Andy's Blog

Many times on the air Allen will refer to his high school with pride when he states that his High School Alma Mater are the national champions at football. Well it is my turn to offer pride in my high school. I was casually checking out Fort Wayne Observed today (it makes me feel connected to "home"), and amongst my parousing I came across that according to US News & World Report, my high school, Homestead High School, has been ranked as one of the top 505 public schools (top 3%) in the country.

There are many times in my life when I have had the privilege to reflect on how blessed I am to have been born in the United States of America. You don't work in AIDS villages in South Africa, or sleep in a bed 1/4 of mile from a bomb explosion in Jerusalem, or build orphanages in Honduras with out realizing that living in America is a blessing - one which wasn't earned, despite what most Americans seem to think.

But more and more recently, I have come to the realization that my school was a blessing I didn't earn either - and it was a blessing that prepared me for college and life more than I could have ever expected.

I often joked with my friends in college that my hardest year of college was my junior year of high school. And while it was a joke, there was some truth there. Taking 5 AP classes and being an editor on the yearbook was quite challenging. But the brilliance of Homestead was that it wasn't just about the bookwork - it was about a holistic approach to education.

I think back to Block (AP History & AP English combined) and think about the extreme amount of energy that had to have been put into that by Mr. Schmidt, Ms. Decalone, Mr. Teagarden, and Ms. Walker. They didn't just teach historical facts and grammar (which we all know I must have been asleep for the grammar part), but they taught us how to think, how to debate, how to process information, and how to interpret.

I think about Journalism and how truly grateful I am to Mr. Kuhn for not just the journalistic integrity he taught me, but the independence he gave to me to learn my own lessons. Who knew I would eventually use those lessons to produce a talk radio show on the largest news radio source in the South (and no I took no journalism classes in college).

I even think about Woodside Middle School (feeder for Homestead) where I did my first and only web programming class and my first and only video editing class with Mr. Gorman. These are two elements of my life where I have succeeded at GREATLY and they have pretty much enabled me to do that which I do now. Yet I had no collegiate education to show for these areas either.

Middle school was also important because it had Mr. Panning – a man that taught me more about life and provided a great example of what it was to be a man during a time when I desperately needed that (he was a great Math teacher and Cross Country coach too).

I even enjoy that when comparing a lot of the “Gold” rated schools to Homestead, it appears most are “privilege sections” of public schools (basically they are gifted-only academies in public school districts). Even that fact makes me proud that Homestead was truly integrated. I was in ALPHA (the gifted program of Southwest Allen) beginning in Kindergarten – yet I had gym with the star football player, I had photography with the crazy hippy where you wondered if she was on drugs, and I had biology and literature with kids who had very different theological and social outlooks. All this to say, I learned about life and how to interact with people different than me. It wasn’t a sheltered bubble of brainy kids isolated like those of "public academies", but rather a melting pot of experience and perspective.

I currently live in an suburb of Atlanta much like Southwest Allen…only about 10 times more wealthy and “yuppie”. Instead of Dick Freeland and Tom Kelly - you’d know who I am talking about if you lived in Southwest Allen - Usher, Jeff Foxworthy, John Smoltz, and the CEOs of Fortune-500 companies are my neighbors. What cracks me up about this area is how many private academies there are (I can count 6 within the same space as my old school district). Yet I still don’t think any of them do as good of a job of educating and preparing a holistic person better than Homestead did. I spoke at a local private academy's career day earlier this year and I reminded them of Mark Twain's quote, "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education." School is more than just books. Homestead got this; I am not sure most private schools do.

Ultimately, it is the teachers that I am most grateful for. I now have a lot of teacher friends, and I know how hard it is. I know how hard it is to deal with parents that think they know better or that their kid is more special than the rest. I know how hard it is to come up with lesson plans that not only educate but that are engaging. I know how hard it is to wake up at 6:30 just to be greeted at 7:30 by a lethargic class. But as all teachers know, it isn't about them. It is about the students. And from one student, simply put, thanks for everything.