This week, I had the high honor of addressing the faculty and staff of the Worthington School District during our annual school kickoff event known as Convocation. The event is part pep-rally, part tradition and part serious talk. There are lots of things I could have focused on during my 7 minutes of fame, but I decided to focus on the district's new mission statement which is:
To Empower a Community of Learners who will change the world.
My message had two main parts - the world-changing role of teachers, aides and public education in general in our society and what specifically it means to change the world.
The opportunity to provide this message is one of highlights of my time on Worthington's Board. It was an opportunity to take a step back from the day to day, week to week routine of serving on a Board of Education and focus on what the heck we are really doing here. Here's the speech.
Good Morning. My name is Marc Schare and I have the
honor of serving as the President of the Worthington Board of Education this
year.
I’ll start my remarks with a bit of a confession.
I’m really not one for corporate mission/vision statements. In my experience in
corporate America, large companies spend a lot of time creating an utterly
meaningless statement that is forgotten as soon as it is introduced. Still,
when our new Superintendent told our board that he wanted to go through yet
another visioning process, I thought it was harmless. A few months went by and
I didn’t really think much more about it. Dr. Bowers would send the Board
updates periodically and a few of us went to a few of the community meetings
and finally, one cold day last February, Trent sends an email announcing the
mission statement.
To empower a
community of learners who will change the world
What an audacious goal, I thought. Aspirational to be sure. Thought provoking?
Absolutely! But seriously, as my inner
voice debated with itself – how many Worthington students will, in the fullness
of time, change the world and what does that even mean. Ultimately, I decided
that it was not only meaningful, not only actionable but absolutely essential
to what we do here and I thought I’d take
my allotment of time to opine why this mission statement, unlike so many others
in corporate America, should be taken seriously as a foundational, governing
document. To do so, I thought I would channel my inner “Trent Bowers” and tell
you a story.
I went to small, private high school on Staten
Island in New York and didn’t have any real opportunities to explore career
options until I was a freshman in college. My first year, I signed up for mostly
introductory classes at my community college turned 4-year school because
that’s what you did in the 70’s but there were really only two classes that I
was looking forward to. The first, and I know this is going to shock you, was Politics
101 and the other was Computer Science 101. I had zero exposure to either area
before college since my high school offered neither. In my political science
class, from day one until day whatever, the professor stood in front of the
classroom literally reading the textbook to us. There was no inspiration, no
passion, little discussion and he didn’t care if you showed up or not, and this
was in the middle of the Presidential Campaign between Jimmy Carter and Gerald
Ford. I did poorly on the final examination despite getting every answer
correct because I missed the instruction in the beginning that said I needed to
write in complete sentences so although I knew that Carl Albert was the Speaker
of the House, since I didn’t write “Carl Albert is the Speaker of the House of
Representatives”, I was marked wrong on every question and very nearly failed
the class for that reason. I do not remember the instructor’s name, only that I
swore I wasn’t going to take another class like that again. The next semester,
I took Computer Science 101 and fell in love with it immediately. The professor
was Mimi Tausner and she was able to take what for most was an incredibly dry
subject and make it come alive for me. She was so inspirational that I did
numerous extra credit assignments for her, including programming a horse race
prediction program among other notable accomplishments that first year.
Professor Tausner is the reason why I went into computer software as a
profession and I’ve always thought that if Professor Tausner brought her
passion to Politics 101 and Professor Politics brought his drudgery to Computer
Science 101, my entire career and life would have been very, very different.
Such is the power you, as teachers, hold
in our society and it is an awesome power to literally change the direction of
a student’s life in a few short months.
But, does changing that life mean changing the
world? Well. That brings me to Part 2 of my story. Fast forward 5 years and I
was working in Bell Labs as a systems programmer working with really, really
powerful mainframes. I noticed that we were doing all kinds of repetitive,
operational tasks manually that could be done more accurately and more
efficiently by the machine itself. A few years and a lot of 1am to 7am
programming time later, the world’s first commercially available automated
operations package for IBM mainframe computers was born. A few years after
that, it and the competition it inspired was running in a thousand companies across the planet and changed the way that
people thought about operating these large scale computers. I don’t know if that is a “change the world”
story but I’m pretty sure it’s as a close as I’m going to get. One thing I know for certain is that it would not have happened if
Professor Mimi Tausner didn’t spend time with
an awkward 17 year old kid who had a really tough time in high school, never
took an AP class or any advanced coursework for that matter, never took the SAT
and yet somehow, she ignited a passion I
didn’t know I had. Maybe I didn’t change the world, but she sure changed my
world, an opportunity you will have every day throughout your careers as
educators. The moral of my story, not to beat you over the head with it, is
that you never, ever know what word, what action, what combination of events is
going to inspire some student into performing some world-changing action.
To Empower a
Community of Learners that will change the world
A few weeks ago, I had a long conversation,
coincidentally, with a 20 something year old Worthington graduate who was
expressing personal angst that he had not yet changed the world and
accomplished something significant. Eventually, the conversation came around to
exactly what “changing the world” means. Does it mean solving some intractable global
problem like world hunger or clean water? Does it mean directly influencing
global public policy? Does it mean you
have to invent something that positively impacts the lives of millions of
people? My answer is no, not necessarily. My fondest wish for our students is
that armed with what you provide them, they go out into the world and, to the
best of their ability, change *their* world in positive ways, whatever that
might mean to the individual, and if it has some broader significance to our
society, so much the better. Some of our students will change their world
through good works afforded via financial success. Others will, I’m quite
certain, achieve scientific breakthroughs (in fact, I saw one at last year’s
science fair). Still others will be
known locally, nationally or globally for their abilities in the arts but virtually
everyone who walks through the door of one of our buildings this week will
change the world as perceived by their parents, their relatives, their
professional colleagues and later on, their children. How they do that is up to
them, and you.
I really believe that every single one of our
students walking into each of your classrooms, getting on each of your buses,
eating one of your lunches, playing on one of your teams or participating in
one of your activities has the God given potential to change the world but it
is up to you, teachers, aides, drivers, secretaries, custodians and
administrators of the Worthington School District to find and ignite within
that student the passion, drive and commitment necessary to maximize their own
world-changing abilities, just like it was up to Professor Mimi Tausner to do
so with me.
No, I’m not one for corporate mission statements,
but this one works for me because it so encapsulates why we are here, why you
became educators, why I ran for the school board in the first place and how our
district will ultimately be successful and how, honestly, that success should
be measured. On behalf of the Board of Education, thank you for your attention,
we look forward with you to the start of the school year and most of all, we
wish you Godspeed in your mission to empower a community of learners who will
change the world.
