Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, July 3, 2006
Slightly off topic …
Indulge me for a moment while a recommend a great new blog that is unrelated to education. It’s called ShareSleuth, a site dedicated to exposing business fraud and other nefariousness using investigative reporting techniques.
The founder, Chris Carey, is a very sharp reporter who formerly worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (I met Chris through the Knight-Wallace fellowships, where he was a 2006 fellow and I was a fellow in 2005.)
This is a really interesting experiment, merging the power of blogging with traditional reporting to try to give readers information of interest or importance to them that they might otherwise never have learned. Expect to see Chris breaking major news stories on his blog in the very near future.
Permalink | | Categories: Journalism
Heartbreaking …
When Ian Ybarra went back to his old high school and talked to his father’s AP classes about a great summer camp opportunity for top students, he also was on the lookout for any really smart, motivated kids he might encourage to apply to top colleges (he’s an MIT grad).
Out of 35 kids, three took Ybarra up on the camp:
- One kid asked for his help, got a letter of recommendation from Ybarra and then … he never applied for the camp.
- Another never said a word to Ybarra or asked for his help, but applied on his own.
- And then there was Jessica Pierce, the one kid who did everything right. She wasn’t afraid to ask Ybarra for help, to utilize his guidance, and pretty soon Ybarra was pulling all the strings he could to get Jessica into a top college.
Jessica was going places, Ybarra said. Which makes her shocking death all the more tragic.
Jessica was on a student trip to Costa Rica when weather conditions changed in seconds and she drowned in the sea along with two other students and a teacher.
Ybarra’s touching tribute to Jessica reminds other young people to seize their opportunities in life:
“Today was her funeral. At the service, one of her best friends concluded her eulogy by reading the following from an essay Jessica had written for school or an application or something:
“We have all been given so many opportunities, and we need to make sure that we are doing everything that we can do to make the most of them.”
Jessica doesn’t have the opportunity to go to college now, or to see more of the world, or to find work she loves and do it with all her mind, body, and soul.
But you and so many others do.
If you run across a young person who’s finding reasons to avoid doing great things, point them to this story. Perhaps they’ll get it. Perhaps they won’t.
If you run across parents who are confining their children’s lives to the limits they long ago placed on their own, point them to this story. Help them understand how lucky they are to be able to send their daughter to college or to an internship or job 1,000 miles away. I know Jessica’s parents would love to do that, just to know Jessica was living and living well. Perhaps they’ll get it. Perhaps they won’t.
Either way, Jessica’s story will speak to those who have that special thing inside that she had. And if her legacy is having inspired even those few people, it will be a legacy of a life well lived.”
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
