By June 2, 2013
Later today I will start driving from southeastern Texas to Utah for the 2013 MHA Conference in Layton. Many JI writers and readers are in the same metaphoric boat this week, so I have chosen to write about the reverse trip: how missionaries travelled from Salt Lake City (SLC) to their assigned areas in Texas. [1]
By June 1, 2013
The only time my wife and I went out to the movies in our 4 and a half years in Santa Barbara was to see Waiting for Superman. My wife, Lee, had seen it the weekend before but wanted me to go with her because she wanted to be able to talk about it with me. Lee works for the New Tech Network, a non-profit organization that is involved in school reform, and was therefore very interested in a movie that addressed those issues.
Seeing this movie about the plight of education in the US in general and urban schools in particular was a rather jarring experience for me because a number of years earlier I had taught high school in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. So I had an up-close view of what those schools were like (they struggle) and what kind of education the kids got there. This was a rather painful memory since, because I walked into the classroom with no training (and very little aptitude, I soon discovered), I struggled mightily and delivered a very poor product to my students. Thus I knew first hand of the educational struggles of urban children that the movie was documenting. Again, this was a rather painful memory that also felt like a personal failure and I wondered what could possibly be done to address this problem.
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