People I Have Worked With, or For

If you’re redesigning high school for 16 million teens it helps to have a broader perspective than the average guy.

I certainly didn’t plan this, am not totally sure how it happened. Still, these are some of the people I’ve worked with, or for:

• The chief technology officer of DARPA
• The county dogcatcher
• A tenured researcher of the bio-physics behind magnetic resonance imaging.
• Sister Elaine, head of St. John’s facility for the developmentally disabled
• A mom&pop florist
• Raj Reddi, founding head of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, and chief investigator of an original manufacturing robotic arm project.
• Welfare recipients working out their matching time for ODOT’s spring litter -pick up crew
• A Special representative from the US Congress to the Joint Integrated Avionics Working Group
• The External Relations director for a city art museum

• First candidate, then US Congressman, then federal inmate, Bob Ney
• Seven county judges
• The staff of the county 0–3 infant program
• A dairy farmer and his herds-woman
• A UH1 Huey helicopter test pilot
• A village water and sewer department

• The space shuttle simulation team at NASA’s Johnson Houston Center
• Juvenile delinquent’s serving out their court-ordered community service time
• The managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal
• The head of the Ohio& Erie Canalway; and members of the National Park Service
• Vice Provosts from CMU and Princeton

• The operating engineer of a 19th century steam-powered flour mill
• A marina owner
• Law enforcement, fire, emergency management, masons, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, auto service and auto body shop owners, senior citizen support staff, water well drillers, gas well surface equipment assemblers, Chesapeake Energy’s community relations staff, tourism & economic development officials, hog farmers.

You can’t make this up.

Each of these has a story in it’s own right. Only the MRI lab was a summer job. A few were for only an hour or two, but most lasted longer. Most were at the person’s place of work, in pursuance of their primary occupational mission.

You can’t plan a sequence like this; I doubt anyone would want to.

Yet, if your main task is to re-imagine high school for 2019 and beyond, it’s not a bad bit of pre-service training.