Rick Shaughnessy was a newspaper reporter and corporate marketing executive. In retirement, he serves as a 7th grade classroom volunteer at a school for homeless youth. He is editor of the annual More Odes to Common Things, which will publish its sixth volume of student poems this year. It was wonderful to connect with him for this interview!
What’s an urgent issue facing education?
Overemphasis on testing, standardized or otherwise. I understand the need to document progress and benchmark students, classes, and schools, but I really want students just to love to learn. I want them to learn to pursue learning independently for the sheer joy of expanding their bases of knowledge. Teaching to a series of standardized tests sometimes means forgoing uncharted adventures that could be great learning and life experiences.
I know this is all too easy for me to say. I am a classroom volunteer, not a teacher responsible for moving 20 economically disadvantaged and mostly underperforming students to the next grade level. I am fortunate to work with a teacher who recognizes that sometimes education happens when you veer off course. She has allowed me to try things with her students that have no place in the official curriculum. As a result, some of our seventh graders achieve a bit of proficiency in photography and others in sailing.
Every one of them enters eighth grade as a published poet.
