Who Is This Man?
by Barry Adkins on January 16, 2012
Who is this man?
I grew up in a small town in Montana, but also lived in Alaska for a few years. Never got to watch much sports on TV, so I listened to semi pro baseball, high school football and basketball on the radio. I could tell if it was a ball or a strike by the sound of the umpire. I didn’t watch Neal Armstrong land on the moon, but listened to it with my transistor radio glued to my ear. At night, my parents would tell me to turn off the radio, so I turned it down so that only I could hear it. Many nights I listened until the national anthem played. To this day, I would rather listen to a game while I am doing something, than waste three hours sitting there watching it.
I was a horrible student when I was younger, mostly because I didn’t see the point in learning. I suspect that many students struggle for the same reason that I did, “Why do I need to learn this?” I think that we need to take another look at how and what we teach our children in school. The show, “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” is proof that we teach our children a great number of things that don’t have real world applications, and if they don’t apply in the real world, exactly why are we teaching it to them?
Shortly after high school, I decided to go back to Alaska, (Homer to be exact), to see if I could find work. I found a job all right, working night shift in a Laundromat. My job was to pull all the wet sheets, from a local hotel, out of the washer and put them in a dryer. Talk about fun! Well, it turns out, the guy that owned the Laundromat was a well known fisherman. He offered me a job working on his boat. He told me the reason he offered me the job was because I was willing to pulls sheets, on second shift, in a Laundromat He was a salmon seiner and I spent two summers with him fishing Prince William Sound and Kodiak Island . A very neat experience indeed!
I became a much better student when I decided to further my education, in this new field of electronics, and I had to pay for it. Now I go out of my way to do things that force me to learn.
Stay tuned for the next installment of “Who Is This Man?”
Something very good will come from this….
