There was a story in the newspaper the other day about some kind of robotics class at Tyner Academy High School that normally I would not have read. But the page one picture with it caught my eye – it showed Jordon Torrance intensely studying a robot arm as the machine actually wrote words per his command. Jordon is black, his dreadlocks hanging down in front of his eyes, and he had a thick chain around his neck, but I am betting whoever is lucky enough to hire him will get a darn good kid.
Jordon doesn’t know it yet but most people who do the hiring in just about any company aren’t real big on ‘dreads.’ Appearance is far too important in today’s employment lines.
But, then again, what the human resource people don’t know is that over Jordon’s school-mandated uniform, he was wearing his Tyner Rams football jersey. I will promise you this – any teenager who plays football for three years under Coach Wayne Turner is a great kid so tell the boss to get past the hairdo.
Dreadlocks don’t bother me. I know a guy’s hair has nothing to do with his ability and right now, while he’s in school with his teammates, that’s probably a cool thing to do -- good for him. I’m more about the hours of hot practice Jordon Torrance has endured when he didn’t have to, about the teamwork, the discipline, the repetition until you get it right, and the other attributes that the delightful Coach Turner inspires in his players (Incidentally, Tyner is now 3-0 going into tonight’s game against Boyd-Buchanan.)
I’m not picking on Jordon. Rather, he is a sterling example of how tremendously important high school athletics are in these times in which we live. Anybody will tell you the life lessons a teenager learns from athletics become the cornerstones of a child’s building process. High school sports aren’t popular with the liberal types, which is the real reason our high school stadiums all across town have fallen into woeful despair. What a huge black eye for the school board and its underlings that is.
The Hamilton County school system will whine they don’t have the funds available, especially since the school board had to ante up $4 million for math books this summer. Please. Any fool would have gone on Amazon and bought cheaper books. Even better, let the Board of Education literally buy the copyright to a math book printed 25 years ago, have the “central office” do-nothings tweak it a little, and we could have printed all we needed for under $10 apiece.
Say what you will, but basic math theory and formulas haven’t changed in about 100 years. The textbook racket is incredible and the school board should know, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, textbook prices – from 1977 through June of 2015 – have risen 1,041 percent. To pay $4 million for math books as East Ridge’s football stadium is condemned is “collectively stupid” by those we had hoped were better than that.
My point is that if there is a slick way that keeps the clueless from falling prey to some textbook pirate, there is a darn good way to preserve our playing fields for deserving guys like Jordon Torrance all across town. And you ask why superintendent Rick Smith can’t raise money?
Tyner Academy is full of at-risk kids. Almost the entire student body comes from a poverty setting but we need to fight for kids who join the Rams’ basketball and track teams instead of the gangs that savagely prey on our children. According to Kendi Anderson’s story in the Times Free Press several days ago, only one percent of those who were graduated from Tyner this spring could meet all four college-ready benchmarks. That’s tremendously disheartening and a harsh charge against any faculty.
But because I know what the football jersey Jordon Torrance wears really means, I read the story that normally I wouldn’t. It was about an innovative program that teacher Bryan Robinson (my newest hero) has brought to Tyner called “mechatronics,” a combination of mechanical engineering, robotics and electronics that will lead to fruitful lives by the kids who seek work once out of high school. That’s the most exciting news I’ve heard about in our public schools in over a year. Wow!
Face it, most Tyner graduates don’t go to college but every one of them needs a job. My whole deal with education is to meet these kids where they are, put them into a challenging classroom with people like Mr. Robinson and leave off the Latin class. Conversely, every child at Tyner should take typing (key-boarding) because that will get them hired instead of the next guy whose only type is his behavior disorder.
When I was growing up, we had Kirkman Technical High School that created job skills for kids all over town. Granted, not many went to college from Kirkman, which is why the liberals had it torn down, but hundreds of kids learned a trade and were the first many companies hired over others because Kirkman kids were already skilled at threading a pipe, sealing a head gasket, or plumbing a field line.
If we still had Kirkman, we could teach kids how to print math books and save even more money. But as I understand it, the dreamers demanded that every child must have a path to be a nuclear engineer instead of a guy who drives a train. As a result, we have plunged so many who should have meaningful jobs today into “generational poverty,” this when there are right now an estimated 50,000 vacancies for truck drivers in the United States!
It is achingly obvious Chattanooga has turned into quite a different town in the last 15 to 20 years. Our education leaders haven’t learned that yet. Volkswagen needs people who can weld, fix computers, and manage much larger robots than Jordon Torrance is mastering in Mr. Robinson’s class. Let’s talk to Alstom/General Electric, Wacker and other companies that are moving here who have immediate openings for “blue collar” workers.
I believe it is going to be cool real soon to be a “blue-collar” worker because Lord only knows this is our most pressing need. People are begging for diesel mechanics, electricians with common sense, and plumbers – have you checked what those cats haul down versus some college graduate with a philosophy degree who still hasn’t landed a job?
Don’t misunderstand. I wish every child could end up with a master’s degree and staunchly believe four years at a university is far more to be desired than the 50 percent attrition rate at Howard High. But my heart bleeds for guys like my Tyner football player because, unless I badly misread a hunch, his football coach alone has molded Mr. Torrance into the teamwork-type of a guy Amazon is searching for this very minute.
Tyner Academy’s “mechatronics” class came because instructor Bryan Robinson saw how truly bright and smart his kids were and thought “outside the box.” There are nine bright-eyed members now in his class and this January about 25 more have been picked. Because of Coach Turner and Mr. Robinson, I am betting Jordon Torrance can get a full-time job before he even gets his high school diploma. I’d sure recommend him.
royexum@aol.com