Posts Tagged ‘SDPTQ’

Mistakes of a first-year Teacher

November 17th, 2009

I have a confession to make.  When I started my teaching career at Tripp High School in 1990, I had no idea what it meant to teach in a small rural school.  Having grown up in Hartford, SD, a small town just outside of Sioux Falls, I always thought of myself as a rural kid.  But in reality, my high school experience was closer to that of a suburban school than a rural school.  And more importantly, nothing in my college teacher preparation courses suggested that teaching in rural schools was any different than teaching in urban settings.

Case in point:  During my first year of teaching, I introduced a personal finance unit into my micro economics class.  Hoping to show my students how they could be “smart shoppers,” I demonstrated how they could save money by switching from buying individual cans of pop from the school’s pop machine to buying pop in bulk. And if they were really smart, I suggested, they would drive to Sioux Falls to buy at a discounter like Sam’s Club — because that’s where the real savings could be realized. 

If you’ve lived in a rural community, you recognize the stupidity of my example.  But for those who don’t, let me explain:

First, I did not factor in the cost of driving the 90 miles to Sioux Falls.  (Boy would my green friends today have a problem with this.)

Second, it did not consider the importance of patronizing a business in one’s community.  Our local grocery story displayed good community citizenship, while Sam’s Club didn’t know (or care) that Tripp, SD even existed. 

And finally, the model for saving money I shared didn’t factor in how the city council would need to ask residents to pay more in property taxes to make up for the declining sales tax revenues resulting from out-of-town purchasing.   

I’ve been thinking about examples like this a lot lately as I work on the South Dakota Partnership for Teacher Quality.  One of the roles the Rural Learning Center will play in the grant is to help first year teachers learn how to live and teach in rural communities.  In some ways, this will involve similar concepts offered by Kyle Ezell in Get Urban.  (see post for more info.)

Teaching and living in rural communities is different from teaching in urban communities. I learned that the hard way.  I wonder how many teacher education programs acknowledge these differences as they prepare teachers?  If they did, we might see young teachers become life-long rural educators.

Photo Credit:  FXR - Flickr

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Rethink, Reinvent, ReImagine

October 28th, 2009

Yesterday, while talking to partner organizations in the South Dakota Partnership for Teacher Quality, I had opportunity to revisit the Rural Learning Center’s tag line “ReImagine Rural.”

I explained to the group that we feel “ReImagine Rural” captures the essence of what the RLC believes about the future of rural communities:  that we need to pioneer a new future;  that this new future needs to be built on transformation — not revitalization; and that this process for rebuilding starts with re-thinking every aspect of our existence.  As Albert Einstein deftly stated decades ago,

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

This in turn reminded me of an open letter Karl Stauber, president of the of the Danville Regional Foundation, recently wrote to President Obama, pleading with the president to find a place for rural communities alongside his vision for urban places.

In the letter titled “Rural Economies must Change or Die,”  Stauber noted a struggle between the defenders of an “Old Economy” and those seeking to bring the “New Economy” to rural communities.  He also emphasized the need for rural communities to seek transformation, stating:

Rural communities used to be able to re-invent their competitive advantage every 50 to 75 years.  Now they must do this every 10 to 15 years.

Re-think. Re-invent.  Re-Imagine.  It’s interesting to think about attaching “re” to a lot of the verbs we use in community development.  Can it be that rural communities need to “re- everything” in our effort to rebuild Rural America?

Note: Karl Stauber is the former president of the Northwest Area Foundation, which helped launch the efforts of the Rural Learning Center with a 10-year partnership the foundation formed with Miner County Community Revitalization.

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