Thursday, June 21, 2007

Big Yellow Fellows

In Friday's edition of the Herald, you will find a story about bus maintenance. To some of you, it may be silly. It may even seem like a nonstory, and you may skip right over it to read about the latest dirt on Paris Hilton or the golf course or check out the new cars in the classifieds.
But the truth is, it all matters in education, from the buses to the food to the books to recess. So I urge you to read it, because it is a positive story on a part of the local school district that is doing something right.
Friday will mark my third anniversary with the paper, and most of that time I have worked with schools in some fashion. Two years of that time I worked in sports, covering high school athletes from this county and beyond and the coaches who lead them. For the last year I have been able to delve deeper into the inner workings of the school district in a newswriter's role.
And during that time, I have come to realize two things. One, there are a lot of teachers, administrators and staffers that truly do care about providing your kid with the best education they can in a safe environment to make them productive citizens of the county.
And two, that doing my job is not fair to them sometimes. I don't try to be unfair. People often tell us we never write anything good about the schools. But when tests scores come out, it is our job to report them good or bad. It is our job to compare them with area counties' scores and give our readers context to base their opinions on the district upon.
I would love to write a story on a kid who learned the alphabet, the meaning of Pi or the capital of Djibouti (it's Djibouti) every day, and I could because those small victories are won every day in classrooms all around this county.
But unfortunately,we don't have that much ink.
Test score season is fast approaching. Writing scores should be available within the next week, and end-of-grade ones will follow in August. I have no idea how those scores will turn out, though I know there have been many teachers and administrators working hard this year in Lee County to win enough of the small battles mentioned earlier, hopeful that it will translate into an overall victory in the war that has come out of federal and state standardized testing.
Hopefully I can write a few more positive stories like the bus one. But if not, just know that there is a lot of positive stories going on each day in each of Lee's 15 schools to make up for the bad ones.
You just have to ask your son or daughter how their day went, or what they learned today.

Friday, June 15, 2007

The PIR

Today is the ending of an era. A turning of a page.
Bob Barker's final episode on the greatest game show in history, The Price is Right, just aired, and as I sit at my desk, only sadness grips me.
Barker has been with me from the beginning. I remember sitting in my living room on summer days as a child (when I should have been outside playing or working) watching fantacizing about one day being on The PIR, playing Plinko or the mountain climbing game or putting alongside the long miked man with the white hair.
In high school, though things changed often, there was always Barker. I remember my second-period journalism teacher at North Moore allowing me to watch it, and today, watching the final episode with Barker, I found myself back in that room...engulfed in the PIR when I should have been working on a paper.
That theme followed me in college, where I laid out of a many an Econ 10 class to watch the show. (But I still got an A- in that class by only the grace of God. I swear I think my professor got me mixed up with someone else.)
And I got pretty good at it, up to the very end. As four of us in the newsroom wwatched this morning, I came the closest to the final showcase and guessed the correct price of a car on the Any Number game.
So where does the show go from here? The best thing about the show with Barker was that it never changed, even though the whole world around it did. It was the one constant in my life. The car prices got hirer, but the games rarely changed. No digital dials or computer graphics. Just plain old wheel-spinning and price guessing.
The putts kept falling. The spay and neuter calls did, too. And the Barker Beauties stayed beautiful, although plastic surgery and implants didn't hurt, either.
Whomever takes over for Barker (God help us if it is Mario Lopez) there is no way the show will ever recapture what Barker had. They'll probably dress it up with fancy camera angles, new spins on old games and savvy marketing ploys.
But it won't be the same.
God bless you, Bob. Have a nice retirement. You will be missed.