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[Note: This is a prepared text, not a transcript. The talk as given deviated from this text in some details; extemporaneous material was not recorded and has not been reproduced. In particular, bracketed material (a) has been inserted for explanation, or (b) indicates material omitted to save time. -- N.J.]
[Thank you, Dr. Grohe [Dr. Barbara Grohe, Superintendant of Schools] for the honor of this opportunity to share some thoughts about the future of K-12 education with the Iowa City School District teachers and administrators.
As some of you know, I was asked, earlier this year, to speak to your Curriculum Review Group. And to think that, in spite of that talk, you'd give me a second chance. Well, it's humbling.
I was born and raised in Iowa City. The Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic is named for my father.]
I have moved around the world a bit during the years since, but I had a daughter and a sister-in-law who attended Roosevelt, and a son who graduated from West.
And I've now reached the age when I have known personally some of the people for whom your schools are named.
Ernest Horn produced my spelling books, with an additional locomotive on the cover each year as we progressed from first to sixth grade. In fact, I can still spell pretty well for a sixth grader.
Irving Weber was my next door neighbor; his son, Willis, my playmate.
A number of my law school colleagues' spouses teach in your schools. And my wife, Mary Vasey, teaches in an alternative school in Cedar Rapids and serves on the Coalition of Essential Schools national faculty.
So my interest in what you do is more than, well, "academic."
In fact, I attended the University's experimental schools rather than the public schools. And therein lies a warning to you.
[Nor is that all.
So I think it's only fair that you be aware of the risks you run by having me here. When the Iowa City School system is closed next year, don't say I didn't warn you.
Just kidding.
Actually, one theme I want to explore this morning is some of the possible future scenarios for K-12 public education -- including the abolition of the school system as we have known it. But I don't honestly expect any of you to be out of work soon.
The other day I saw a sign hanging on the Roosevelt School fence on Benton Street. It was advertising an ice cream social. I'm partial to ice cream, so it caught my eye.
But it also reminded me of the old bumper sticker: Wouldn't it be nice if teachers were given even more money than they requested, and the Air Force had to hold a bake sale to get enough money for another bomber.
Few of you are old enough to remember, but when I was a boy there was a song with the lyrics: "Our day will come/When we'll have everything."
It remains to be seen whether K-12 schools will ever be given everything; everything you need to perform the role now required of you. But there can be no doubt that "your day has come."
In the 1960s the Broadway musical "Hair" gave us a song with the words, "This is the dawning of the Age of Librarians" -- at least I think those were the lyrics. Well, it is also the dawning of the Age of the K-12 school.
Monday at lunch Barbara and I found ourselves in the same restaurant. She with her guest. I with five of my colleagues from the law school faculty. She was able to see and hear how six law professors can carry on seven simultaneous conversations. In fact, it was hard for her not to hear.
The way we do it is easy, actually. It's a cheap trick. Nobody listens.
But we do have to have a topic. A serious topic.
And Monday's topic, so long as I could control it, was what law professors have to say to K-12 teachers and administrators.
They offered you good news and bad news.
The good news is that they -- like I -- think you are terribly important, that you have an almost decisive impact on the educational future of your students -- and our nation. You are more important than educators anywhere else in the system -- including, not incidentally, law professors.
The bad news is on the other side of that coin: it's the old "pass it on down" reaction to students' poor performance.
The graduate schools blame the faculties of the colleges and universities. The college professors blame the high school teachers. The high school teachers blame the grade school teachers. Everybody blames the parents. And the parents blame TV.
All are correct.
[I am currently in the process of trying to finish up a two-hour, spring semester seminar that is going to end up running at least a full year. I want the students to have the experience of producing professional quality writing. Papers that we can publish on the Web. Much of the editing and many re-writes they are going through involve the correction of errors that somebody should have caught ten to fifteen years ago. But that's the law school faculty's fault as well. We should have been polishing that writing two years ago in our first-year, small- section writing program.]
Part of the explanation lies in George Carlin's wisdom: "Some say the glass is half empty. Some say the glass is half full. I say the glass is too big."
The fact is that we do often put unrealistic expectations on our educators -- and students -- at all levels.
You have asked me to take a forward look this morning and I am happy to try.
It is, of course, impossible to know what is going to happen in the future.
However, it is possible to try to understand what is happening now, and we ought to make more of an effort to find out. Because it turns out that much of what we need to offer our students are some of the same insights we, too, need to speculate about, learn and practice.
As a law professor I am used to speaking for entire semesters at one time. So as a concession to the shortness of life, and my awareness that a new school year is beginning for both you and me, I will hold my comments to a brief skip along the top of a few themes.
Some of what I will say you may find to be new. Most will be familiar to you, but hopefully worth your time to recall and re-apply.
Because we hear a lot about "the Information Age," and because I will be using that phrase from time to time, it may be useful to explain briefly how I use it.
Whether you think of the concept as factual, or mere poetic perspective, I find it a useful way of thinking about both the accelerating rate of change for which we must prepare ourselves and our students, and the revolutionary nature of that change.
That is what distinguishes an "Age" as I am using the word: What is the economic activity in which most persons are engaged? Initially it was foraging.
Few of your graduates, today, will be riding tractors, working the soil, standing on assembly lines, or manipulating machine tools.
Much as we might wish it to be otherwise, the role of education through these Ages has been to prepare the young to be warriors and workers. The courses may have changed from such texts as there may have been for The Sabre-Toothed Curriculum to the Word Perfect help screen on a computer; the so-called "games" -- which we know are training -- may have changed from "cowboys and Indians" to the video war games designed to prepare future F-16 pilots. But the ultimate function remains.
Consider the educational system we created to service the Industrial Age. We were training high school graduates for jobs in factories -- factories run by hierarchial, top-down managerial organizations.
How do you do that? Of course, you make sure students have enough reading and computational ability to run the machinery. But equally or more important, you train them to take orders, do as they are told, receive penalties for absence or tardiness, respond to bells, on schedules, and raise their hands for recognition if they want to speak or otherwise deviate from expected behavior -- like taking a restroom break. Remember when schools were like that? They were just doing their job, and doing it well.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Information Age.
Consider the Internet. You remember who invented it? That's right, the military. The ultimate top-down, hierarchial organization. And look at how they designed it. It was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. An unrealistic goal perhaps, but one producing a radical change in military thinking.
The Internet could not have a single, central "headquarters." Headquarters can be bombed and destroyed. Networks, with a capacity for re-routing themselves around the damage, are bomb-proof. The Internet had to be what, in business literature, we call a "flat organization." What Harlan Cleveland calls a "nobody- in-charge" organization.
Not incidentally, as you probably know, it is the fastest-growing machine-human organization in history.
This has not been lost on American business.
Why is it that the more major corporations "downsize" -- the current euphemism for "fire people" -- the more employment we have? Because global telecommunications is creating a whole new world out there. Telecommunications can link specialty skills, contractors, and suppliers with customers in networks of thousands of independent entrepreneurs located anywhere on Planet Earth -- including Iowa City. It can link them into an organization as closely knit as if they were all across the hall from each other.
And such organizations, like the Internet itself, cannot be run as top-down, hierarchial companies. They are loosely knit associations, partnerships, teams, and think tanks. And those who serve them can be changed as quickly as the computers that run the Internet.
Hopefully, we are helping our students learn to prepare for much more than employment -- for life, leisure, child rearing, and participation in civic affairs.
But imagine a business that earns over 50 percent of its gross revenue from the sale of products and services that did not exist five to ten years ago. What use does it have for someone who only knows how to sit in rows, raise her hand, take orders, and repeat what she's been told? Today's business needs problem solvers; innovators; innovators with imagination; with what, in college, we call a "liberal arts" education. Integrators of knowledge who can see the significance of what they are doing as a blend of ethics, chemistry, sociology, marking, human rights, foreign language, political science, customer service and law. It needs individuals who are used to cooperating in teams, not competing for test scores.
Note that as our species has evolved through the various Ages we have not only needed to adapt to change, we have needed to deal with an ever-increasing rate of change.
There have been some changes in cars from my first Model A Ford to the 1998 models soon to hit the showrooms. But the similarities outweigh the differences, and the innovations have been slow to come. Cars are a product of the Industrial Age.
Computers, by contrast, double their computational capacity every 18 months. This gives rise to what I call the "99.9% off sale."
We are used to Iowa City stores providing sales of 20 or 30 percent off, maybe even 50 percent on occasion. How would life, and our purchases, be different if they had 99.9% off sales?
Because that's exactly what's happened with electronics.
Think again about cars. Suppose you could buy what is today a $25,000 automobile for $25 -- that it would be capable of powering the Queen Mary and could get one million miles to the gallon. That's the rough equivalent of what has happened to computers. How would a twenty-five-dollar car affect your use of them? The number you'd have. Where you'd keep them.
We need the concept of "orders of magnitude" -- changes that involve multiples of ten -- to think about change today. Concepts like "twice as powerful" or "half the price" are no longer very useful.
We are simply not used to orders of magnitude thinking.
When I was a boy in Iowa City there was a Western Union office in the 100 block of East Jefferson. So far as I know, there was absolutely no one in Iowa City at that time who ever entertained the idea of having her own Western Union office in the back yard -- not to mention the living room. It's not that they considered it and rejected the idea as too expensive. It's that the thought never occurred to anyone.
My guess would be that, as of this morning, nearly everyone in Iowa City has at least considered it (even if they haven't acted on it yet), and that probably a third of you in this auditorium have already done it. We call it e-mail.
Sometime when you have a little free time on your hands -- for most of you, I gather, that's only when you're in the shower -- think a bit about the implications of orders of magnitude change in K-12 education. Play the "what if" games.
What if the cost of reproducing all the books in the Library of Congress dropped to a level where half of the families in Iowa City could afford such a library in their homes -- along side their Western Union office? That one is not that far off. What are the implications for our school libraries and media centers?
What if the difficulty in learning to operate computers were to decline by two or three orders of magnitude -- say, to something like the difficulty of dialing a telephone, or channel surfing on a TV set? What would that do to the computer training in schools?
Some years ago I chaired an experimental program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology called the Virtual Classroom Project. We were testing how well students could learn, at home, using only computer conferencing -- rather than attending school. What we found was that, at least in terms of test scores, they did about as well -- sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse.
What if the cost of new school buildings were to increase by one order of magnitude (at least that much has already occurred once in my lifetime), while the popularity of home schooling were to increase by two orders of magnitude?
What if self-instructional materials for the home were to reduce by one or two orders of magnitude the difficulty students have in learning foreign languages and higher math? Would that impact the future job opportunity for teachers of those subjects?
I encourage you to play these "what if" games with orders of magnitude.
So, where are we headed?
It's like the commercial airline pilot's announcement to the cabin: "The good news is we have a tail wind and are making extremely good time. The bad news is we haven't the foggiest notion where we are."
What I am about to read to you is a brief passage from a speech. It was delivered by none other than a president of the United States, President Ronald Reagan. [From the videotape of the event, as well as the structure of the text, he appears to be speaking from the heart, without script or teleprompter. And although I do not know the precise date, it was at least ten years before there were even rumors, let alone acknowledgment, of his having any medical problems whatsoever. He is speaking to a meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. In this excerpt he is telling -- what else? -- an incident of World War Two valor. And the videotape shows that he is bringing to this very solemn moment all the emotional content for which he was so famous -- an ability I will not even try to imitate, lest I bring you, too, to tears.]
"A B-17, coming back across the Channel from a raid over Europe, badly shot up by anti-aircraft. The ball turret that hung underneath the belly of the plane had taken a hit. The young ball turret gunner was wounded, and they couldn't get him out of the turret there while flying. But over the Channel the plane began to lose altitude, and the Commander had to order, 'Bail Out.' And as the men started to leave the plane, the last one to leave -- the boy, understandably, knowing he was left behind to go down with the plane, cried out in terror. The last man to leave the plane saw the Commander sit down on the floor. He took the. boy's hand, and said, 'Never mind son, we'll ride it down together.' Congressional Medal of Honor, posthumously awarded."
After the President's speech, the White House and Pentagon were asked, attempted, and failed, to find any record of such a Congressional Medal of Honor having been awarded.
Where did this story come from? Why would the President tell it on such a solemn occasion if it were not true? This was neither the time nor place to make up such stories. He had absolutely nothing to gain by doing so -- and risked some considerable loss of stature were it to be discovered and revealed.
No, I think we have to conclude that President Reagan actually believed the events he described had taken place. He thought he was telling the truth.
So we're still left with the question: Where did this story come from?
As you may well have guessed, the story comes from a feature film.
[For those movie trivia buffs among you, it was a 1944 World War Two film, 97 minutes, black and white, with a three-star rating from Leonard Maltin; Henry Hathaway was the director; the cast included Dana Andrews, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, and Don Ameche -- anyone got it yet? -- that's right, "Wing and a Prayer."]
Were this but a single slip by President Reagan its occurrence would be mere inconsequential trivia. Unfortunately, it is not. There were a number of occasions in which the President seemed genuinely to confuse feature film fantasy with reality.
The signs that this is affecting all of us do not end with anecdotes about former President Reagan.
Ophelia is not the only one who needs reviving.
The Internet and World Wide Web are providing an illusion of interpersonal relationships for people who are seldom far from a computer screen. Sending bits and bytes around the planet at the speed of light is being substituted for face-to-face visits with a neighbor across the street whom one may never have met. The free software, like Internet Phone and CU-SeeMe, that now make voice and desktop video conferencing possible over the Internet without the use of conventional telephones will only accelerate this trend.
With faster CD-ROM players and larger screens with better resolution (and the animated "Hot Java" programming coming to the Internet) children's video games, computer games, and computer simulation take on more and more of the superficial quality of reality, while delivering a substance that is increasingly divorced from it.]
I remind you that the dictionary definition of schizophrenia is "loss of contact with the environment," loss of the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy.
And now the notion of reality becoming "virtual" has entered our vocabulary, our markets and our lives. Relatively cheap computers can provide the illusion that one is capable of walking around a building, or other location, and seeing it from all angles. Three dimensional illusion is possible.
With the proper headset, gloves and body suit, one can experience the illusion of being transported anywhere on planet earth -- or out in space -- totally emerged and surrounded on all sides by fantasy. Virtual sex is coming to a computer store near you. Lawyers are awaiting the first divorce case to be filed on grounds of virtual adultery.
As if preparing our kids to evaluate television programming weren't enough, now virtual reality is going to give our K-12 efforts at media literacy a whole new challenge.
IBM executives once thought the world would never need more than a half- dozen computers. They were convinced the desktop was nothing more than a toy.
Kodak was offered, and rejected, the videotape, polaroid process, and machine copier.
Are we educators any more prescient? Can we see what's coming? Are we making intelligent responses?
This is what we call being blind-sided. You're in a lucrative business, in a near- monopoly position, and suddenly, without warning, you're confronted with a very formidable competitor -- or interchangeable goods or service.
Could that be possible for K-12 schools? Could you be blindsided? How should you respond? How does business respond?
One response to potential blindsiding is convergence.
By convergence we mean that things that used to be separate and distinct are now merged, or otherwise blurred.
[(Of course, this also give you the opportunity to use encryption to protect the privacy of your communications, using the same mathematical formula to scramble those bits at one end and unscramble them at the other. This alarms law enforcement -- FBI and CIA among them -- which will no longer be able to eavesdrop on terrorists, drug dealers and innocent citizens alike. But that's another story.)]
[I experienced an interesting example of this change and convergence yesterday. C-SPAN is an innovation unlike anything that existed when I was a kid. It's one of the few contributions of the cable industry I find genuinely worthy of praise. In the mornings it has a call-in show, often with guests. That, too, is something of an innovation -- linking as it does the telephone network with the communications satellites that serve local cable systems like that of TCI in Iowa City. The morning show is often devoted to callers reporting on the leading stories in their local papers -- another innovation, otherwise unavailable, involving newspaper content distributed over television. But on this occasion, when the program dealt with the UPS strike settlement, it involved yet another innovation. Because, as the hostess noted, the Internet versions of newspapers are often more up-to-the-minute than the newspapers themselves. So she had the camera focused on a co-worker whose job it is to surf the Internet. She, in turn, was able to read to the audience off of her computer screen the very latest news from online newspapers around the country.]
The Wall Street Journal now requires nearly a half-page to detail for readers all the alternative ways available to them for getting its news: voice phone, fax, e- mail, Web pages, and so forth. The Cedar Rapids Gazette isn't far behind.
If you've grown up with this evolution none of it is very noteworthy. But if you consider it together, and compare it to what existed a mere 20 years ago, it becomes quite remarkable.
So, where's the convergence in education?
When I was a boy most education was provided by traditional, formal, public K- 12 schools, colleges and universities -- with a few private on the side. It wasn't many years before that they abandoned the compulsory study of Greek and Latin.
No longer do you hold that monopoly over education.
What are the implications of this "distributive education" -- learning without walls -- for the future of school building projects and budgets?
I'm not fond of what I understand to be the so-called "home schooling" movement. But what are the implications of the new, alternative sources of educational materials for the future of traditional K-12 educational institutions?
We hear a lot about "information overload." You've probably complained about it at one time or another. Not surprisingly in an Information Age we seem to swim in a sea of paper, television programming, advertising, Internet Web pages, and so forth.
But I think it is not helpful to think of our condition as one of "information overload."
You and the student may have a scanning problem, an information evaluation problem, but you don't have too much useful information -- you don't have enough.
We have long taught library research techniques, but never have they been as important as they are today.
If others can find information you and your students can't find, if they can find it in a fraction of the time it takes you, if they are better at sifting the useful from the fraudulent, you are at a terrible competitive disadvantage.
And how can we teach information evaluation?
Let's put aside the problems associated with pornography on the Internet for a moment. I don't deny it's a problem, I just think it has been blown way out of proportion.
A far more serious problem, in my view, is how we can teach students to evaluate information generally. This is not something limited to the Internet. It applies to the hallway gossip in school, what they hear on the MTV cable channel, or read in the Iowa City Press-Citizen.
Have you ever looked at the supermarket tabloid called Weekly World News? It's my favorite of the genre. There is little pretense by the editors that it is anything but fiction. Yet I am sure that some people read it as gospel. [ (I sometimes hear them quoting from it as such on the crazies' talk shows in the wee hours of the morning.)]
How do we teach our students the difference between a story in the Weekly World News and one in the New York Times?
Corporations, and governments, sometimes lie to us. A substantial proportion of the American people do not believe that NASA recently put the Pathfinder on Mars. How can our students know when to believe them and when not?
Once we figure that out we'll be well on our way to helping students evaluate what they get off the Internet.
In that connection, one of the disciplines I'd like to see re-introduced into the schools is what is called "general semantics."
My father was one of the founders, or early popularizers, of general semantics. One of his books, People in Quandaries, stayed on the standard book sellers' lists for years and is still in print over 50 years later. In my estimation there is no better single source of the tools essential to evaluating information today, the tools for understanding the thinking that our language is doing for us -- often without our knowledge and even against our will.
Of course, I don't mean to suggest that's the only book, or necessarily even the best. There is Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action. There are many books. There are materials specifically designed for teaching general semantics in high school.
To explain the full power of the insights of general semantics would truly require an entire semester, but if you're interested you can find some references on my home page -- as well as from the link it provides to the "Wendell Johnson Memorial Web Page."
Just one little illustration.
As a youngster I had no guns. But I soon discovered something even more powerful: the general semanticist's two questions, "What do you mean?" and "How do you know?" With them, I discovered at an early age, I had the capacity to interview, and often render quite uncomfortable, even the most learned Ph.Ds visiting in our home.
Properly handled, these need not seem questions designed to ridicule a speaker. They show the listener is paying attention, and wants to understand better.
What do you mean when you say there is a UFO following in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet? How do you know? Do you have a scientific instrument capable of detecting UFOs? How does it work? Did somebody just tell you that? Who? Did you see it on an Internet site? (That was, apparently, Pierre Salinger's source for his charge that the TWA plane was shot down by a missile over New York City.) How reliable is your source? How do they know?
As former CBS News President Fred Friendly has observed, it is no longer true, as our grandparents believed, that "what you don't know can't hurt you." These are times in which what you don't know can kill you.
But it is also true that, even more dangerous than what we don't know is that which we do know, or think we do, that turns out not to be true.
A colleague of mine at the law school (who happened to be at that lunch last Monday) is fond of telling a story that comes out of the 1972 McGovern-Nixon presidential race. A student came to his office and announced, with some excitement, that McGovern was going to win. "Oh, really," questioned my colleague, "how do you know?" "Well because," said the student, "everybody I know is for McGovern."
Of course, the student was right. Everybody he knew was for McGovern. He just didn't know a very wide range of people.
Is your students' range of acquaintance any wider? How many things do they take as true because "everybody they know" agrees with them? How might they respond if you were to push them a bit with "What do you mean?" and "How do you know?"
You may recall from John Steinbeck's novel, Grapes of Wrath, the exchange between a filling station operator and one of the Joad family members on their way from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to California. America is in a depression; there are no jobs, no money. Even the top soil is blowing away. And the station attendant asks, "What's the country comin' to? What's it comin' to?" Tom Joad responds, "You ain't askin' nothin'; you're just singin' a kinda song."
Remember that line next time you're listening to an idealogue -- whether of the left or the right. Most of the time they're not asking questions; they're not making useful suggestions. They're "just singing a kind of song."
I'd like to close with a word about the relationship between democracy, education and technology.
[An African-American friend of mine told me of his first job as a disk jockey at a small town radio station in the South. When he walked in the first day the white owner handed him a stack of records and instructed him simply, "Here, boy, y'all play these."
"How about the news?" my friend asked him. "We don't have news," the owner told him. My friend persisted, "Maybe I could just read some wire service copy?" "We don't have a wire service here." "Well, maybe I could just get the local paper, and read some of that news over the air."
"Look, boy," the owner finally said, "I don't seem to have made myself clear to you. You're not going to educate the people of this community at my expense." (Except he used another word, rather than "people.")
The thing you could admire about that owner -- perhaps the only thing -- is his total lack of hypocricy. He knew that ignorance was in the best economic and political interests of himself and his friends. He was up-front about it. No doubletalk.
The CEO's of today's global media conglomerates are not so candid.
"We just give the people what the people want," they say. "We wouldn't want to take sides," they say. "That's too controversial," they say.]
But ask yourself: suppose what they were feeding the public resulted in a transfer of wealth from the wealthiest 1% of Americans to the poorest 20% -- instead of the other way around. Suppose, instead of having the greatest spread between the rich and poor of any industrialized nation, we had the narrowest. Do you think for a moment those programs and publications would continue? Of course not. [They're not going to educate the people of this country at their expense. Not when ignorance, not when bread and circuses, keep them in power and wealth.]
You may or may not know the refrain from the old union song: "Which side are you on? Which side are you on?"
It's clear which side education is on -- or ought to be.
Johnson County residents pride ourselves on living in the county that has the third highest educational level of any county in the United States.
But what percentage of these over-educated eligible adults register and vote in school board and city council elections? Maybe 10 percent. Is there no limit below which we can no longer say we're living in a democracy? Five percent? One percent?
Properly done, there's nothing more exciting for young people, and nothing more educational, than community organizing, challenging the establishment, bringing about change.
When I was a kid it involved a playmate and I uncovering the corruption that was about to put the City's swimming pool on property owned by a member of the City Council. We learned about local government very quickly; circulated petitions; planned our speech presenting them to the Council; and were ultimately able to swim in a swimming pool located in the City Park.
There are a thousand similar challenges in Iowa City today.
How much public money is flowing to the developers of the new Coralville Mall -- a mall that will despoil the environment, and drain business from downtown Iowa City -- money for highways, public services, reduced taxes, and so forth? And if students can't find the answer to that one, the next question is: Why not? What's secret and what's public information in Iowa and why? What is it about administrators that results in a little toy town like Iowa City having six overlapping bus systems? Where are the toxic dumps around here, and who is profiting from them? Who wants to close down the Ped Mall, and why? When are nuclear wastes shipped along Interstate 80 and the railroad? And speaking of the railroad, is there any way we can control the dangerous practice of railroad cars blocking emergency traffic on Iowa City streets? How much democracy are students permitted to exercise in the formulation of Iowa City School Board policy?
Properly organized such projects can teach much more than social studies. Before they're finished students will be using math and science, polishing their writing and public speaking, using the Internet and library resources, picking up some economics, law and business.
Just a thought.
When I was Maritime Administrator I asked a ship owner why he built an 83,872-ton tanker when most were building 100,000-ton tankers. "Because the money ran out," he said.
And so that is why I'm stopping. Because the time ran out.
But I'll be around awhile this morning, and look forward to visiting with you more. And you can always check out my Web page or send me e-mail.
Good luck to you as you start your new school year.
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