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Mayor can use time to prepare

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Contributed by: William Kus on 7/3/2007

One thing people should try and remember is that battles are won before they start. Or how sports are won in the training rooms.

You have a year to prepare for a Mayoral surge into the LAUSD. Instead of stumbling into it, you can set it up so that you don't need any "settling" time. You can proceed with plans that you've smoothed over with the parents and stuff.

Use it to make sure you won't use a bunch of superficial ideas with no merit.

What exactly were you going to do with your cluster of schools if you got them? I'm sure you have some ideas.

Like Admiral Brewer III was saying that you need to work in partnership with the parents, teachers and most importantly the students. Building trust and getting more input from them is crucial to the success.

Have we asked the students what might help. Probably not as much as we should.

I would go to every school, good and bad, and find out what works and what doesn't work. Use those programs that work and get rid of the ones that don't.

Maybe some programs work some places and it doesn't others. You can find out why.

Maybe you think you've done this already, but it never hurts to keep going and finding out what is really wrong with the LAUSD.

Were you that great of a student Mayor? I know I'm not. The whole system of school sets us up for failure.

Lots of successful people didn't go to that much school. Maybe a complete overhaul of everything LAUSD is necessary.

I know the majority of changes will be largely superficial.

Repaint some schools, new text books, raises for the teachers. Couple of new afterschool programs scattered around a million students or something.

New programs with catchy names like No Child Left Behind or something.

Why not something more interesting like "Skateboard class" or "DJ class", nah let's learn Math that nobody uses anyways.

It's one thing to train your mind, but there are other ways to make your mind sharp without mundane classes.

I was saying before, schoolspromote a culture of idiocy ina lot of our modern campuses. They aren't learniing zones but gangster zones where a bunch of kids go who DONT want to be there.

Let'sget a good picture of where our kids stand. Let the kids whowho don't want to go to school not go so that they don't ruin the few good ones.

Anyways,if the Mayor had 100 years to prepare he couldn't fix the LAUSD, so I hope he uses this one year to make some dramatic progress.

He can make dramatic progress by motivating the teachers, students andparents to start to learn.

You don'tneed afancy school to learn, you just need a strong desire to learn. From there the world opens up.

I didn't start seeing the wonders of learning until Itook music classes, then dance. Then some PE classes. I started to learn school could be fun.

There's plenty of fun stuff to learn about, like fixing cars, taking photographs, all sorts of outdoor sports like rock climbing, kayaking, boating, surfing, boogie boarding or whatever.

They made me realize that learning could be fun. When you teach yourself how to learn something easy, you can apply that to something more difficult, like Math or English.

People need motivation to do things. Only the hardiest of folks can do things they hate and do a good job. Most do a terrible job when they hate something. Some people do a terrible job when they love something, but usually if they love something they'll do a good job by default.

They always say, most people just haven't found what they like to do. Video games was something I liked to do. I played video games professionally as a QA tester for 8 years.

It was great, I made a lot of money. But I am glad I went back to school. IIt was then the world really opened up.

I wish I could have known how fun school could be when I was young. Maybe I could have made it fun for myself like I try to make college.

But the LAUSD was the most spirit sapping experience I could have ever imagined. I thank my mom for putting me in a home schooling program. I learned nothing and yet I learned more than most kids who stayed in school.

I didn't learn discipline though. That's something that still eludes me.

Anyways good luck to the Mayor and the Admiral, they are going to need it. I think they'll make good changes. But the real changes will come in the communities. It fits into their parents welfare and society in general.

The LAUSD is red light saying our society is broken, our communities are broken, our country is also broken in many ways.

Nobody can see it until it's too late to fix.

Hopefully they become proactive leaders.

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