Today was a day of extremes. In the morning, I was at a career center in one of my districts, and the high-school juniors and seniors in the class were working with programs like Illustrator, Photoshop and Rhino, which is apparently a CAD-type design program I have to admit I've never even heard of before. In the afternoon, I had sixth-graders, most of whom had the regard for education that the lion's share seem to these days; distaste, unwillingness, and seemingly the remnants of some enculturated idiocy. The expectation, it seems, that if their education happened to fail them...no problem. Spend enough money on lottery tickets, go on a game show, or, God forbid, work, if you really had to, but inevitably somebody would take care of you. I mean, this is America, land of the free, and home the indigent and pampered, right? THAT particular bubble cannot burst soon enough. The truth, of course, is probably somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, and it really is heartening to see young people learning high-tech skills while they're young enough to make a difference. That's what I really want; to teach kids who WANT it. Those who have the intelligence and foresight to realize that it's either keep up, or get mowed down. Those who aren't waiting to be driving behind an armored car and have a bag of money fall on their hood. I've seen that kind of want-it attitude in America before, but it isn't nearly as common as it is in other countries. Here, we suspend students from school, hoping that it's going to be a punishment, and they take it only as more time to sit at home and play video games. I had one of my sixth-graders today that I had to send to the office; his retort to me on his way out the door? "Thanks for the vacation." I was heartened here only when I saw that he got an In School Suspension, which is the way things should have always been, or we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in as a nation right now. I guess you can call that progress. Instead of filling up the jails, or inflicting the ultimate punishment of just pure stupidity, some people are thinking. Perhaps not soon enough, because public elementary and secondary education budgets are still being raided to fund higher education. Say WHAT? How the he*l are students supposed to even GET to higher education, if they don't have the skills to get into college in the first place? This is the most bass-ackwards philosophy I think I've ever heard of. Not unexpected, if you ask me, but screwball none the less. If we consider "education" to include those learn at 50 what they should have learned at 18, because the industrial economy in America prized muscle over intellect, and a group of people ended up getting caught out, yeah, I suppose that's progress. And maybe it's these people who will finally succeed in extinguishing the suckling, unwarranted expectation that has essentially robbed this country of its greatness. But somehow or other, it's got to be instilled in our young students that they have no right to expect anything great if they haven't put the time into thinking that they should. I'll cheer when every student from the age of 5 on up wants it, and nobody expects that their failure to learn should deny them anything.