December 1998
(Collier County math teacher and 1997 Golden Apple winner Tom Groce receives a hug from colleague and previous winner Jory Westberry as Ed Clark '49 (left) looks on with enthusiasm.)
For a classroom teacher, being the recipient of a Golden Apple award is comparable with receiving a visit from the Publisher's Clearinghouse prize patrol and winning one of the film world's Oscars. In surprise classroom presentations, a golden apple (well, OK, it's bronze, but it's very shiny) is given to five educators in Collier County, Fla., for outstanding teaching. Later, the teachers are guests at an elegant awards ceremony and dinner. Ed Clark '49 sits on the selection committee of the Collier County Education Foundation that determines the winners.
Collier County's Golden Apple Teacher Recognition Program began eight years ago and is based on the trademarked Golden Apple Teacher Recognition Program in neighboring Lee County, Fla., that was started 12 years ago. Clark, who has been on the selection committee for three years, describes a detailed and confidential process of applications, recommendations, and classroom observations that screen potential winners based on numerous aspects of their teaching, including the ability to create a comfortable atmosphere for students, to challenge them to reach high standards, and to involve families in the educational process. The selection committee is made up of educators and business and community leaders.
The applicant pool is whittled to 100 teachers, each of whom is observed by members of the Golden Apple Core, comprising former educators, parents, students, and former selection committee members.
Clark says the program "puts a spotlight on good teaching and shows that the education system is working. It encourages young people to become educators and encourages teachers, who can see that they are honored and respected." The Core narrows the field to 40 Teachers of Distinction who receive cash awards during surprise classroom presentations. The selection committee then spends approximately 500 hours observing and discussing to determine the top five winners.
The five Golden Apple awardees receive the engraved golden apple, a 14-carat golden apple pin, a cash award of more than $2,000, and several other gifts from local businesses. At the dinner in their honor, held at the elegant Ritz-Carlton hotel, the teachers also receive membership in the Golden Apple Academy of Teachers--an ongoing element of the program that allows teachers to give their input on key educational issues both locally and nationally.
Clark says all the attention is warranted: "Teaching is often looked upon as a second-class profession. Educating our children is one of the most important jobs there is. I benefited from a good public education and was able to go to a good college."
Part of Clark's enthusiasm for the Golden Apple program comes from his unfulfilled desire to have been a teacher himself. He remembers reading Houston Peterson's book Great Teachers: Portrayed by Those Who Studied Under Them while a student at Swarthmore in the late 1940s. Clark had served in World War II and had returned to the College to finish his education, hoping to go on to earn a graduate degree in education. But he was also newly married to Janet MacLellan Clark '48, and they were expecting their first child. So Ed Clark put aside his dream of being a teacher and entered the insurance industry, where he had a successful 42-year career.
Susan McManus, executive director of the Collier County Education Foundation, says Clark is "a compassionate and committed volunteer." Many people, after they retire, do not get involved in their retirement communities," McManus says. "But Ed not only sits on the selection committee, he volunteers in our schools. He's a real asset to the community and a wonderful example."
The Collier County community heavily supports the program through business sponsorships and media coverage. The local McDonalds restaurants even print placemats with pictures of the 40 Teachers of Distinction. The banquet, which is televised live in conjunction with Lee County's award program, shows video clips of teachers instructing their students in the classroom and then gives each honoree an opportunity to make an acceptance speech. The evening's festivities also give teachers and community business leaders an opportunity to come together and talk.
Clark encourages other communities to follow Collier County's example, citing the recent formation of a Golden Apple program in his former home of Springfield, Mass., and other places around the country. "Everything about the program is done first class and with the highest quality," says Darlene Grossman, president of the Foundation for Lee County Public Schools, "because we believe that's the way teachers should be honored."
--Audree Penner
(Clothes are "vessels of memory" according to Dorothy Globus, who creates exhibitions at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. An example is the recent retrospective of the work of designer Claire McCardell (top), whose postwar work Globus calls "revolutionary.")
Dorothy Twining Globus '69 has one of the biggest closets in the world. As director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York, she is responsible for a collection of more than 50,000 costume pieces and more than 30,000 textiles.
Globus oversees all aspects of mounting the museum's exhibitions, from budgeting and grant writing to the development of themes, the use of physical space, and publicity. Each exhibition can take years to bring to the public--and to the 11,000 students of FIT, who study art and design, business, and technology at the school's Seventh Avenue campus.
"Clothes are vessels of memory," says Globus of her exhibitions. "People love to look at fashion. Clothing evokes associations with times past. Just about any woman can tell you what she was wearing on the important occasions of her life. It's an interesting phenomenon."
A recent example is an exhibition of the work of clothing designer Claire McCardell, whom Globus describes as a "revolutionary designer of the 1940s and 1950s. McCardell made an American lifestyle practical, wearable, and affordable. Her innovative construction and materials have inspired many a contemporary fashion designer.
"When word went out that this exhibition was being produced, we had numerous phone calls from women who had held onto their own Claire Mc-Cardell garments and wanted to offer them for the show. From these unsolicited calls, we ended up taking in a dozen more outfits."
At FIT, Globus mounts four to six major exhibitions each year, along with an annual student exhibition that showcases around 2,000 pieces from the school's art and design division. FIT's curriculum ranges well beyond fashion and includes such subjects as advertising design, cosmetics and fragrance marketing, interior design, packaging, fabric restoration, and toy design.
With 12,000 square feet of gallery space and two floors for storage, Globus has developed exhibitions on everything from linen (a fiber used not only for garments but for such purposes as mummy wrappings and making fire hoses) to the innovative contemporary clothing designs of Isabel and Ruben Toledo, a young Cuban-American couple.
Globus has been intrigued by museum work since serving as a student intern at the Smithsonian in the 1960s. After graduating from Swarthmore with a degree in art history, she went to work full time for the Smithsonian, where she met her husband, Stephen Globus, now a venture capitalist. She moved to New York in 1972, when she was appointed curator of exhibitions of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum--the national design museum of the Smithsonian Institution. Globus joined FIT in 1993. Her predecessor there was another Swarthmorean, Richard Martin '67, who is now curator of the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The FIT museum looks back, but it also looks forward. Globus recently completed a show with three professors from Central-Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Titled "C'AD Infinitum: Textiles, Techniques, and Technologies" it showed how computer technology has changed the design and production of textiles.
"People think you would lose a lot of the handwork that goes into creating designs for fabric," she says, "but actually computers have aided in timesaving ways.
"Computer technology is important, but there's nothing like seeing and touching the real objects," she said. "I think that's the future of museums--contextualizing things and understanding how they fit into the world. That's what the FIT museum does as it adds to its collections. It makes fashion and textiles accessible for study by students, scholars, and industry."
"You can look at a photograph alone, or you can look at the actual item, which will tell you far more about the garment, how it was made, and even reflect what was going on in the world at the time."
--Audree Penner
(Putting
Iqbal Quadir's idea into practice, a rural Bangladeshi woman (left)
sells phone services to her fellow villagers. She bought the cellular
phone with a Grameen Bank loan.)
In 1971, Bangladesh's war for independence forced some city dwellers to flee to remote villages. One day, Iqbal Quadir '81, the 13-year-old son of one such family, was sent from the village, where they had taken refuge, to another village to get medical supplies. The two motorboats that had supplied efficient transportation between the villages had suspended their service because of the war, so the boy had to make the 10-kilometer journey on foot.
After walking all morning, he arrived to find that the person he sought was not at home. Young Quadir spent the afternoon trekking home. When the boat service later resumed, life in the villages improved dramatically--farmers and fishermen, again able to transport their products more easily, earned more; necessities became available again. The young Quadir was struck by the importance of being connected and the disadvantage of being isolated.
Some years later, armed with a degree from Swarthmore and an M.A. and M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, Quadir went to work briefly at Security Pacific Merchant Bank. Then he joined Atrium Capital Corporation, a small New York City investment firm.
In 1993, memories of Quadir's childhood experience were rekindled when a computer link in his office broke down. He said: "I remembered the wasted day in 1971. Connectivity was productivity, be it in a modern office or an underdeveloped village."
Research on telecommunication in Bangladesh revealed two phones for every 1,000 people and virtually none in the rural areas, home to 100 million of the nation's inhabitants. "I wondered how much human energy was being wasted in such an unconnected nation of 120 million," Quadir said, "and I found it particularly disturbing at a time when new forms of connectivity such as the Internet and e-mail were transforming even such mature economies as in the United States." Research showed him that a significant contribution to economic progress comes from telecommunications and that a poor economy like Bangladesh would gain $5,000 annually in gross national product by installing just one $1,000 phone. "Furthermore," Quadir said, "the prices of telecommunication links are declining continually. Because India, with comparable economic conditions to Bangladesh, had five times as many phones per capita, it was clear to me that the culprit was poverty in initiative, not economics." He decided to take the initiative.
After a year of investigation, Quadir concluded that the main obstacles to telecommunication in Bangladesh were deficient infrastructures such as roads to facilitate servicing a telephone network, records to enable credit checks, and banks for collecting bills. Seeking a bright spot in the gloomy situation, Quadir approached Grameen Bank, which had initiated a revolutionary microcredit system, making small loans to the very poor. Grameen was already operating in 35,000 villages with 1,100 branches and 12,000 workers. Quadir said, "Its workers were obviously making good credit decisions, as 97 percent of its two million borrowers--mostly women--were paying back their loans." Typically a woman borrows $100 to $200 without collateral from Grameen to start a small business. For example, she uses the money to purchase a cow. The woman then sells milk to her neighbors, makes a living, and pays off the loan. She becomes self-sufficient.
"Connectivity
can play a similar role," argued Quadir. "Just as credit obviates
dependence on middlemen, a telephone connects the woman to customers
and suppliers without intermediaries. Moreover, a telephone can be a
'cow' as well." A woman could borrow $200 from Grameen, buy a
cellular phone, and sell communication services to fellow villagers.
By 1994, Quadir convinced Grameen that a telephone network would work
to its advantage, and that the bank's widespread experience could
compensate for the lack of roads, billing systems, and credit
checks.
"This was the proverbial 1 percent, the inspiration," said Quadir, "with the remaining 99 percent, the perspiration, to follow." He persuaded Telenor AS, the state-owned telephone company in Norway (which in 1995 had more cellular telephones per 1,000 people than any other country in the world), to support his initiative. "After much effort by Grameen's management," Quadir says, "today we have GrameenPhone in Bangladesh, a commercial operation that already has 25,000 customers in Dhaka alone and is rapidly expanding into other areas."
A pilot program involving 150 Bangladeshi villages has confirmed that each village operator makes an average of $2 a day after expenses, or $750 a year, which represents more than twice the country's per capita income. Hundreds more villages will soon be part of the network too.
"I believe," Quadir says, "that the digital revolution has no reason to be confined to advanced countries but can become a revolution in economic development as well."
--Carol Brévart
ALUMNI DIGEST / BACK PAGES/ BOOKS BY ALUMNI / COLLECTION / EDITOR'S NOTE / FEATURES /
IN MY LIFE/ LETTERS / POSTINGS / PROFILES / ARCHIVE / TALK BACK
Swarthmore College 1998. All rights reserved.
