Fall gives us the "sweet spot" with weather

MEA week falls at a time of year that can be most pleasant: no more onslaught of summer heat, no onslaught of snow yet. The photo shows my late parents, Ralph and Martha Williams, enjoying our yard along Northridge Drive in Morris. They appear to be enjoying the leaf-raking! Is leaf-raking really essential to do? Can't we just mulch the leaves with our mowers in spring? Well, many people get into the fall ritual of raking. It appears we are done with our lawn mowing for the season. Dad died in 2013 and Mom in 2018. Both lived into their 90s. We'll see if yours truly can be so fortunate. MEA weekend comes just before the high school football playoffs. I hear the Tigers will be playing on Tuesday. We're coming off a big win over Fergus Falls. It is Sunday. How much has our Stevens County Times newspaper shared about the Fergus Falls game? I mean, on their website. Better check and see. So much to write about. The Times makes money putting out its product. I would thus hope they are incentivized to report in a colorful and timely way on the win. I certainly try to do that in my personal blogging. I get no financial reward.

 

So it's MEA weekend. The annual MEA week football game makes it clear what is coming up: the long weekend for the kids with no school. When I was young, any day with "no school" was occasion for clicking your heels. It was total time off. It's pretty obvious that school was more difficult, more arduous in those days. 

As the years passed, I began to gather that a new approach was taking over. No longer was it so automatic that kids would "hate school." It sure wasn't a given like in my young days. 

Would seem to make sense: we only live once so why inflict suffering? Because kids have to learn? Learning is always an ideal. The big difference today is that kids have natural incentive to learn, at least where basic literacy is concerned. They can hardly begin to harness the electronic media soon enough. They are eager to communicate with friends and share their thoughts with the world. They learn keyboard typing skills. No need for a teacher lording over you. 

What I'm suggesting is that it is not a chore. "Learning" of any kind seemed a total chore when I was growing up. 

Sometimes we'd hear out and about that kids "want to learn." No, not really. The statement was like a cliche. An ideal, yes, but not with real world truth. I think we all knew that. Kids were not natural self-starters. Today the activity with communications can get so intense, we have "screen addiction." What does that tell you? Kids really "want to learn" where communications are concerned, maybe to a fault. 

Maybe you want to dismiss social media as so much foolishness. I smile as I weigh that, as I remember what comic books meant for me. Many people and certainly "academia" put down comic books as little more than garbage. 

I consumed other material on my own that wasn't so much different, e.g. Mad Magazine, Hardy Boys and Tom Swift stories. Such fare was not in classrooms. I had a college professor who dismissed the Hardy Boys series - well of course this individual would, because it was outside of the world where teachers held forth. Thusly such people dissed the "Sylvan Learning System" because it was outside the standard realm where the teachers wanted as much of a monopoly as they could get. 

Power and money: pretty simple to grasp. 

I loved comic books, TV network entertainment programs, Mad Magazine and books that were outside of school. Literacy? The fare I just cited advanced my grasp of literacy far more than anything in the classroom. Comic books were so stimulating because of the tremendous imagination they reflected. Reading these were like liberation from the droll classroom. 

There is no stopping social media for the kids today. Go back in time and use the term "social media" - it would have meant nothing. Imagine living without all the digital blessings of today. Well we did. We got by. Kids hated school. If there was a "snow day," we could just relax with idle time at home. And of course watch TV. 

 

In defense of TV

Why were we made to feel so guilty if we just watched TV? After about eight hours in a school building, couldn't a kid just be excused for watching a little entertainment television? Looking back, I feel hurt by how we were made to feel it was pointless. It was entertainment. So what? Kids worked plenty hard in school anyway. 

There should have been a law against "homework." Why did teachers find it so important to foist that on us? Was it about power? Was it about teachers wanting to virtually command our lives? Did the controlling impulse come from teachers not wanting us to advance ourselves by using means outside of school? So teachers could proclaim how indispensable they were? Helpful for turning the screws on the community in the next contract negotiations? 

If teachers wanted that kind of power, maybe it worked for a time, but then the digital world made its steady advancement and it became clear, like it or not, we were not going to be so dependent on professional teachers. 

You hear the comment today that teachers have become more like caretakers for the kids. Get the kids through the day, try to make sure they stay out of trouble. The basic goal is just advancement toward maturity. 

Today the kids are guided toward real idyllic objectives. And that's super, but it contrasts with when I was young and the boys had to fear getting drafted and sent to a foreign war. Specifically Vietnam, although such ventures came and went through the years. Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan to cite three targets. Made it hard to develop a real idealistic sense, a sense of belief in your authority figures, the people who approved of war measures (without having to go over and fight themselves of course). 

Today's young parents - bless them - cannot grasp what it would be like for their kids to be at risk of being drafted and sent to "fight" someone. And to quite possibly die. It isn't in the cards. 

Our more recent military adventures were with volunteer military. Or in the case of Iraq, National Guardsmen? Wasn't that a surprise? All the money we spend on the military and its bloated bureaucracy, and then we send National Guard units into foreign conflict? I could never wrap my arms around that one. This community lost David Day. 

We fight wars now just with money? Like the $100 billion we may be about to spend to aid Israel? To hell with that. Oh, does that make me anti-Semitic? Aren't we all just tired to hell of the Israel thing? Would that it would just go away.

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com