Eisenhower High School - Crest Yearbook (Blue Island, IL)

Page 100 text:

and justify all the busywork you've pawned off on kids under the guise of excellence in education. Why not eliminate homework and find a better way to teach cooperative cheating? And if all else fails Why not try to excite, stimulate, energize, or inflame a kid and let the homework take care of itself? Why not build a humanities cafeteria with an a la carte line loaded with goodies. Perhaps a student will learn to serve himself occasionally without always waiting sheep-patiently for the waitress to push the well-cooked curriculum dujour into his hands into his head into his heart the leftovers into his intellectual garbage can. Why not advertise the delectable and diverse dishes from language and lit and composition and LIFE and maybe just maybe MR will be better known as Motivational Research than as Mentally Retarded. Why not stop drawing and re-drawing the floor plans of our homemade curriculum prisons with every fetter in place anchored securely with the cement of whatever's current from the past? Why not Cindeedb stop drawing fresh plans of old prisons and start tunneling or scaling or vaulting or even scratching a little. Why not try to find relevance between what goes on in class and something else anything else? Why not ask o parent for help or a teacher or a curriculum consultant or the United States Commissioner of Education? Why not ask a life guard or a truckdriver y or a poet? Why not retire the miniature federal reserve board in every school that controls the banking practices in classrooms? A kid earns a credit and puts it into the bank and once it is safely deposited he throws away all of his notes and admits original innocence just another virgin brain with thirteen credits in the bank. Earn another credit and put it in the bank earn still another credit and put IT in the bank earn them., bank them, forget them

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WHY NCT Why not soy thot school is for kids rother thon teochers or jonitors or secretories or cooks or orchitects or even principols? Why not soy it ond believe it. Why not ooondon required homework ond put o few kids on the streets or reoding books or wotching tv or tolking with o friend or woiting for o sunset or picking pimples or just sitting? O Why not throw out mondotory homework ond find onother woy to intimidote kids? Why not bite your tongue hord

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earn 'em, bank 'em, forget 'em findem, earnem, bankem, forgetem Why not claim language as our rightful stock-in-trade our raw material ' and also our finished product Why not help a kid take pride in the power of language personal and social Why not help a kid use language to communicate with an editor a'draft board a girl or to discover the nobility of man? Why not dissolve the red ink communion fthe grades that DEgradeD Why produce self-satisfied grade mongers judging their worth by OUR standards that make credit bankers out of philosophers that make us teach multiplechoice knowledge and that convince kids that the dung beetle who collects the biggest cognitive ball is best. Why not try to evaluate kids honestly individually Why not try to find what a kid learns from you 1 rather than what he hasn't learned from his past teachers. The difference between a student and a teacher should be something more than a grade book or an answer book. Why not make attendance optional? lf the multi-mediaed McLuhan is right and going to school interrupts education Why not entice with connections of life not plague with demands for inconsequence Why not take our eyes off the rearview mirror long enough to think September o, 1999 What will lT be? pain? vitamin-enriched soma?? darkness??? Why not look into a crystal book or ball and find out and at the same time find out how our classes can let a student want to learn throughout life or make him mankind-sensitive or let him see his choices and decide or show him how to love himself or prepare him for more leisure time AND for cybernation one cyber Nation, under IBM indivisible with conformity and structure for all. Maybe. Ray Scofield ' , Language Arts Workshop, 1968 Eugene, Oregon Taken from Media and Methods