Inclusion - Giving Students What They Need to Succeed

 I was born in 1962. My formative years stretched from the mid-60s through my graduation from high school in 1980—a window of time that, looking back, feels both simpler and fuller.  Not better. Not worse. Just… different in ways that are getting harder to explain to anyone who didn’t live it. What we had back then wasn’t much by today’s standards—but somehow, it was enough.

When Less Wasn’t a Problem.  We didn’t have everything. We had what we had. We had one phone in the house, usually attached to a wall, with a cord that could only stretch so far before someone yelled, “Hang it up!”

We had a handful of TV channels, and if you missed something, you missed it. No rewind. No streaming. No second chances. Honestly? We weren’t inside much anyway.

We were outside playing baseball or kickball in the yard all day long. Not on screens. Not in organized leagues. Just pickup games where the rules were… flexible, depending on who was winning. There was pushing, shoving, arguing over bad calls—but we figured it out. We self-policed ourselves. No referees. No parents stepping in. No parents with juice boxes and goldfish ready; that’s what the garden hose was for! Just kids learning how to navigate fairness and frustration in real time.  A cinematic reference, we were the Sandlot, or the Bad News Bears before these were hit movies!

When we weren’t playing, we were listening. Not playlists. Not algorithms. Stories. I can still remember being under the blankets with a flashlight, listening to those old mystery radio shows—Mystery on the Air-type stuff, letting my imagination do all the heavy lifting. And it did. Those stories were terrifying in the best way, because what you imagined was always scarier than anything a screen could show you.

Sports weren’t something you consumed; they were something you experienced. We’d listen to the Kansas City Royals or the Chiefs on the radio, hanging on every word as it mattered more than anything else going on in the world. And sometimes, if we were lucky, we were there in person.

Back when tickets were affordable. I remember general admission at Royals Stadium being about two bucks. Parking was five, which meant we’d pile as many people as humanly possible into Rick Gray's Jeep or Scott Willis’ old LTD just to make it work. It wasn’t about comfort. It was about being there.

Refreshments? Let’s just say there were no $8 sodas. We passed around a single cup of Kool-Aid in the car like it was gold. Nobody complained. That was just how it was. And somehow, it was enough.

Now: When Everything Is Available All the Time. Fast forward to today, and it’s a completely different world.

We carry around devices that can do just about everything—phones, cameras, TVs, maps, music, news, conversations—all in one place. We can watch any game, any show, any moment, whenever we want.

We don’t miss things anymore. Strangely… it feels like we miss more. We have more entertainment than we could ever consume, yet still find ourselves saying, “There’s nothing to watch.”

We’re more connected than ever, yet somehow feel more disconnected. We’ve traded waiting for instant access. Traded imagination for high definition. Traded presence for convenience. Sitting right in the middle of it all is artificial intelligence—accelerating change at a pace that makes the last 60 years feel like a warm-up.

What We Lost Along the Way. It didn’t happen all at once. Somewhere along the line, we lost a few things: We lost the art of being bored and the creativity that came with it. We lost some patience, the kind that made things feel worth waiting for. We lost a little bit of that raw, unfiltered living that didn’t need to be documented to matter.

Back then, nobody was pulling out a phone to capture the moment. You were just… in it.

This isn’t a “back in my day” rant.  Let’s be honest, there are things today that are undeniably better. Medical advancements. Access to information. The ability to stay connected with people across distance and time. Tools that make life easier in ways we couldn’t have imagined. There’s real value in a lot of what we have now. But not all of it.

The Stuff We Could Probably Live Without. Here’s where I start to wonder. How much of what we have today is actually necessary? How much of it just fills space we used to fill with living?

We could probably live without:

• The endless scrolling that never really satisfies
• Notifications that make everything feel urgent when it isn’t
• The pressure to capture every moment instead of experiencing it
• “Upgrades” that don’t really improve anything
• Technology that solves problems we didn’t actually have

We’ve engineered convenience so well that we’ve almost removed effort from the equation. Maybe effort was part of the point.

I grew up in a world where change came in chapters. Now it comes in updates. My laptops, Apple watch, and iPad all need the latest update tonight! If the next wave of change, driven by AI and everything attached to it, is going to be bigger than anything we’ve experienced so far, then maybe the question isn’t just about what’s coming next.

Maybe the better question is this: What do we hold onto… on purpose? 

If a $2 ticket, a car full of friends, a cup of Kool-Aid, and a radio broadcast could give us a full day, maybe “more” isn’t always the answer. Maybe some of the best things we ever had… were the things we never realized we’d lose.