four lunch shifts. I was a sack luncher and bought a half-pint milk carton every day to go with my sandwich, carrot sticks and cookie. There was a milk counter at each end of the cafeteria. I knew that were classrooms on short hallways behind the milk counters, but I did not know anyone who went to those classrooms. Down the hallway, there were open doorways and I could see students walking from room to room. I had never been in that basement corner of our school.

I was buying my lunch milk one day in early December when I saw Bobby. He was standing in the hall, about 40 feet away, looking at me. We mirrored each other in our smiles and waved at each other simultaneously. I turned to the lunch lady when she asked for my nickel for the carton of milk and when I looked again Bobby was gone.

The next morning, I asked my home room teacher about the classrooms behind the cafeteria. She told me something that was completely new to me. Those classrooms were for special education students. They had a small and separate school within our school. I asked her what was special about special education, and she told me it was for students who have difficulties learning in regular classes. And that was all she said.

I asked my mother about special education, and she told me that some children are born with mental disabilities that make learning in school difficult and there are special classes that teach those students differently than how I am taught. I was hearing a lot of small answers for a larger question.

For weeks I looked for Bobby down that hallway. I saw others but no Bobby. In January, after our winter vacation, I bought my lunch milk, stepped around the milk counter, and walked down the hallway. Looking in the doors, I saw students in wheelchairs in one classroom and students weaving baskets from straw in another. In the third classroom I found Bobby all by himself. When I called his name, he looked up, shook his head, and waved me off. He said in a faint voice, “I am in time out.”

“Steve, can I help you?” It was one of our football coaches. “I was looking for my friend, Bobby” I said. “Bobby is in time out because he was causing a problem in class” Coach said. “Problem? Bobby? He is never a problem with me,” I said. With a smile and kind voice, Coach told me to go back to the cafeteria.

I never saw Bobby in school, junior high or high school, again.

In the 1960s I could earn my University of Iowa tuition, room and board, and spending money, and more, from summer employment at the meat packing plant in our city. The “more” at the packing plant was my education into the working men and women who did not live in my neighborhood or attend the university. These were men who tutored me in the killing and butchering of cattle, hogs, and sheep. They were my surrogate parents in the world of work. It was hard and honest work that required sweat, attention to safety, and unique camaraderie. Our mutual safety and well-being rested in the person working on either side.

We talked while we worked. I learned stories of men who were born in the south, served in World War Two, and moved to Iowa after the war for new beginnings. Throughout all stories, I heard about underlying bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination. These were not stories told in my neighborhood or in my classes at the university. Their stories were the gist of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King. They were stories of people who suffered discrimination because of their color and race. Work at the meat packing plant, we called it “the Pack,” was a job they could get, and hold, and create a life around.

At the Pack, the only prejudice was for a person who would not work hard and safely. I worked, ate my lunch, took my breaks, and learned every day from black men who became my friends.

That is where I re-found Bobby. At the age of 21 he was a large man and did a large man’s work. Bobby worked in the beef offal section. His job was to fill in where needed. Because of his size, he easily pushed the carts of lace fats from offal to the rendering room. He carted out the kidneys and the livers. I saw him cleaning cow stomachs, washing intestines, and cleaning silage from the floors. He was good with a knife, a smile, and willingness to do whatever was asked of him.

One day as I was filling in for a man in offal on the stomach washing stand, I felt a tug on the back of my full-length rubber apron. After a second tug, I looked behind to see Bobby. It was a face I knew. He was all smiles. I smiled back at him instantly.

“See you at break” I yelled above the constant and loud noise, and he nodded and pushed another lace fat cart down the aisle between stands.

Bobby and I took breaks and lunch together for the rest of my summer employment. Slowly, Bobby filled in the years. He dropped out of school after seventh grade. Due to being retained in a grade level several times, he was a 16-year-old seventh grader. He said that school was too hard, no fun, and not worth his time. At 16 years he got his first job at the Pack and had been working there since. Although he wanted to hear about me, I wanted to learn about him.

Sometimes we learn from a person and sometimes from what others say about that person. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was Bobby’s friend. “He is the kindest soul on earth!” “He has a quick smile, a great laugh, and helping hands.” “I can’t tell you how many times and in how many ways he has helped me. Most importantly, he has been my friend.” “Bobby is family.”

Bobby lived with his aunt. His parents told him that if he was working at the Pack and not going to school, he needed to live elsewhere. He would not be a good influence on his younger brothers and sisters. His aunt took him in, renting him a room with breakfast and supper for $1 per year. Even though he was no longer in his parents’ home, Bobby saw and played with his brothers and sisters every day. He did not go bars or hang out with older single men. He loved his family.

He owned and drove a car, but he did not have a driver’s license. He could not pass the written test. He had a savings account at the Pack’s credit union, though he gave more than half his weekly earnings to his family and aunt.

I worked five summers at the Pack. The first day on the job each summer, I used my morning break to find Bobby, and each June it seemed like we had not been apart since the prior September. While I was getting a college education and preparing to teach English and social studies, Bobby worked his jobs at the Pack.

Before I graduated from university, I was offered teaching contracts in four different school districts. I accepted a job at junior high school out-of-state. Reality, though, was that I had no money to get from graduation, across the summer months, to the start of my teaching job.

I returned to the Pack the day after graduation and my friends and Bobby. I was assigned beef offal, of all places, for my first day. At the morning break, I was surrounded by men and women in their rubber aprons and Pack hats who congratulated me on my graduation. My working friends were happy with my educational success. Although none of them attended college, and some had not finished high school, most had children who were college grads. Educating their children was hugely important for Pack workers. And Bobby was right there in the middle. Smiling as always.

It was a short summer at the Pack. I needed to move hundreds of miles away, settle into an apartment, and attend new teacher orientation. On my last day at the Pack, Bobby and my friends took me to the closest bar for a lunch of sandwiches and lemonade (for Bobby and me). Knowing what was planned, I had arranged to pay the bill. And, at the end of the day, I left the Pack never to return.

Life is life. I taught junior high English and social studies for five years, earned a master’s degree, and took a job as an assistant high school principal. The meat packing industry changed. Meat packing was mechanized and robotics replaced human hands. After several years, the Pack closed and the city razed its buildings; the contaminants in the ground were monumental.

I read Bobby’s obituary in 2005. He never left the neighborhood. Bobby died in a car accident, he was driving. I feel the same about Bobby as I do about Carol. I could have but had not kept up our friendship.

My bookends stayed with me throughout my career in school. Because of them, I was highly aware of intelligent children and challenged children. I knew hundreds of children like Carol whose significant intelligence lit up their classrooms and teachers. Carol was my reminder that the “stars” in school need friendship and nurturing. The pressure of being the top student can be unkind and harmful. And I knew thousands of children like Bobby who did not need basement and hidden classrooms, but teachers who saw their assets instead of their deficits. Bobby is my reminder that all children can learn if we know how to teach them.

So, I will write it again. Life is life. As I did not stay in contact with Carol and Bobby, neither did they keep in contact with me. The former is my fault. In my sunset days, I spend moments considering the latter. Although I remember and cherish my years with them, perhaps their time with me was not that special to them. That is sobering.