| Educator not a Politician |
The common line of thought when an individual states he or she is an educator is that of a teacher performing in the classroom. As an educator or many years my classroom has taken the form of many different environments. As the oldest child in our neighborhood my classroom was my neighborhood, here I taught the younger kids how to shoot marbles, spin a top, catch a baseball, pole vault and more often then not how to fix a flat tire on their bikes. Showing other what to do and how to do it was second nature to myself, it came naturally it was my destiny. My last year in high school was spent as the gym teacher’s assistant to the sophomore class during their gym period. Although not a great athlete I had an understanding of the fundamentals in a wide variety of sports and physical education activities this I shared with the lower classmen. I spent the early part of the summer before my senior year as the coach and trainer for elementary and junior high students in the district Junior Olympics program; this incidentally was a welcome break from previous years when I worked in the fields in near by Henderson. My purpose was to take what I knew and relay it to others; I was functioning as an educator. After my discharge from the US Army I became involved in a number of community and civic activities, this while attending my first year of college at Metro State in Denver. I soon was teaching in the in the East, West and North neighborhood of Denver and here in Commerce City ethnic pride and the need to get an education beyond high school. My students were young Chicanos and Chicana's who had given up on themselves because of the hardships they encountered because of their race. My lesson was we could achieve beyond that which was taught in the school system by first realizing the abilities each contained within themselves. Yes I was an educator only my classrooms were the streets, the places kids hung out at, youth organizations, be it detention centers or Cub Scout packs. In 1971 I took my students and my classroom to the Southside of Chicago, the ghetto. Kids were beginning to be attracted to gangs or neighborhood cliques. They saw their neighborhoods as barrios or ghettos and themselves as victims of the inner city. I put together a group of fellow college students from Brighton, Ft. Lupton, North Denver and Commerce City and we formed a caravan of several vans and cars and took our student to a real ghetto and a community where real gangs existed. We passed the hat and gathered enough for gas money, we packed meals of burritos and bologna sandwiches and some cheap cans of pop and headed out of Colorado. Our first stop was in Ogallala, Nebraska and the students experience their first Native American POW Wow. They experience first hand the beauty of the Native American music, the dances and they listen to the wisdom of the tribal elders. The following day we continued our journey to Chicago, eating a breakfast of cold burritos and drinking soda pop cooled by sitting in the trunks of our vehicles. We arrived in the dead of night in the south side of Chicago in the Latino community the guest of a well know gang in that part of town. We were housed in an abandon school three story school that had been taken over by various community groups; this was my first real experience of teaching in a school. Over the next few days the students in our care learned what a real ghetto was, they realized as old as their neighborhoods appeared this did not compare to the inner cities of a Chicago, St. Louis or New York. Our guide of 15 or 16 years of age showed us his neighborhood where he had never ventured out of the 6 block radius for fear of being attacked by a rival gang, his world was 6 block by 6 blocks. I managed in the few days we were in Chicago to take my students to the Museum of Science and Industry, another of my makeshift classrooms. I would realize later that my approach was neither new nor novel. It had been in existence for thousands of years and perhaps the greatest educator us this method of teaching when he taught in open fields as well as the classroom of the day, the local synagogue. Later my classroom became the pulpit of my church, the Sunday School Classroom, the Vacation Bible School, the adult and youth retreats I put together. My classroom became the work place where I taught new students destine to become skilled workers in a major data center the day to day functions of such a facility. Yes I believe myself to be an educator and not a Politian and this is what we need to meet the educational needs of our community and the children who attended school in our community. In all that areas that I have been able to share the knowledge I have obtained over the years the most important student I have dealt with is myself. I have engaged myself in the area where I would be called to teach to the greatest degree available to myself before I attempted to teach others. You cannot teach what you do not know and it was for this reason before I even remotely decide to run for the school board of Adams County District 14 I spent 2 years in the classroom. Every other Tuesday I educate myself on what is required, again the fundamentals, of a School Board Member which I believe it to be an Educator not a Politician. |