It’s been a good while since I’ve written a column on “Our Hometown.” I grew up in a little town, population 600 in the semi-rural backwoods. Many of you too, grew up in some little strange out of the way place. We share together the odd, strange, bizarre and beloved things that go on in small towns.
Today, there is a town some ten miles to the south of where I grew up, one that has grown and declined over the decades, for it is in the factory rust belt. Belt, heck, full dress suit of rust is more like it. With a cape. And ten hats.
This is a report from the schools in that heart of America town on the south bend of the St. Joe river in Patowatomi and French explorer country… a place with longtime Black, Latino and Eastern European immigrant families…. a town that will not likely hit the evening news, a place where at most schools, four or fewer students out of each school did not attend Obama’s speech today. I might mention, this state, this county, this particular town is still threaded through and through with the wealthy and the well-positioned who often lean hard into classical conservatism.
SOUTH BEND – All 32 sets of eyes locked onto President Barack Obama on the TV as he delivered his homework.
These kids in an eighth-grade honors class at Edison Intermediate Center – well, none of them took notes.
But when Obama finished speaking to them – and to students in kindergarten through the 12th grade across the nation Tuesday – the Edison class was ready to analyze.
Teacher Tisha Mattei asked how they’d rate him on a 10-point scale, and they offered 9 … 10.
“He doesn’t act like he’s talking to a big group,” Becca Ercoline said. “He talks like he’s talking to one person.”
They observed: He used small words. He used correct grammar. He memorized his stuff, or so it seemed. And he related to their generation by dropping words like Google and Twitter.
Mattei asked whether it felt like a stern lecture. “Nooo,” the class responded.
What’s even more telling is which of Obama’s key points they recalled.
“He got into trouble, and he had second chances to do better,” Jesse Stires said.
“He said that everybody has a chance to do something in life,” said Terrell “T.J.” Jones. “You can’t just drop out.”
“He said you may have certain talents that you may not know yet, like student government,” Evan Thomas said.
This is the speech that had riled up parents and groups nationwide before it aired. They worried that it would be political.
Parents were free to request that their kids not watch Obama’s speech. Locally, there apparently wasn’t any significant wave of parents who exercised that right.
At Edison, only one of the 622 students had parents who asked to opt out, Principal Karla Lee said.
In the Penn-Harris-Madison School Corp., an average of four students at each school had parents ask that their children not watch, said PHM spokeswoman Teresa Carroll.
And out of the 1,100 students at Plymouth High School, there was just one student whose parents asked administrators that their child opt out of the speech, Principal James Condon said. He had no idea how many parents, if any, made that request directly to teachers.
Edison guidance counselor Libby Jackson watched the speech in her office and said, “I hope as staff members it gives us the courage to say things as well (to students and parents).”
A short while before, she’d taken a call from a disgruntled parent over a child’s homework assignment.
“It’s hard for parents; they really struggle,” she acknowledged. On the other hand, she feels Obama’s message about helping yourself against the odds encourages her. “It’s OK to say to a parent, ‘Sorry, but you are going to have to make sacrifices to help your child.’”
Like other teachers at Edison, Mattei weaved Obama’s speech into a lesson about the students’ educational goals. Almost all of the kids raised their hands when she asked who among them had set any goals in their lives.
In between classes, sixth-grader Wayne Belcher said the speech inspired him because of “the way it was told.”
“Because of what we do now, in the future we can cure cancer and AIDS and have a good life,” he said of what impressed him.
And from yet another class, eighth-grader Tyler Brunner said he was inspired just “a little” because he already does his work and gets good grades. Still, he said: “I liked how he used figures from his past. … I liked how he said what you do affects the whole nation.”
“I’m more of a shy person, and he inspired me to ask questions,” said Katie Tretheway, an eighth-grader.
“I was working hard,” eighth-grader Velma Easton said. “Now I know what I have to do: Ask a lot of questions.”
Staff writer Joseph Dits
Photo by Barbara Allison
Setting aside any poisoning cynicism… I find that cynicism is very often the armor worn by the most deep and most tender-hearted of idealists… I think the above view of ‘school today’ is the one most overlooked by slavering journos.
To a good many of us, I think it is good to see that here in the American heartland, as in many other places, kids and teachers were today, as usual, interested in learning, in seeing, in inquiry, in applying the great ideas to their own young lives… and equally so, thinking about that thing which Ibsen called ‘the most radical’… that is, thinking about how one might affect the future.
I just say: Brava to the children. And, thank you. Truly. For dreaming about the future today… and for being able this day to resist the antics of grownups who too often cut short the broadest, deepest dreams of the young before they’ve even had a chance to unfold.
Thank you to the parents and teachers, today and always, who dont narrow their children’s dreams by saying ‘you must believe as I do, or else you dont belong to me’ … but rather who believe their children belong to them no matter what, but also that their children belong to the world…
that their children came to earth for good reason, that the children came bearing gifts of incomparable treasure, wrapped often in the oddest of packagings, that each child on earth is needed here in order to bless and teach and care for our world, nonetheless.
And our work in all this regarding broad and deep education of children? If even one sparrow falls from the sky… here… or way over there…