There's no such thing as a free lunch

You might want to read this column — while you still can.

It's Mike Klocke, editor of The Record, the newspaper from my home town of Stockton, Calif. He writes most Sundays, and yesterday, Jan. 10, he defended his company's decision to create a "pay wall" to access Recordnet, the online version of the newspaper. That pay wall should be in place beginning this week.

For this small pond, that's big news.

The Record isn't the only paper in the Dow Jones Local Media Group to do this. SouthCoastToday.com is also piloting the pay wall. (Read more here.)

But why, in my blog devoted to high school education, is it the subject worthy of a post?

Well, because students in general need to learn this lesson — the lesson taught to me in Econ 1A at Delta College nearly three decades ago and still true today: "There's no such thing as a free lunch."

When I was in college, that saying seemed like a mere abstraction that belonged in the textbook and needed to be memorized for the upcoming test, not particularly relevant to my 18-year-old world. Now it seems different.

Most of the students I teach are poor; some are middle class. And yet so many, regardless of socioeconomic standing, manage to carry around iPods packed with music and go home to computers filled with software. Did they really buy all those songs? Did they really buy that version of Photoshop?

Once you discover these same students are watching new release movies at home on those same computers, you know you already have the answer to those questions. They may not have much cash in their pocket, but they manage to keep themselves fed when it comes to entertainment.

I realize, sadly, I am sounding like the old person that every young person swore he never wanted to become. In my day we did this. In my day we NEVER did that.

That's not what I mean at all.

If I were a high school student now, I too would know the names of all those sites where I could download free music, free software and free movies.

At the same time I suspect someone would tell me it is wrong to do those things. As a teacher of journalism and English who promotes creativity and original expression and who punishes plagiarism with a cruel hand, it is awfully hard to say nothing about ethics.

Students might respond: But those artists have more money than they'll ever need. What does it matter?

I might respond: What about tomorrow's artists?

Same thing with journalism. Yes, countless people have read Recordnet.com without having to pay (and without buying a print edition) for years now. Why should they start paying for something that had once been free? Well, for the same reason that people now pay sometimes up to $100 a month to watch TV when once it was free. (Yes, I know ... many more channels now!)

Journalists aren't necessarily artists. And they sure don't have "more money than they'll ever need."

But we need journalists. We need reporters to tell the truth when our elected official attempt to conceal it.

And if that costs 77 cents a week, well, a democracy is well worth it.

It's always a sports analogy

I write this on Jan. 1, 2010 — the beginning of a new decade. Decades are always cause for pause and reflection. Presidents can vow to send a man to the moon or to have a terrible wall torn down, and given time, it just might happen. As for schools, it's a little different. We may have the same politicians and similar fiery speeches. We may have the same impassioned promises. We may have blue-ribboned panels and millions (or billions) of dollars attached to the project. The project may be to address the Nation at Risk. The project may be to leave No Child Behind. We all want students to be smarter, more prepared; we want schools to be technologically up-to-date; we want classes to be small; we want the curriculum connected to the careers of tomorrow.

Oh yeah. We want good teachers, too.

Which leads me to reflect that today is also Jan. 1. Day of resolutions. Day 1 of diets. Day of nonstop football.

Leave it to Malcolm Gladwell, great writer and thinker, to put together two seemingly disparate topics: football and education. Or, more specifically, how to find a great quarterback, and how that is just as difficult as finding a great teacher. In my post-holiday trip to a bookstore, gift card in hand, I picked up two of his books, The Tipping Point and What the Dog Saw. The latter is a collection of his essays from The New Yorker magazine.

The essay that begins by looking at sports but ultimately examines education (for what we do poorly) and the field of financial planning (for what it does a bit better) is entitled "Most Likely to Succeed: How do we hire when we can't tell who's right for the job?" The entire essay, originally published in December 2008, can be found here.

Although I do like how Gladwell writes, I appreciate even more how he thinks. He avoids the tempting traps of those writing about education, chief among them propose a simple solution (because we teachers could never think of something simple) and compare schools to the "real world" (because we teachers have no understanding of that place).

Instead, Gladwell does two things that make a whole lot of sense. First, he identifies the teacher as the most important single component to an education, much like a football team revolves around the quarterback. Second, he says it is almost impossible to foretell what will make a good teacher until the person is already doing the job. Scoring high on a test is no more predictive of success for a prospective teacher than firing a football through a tire for a prospective pro quarterback.

It is this premise (the importance of good teachers) and its accompanying challenge (the difficulty of finding good teachers) that spurs this blog. As a teacher for more than half of my life, this topic has long been a passion. I believe it was important to me even when I was a high school student myself. I know it now has greater importance as my own son is in high school.

Education, of course, is everyone's concern. It is even the concern of the retired couple that would prefer not to pay more for property taxes because their kids are now "long out of school." Education must be important. Why else would every president, every governor, even every mayor make it somehow central to the campaign?

Everyone's voice matters when it comes to discussion of public schools. I hope in this blog not to be either a complainer or an apologist. We teachers are important, yes, but we can quickly become annoying.

Let's just see what happens if I tell the stories and let you decide.

Happy new year. It's time to kick off a decade.