Skyline High School and the Shortest Poem in the English Language

At the end of this school year I went to the Skyline "Pinning" Ceremony. The "pinning" ceremony is where honors students get their honors pins. The speaker for the event was a well-loved Skyline teacher--Collin Ganio. I really enjoyed the speech, and I thought you would too. So I contacted Mr. Ganio--who teaches Latin and etymology--and asked for permission to publish it. Permission given!

Permission given, with the caveat that I mention that the story about Ali's speech to the graduating class was originally told by the sportswriter George Plimpton.  He tells it in the film When We Were Kings, and I've put the youtube link (if you want to see Plimpton tell it) at the very bottom of this post.

The Shortest Poem in the English Language

by Collin Ganio

Good evening, everyone.  Those of you who know me know that I love words.  I really do.  I honestly think they’re the most powerful tool humanity has ever created.  Words have started wars, words have ended wars, and—when we’ve gotten really lucky—words have averted wars altogether.  I love it when people use words well.  And whenever I hear someone using words poorly, it makes me throw up in my mouth just a little.  If you know me, you also know I love telling you stories, so here’s one last one for you.

Muhammad Ali—there was an amazing wordsmith.  You know, he struggled with dyslexia, but rhymed with ease.  He composed extemporaneous poetry about his upcoming fights all the time.  One of my favorites: “I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale.  I’ve handcuffed lightning an’ thrown thunder in jail.  Yesterday I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick.  I’m so mean I make medicine sick.”  There are plenty of others. Just go google ‘em and you can find ‘em easily.

Muhammad Ali bust portrait by Ira Rosenberg. Available from the Library of Congress.

His most thought-provoking poem (for me, at least) is also the shortest poem in the English language.  Harvard had invited him to come speak to their graduating class.  He gave a great speech about how he had not had access to their education, and how the new graduates should take the opportunity that they had been given to go out and change the world.  At the end of his speech, as the applause died down, someone yelled “Give us a poem!”

He looked out at the class of graduating seniors, people very different from him in so many ways.  He gestured to himself and said “Me.”  Then he opened his arms to include all the students and said “WE.”  The crowd went wild.

What a poem!  Two simple pronouns, without even a verb.  Four letters in all.  The first letters of each word are just reflections of one another.  Is the second word the opposite of the first word, or just a reflection of it?  The meaning of this poem is so much greater than the poem itself, when you think about it.

We’re all part of Generation ME—anyone born in the 1970’s, 80’s, or 90’s is a part of this generation—and we’ve been taught largely that the self is the most important thing out there.  “What’s in this for ME?  How does this benefit ME?  What am I going to get out of this?  How is this going to help ME succeed?”  And the internet, which theoretically broadens our social horizons to include a global community, ironically tends to focus on the self—Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter are all, ultimately, in a way, tools for the narcissistic.

With two little words used so simply, Ali suggested that this world might be a happier place if we spent less time thinking about me and more time thinking about we.  I issue the same challenge to you—think less about Myspace and more about Ourspace.  Use your agile minds and big hearts—ask the deep questions—in order to make this world better not just for yourselves, but for everyone around you.  I mean, think about it—if everyone worked to better a community for their fellow citizens, then we might not spend a lot of time working to make our own lives better, but we might not need to, since everyone around us would be doing that for us. 

And wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing?  Thank you.  Good night.

Thank you, Mr. Ganio!

 

Skyline Graduates Its First Class! Happiness!

Tonight was Skyline graduation. For those of us with children who graduated--and that includes the Deputy Superintendent, Robert Allen, as well as myself--it was a very happy day! The event was held in the EMU Convocation Center.  It wasn't as warm and fuzzy as the Community High School graduation I wrote about two years ago, but there were three times as many students, and the arena was much bigger. And as I wrote then, of course it was awe-some! It was my daughter!

So here is my list of interesting/fun/meaningful things about the Skyline graduation. This is mostly random, but of course #1 has to be #1.

Students walking in. The yellow banner identifies the "Small Learning Community."

1. It was the first class to graduate!!!!! This is something those kids will carry with them for  years. I know this because I have a friend whose dad was in the first graduating class of a Detroit high school. He's in his seventies now, but he can still give you lots of details about the experience. My favorite t-shirt that the students ever made was "Even the Mayans saw us coming." Of course, they didn't get to wear that t-shirt at graduation. They wore light blue caps and gowns.

The first person to walk across the stage--my daughter--sits down! (First, by virtue of a last name that starts with "A" and an assignment to the Small Learning Community that went first. In other words, by virtue of luck.)

2. Ms. Jackson had kids with different types of honors and involvement stand up. Sure, there were lots of great students who did lots of great things. But the most impressive thing to me? I was completely blown away by the number of kids who had participated in sports, and then in clubs. It was over 2/3 of the class each time! And in fact, that is one of the reasons that people voted to build a third comprehensive high school--so that kids could have more opportunities for participation!

Todd Roberts on the big screen. And. . .

3. Todd Roberts, the former Superintendent, who was here while the school was being built and for its first three years, was asked back to speak. I thought that was a nice touch for the first graduation. One quote he shared, that he attributed to a science teacher, was "Reason answers questions, and imagination asks them." That was my favorite quote of the evening. (He went on to stress the importance of asking questions. "Ask how. Ask why. Ask why not." As it happens, that is a philosophy with which I am in complete agreement. In fact, that is why I have this blog!

. . . Todd Roberts at the podium

4. I loved the class gift. If you've ever been on the first floor of Skyline, you know that the halls are long (apparently, 1/10 of a mile) and very white. There is one mural completed now, and a second mural on its way. The class gift is a third mural. One student also organized a plaque to leave at Skyline. It has a Dr. Seuss quote (of which I think this is only a part):

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. 

5. The loudest applause went to Jasper Lindsay. He's a student who is in a wheelchair, and he received honors at the academic "pinning" ceremony earlier this month. The students were on their feet and clapping, because--according to the announcer--he trained for three years to be able to walk across the stage to get his diploma. And walk he did!

Jasper Lindsay as he sits back in his wheelchair after walking across the stage!

6. I really enjoyed watching the American Sign Language interpreters. I could see two of them from where I was sitting. Is that standard? I am guessing it was by special request, but I don't know that for sure.

Note the two American Sign Language interpreters. One bottom left, and one in the corner of the stage.

7. Fifty-six percent of the class graduated with academic honors. In fact, 13 students had 4.0 averages. Is this proof there is grade inflation? Yes. (I am not sure if anyone in my graduating class of 262 students had a 4.0). Do we care? I am not sure. Maybe the number of kids graduating with academic honors can be attributed to Skyline's mastery learning approach.

The graduates!

8. Beach balls. There were three that ended up in the graduating student section. You might think that came from the students. At least two of them came directly from the audience! Parents--right in front of me--threw one of them down! Yes, I saw it with my own eyes! Next year, at the end, maybe they should hand out beach balls to the graduates--they are light, they are fun, I believe that no harm was done.

Look in the top left corner and you will see one of those beach balls!

9. Really worth noticing--Band, Choir, and Orchestra each commissioned an original piece in honor of the first graduating class. I thought that was really cool, and I hope they play them in subsequent years. I took some video of that. I just have to figure out how to upload it.

10. And then, it was over. Four years, gone in a flash. And for the seniors, it was on to the all-night senior party. Of course, that's going on now. I hope it goes well. I do know that a lot of parents worked very hard to make the all-night party memorable. And I hope a new Skyline tradition will be born.

Proud Music

I spent much of this evening at the Ann Arbor Open winter band and orchestra concert. For middle schoolers, they sounded pretty good! The improvement between the intermediate and advanced groups is very noticeable. It's so nice to really see the difference, and understand that they are really learning!

As a parent, it is always a "kvell moment" when your child is performing, and there are not enough opportunities for performance in many types of school work. (Kvell--a Yiddish word that roughly translates to "swell up with pride.")

While I was sitting there in the audience, I was thinking about a couple of conversations I had with my sister and sister-in-law over the past few months. They both have middle-school-age kids, and they all go to "very good public schools" (in other words, comparable to Ann Arbor). But do their kids play instruments? Not anymore. "She tried it for a week..." "After two weeks she decided she didn't like it..." "She wanted to play the flute but she could barely get a sound out of it."

Two things stand out here. First, in the Ann Arbor schools, nobody tries instrumental music for a week. Everybody has to try it for at least a year! Second, students spend a few weeks at the beginning of fifth grade trying out different instruments, and if it's hard for a student to get a sound out of a flute, the teacher will probably not assign flute to that student.

So those conversations--and tonight's concert--really made me appreciate the Ann Arbor Public Schools music scene...especially in the elementary and middle schools, before it gets super competitive. The start that AAPS gives kids in music is awesome!

Or perhaps I should say that the AAPS music program...

Is jazzy.

It's snazzy.

It rocks and 

it rolls.

It's classy and

it's brassy!

It boogies and

it bounces!

Thanks, music teachers!

P.S. I would put in a plug here for Horns for the Holidays, but I'm not sure it still exists. Does anybody know? If you have an instrument in good condition, many of our local school districts would probably welcome the donation.

Unintended Consequences

I know you've all been waiting for this post. 
At the end of the 1985 reorganization, several schools were closed: Bader, Clinton, Freeman, Lakewood, Newport, and Stone schools. In addition, the K-6 elementary schools became K-5 schools; the 7-9 middle schools became 6-8 schools; and the grade 10-12 schools became 9-12 schools. In addition, the Open School got a School Of Its Own, at Bach.
Now, back in the day--pre-proposal A--decision-making did not take into account the number of students in the district the way that it does today. Of course, overall the size of the district population mattered, but ten students here or there did not make any significant difference. In fact, the five-year forecasts the 1985 committee used showed the elementary school population growing slightly, and the middle and high school populations decreasing slightly. The 1984 total head count was 13,772 students, and the Committee on Excellence used a 1990 projected head count of 12,741 students.
After the decision was made to close the schools, the district had to decide what to do with them, and the decision was made to sell some, and keep others.
Bader (which is in Ann Arbor Hills) was bought by a preschool, the Ann Arbor Hills Child Development Center.
The district held onto Freeman (which is in the Dixboro area), and gave a long-term lease to Go Like The Wind Christian Montessori. Side note: Rec & Ed soccer games are still sometimes played there.
Clinton (which is halfway between Stone School and Bryant, and which abuts Clinton Park) was bought by the Jewish Community Center, and both the JCC preschool and the Hebrew Day School are located there.
The district held onto Lakewood School (on the west side of Ann Arbor near Dolph Park), and reopened it in 2001--at which point it got some fairly extensive renovations. After being closed for 15 years, it probably needed them.
Newport School (on Newport Road) was sold and became the Rudolph Steiner School.
Stone School (at the corner of Stone School and Packard) has been used by the district for various things over the years--for Rec & Ed, for the New School (an alternative high school), and now for another alternative high school, Stone School.
When you close a school, who are potential buyers? For whom is a building like a school perfectly suited? Why, for another school. 
One of the unintended consequences is that, in selling schools to other schools, the district set up competition for itself. This doesn't seem to have been anticipated at all, and in fact--pre-proposal A--what mattered most was whether the community would support the schools, and not the exact number of students in the public schools.

So, for instance, the Rudolph Steiner School started in 1980 with a handful of students, and grew slowly until 1986, when it was able to occupy Newport School. By 1999, the Steiner School had 298 students--the vast majority in their K-8 lower school (313 students K-12, 2009).
In 1985, the Hebrew Day School was in very inadequate space, and had under 50 students. By 1999, the Hebrew Day School had over 100 students (87 students K-5, 2009).
Go Like the Wind Christian Montessori school, which only opened in 1987, had over 100 students by 1999 (101 students K-8, 2009). 
And Ann Arbor Hills Child Development Center goes through age 8, with a K-2 primary school program that in 1999 had 35 students (33 students K-2, 2009).

Of course, not all of those 500 or so students live in Ann Arbor, but probably about 75% of them do. (That is an unscientific number, based largely on the people I know who send their children to these schools.) In addition, at least three of these schools have feeder preschools, so children who get started there are likely to stay there.
Certainly, all this was an unintended consequence.

All of this didn't matter so much then, but it matters a lot more now, when per-pupil counts matter so much--and I feel that in some sense, we gave these schools the freedom to expand. Sure, they might have found space anyway (several of the charters have), but we made it easy for them. Obviously, excess capacity can be a drag on the system. However, there were estimated savings at the time--have they come to pass? I don't know, but if you include the per-pupil costs, I think the closings probably haven't saved money.

And in the "this might be too far-fetched to consider" category, I will add one more possible unintended consequence: the building of Skyline High School and the building of the Ann Arbor Preschool and Family Center. Regarding Skyline, I say this because, today, we still have significant excess capacity at the middle school level. (Remember, this was also true in 1985, and one of the proposals that wasn't implemented included closing a middle school.) At the time, putting sixth graders in the middle schools kept the middle schools at essentially the same size, and adding the ninth graders to the high schools put Huron and Pioneer essentially at capacity. I say that the building of Skyline as an unintended consequence "might be too far-fetched to consider" for two reasons: first, the estimates of student enrollment only went out five years, and the estimates were essentially flat. This turned out not to be the case, at least ten years out, when the fall head count had grown by 1500 students. The other reason is that educational trends can be like bulldozers, and the trend to move to having ninth graders in high schools reached its ascendancy many years ago. I don't think there would be much traction for moving ninth graders back to middle school--at least, I never heard it entertained as a serious suggestion during the whole time that building a new high school was discussed.

In a similar vein, it seems to me that the building of the AAPS preschool center admits the importance of having feeder preschools to the K-12 AAPS program--something these private schools figured out years ago. Yet, at the point at which this was identified as a need, there was no obvious building for locating all of the preschool programs.
[As to what I think about the excess middle school capacity--I think that there is a lot of demand for K-8 schooling, and one of the middle schools could become a K-8 school. But that is a subject for a different post.]

Last, but not least--the planners did not (and I would say, probably could not) have anticipated the ascendancy of charter schools. Charter schools have undoubtedly had an impact on some of the schools' enrollment, particularly in the elementary schools. The Committee on Excellence had a goal of ensuring that all elementary schools have enrollments over 300. In 2009, three elementary schools fell short of that (I'll give Abbott a pass at 297), with Pittsfield School having the lowest enrollment--and my understanding is that at least some of the reason that Pittsfield is so small is due to the fact that charters have attracted many "potentially Pittsfield" students.

So--unintended consequences--is this what you thought I would say?

P.S. Because this is the last post I will write on this for a while (at least I think it is), I just want to say that I believe the Committee on Excellence did a really good job with the information at hand, and the reason is that the process was good. The process was used to the advantage of the school district. The process involved a citizens' committee gathering input from the larger community, bringing a proposal to the School Board, with the administration serving as support for the committee. Read about that process in the report itself. That was then, this was now--let's learn from our past. And if you see any of the members of the Committee around town (some have passed on, but some are still here), you can thank them, because I'm posting the list of members:
1. Mary Austin
2. Ronald Bishop
3. Vincent Carillot
4. Patricia Chapman
5. Susan Doud
6. Cheryl Garnett
7. Leonard Gay
8. George Goodman
9. Charles Kieffer
10. Norma McCuiston
11. R. Griffith McDonald
12. Bettye McDonald
13. Melinda Morris
14. Merrill Nemiroff
15. Duane Renken
16. Ingrid Sheldon
17. Joann Sims
18. Estelle Titiev
19. James Wanty
20. Ronald Woods

Some Interesting Links

A tweet from DavidNGoodman (Detroit-area AP reporter) led me to this teacher blog from someone who started out in Teach For America: Not Much, Just Chillin' and to this very interesting article from the New York Times, Building A Better Teacher by Elizabeth Green. The article gives a shout-out to both the Michigan State University and University of Michigan schools of education. And I don't necessarily agree with all of the conclusions, but it is interesting to read about. The article also links to the Uncommon Schools web site (which is promotional--just a warning). I wouldn't normally link to it but I did like the teaching clips on the right hand side.

[There is a recent post on the teachers' blog Not Much, Just Chilling that talks about what this teacher gets paid as a teacher in eastern North Carolina. It struck me just how little she is getting paid, after 5 years on the job, and how low pay is in eastern North Carolina as compared to Michigan.]

Also in the New York Times, as part of a series on the impact of immigration, you can look up every school district in the country (yes, including Washtenaw County), and check out both racial/ethnic makeup and the assigned diversity index (the percent chance that two students selected randomly would belong to different ethnic/racial groups).  The key question--is diversity increasing or decreasing? The data spans 1987 to 2006, so you can really see some trends. In Washtenaw County, for 2006, Fortis Academy is #1 in diversity. Check out #2... (I had fun guessing.) I went back and looked at my hometown in a New York suburb. Racial and ethnic diversity is still every bit as low as I remembered from high school.

In graduate school in education, I often found myself disagreeing with Diane Ravitch, a leading educational thinker. So I was surprised to listen to this NPR interview with her, and find that for the most part I agreed with her. [I think she may have changed more than me. And she essentially says, "I thought this, but now I have changed my mind." Kudos to her for being willing to admit to a change of mind.]

And today, NPR has an article about the Department of Education stepping up civil rights enforcement. It's about time...

On a totally separate topic--not education, but yes, local--The Farmer's Marketer is doing a series on the various community farm/share options in the area. I tried one a few years ago but didn't like driving out to the farm every week, so I'm shopping around, and maybe you are shopping too! There are a lot more choices now.

Thank You

I received two nominations for the Thank You contest. I am hoping, though, that some of you will thank those staff who have been helpful to you--directly.

THANK YOU TO:   

CARINA SIETZ of the Pioneer High School English Department. Her nominator says "Her class is very demanding but interesting. She is kind and inclusive."

THANK YOU ALSO TO:

SUSAN CARPENTER from Summers-Knoll School. Her nominator says, "She is fun, works hard, and [is] very warm to her elementary kids."

I do have a few teachers I am going to thank directly. I thought about listing them directly, but decided it would compromise my semi-anonymity. Instead, I would like to take this space to thank the administrative staff at my kids' schools,  the custodial staff at my kids' schools, and the crossing guards and lunch ladies/men.

The administrative staff have helped me track down lost kids, make last-minute copies, and solve all kinds of problems. The custodial staff have cleaned up my kids' messes, and your kids' messes. The crossing guards make sure kids get to and from school safely, and the lunch staff keep the peace. I would like to give them a round of applause. 

Now, it is your turn--take time this week to thank a school staff person.