Every now and again, a fantasy strikes: Our governor says, “This is the kind of state we want to live and work in, this is what it will cost to do that, and I will make the case to the voters.”
It’s not entirely a fantasy. Dick Lamm fought the 1976 Winter Olympics (OK, that was before he became governor); Roy Romer promoted a new airport; Bill Owens marched for T-REX and pushed Referendum C.
But now we face major cuts in education funding, and our governor says we just need to live with it. He could be right. All those years we spent money on education, and yet Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are still taken seriously. What’s the point if that’s the result?
When it comes to education funding, I’m of two minds. On one hand, our daughter Abby is a stay-at-home mom in Oregon who took up freelance writing, despite my best efforts to talk her into trying something more remunerative, like looking for dropped change on the sidewalk. But she’s persistent, and just sold an essay to the Christian Science Monitor.
So she may make a go of it, but it’s a dicey business. Her husband is a teacher. I want Abby and our grandson Ezra to eat regularly under a roof, and so I want teachers to be paid well.
Recalling my days at Greeley West High School, I had two great teachers. Mrs. Williamson taught senior honors English. Often I hated her because she pushed and pushed, always insisting I could improve my organization while writing with more vigor and clarity. With her I learned more about English composition than I did in any college class.
Mr. Springston taught geometry and trigonometry. He put us in small groups where we worked on problems and mostly taught each other. He’d wander from group to group, look at our work, and say things like “the theorem you need is on page 287.”
But senior year I took calculus, and the Greeley schools decided against offering a small class at West. Thus, a few of us went to Central for a daily hour of calculus. The teacher wasn’t nearly as good. Despite efforts then and later, I have never learned calculus.
Other than giving some credit where due, I also note that it’s difficult to evaluate teachers. Many of my classmates were terrified of Mrs. Williamson and Mr. Springston, and I didn’t realize how good they were until later. There isn’t enough money in any public treasury to pay teachers like that what they’re really worth — or at least what they were worth to me.
I can also recall many classes that were a waste of tax money and student time, where the teachers were petty tyrants and all we got from them was busy work. Even those teachers may serve a valuable purpose, though. Our other daughter, Columbine, inherited some of my more annoying traits, such as a loud mouth and a low tolerance for crap. Thus there were problems with one high-school teacher.
After listening to my elder daughter’s sensible complaints, I got philosophical: “Columbine, for the rest of your life you will deal with idiots in positions of authority. This is as good a time as any to learn how to handle it.”
So we can have battalions of overworked and underpaid teachers in overcrowded and underfunded classrooms. We’ll keep taxes down and, as Columbine learned, something educational can come from dismal classrooms. Maybe that’s what the governor has in mind.
Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
