Swickard: Testing centric schools are toxic to students

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” Albert Einstein

             The effort to kill curiosity in public schools is the problem in our educational system. Curiosity doesn’t survive the always testing public schools. Our nation takes normally curious young people and uneducates them by focusing on testing which is of no interest to students.

            Worse, we spend incredible amounts of money on testing and administrators. We are spending money to have a problem. The teachers know that the system is corrupt and does not serve the students but can’t be heard over the administrators feathering their nests.

            The new accountability numbers are out from the New Mexico Public Education Department and like all years before we in the public know nothing after seeing the numbers. To most people it is a list of monkey points that each school has earned with no understanding of what the numbers mean.

            Schools go up and down on the scale and it is the average of the school so it doesn’t really tell us anything about individual teachers or classes. After looking at the numbers I know nothing about any school.

            At the core is the notion that administrators can improve the education of students by making them spend most of their time learning how to juke the testing system. We see the administrators say that testing is only a couple of days a year which is false.

            Testing is every day and all day. It is the “Be all and end all” of every data meeting that teachers must attend. Testing holds no interest to students. Day after day, hour after hour students are preparing to take tests that mean nothing to them about subjects to which they are not interested.

            Teachers have a personal battle to try to keep something interesting in their classes while being pushed to only focus on tested material. Want to talk dinosaurs? Forget it, it is not on the test.

            If America had an enemy that got control of our educational system, they wouldn’t do anything different with American education since the administrators have made the enterprise as bad as it can be.

            What is maddening to thinking people is this thought exercise which I have suggested many times. Since there is the notion of testing the teachers by testing the entire school, let us swap all of the adults at the five highest scoring elementary schools with the five lowest scoring elementary schools in Albuquerque.

            Two years later the five highest scoring schools will still be the five highest scoring schools and ditto for the five lowest scoring schools. This is despite all new teachers, administrators, cooks, librarians, janitors and crossing guards. The adults lauded as the best become the worst by being moved to a different school. The whole testing mania is bogus.

            Just as bad is the new push to get every student to go to college, starting in Kindergarten. We need to give all students basic education and let them follow their dreams, not ours. Tell me this: when a smelly sludge comes back flowing out of your biffy what are you going to do? Call a plumber or a philosopher? The learners need to be in practical education if that is what sings to them.

            In junior high school I took six semesters with some practical education classes. One semester it was electrical wiring, one was woodworking, one was tools, one was metal work, one was welding and one was automotive. The rest of my life I have been relatively handy because of those three years. And it didn’t change that I got a Ph.D.

            Primarily we need to refocus education onto the students.

            Students every year need: first, engage their curiosity, next give them literate and numerate tools to satisfy that curiosity. Third, they must enjoy the passage of time in school. It doesn’t have to be a carnival but if they hate every moment, they will come away with little. Next, the education must be appropriate to their brain development and finally, they must retain their dignity at all times.

            School years in a testing-centric school environments are toxic for students. Let’s wake up and focus on the students.

Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com

Swickard: Testing centric schools are toxic to students

Swickard: The no longer grateful nation

21 year old B-17 pilot Jesse Jacobs

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  New Mexico born World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin died more than ten years ago. To some people he is of no use any longer, therefore he is forgotten. To those who were home or in combat during the second world war Bill Mauldin and his cartoon characters Willie and Joe were some of the most important people ever.

            That was long ago. It is not even taught to young people today. Being forgotten is happening not only to those who die but also those who get old. When I was young old people were revered.

            Today there seems a backlash against elderly citizens. Even when we talk of the “Greatest Generation,” those who fought in World War II, there is little acknowledgment by young people today.

            A few years ago at halftime during a New Mexico State University football game, former NMSU president Gerald Thomas, a WWII combat flyer, was honored on the field. At the time President Thomas was about ninety and was moving slowly. He made it to age ninety-five before his death.

            At this football game one student was impatient and hollered, “Get those old farts off the field so we can get back to the game.” Everyone around him, including me, tried to hiss him into silence. He protested, “I was not even alive during that time so I do not owe him anything.”

            We gave him an earful but he was never convinced. He asserted that if he was not alive in the 1940s he does not own any debt to these people who served in the military. He and many young people today show no gratitude for what has come before them. Apparently they were never taught these things.

            This last weekend was the 93rd birthday of my friend Colonel Jesse Jacob USAF retired. He flew B-17s in World War II and F-80 fighters in Korea. After that he had a long aviation career that would take several books to document. Unlike most of his fellow flyers in Europe and Korea, Jesse is still alive. He is one of my favorite people of all time.

            Cartoonist Bill Mauldin died in 2003 and was born 95 years ago near Alamogordo at Mountain Park. He enlisted in the Army in 1940 as a rifleman and gradually people realized that while a fine rifleman he was a fantastic cartoonist. What many people don’t realize is he was also a great writer.

            His 1946 book Back Home details how poorly combat troops were treated when they returned to our country after the end of the war. But that premise is rejected today because people just don’t want to believe it. The ink on my book was put there in 1946 by this Pulitzer Prize winner and no revisionist can change that.

            In our everyday life we see wrinkled old people and not the youngsters that they were. One of my grandfather’s friends fought in the Pacific. He had a tattoo that read, “Tojo is a dwarf.”

            When I first met him years ago I asked him what that meant. He said it meant that while in combat with the enemy from Japan, he was never going to surrender. Few men in the Pacific on either side did.

            My father was a combat photographer in WWII making landings in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Anzio. In the middle of the battles my father and his fellow photographers were documenting what was happening.

            Stephen Ambrose summed up, “Then I think about those who didn’t make it, especially all those junior officers and NCOs who got killed in such appalling number. What life was cut off… a builder, teacher, scholar, novelist or musician? I sometimes think the biggest price we pay for war is what might have been.”

            I salute those serving and who have served in our military and their families. But there is more. It seems that our nation has turned on the older generations who built and ran our country. There is a blowback against senior citizens by the young because the senior citizens are no longer as productive as they were in their prime.

            As a senior citizen I see this often and I am offended.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com

Swickard: The no longer grateful nation

How do they campaign twenty hours every day?

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.  Ask any astronaut what question they are asked most. Is it about the wonders of the cosmos or dangers they face or what launch feels like? According to many astronauts, they’re most often asked how they use the biffy in space.

            Lately I have been thinking about the presidential contenders. While I don’t care about their biffy use, I wonder: how can they campaign twenty hours a day, seven days a week, and do so for months and months?

            Speaking for myself, I work ten-hour days usually five or six times a week, and get plenty tired. The presidential contenders could be tougher than me, or, as some people suspect, they enhance their stamina pharmacologically.

            There is no chance the current presidential candidates will disclose what drugs they take to campaign relentlessly. I wonder about the side effects?

            Maybe none of them take drugs. A few years ago I remember watching New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson spend much of six years running for president while he was also the governor of New Mexico.

            Sometimes in debates he was sharp and collected. Other times he was sweaty and off target. Could it have been too much caffeine? He has the Guinness handshaking record for an eight-hour span. He shook one hand every 2.15 seconds for eight hours. How much energy does that take?

            The 38th Vice President of the United States, Hubert Humphrey, was elected vice president in 1964. He was known as the Happy Warrior because he could campaign around the clock. Interestingly, he was a licensed pharmacist. Perhaps there was a connection.

            This presidential election cycle we are getting some very odd statements from both major candidates. In 1972, Ed Muskie broke down weeping uncontrollably at one campaign stop while reportedly taking drugs to keep his energy up. This kind of behavior on a slow news day spelled the end of his candidacy.

            Writer Hunter S. Thompson wrote in a 1972 edition of Rolling Stone Magazine: “It was not until his campaign collapsed and ex-staffers felt free to talk that I learned working for Big Ed was like being locked in a rolling boxcar with a vicious 200-pound water rat. Some of his staff considered him dangerously unstable. He had several identities, they said, and there was no way to be sure on any given day if they would have to deal with Abe Lincoln, Hamlet, Captain Queeg, or Bobo the Simpleminded…”

            Thompson captured the antics of politicians in the extreme on the campaign trail. Some stand for hours at fish sliming plants shaking hands with workers before they wash their hands at the end of their shift. Mechanically they say, “Shake hands with the next president, shake hands with the next president...”

            As I watch this presidential race I wonder: is this the best we, as a nation, can do to select our leaders? Further, will this process produce the best leaders? After they have spent many a disgraceful year pandering to the voters, will they be able to step into the White House prepared to be presidential?

            This election is not about how many hot dogs they can eat or a parking ticket or if a friend of a friend heard someone say they didn’t leave a tip one day. They are asked “Gotcha” questions which are routinely misreported by media sources who are pushing a candidate.

            Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have stumbled on the stump. Perhaps they took just one too many of the energy drinks or whatever they take to keep going. Wondering is not proof but both have had some bad moments on the campaign trail.

            The over-hyped media makes each day on the campaign trail sound like the Hindenburg has just crashed: “Trump is one point up in Indiana today. We will have twenty-four non-stop hours of analysis to know what the people of Indiana are thinking just one hundred forty-two days before the election.”

            Going back to Kennedy/Nixon, I’ve watched each presidential election, somewhat in awe and often in horror. This presidential cycle is worse than any other I have experienced. If they are like this normally and not taking dangerous drugs - it will be a long four years.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com

How do they campaign twenty hours every day?

Swickard: Budget problems then and now

© 2016 Michael Swickard, Ph.D.   Many people were surprised at the recent controversy about New Mexico State University needing to save $12 million because of a budget shortfall. There are many hard feelings by people being cut and the push back is enormous to any cuts.

            What the administration of NMSU wanted was to make no cuts and force the students to cover the budget shortfall by another tuition increase even though enrollment is dropping. That’s because of the tuition increases over twenty years which increased tuition and fees from $600 a semester to over $4,000 a semester.

            The NMSU Regents would not go for another increase so the budget axe has fallen on several programs with the resultant howls of outrage. Budget problems have been a continuing problem at NMSU starting with the institution’s first classes in January 1890 clear up to today. Often something was done to shrink the budget.

            In June 1997 here is part of what I wrote in my column:

            There is a battle going on at New Mexico State University - not a noisy battle with clanking swords, it is a battle of wills. As with most battles there’s winners and losers. Some employees will gain, some will lose. It was started by a June 18, 1997 report from the NMSU Strategic Planning Academic Programs subcommittee which rated academic programs and recommended some academic programs be eliminated.

            What effect will this have on the citizens of New Mexico? I don’t know but this scuffling is good for NMSU and New Mexico. It forces the NMSU leaders to accept they cannot be all things to all people. A priority must be established for the NMSU core programs.

            Three perceptions: First, it’s good someone started the process of aligning the academic programs to NMSU’s mission; secondly, the committee members are going to be flamed vigorously by employees who stand to lose; and this is just a report, the NMSU Administration and Regents will make the decisions.

            The mission of NMSU is to benefit the citizens of New Mexico. The output of NMSU is graduates, research done and the service that NMSU’s faculty, staff and students provide New Mexico’s citizens.

            One of the recommendations was that the Philosophy Department be eliminated. Those professors did not take that recommendation philosophically. There was a call to eliminate the Engineering Technology Department. The people in these departments will be injured by these decisions, if they are made.

            Still, there comes a time when the injury to a few must be accepted. NMSU is not some employment agency that seeks to employ the most people possible regardless of need - even if that is what it seems.

            NMSU has a job to do in this time of declining budgets. They must insure NMSU is of benefit to the citizens of New Mexico above any personal interests of NMSU’s employees.

            It is a battle of priorities - personal and professional. There will be winners and losers. Hopefully, the losers won’t be the citizens of New Mexico.

            Amazingly the issues today in August 2016 are much the same as in 1997 while the NMSU Philosophy Department remains with seven professors. Nineteen years after they were identified as not a priority they remain nor were they cut this time.

            The University of New Mexico has thirteen faculty members in their Philosophy Department. In good financial times both NMSU and UNM can duplicate each other’s programs to no harm. But when money is tight, as was noted in 1997, this is one place to cut.

            The notion is once a program is started using public money, once the first person is hired by the government in some form or another, there can be no shrinkage of the size of government. In fact, there is a notion that all government must cost more every year, even with money becoming tight.

            Having worked at both UNM and NMSU at different times over the last forty years I have experienced the budget crunch syndrome at both institutions. In every case I have said, “Guess now we will see what our core priorities are at this institution.”

            Often the priorities are the employees rather than the citizens of New Mexico. We should change that.

 Email: drswickard@comcast.net - Swickard’s new novel, Hideaway Hills, is availableat Amazon.com

Swickard: Budget problems then and now