Education Matters: Focus still kept on students' true potential

Here was a town that I had passed through so many times before and on each occasion driving along its tiny main street, I was charmed by this dot in the desert and thought many times how interesting it would be to walk its streets and see up close what had been a blur on my annual trek to bigger places.

There's a high school in Lone Pine that has always intrigued me, and I found myself the next morning taking a stroll around its perimeter. It was officially my first day of retirement after 35 years of teaching high school, and there I was at 7:15 a.m. on a high school campus.

School hadn't yet started when a teacher saw me looking about and asked if I needed any help. In just a few sentences we established a professional connection, and he took the time to show me around the place.

It was a small school as one might expect, but one feature that struck me immediately was the presence of shop classes integrated into the physical layout of the campus and imbedded into the curriculum. As my guide informed me, "Some of these kids are not headed for a university, but they have other choices here to keep them in school and help them realize their true potential."

Sounds like a great idea, but I've beat that drum more than a few times in this space. The general trend in education now is to treat every student as college material, which is a colossal mistake given the present make-up of school populations in secondary schools across the nation.

How ironic that this little school in this rural outpost is able to offer a more complete education (including state-of-the-art computer technology) to its students than its urban counterparts.

On a completely different note, I want to send a birthday wish to my lovely wife, who today reaches a certain milestone age that I did a year ago. Unlike me, she looks 20 years younger and is still the girl I married nearly 40 years ago.

Happy Birthday to Nadine, my very best friend, my constant companion and the love of my life.

DAN KIMBER is a former teacher in the Glendale Unified School District, where he has taught for more than 30 years. He may be reached at DKimb8@sbcglobal.net.