727, Quote from my second grade teacher. Posted by Mike Shaffer, Fri May-22-20 08:55 PM
“We don’t know if Michael can read, because he won’t read out loud.”
It turned out to be the best thing to have happen at age seven. I got books. And Dad started buying classics like Moby ##### and David Copperfield that were included in some sort of deal at grocery stores in the mid 1950s. And as a bonus Dad would read to us at bed time from books like Call of the Wild by Jack London. And he took my brother and I to the library on payday weekends. It was an amazing time because Dad never did anything halfway.
I was shy. The Army and Nam helped to knock that out of me, but what turned the trick was teaching a college course on Railroad Transportation Concepts to adults. To quote my buddy Eddie, “That’ll learn ya durn ya.“. I used to dismiss the class early, because I was basically teaching the test that they had to pass to be considered for a job, and the students all worked full time at jobs that didn’t pay as well and lacked things like healthcare, sick leave, vacations and a dozen other incentives that railroad work would afford them. One night a lady complained about not understanding, so I told her to come back in and have a seat. She shouted over her shoulder that the students could all come back in and most did. So, I started asking questions to find out what the problem was. It was worry. The jobs they were trying for paid well and basically they were afraid of not scoring high enough...90 percent or more was the required average. The only person who failed to score 90 or better, in about a decade of classes...left and had left a test page blank. She missed it completely. Students were supposed to have a buddy They could call and who could call them, but she did not. She missed the cut by one percentage point. I explained to the folks in personnel that she had aced the rest of the test, but was a point shy because she had inadvertently skipped a page. The answer I got back was “safety concerns”...The Railroad did not cut corners when it came to safety.
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