Praise from Dr. Kurt W. S. Smith

During my years of teaching, I crossed paths with remarkable students who left a lasting impression. One such student was Kurt Smith, class of 2006 at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus.

Mississippi has many talented people, and a few develop their aptitudes to the fullest extent and become excellent professionals and outstanding Americans who love what they do for a living and return to Mississippi to pass on the baton of excellence.

During my twenty years at MSMS I have fond memories of students like Jennifer S., who became a successful engineer and marathon runner, Ben H., financial advisor and excellent Mercedes mechanic. Shannah T. H. advocates for rare diseases, giving platform to those who had no voice before and saving her daughter in the process; Melissa H., an excellent elementary school teacher and long-distance runner and an avid world traveler; Melissa M. A., excellent mother of three boys and an advocate for juvenile diabetes. Some former students are gifted engineers and doctors who care for all Americans. Bryan, a young medical doctor with a Ph.D. in medicine, studies prions in mad cow disease; Joe S. and his friend Michael H. whom we took to baseball games at MSU are medical doctors, saving women’s lives; Katie D., excellent RN and mother of five; the Italian class I took to Ole Venice (18 miles away) as a reward for earning college credit through a standardized test; Emily S., a medical researcher; and Nate W., an engineer who runs his wife’s medical practice in rural Alabama. These are just a few of the students who left a clear and lasting imprint in my fond memories.

This May 2024, Kurt W. S. Smith earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics after an undergraduate in German and International Studies, with a minor in Italian and Spanish, a master’s degree in German and Teaching English as a Second Language, and another master’s degree in business administration. He also worked for more than ten years in higher education administration at Ole Miss.

Kurt’s doctoral dissertation dealt with the “utilization of authentic reading materials in ESL textbooks and the role that textbook-based tasks serve in enabling language classrooms to mirror the target environment.”

Kurt proposed a “new Continuum of Authenticity Scale technique to measure the authenticity of materials in textbooks beyond the current binary model.”

At his dissertation defense, Kurt thanked “my MSMS language professor, Dr. Ileana Johnson, for inspiring me with a zeal for language learning and for modeling authenticity in the classroom environment.”

Kurt wrote on the MSMS alumni webpage, “Dr. Johnson was the kind of professor who, in addition to teaching me in German class, also let me sit in on her Italian and Latin classes because my schedule was too full to formally register for them, and she privately taught me and another student Russian lessons during her office hours. The earliest foundations of my dissertation were rooted in how she would bring in sales receipts, brochures, newspaper clippings, and other seemingly mundane artifacts from foreign cultures as windows of authenticity for students to see true representations of language as it is actually used in the target environment as opposed to a reliance on the completely pedagogically invented texts found in textbooks, with their invented characters, invented scenarios, inauthentic passages, and obviously fake dialogues. Indeed, her subtle rebellious contempt at having to use a textbook in the first place helped to shatter the within-the-box thinking that had been instilled in me for the prior ten years before attending MSMS. (What? But how can you have a class without a textbook? You can’t question the paradigm.)” It turns out that she could.

Ten years later, as a researcher-teacher, Kurt described how he scrapped the textbook for the course he taught and developed an “open-source course packet instead, filled with authentic materials from the target language and culture that complimented the learning objectives of the course, expanding on the approach Dr. Johnson so effectively modeled.”

Kurt celebrated his doctoral graduation with a pilgrimage trip to Italy with his family and was pleasantly surprised how easily the “language came back to me, with vivid memories of how I learned functional words and authentic language skills in Dr. Johnson’s class.”

Posting on the MSMS alumni website, Dr. Kurt Smith wrote, “I just wanted to share with the rest of the MSMS family how impactful and life-changing the MSMS experience was for me, and how the passion and personality of one phenomenal professor set me on a path to improving humanity’s understanding of language pedagogy.”

As a life-long teacher and a consummate professional for thirty years, I had seldom received praises or recognition from my colleagues, the dean, or the professional field in MS for a job well done, nor did I amass the Department of Education certificates on the “I love myself educational wall” other than my four college diplomas which I earned while raising a family of four as a single mom. I was content with the stellar results of my students.

Kurt’s writing brought tears to my eyes and made me realize that some of my students did recognize the quality education they received from me. And Kurt is a shining example of my exceptional students.

 

The Direction of Teaching in America

As a former teacher, I was dismayed at times about the quality of teachers who were shaping impressionable young minds in public schools. I was shocked that they knew so little and often were proud that they were ignorant. Too many teachers were not ashamed to admit that they were weak in history, mathematics, literature, science, geography, physics, and chemistry.

I watched such teachers like a hawk at my children’s schools. Every day I knew the lessons and the topics they covered. I monitored my children’s learning all the time even when they seemed tired of my questioning them. We went over homework, words, concepts, capitals, historical dates, math tables, spelling words, and cursive writing. It was a joy at the beginning of the school year to shop for school supplies with my children at Walmart and to organize the famous Trapper Keepers for each child.

The school principals and teachers then did not have the Democrat party’s activist agendas, they were struggling with class scheduling, faculty meetings, disruptive students, failing students, reading and math proficiency, unreasonable parents, missing parents, helicopter parents, parents demanding unearned grades for their progeny, truancy, graduation rates, ACT scores, pregnant students in school, hungover teachers in the classroom, and the occasional teacher’s scandalous affair which spilled into the school and impacted teaching and learning. 

There was no Internet, no libs of TikTok, and other social media platforms to spew hatred and woke ideology. There was some respectability to the teacher profession, teachers in general tried to be moral and behavioral models for their students.

Teachers were not sporting pink hair, nose rings, multiple facial piercings, sleeve tattoos, scuffed jeans with holes, and t-shirts with Che Guevara’s revolutionary photo and communist logos. There was no overt communist social activism in the classrooms. Teachers were not withholding information from their students’ parents; they sent home daily and weekly classroom lesson plans. Students could bring home their textbooks.

There were no teacher unions in some states, but the State Department of Education was king in choosing what the students learned every year since 1979. Most teachers had good intentions, slightly under-prepared for the brighter kids but were not the Marxist activists of today.

Teachers were following the latest educational fad and directives from the State Department of Education, in line with the latest teaching methods coming from the minds of academia. 

These teaching methods were the hobbyhorse of research for research’s sake from Colleges of Education at universities around the country, especially teacher colleges that had been grooming communist teachers for multiple decades, following the model of the European “intellectuals” who moved to New York to seed their Marxist indoctrination in American academia.

The global warming agenda started to creep in and infiltrate public schools via student channels, video games, movies, cartoons, and other mass media forms of indoctrination. Students were frightened by their teachers that the planet was going to burn up or freeze over because their parents’ lifestyles were killing the planet.

The quality of teachers started to diminish in the last thirty years, as fewer students sought a degree in Education. It was a trend caused by poor teacher pay, lack of respect, the inadequate preparation, and the quality of potential students who failed to pass basic courses in math and science. It was easier to memorize educational fads which changed each year to fit the woke agenda developed over the last fifty years. As the saying goes, “Those who can’t, teach.”

Students began pursuing journalism and communication degrees, social studies degrees, social justice, gender justice, environmental justice, racial justice, and other newly developed and woke collegiate curricula, shamelessly claiming the existence of “injustices” across the board in the U.S. Pick a subject, we will find and create an injustice in that field.

The market became overfilled with starry-eyed social justice warriors seeking a significant place in the myriad of non-governmental organizations that did not pay better than teaching but afforded students the opportunity to travel to third world countries to bring them American “democracy,” mob rule that is.

In their feel-good, easy-peasy college classes, these graduates failed to learn that we are not a democracy but a constitutional republic. Why would they know when most of them have never read the Constitution, nor did they take or pass a civics class.

Educational scholars in the U.S. then and now were influenced by the Frankfurter School which comprised the German intellectuals at the Institute for Social Research, an organization at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, founded in 1923. Its founder was Carl Gruenberg, a Marxist professor of law at the University of Vienna. This Marxist center was funded with money from Felix Weil, a rich student, whose doctoral dissertation focused on the pragmatic problems of implementing socialism.

These German, Italian, Canadian, and American scholars sat the stage for the eventual decline of education in this country and its devolution into the cultural Marxism we see today.  They helped train, brainwash, and establish teachers as a revolutionary frontline who would eventually transform society into the socialist/communist society they sought.

In the words of Barack Obama, five days before he became president, “We are five days from the fundamental transformation of America.” Few people focused on that one ominous sentence unless they survived a socialist country ruled by the Communist Party. For them, that one sentence chilled them to the very core of their beings.

How did the federal government become so powerful that it dictates what is happening to teachers, administrators, schools, and students? Certainly the 1979 establishment of the U.S. Department of Education by President Jimmy Carter was the official start of a declining American education.

The government now forces schools to teach racism under the pretext of anti-racism. The Critical Race Theory (CRT) is aiming to fundamentally change schools into places of overt Marxist conflict, whites against minorities, rich against the poor, heterosexuals against the gay and transgendered.

The funding largesse is going to schools, most of which are starved for cash and are not going to turn down “fee money,” to compel them to replace traditional learning with CRT. Money is also invested in perverting and sexualizing students. Homosexuality and gender confusion has now exploded into brainwashing young children into body mutilation. Drag Queen Story Hour, encouraged by teachers and administrators, features men dressed as women, reading disturbing stories to kindergartners.

Public education has become government education and teachers are government employees expected to do their bidding. They must accept and agree to escalate in their classroom the social re-engineering of public education. Common Core curricula, in place all over the country under different names, has dumbed down the students’ performance in mathematics, reading, and writing, behind many less developed countries.

Before 1979, Americans used to be the most educated people in the world thanks to private and home schools. John Dewey’s and Horace Mann’s dreams of a centralized, government-controlled, anti-Christian public education became reality, and the quality of teachers and students began a serious decline after 1979.

“Today, in school districts all across the country, teachers, administrators and superintendents all work toward the same mission as the founders of public education, as they help brainwash and raise un-American and amoral generations of adults, in the same manner as was done to them.”   The Problem with Public Education : The John Birch Society (jbs.org)

We are no longer a superpower thanks to public education, we have moved to a dumb, ignorant, and self-destructive immoral nation. The government is in control of public education and is “weaponizing” it, destroying Americanism, its uniqueness, talent, and creativity, and replacing American exceptionalism with collectivist ideals.

Unless we reverse this educational trend of destruction and start training and hiring teachers and administrators who respect and understand our constitutional republic, and our history, there is no fixing America’s decline.

NOTE: Google is no longer allowing me to post comments, so here is one comment by Pilgrimson:

"The last sentence of this article states...

"Unless we reverse this educational trend of destruction and start training and hiring teachers and administrators, who respect and understand our constitutional republic and our history, there is no fixing America’s decline."
I believe that there have been at least two generations of destruction that have passed, that I do not conceive there are enough teachers and administrators alive to be able to fill the positions needed to accomplish the fixing of Academia.
Not to mention being outnumbered by the Communist Marxists!

Teaching is an Art, Teachers Are Not Made

“To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”                   – Friedrich Hayek, The Pretence of Knowledge

The week of June 11, 2016 issue of The Economist published a one page editorial on “How to make a good teacher.” It makes a very weak case that teachers can be trained. There is obviously no stated government mold for such a teacher. There is teacher licensing set by the Department of Education which requires teachers to be graduates of the College of Education and mandates that teaching methodology courses and student teaching are part of the College of Education curriculum for future teachers.

Unfortunately, the requirements for subject matter study are very weak and, generally, because teacher pay is low compared to the private sector, the College of Education tends to accept the weaker students who have a hard time passing core requirements classes such as mathematics and science.

Here is why teachers cannot be trained. Good teachers are born, not made. You cannot use a cookie cutter and presto, you have good teachers. What you do get are drones following a set curriculum such as the collectivist Common Core from which they cannot diverge.

You can learn to emulate a famous and successful teacher, but you cannot copy their temperament, disposition, knowledge, rich vocabulary, linguistic articulation, voice, unique delivery, creativity, talent, and love of what they do.

Teaching is an art. You cannot teach art. You are either talented or you are not. Secondly, in order to teach, you must have a strong knowledge of your subject matter. Thirdly, you must like children and love what you do for less remuneration.

You must be patient and able to handle criticism from administrators with an agenda who think they are the solution to everybody’s problem; you must be able to handle criticism from lazy students who complain in order to excuse their lack of effort; you must smile upon hearing criticism from parents who expect teachers to become de facto parents, in absentia parents, and do not care if Johnny learns; they want Johnny to have straight As, a diploma, and many awards he didn’t deserve or has not earned; and you must overlook criticism from the general public who sees the teaching profession not worthy of respect and as a walk in the park. How could you not handle the darling brats guilty parents raise in the 21^st century? Last but not least, teaching involves mandated standardized tests that do nothing to reflect what a student has actually learned or knows. Standardized tests just regurgitate memorized facts and dates that are soon forgotten.

Mass government education is just mass indoctrination into a program mandated by the federal government across all fifty states. More recently that was called Common Core, an attempt to raise busy little technical support workers who believe in global warming, communism, and worship Islam, not Christianity.

Government has dumbed down education through the Educational Leadership and Teacher Education curriculum in order to socially promote every student as painlessly as possible through twelfth grade and possibly through a worthless but expensive social studies education.

Insane school discipline procedures or lack thereof for children coming from broken homes, irresponsible parents who don’t read to their children, don’t care if they do their homework or study, dealing with less than mediocre teachers who cannot get employment elsewhere but cannot be easily fired, dealing with teachers who don’t try to teach well because the pay is low, neglected children in households where both parents work and have no time to devote to being involved in their children’s education, high income households who can afford and often do hire nannies and delegate parenting to them, are some of the problems.

Then there is the problem of inveterate socialist teachers who continue the tradition by indoctrinating their own students. It becomes easier as most teaching materials are written and published by die-hard progressives with an agenda to sell books and propagandize as many generations of students into their Marxist philosophical beliefs, turning students against their parents, against Christianity, against their own country, against patriotism, and shaping them into atheistic anti-Americans who are taught revisionist history using Howard Zinn’s progressive interpretation of American history, rewriting historical facts.

Teachers control students’ minds on the average of 6 hours per day. Some students go home to dysfunctional, broken homes, to parents who are unengaged, have their own issues to deal with, and who may or may not care about their children’s education or education in general. No schooling in world and no teacher training can fix that.

More money, computers, books, supplies, will ever improve a child’s education until their parents are involved in their child’s education, and until they stress to their progeny how important, useful, and fun learning for a lifetime can be.

No “eco-pedagogy” or “conscientization” or whatever the newest educational fads the progressive indoctrinators have adopted will actually help students learn. They are just means of brainwashing children into the Gaia environmental movement which promotes non-existent global warming in order to redistribute the middle class wealth around the world in the “social justice” vision of progressivism.

Some poor countries teach children in a dirt hut with no technology, just a blackboard and chalk, relying on an old encyclopedia and a good math book.  No brainwashing, just common sense, and correct history, and their students are exceptional. Many poor schools don’t have laboratories yet students outperform western students in both science and math, even though they don’t have calculators. And the school day is four hours.

Finland successfully tried the no-technology-allowed in the classroom approach as well while the U.S. is now relying heavily on technology. The more technology we develop and provide to students, the less and less they actually know.

No matter how well trained a teacher may be, a child coming from a broken home with drugs, alcohol, and other issues, has a severely affected ability to learn. It helps when teacher to student ratio is manageable. Class size is important in interacting with each and every student as often as possible. Students will share their problems if the teachers really care and take time to listen.

Many schools are run by administrators and superintendents who are marginal or poor administrators, pathetic leaders who lack the skills, philosophy, and temperament to develop a strong learning atmosphere in their schools.

Selection committees who are tasked with hiring principals and superintendents do not have the necessary knowledge to select the proper school leaders or are hampered by their own political correctness, misconceived ideas, and socialist agendas.

Often exceptional teachers get in trouble with dictatorial administrators who impose their curricular ideas that may or may not work in a specific classroom or a specific group of students. Such excellent teachers are sometimes at odds with their lazier and non-creative colleagues who are licensed and unionized, secure in their jobs, but expend the minimum effort necessary to keep their jobs; they cover their walls with “I love myself plaques” given to them by peers at conferences sponsored by various teacher associations.

Thomas Sowell, exceptional teacher and economist, said, “The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today's dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should -- and will -- be paid by raising taxes on ‘the rich.’"

 
Apparently, the ‘rich’ have rigged the system so much that nobody can succeed, they were told. But the rich create jobs and lose money and wealth every day. If they have rigged the system and continue to do so, they sure did a lousy job of rigging it.

“None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think -- and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.” http://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/thomas-sowell-socialism-for-the-uninformed/

 

 

 

 

"Let's Exercise, So We Can Die Healthy"

When the university adopted a wellness program seven years ago, Maribel rallied the faculty with a humorous phrase that always brought laughter and smiles, even on the gloomiest days, “Let’s exercise, so we can die healthy.” Like a bundle of pent-up energy, Maribel walked really fast. I could barely keep up with her on our walks around the campus between classes. In spite of my pain, she always managed to make me laugh.

My colleague and friend of ten years loved making people happy with her cooking, a “joie de vivre.” With a master’s degree in Food Science, she knew the precise art of making cheese. As a teenager, she attended school in France with her mom, learned to speak French fluently, and studied the many varieties of French cheese. She never dreamed that someday she would teach French and Spanish to gifted students instead.

A native Venezuelan, Maribel prepared her famous paella for outdoor parties around the campus gazebo. There was always an excuse for another fiesta or a celebration that necessitated a party, cooking for a large crowd, and Maribel’s talent of bringing everybody together on a short notice and on a tight budget. The introduction of a new faculty member was a party with Maribel’s ham as the center piece, cooked slowly with Bourbon.

Maribel loved life and her students. She taught them to pursue their dreams, never give up, and to enjoy life to its fullest. A mentor and motivator, Maribel would give time, money, clothes, and advice to students who were less fortunate and had a strained family life. She made them comfortable enough that they confessed their problems and she offered solutions.

Speeding in her old white Toyota like a woman with a divine purpose and a ticket plastered to her windshield, Maribel would always arrive a few minutes late but always left long after all the faculty had cleared out, talking to students in hushed, soothing tones, probing to see how she could help them. In Venezuela, she used to say, you were not on time unless you were fifteen minutes late.

In her first teaching year, Maribel put up a beautiful Christmas tree in the lobby, without consulting the powers that be. After a letter of reprimand was put in her file and a verbal dress down, she happily continued to add decorations and secret Santa gifts under the tree, helped by students of various religions who enjoyed the Christmas tree as much as she did.

Every year, Maribel voluntarily raised thousands of dollars to help students have a memorable prom. She gave endless hours of her time in preparation for the fundraiser, the planning, and the execution.

The mother of three children and a devoted wife, Maribel found time to be a substitute mom to other people’s children who were not as lucky as hers. Her genuine care put students at ease and gave them comfort.

Always in pursuit of excellence, Maribel set out to become a nationally certified Spanish teacher. She did not give up after failing twice. On the first attempt, after building a year-long portfolio, she flew to San Antonio to deliver the project in person because she would have missed the deadline otherwise. She succeeded on the third try. Sadly, she did not get to earn much of the merit pay that came with the national certification.

Although a picture of health and seldom sick, Maribel was stricken by a rare form of cancer. She passed away last year in her beloved Venezuela, in the prime of her life, surrounded by friends and family, and mourned by hundreds of former students.

As her March 14 birthday approaches, I found a favorite picture that captures perfectly her wonderful spirit, her contagious smile, and her zest for life. Maribel’s generosity, love of children, of dancing, teaching, and cooking has touched so many along the way.

Because Maribel had never met a stranger, I imagine my friend with beautiful curly tresses and a sunny face, rolling up her sleeves and teaching angels in Heaven how to properly plan a fiesta and cook arepas.