A REASON TO REASON

Thanks to our partners at the Ohio State University, our students were treated to another great opportunity to expand their minds, question their thoughts, and to examine how they spend (or waste) their time. Author Susan Jacoby visited Metro for a book discussion with Mrs. McAllister’s third-period American Literature class. Ms. Jacoby has written several books on history, American secularism and intellectualism, and frequently writes for the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Her current book, The Age of American Unreason, is a chronicle of the downward slide of American intellectualism in the past 40 years. She claims we do not collectively use reason or intelligence to make political and national decisions and that settling for mediocrity and intellectual laziness has cost our country greatly.

Ok, so I read the book in anticipation of her visit, and—I’ll admit it—boy did I feel DUMB! I love to read, but I haven’t had anything challenge me like this since I graduated from college. I had to take notes and write down questions and look stuff up! At first I didn’t think I could get through it, and I certainly wondered how our students could, but then it seemed to grab me and I had a hard time putting it down, even while on spring break.

During the first week of April, Ms. Jacoby gave a lecture at the university on Wednesday evening to a full house. The next day, she came to Metro with our friend Kathy Sullivan from the OSU Battelle Center for Education Policy. They immediately requested 2nd year student Travis Kent as a tour guide. It seems Travis had attended the lecture the night before with Mrs. McAllister and another student, and made sure that he stayed to meet both Kathy and Ms. Jacoby. He obviously made quite an impression!

After the tour, we sat in one of our cubby circles in the open space and the nine students were given time to ask questions and discuss their thoughts about what they had read. I have to give a LOT of credit to Mrs. McAllister for working on this with them. They had a great grasp of this challenging material and they were very brave to question the ideas of an intellectual author. As always, they made me very proud.

After the discussion, Ms. Jacoby headed to Battelle to speak at the Women’s Employee Resource Group brown-bag. The first thing she said was how much she had enjoyed meeting students at Metro and how it left her with such a feeling of hope! Coming from someone who has just written a book about the dumbing down of America, it was high praise indeed. She said if there were more schools like Metro, she wouldn’t have had to write the book!

She even remarked that Travis had asked her to advise him on the proper amount of time a young man like him should spend watching television or video games versus studying. She loved his question because it showed that he understood her message correctly—that television and video are not bad, only that we don’t balance them in our lives in order to leave time for learning. Mrs. McAllister’s students were so thrilled when I told them of the great comments she made about them to Battelle staff!