Do You Question Your Value? Read This

By Steven W. Simpson, Ph.D.
Columnist EdNews.org

Have you seen those cartoons with someone on a tiny island out in the middle of the ocean looking at a sign that says, "You are here"? The joke, of course, is that there is no need for a sign. It is painfully obvious that the person is there, on that tiny island in the middle of the ocean.

A teacher is like that person on the island. We don't need signs to tell us how serious the problems of our children are. No signs are needed to tell us that we often feel like we are alone in a vast ocean of humans who seem not to care. We teachers do not need signs, but the signs exist, pleading for that ocean of uncaring humans to turn their gaze to those among us who are most vulnerable.

One of those signs is UNICEF Report Card No. 7, published in February, which showed that the United States and United Kingdom have the worst child outcomes, including those for education, among all industrialized countries. This report summarized children's educational, health, safety and family well-being. As University of Washington Professor Stephen Bezruchka notes in his article "Give U.S. Children Our Best," published in the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times, "While we are the richest country, we rank highest in child poverty rates . . .Our children's death rates are the worst as well."

Do you think those signs will catch anyone's attention? What about Save the Children's State of the World's Mothers 2006 report that tells us four million babies world-wide die within the first month of their lives each year, primarily due to easily preventable or treatable causes. Why bring this up on what in the Northwest is a beautiful, sunny Sunday afternoon? Let me tell you a story.

My mother lived to be 85 years old. She survived the Depression and World War II. She raised four children. In her life she knew terrible poverty, and we were raised in a home that did not always have enough food. One day I was down in California visiting my mom. Her doorbell rang and when she opened the door, there was a ragged, dirty, obviously troubled woman. "Can you give me some money?" she asked. As I sat watching, I could see that my mother was stopped cold, and I knew she was thinking about how she had suffered from cold and starvation during the Depression. She was thinking about how we lost our home in bankruptcy and how she could not always find enough food to feed her four hungry children. I watched my tough old mother think about the beaten down woman at the door and wondered what she would do.
My mother never said a word to the woman at the door. She turned around, slowly walked across the living room, took out her wallet, removed two twenty-dollar bills, walked back and handed the money to the woman. I was stunned. It was all the money my mother had in her wallet, and never before in my life had I seen her give money to anyone. I thought that the most she might do was give the woman a dollar or two. I was so shocked I didn't know what to say. She closed the door, looked at me with those thousand year old eyes, and said, "She needed help. That was as much as I could do."

The point of all this is that we are here. We are here in this world, in the middle of these terrible things happening to our children, and like my mother, we know they need help. We are doing what we can to help them. We can't solve all of the problems in the world. We can't solve all of the problems in our classrooms. But we get up every day and go to work. We help the children we can help. We do it every day because that is our gift, that is our faith.

Millions of children are in trouble and we are here, doing what we can to help them.

Pulbished May 4, 2007

Friday

May 4th, 2007

Steven W. Simpson, Ph.D.

Columnist EdNews.org

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Do You Question Your Value? Read This

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