Learning Different Than Knowing

 


What we learn, we know. I don't know how to steal hubcaps, rob banks, or sell drugs. Nobody ever showed me how to do those things. I have always felt my body type was better suited to robbing banks than teaching English.

Fortunate for me, and maybe you, too, some adult took me by the hand and showed me, or told me, how to do other things. My grandmother, Lillie Howell, was one of them.

One day home on college break and eating a corner piece of one of her June blackberry cobblers, she walked up to where I sat and said apropos nothing, "If you ever get thrown in jail, don't expect me to come visit," dished me up another serving, and walked back to the stove. Obviously, it made an impression. I'm still talking about it, right?

And so it has been as far back as I can remember: Men, and quite a few women, setting me on the straight and narrow whether I liked it or not.

I don't know why Gary James took it upon himself to teach an archery class to Keystone Elementary kids grades K-6 this summer after school had closed, but he did it. I think the kids had "Coach" James' undivided attention for three days, maybe four. Lots of other adults had already gone on vacation. I'm one.

James had some help. Chris Nelson, Laurie Veteto, Colin Berg, Wayne Hayes, and Linda Wilson jumped in and shored up the "weak spots." Imagine one man corralling all those Mexican jumping beans. Kids here, kids there; here a kid, there a kid, everywhere a kid, kid, and some of them carrying bows and arrows.

Every day's session involved hands-on-instruction, skill tests for average scores to mark progress, and prizes for every participant. The cost for all that? Nothing, except time, donated, out of the lives of the adults making it all happen.

Once students advance to the seventh grade, they can qualify for the national tournament for school archery programs held in Kentucky. James' program sent several Keystone rangers to Nationals this year.

One of James' fifth graders this year, Isabel Ramsay, had to practically be forced to participate because of shyness when she entered the program back in the third grade, but this year won two tournaments, now practices on her own at home, and is likely to be good enough to make Nationals when she enters seventh-grade. Exactly the kind of story that makes a coach happy, happy, happy.

David Campbell? Yes, he teaches the junior high kids in the Transitional Learning Center in Sand Springs, not the easiest job on campus. Well, yes, he gets paid, but not for the extra trip to Zink Ranch every year to expose some of those kids to maybe the first fishing trip of their lives. He is months in organizing the affair, finding sponsors to donate products for the kids to use, buying meat and extras for the event's picnic lunch, barbecuing briskets, hamburgers, and whatever else doesn't get out of his way, and cleaning up the mess afterwards. No overtime, just lots of time willingly given away from his own family.

Clyde Boyd Assistant Principal J.J. Smith, right in there with him. Two good men with too many kids, but it has always been so, right?

Some things, some people, aren't for sale. We learn their value way too late; sometimes not at all. Those I know wouldn't have it any other way.

My grandmother had no money. A fistful of twenty-dollar bills wouldn't have gotten her on the inside of a jailhouse. Yet, she wouldn't let me go to school in ragged clothes. She knew how to sew and would. She fed me well. It was all good, and I learned what I know.

Copyright © 2013 Conrad M. Vollertsen


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