Feb.11, 2004

By Alex J.Walling

True story:

Last June, opening of an ice cream shop (Fairview location) and a young (18 year old), seemingly intelligent and pleasant young lady is at the controls. She is working to make money and had been accepted as a first year university student to the Dalhousie / Kings ‘foundation year’ program.

We are setting up for opening day and there is a problem as the cash register is not functioning properly.

“Oh, my god, what I am going to do she says?”

“No problem,” I reply, “here use the cash box and take this calculator to figure out the total,” I said.

“But, but….I’m not good at math,” she says, now getting flustered.

“What math?” I say, “We are talking about multiplying, adding and subtraction, not geometry or calculus,” I say somewhat perplexed after all she is going into UNIVERSITY.

“But, I’m not sure how to do that,” she said.

Yes, I was slightly shocked but should have known better.

Case #2:

The best panic attack I have seen in the past five years is when I dropped into, following a Mount “A” game, the Wendy/Tim’s outlet on the Trans-Canada near Sackville, NB.

I walked into a crisis.

Had there been a robbery?

Was an employee hurt?

Did a customer have a heart attack?

No, no and no.

The crisis was the computers were not working. There was a computer malfunction and only one calculator was available to some ten staff members and I think the battery was dying on it.

The employees, mostly high school kids working the weekend shifts, were forced to …..imagine this……ADD, MULTIPLY AND SUBTRACT WITHOUT CALCULATORS !!!! And they were struggling to do it.

“When do you carry something? “How do you subtract and carry over or borrow for the next figure?” was the question from another one. My bill, a simple one, was pondered like the New York crossword. It took nearly five minutes to add and subtract and it should have taken seconds.

The examples are countless.

For nearly 15 years I owned and taught at the Atlantic Media Institute. On the first day we informed kids that the number one activity they would do is read. Read the Daily News, the Herald, Readers Digest, Trade periodicals, the Internet. Read, read and read.

That’s what most of us in the news business do. We read, watch (video) and write. In TV we watch tons of material in viewing the video feeds; in radio we are forever reading the BN/CP news wire and the same in print.

The biggest shock since 1988, when I opened up the career college, then called ABI (Atlantic Broadcasting Institute) was the fact that most kids know so little outside of their immediate surroundings.

Our audition was fairly simple and it was meant to give a general indication of a person’s knowledge and also to show the student how much work (reading) they have to do in the coming months.

There was a simple geography test such as, name the ten provinces, and their capitals and the premiers?

A perfect score was 30. None of us expected that although we did get a few, very few. Maybe 65-75% knew the ten provinces (no, Vancouver is not one of them) but only 20% could rattle off all ten capital cities. Most said Calgary was it for Alberta and again most said Vancouver for BC. 80% forgot Victoria.

As for naming the premiers, forget it. 90% couldn’t name the maritime premiers, many couldn’t say who ran Nova Scotia and 95% didn’t have a clue who was the mayor of our city is and yet some want to be ‘legislative and municipal reporters?”

And these people are grade 12 graduates with many being college students and maybe 20% had university degrees.

One political science major kept calling our northern provincial neighbour, New Brumswick. When informed by yours truly that it was Bruns – not – Brums.. He was shocked to be told he was wrong and strongly suggested that I get a map and check it out, for he had been there and he was certain he was right.

And so was I, some 32 years ago, when on a CHNS radio cast said ‘irregardless’ and ran into one of the finest wordsmiths that I have ever encountered in Clive Schaeffer.

“AJ, do you mind being corrected?” he said to me. “Why, did I make an error,” I semi bellowed in jest.

“Yes, you did. You said ‘irregardless’.

“That’s right, I did,” I punctuated.

“That word doesn’t exist, AJ,” the veteran human dictionary stated.

“Of course it does,” I retorted.

“Would you like to have a friendly wager on this matter, Mr. Walling,” Clive asked.

“Yep, $1.00 and you can pay me as soon as I find it in the dictionary,” I told him with that confident smirk on my kisser.

Ugh, I never found it.

There is no such word. It is ‘regardless’, not irregardless. There is no Febuary but rather February (rew). It is probably the biggest misspoken word in the language and it’s AT-lantic Canada not A-lantic Canada. Thank God for Clive. I learned more about words and language from this man then any other.

And I have made that dollar back (irregardless) at least 100 times over the decades.

I also, as a media educator, learned that kids need to be challenged and if need be, shown how wrong they are. Show them in a polite, professional and if one can, in a humorous way. But show them and don’t ignore the mistakes.

We had current event tests, twice a week. The material was gleamed from the local newspapers and the top news stories of the day.

The results were posted on the door the next day for all to see. I expected a minimum of 70%, after all this was a media operation, and in the ‘real work force’ we are being paid to inform the public.

‘How can we inform the public if we are not informed ourselves?’ was a line used by all media instructors.

The results went from the rare, but at times attainable 100% to those who got 20-10 and 5%.

Some of the low mark students were not pleased. Not at their marks but the fact that we made it public by posting ALL scores on the board. Some of their parents were upset and a few (not that many) came to see me.

“You are embarrassing my son/daughter is what I was told,” let’s say 7-10 times in my 13 years of running that school.

My answer was one I truly believe in and that is: “I’m not embarrassing your child he/she is embarrassing himself/herself.” Performances like that in the ‘real world’ either gets you fired or never hired and the sooner our kids realize this fact of life, the better.

I’m getting fed up on this self esteem thing. We can’t say this or say that because Johnny or Jane will have their self esteemed lower.

It’s time for Jane and Johnny and their parents to wake up. Self esteem is in most cases regulated by performance. Sell many cars and you get the top salesperson award and a better parking spot. Sell more homes and you get a corner office. Kids have to learn to achieve or try to and failure, while a sign at times of someone trying, is also a sign that can cause problem and the reasons for failure have to be addressed especially if it is laziness or apathy.

We weren’t embarrassing them by putting up the scores we were acknowledging the work done by the students who were doing the job or mastering the current events.

Go to any car dealership and you will see who the ‘top salesperson’ is. Go to a fast food place and you are apt to see the ‘employee of the month’. Walk into most businesses and you will likely see the achievements that the company or the staff has gathered.

The best thing a school education can do is get a kid ready for the real world and give them tools to battle or function in it.

Those tools are reading, writing and math and sorry folks but we are either last in this country or darn close to it, in these critical subjects and I don’t understand why? Also a good attitude and some realization of the ‘real world’ doesn’t hurt and should be taught or mentioned often as soon as a kid hits high school.

“Being average isn’t good enough,” is a saying that a friend of mine uses.

‘Who wants to be represented by an ‘average’ lawyer? Who wants to hire an average student when a top one is available?

I’m also fed up at hearing about class sizes etc. which is the normal pap coming out of the teachers union.

Baloney.

Why can’t kids add? Do they even know what a times table is? I doubt it.

Can they spell?

Why not and why isn’t a weekly spelling bee a part of class starting in grade 3 until the end of junior high?

If a kid speaks poorly like, “I don’t got none…” why doesn’t a teacher step in right then and correct it. And keep correcting it until they get it right?

Class size has nothing to do with it. It’s the biggest copout going on these days.

Kids can learn, and most want to learn, but we have to teach them.

In my last years as a media instructor I became hell bent on people speaking properly. My excuse is, ‘when I hear the likes of Steve Murphy, Bruce Graham, Bruce Rainnie, Lloyd Robertson and others start to speak poorly’ then I will give in, but not until then. And I don’t see it happening in my lifetime.

By the way, other than Rainnie who graduated from Dal and was looking at med school, all the others never went to college.

In conversations at AMI, if a kid made a grammatical mistake they paid a dollar to a charity.

The biggest mistake was the phrase.. “Me and … as in, ‘me and John’. “No, it’s John and I” we would say as we collected the dollar.

Do you want proof that kids can learn? No student ever paid more than eight dollars in fines. And only one or two did that and one of those got hit by saying ..’me and so and so’.. three times in the same sentence.

Never, more than eight bucks to sound educated and not ignorant.

But the kids have to be corrected. They have to be challenged and teachers seem hesitant or are gutless to do so and I don’t understand why.

The result is we have or are bordering on having the most ignorant students in this country and something has to change. We deserve better. Our kids deserve better and the classroom is the best place to start.