UHAMKA - University of Jarkata for Studies

 

To my friends at Uhamka, Jakarta. Blessings. - re slater

https://uhamka.ac.id/

HAMKA NEWGENS,

WELCOME TO UHAMKA!

University of Muhammadiyah Prof. DR. HAMKA (referred to as UHAMKA) is one of the private universities owned by Muhammadiyah located in Jakarta. As one of Muhammadiyah's movements in education, UHAMKA is an Islamic university that implements the Al-Quran, As-Sunnah, Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution. UHAMKA also carries out the catur dharma Muhammadiyah universities involving obligations in education, research, community service, and Al Islam and Ke-Muhammadiyahan.

https://uhamka.ac.id/

VISION, MISSION, GOALS

As a transformation process at Private Universities (PTS), Uhamka is here to build a progressive civilization as an effort to realize Islam Rahmatan Lil'Alamin, the Uhamka Vision for 2024 is formulated, namely:

Vision

"To become a prophetic teaching university that educates spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and socially to create a progressive civilization"

Mission

Organizing education that integrates the values ??of Al-Islam and Muhammadiyah with science.

Organizing high-quality and innovative student education and development to produce graduates who are spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and socially intelligent;

Organizing research and community service that is excellent and tangible;

Organizing high quality university asset management and services based on competency quality with the support of ICT;

Organizing financial and non-financial asset management to improve performance and welfare in a sustainable manner

Goals

Realizing a campus which has academic norms that integrate Al-Islam and Muhammadiyah with science;

Producing graduates who are spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and socially intelligent;

Producing high-quality and broad-impact in scientific and community service works;

Realizing a transparent and accountable higher education governance system;

Realizing a transparent and accountable higher education governance system;

Basic ValueIntegrity : All Leaders, Lecturers, Education Personnel, Students, and Alumni of UHAMKA must make the value of honesty the basis for self-development.

Trust.: UHAMKA as the fire of civilization is responsible for continuously building trust for the sake of truth through studies and research.

Compassion (Caring) : UHAMKA must develop science, technology, arts and culture that provide great value for humanity. UHAMKA teaches and trains all human resources and students to care and have a strong side to the oppressed and marginalized groups.

https://uhamka.ac.id/

Advantages of UHAMKA Graduates

Spiritual Intelligence

Obedient to Practice Religious, Diligent in Worshiping, Having Noble Morals, Conscience, And Deserves To Be An Model.

Intellectual Intelligence

a. Smart

b. Creative

c. .Innovative

d. Objective

e. Agile

f. Be a solution for the community

Emotionally Intelligence

a. Self-awareness

b. It is better to "give" than "to receive"

c. Empathize / without contempt

d. Eager to excel

e. Good at collaborating / synergizing

Social Intelligence

a. Beneficial to the environment

b. Tolerance / tolerance

c. Respect for others

d. Have a good relationship

e. Feeling an inseparable part of the social environment

f. Feeling responsible for being an element of the Muhammadiyah association

https://uhamka.ac.id/

Wendell Berry - Seed Will Sprout in the Scar

PRESENTED BY

THE SEATTLE SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY

https://theotherjournal.com/

SEED WILL SPROUT IN THE SCAR:

WENDELL BERRY ON HIGHER EDUCATION

By Matt Bonzo & Michael Stevens

August 13, 2008

At some point in our lives, all of us have been students and have felt the vague malevolence of that monster we know as educational policy. Some teachers begin their careers thinking they will become the reformers of these educational forces only to realize that they not only have failed to vanquish the monster, but that they haven’t even discovered its lair. The more sophisticated critics of higher education may generate analyses of the monsters’ habits and whereabouts, but many of these critiques are predicated on shaky notions of reality. Education commentators worry that we’re falling behind economically because we haven’t shored up math and science, because our children don’t study enough compared to Chinese children, and so on, yet this line of reasoning veils the real problem with our educational system. In fact, such thinking reinforces the real problem: academia is overly concerned with what is “relevant.” Relevance has an attraction and immediacy to it that woos administrators, parents, and students. But the hard shell of relevance makes the monster so slippery that it can’t be cornered. Although the notion of a relevant education may sell seats, it comes at the price of disease and dislocation as the monster still rules the arena.

Wendell Berry has been critiquing society’s unhealthy practices for forty years, but some of his most harrowing critiques are directed at this monster of higher education. Indeed, after Berry decided to “quit” from the University of Kentucky to farm his land full-time, he insisted on that verb, emphatically asserting that he did not “retire” or “move on”—his point was that he could no longer identify himself with a large state university that, as he argues in Life is a Miracle, fosters an “academic Darwinism [that] inflicts severe penalties both upon those who survive and those who perish. Both must submit to an economic system which values their lives strictly according to their productivity.”1 Berry offers an even harsher assessment when he states in “Higher Education and Home Defense” that the purpose of higher education has now devolved into training for “entrance into a class of professional vandals.”2 Ouch!

For those of us who love Berry’s ideas but make our living in higher education, his essays are a bit uncomfortable. But all is not lost, even under the stern gaze of Berry’s sharp farmer’s eyes; his work provides hope for what could happen to higher education if colleges and universities became true to their original purposes (that’s a huge “if” for Berry, but an “if” is better than a never). So in his essay “The Loss of the University”—that title really sets the mood—Berry fights through the clouds to glimpse a far-away goal: “If the proper work of the university is only to equip people to fulfill private ambitions, then how do we justify public support? If it is only to prepare citizens to fulfill public responsibilities, then how do we justify the teaching of arts and sciences? The common denominator has to be larger than either career preparation or preparation for citizenship. Underlying the idea of a university—the bringing together, the combining into one, of all the disciplines—is the idea that good work and good citizenship are the inevitable by-products of the making of a good—that is, a fully developed—human being. This, as I understand it, is the definition of the name university.”3

In some ways this is an old idea (Cardinal Newman was already beginning to lament the undermining of such purposes 150 years ago in his The Idea of the University), but Berry’s sharp questions indicate just how novel and even fantastical it seems in our current milieu. Indeed, the broader message of “The Loss of the University” is that until the fiercely guarded boundaries of academic specialization are broken down, until each department, division, and discipline ceases to create its own narrow silos of knowledge over against the others, there will be no possibility of wholeness for the student. And anyone who has endured the rancor of a faculty meeting understands how distant such a goal now seems.

Berry hasn’t left us without direction, and we have his granddaughter to thank for that. Indeed, it was a surprise to hear that a man who is much more likely to speak at a cattleman’s convention or a protest against strip-mining than in an academic context agreed to do a commencement address as he has did recently at Bellarmine University and Duke Divinity School. We admit a brief flush of envy—the one time we dared to write Berry and ask him to come to Cornerstone University, he wrote back telling us he was trying to stay home more. The Bellarmine University address was given in Louisville, which is pretty close to home for him, both geographically and in the case of the class of 2007,4 familially, with his granddaughter among the graduates. And perhaps some heartstring was tugged, because Berry’s tone, if not glowing with optimism, was at least open to the thought that students at small colleges might still have a chance: “A school the size of this one still can function as a community of teachers and students, with responsible community life as its unifying aim.”

Yet the strong current, the unceasing riptide of the unholy quadrumvirate that Berry identifies as “STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,” will pull each student to become “an unconscious expert with Jesus Christ Munitions Incorporated, or Cleanstream Water Polluters, or the Henry Thoreau Noise Factory, or the John Muir Forest Reduction Corporation, or the Promised Land Mountain Removal Service.” According to Berry’s assessment, this path of death and ruin is masked as a glowing opportunity, or perhaps as our only means of retaining primacy in the global marketplace. The universities are buying it, parents are buying it, students are buying it, economists are buying it—but ultimately, Berry tells us that we need not shop for a tasteless education sold in six packs. There is a path out, a path of resistance and recovery that will lead us to fresh waters.

Thus, Berry calls the Bellarmine graduates to resist—to resist “technological determinism,” to resist “conventional greed and thoughtless individualism,” to resist “the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism.” In so doing, Berry suggests that graduates will enter into an alternate stream in our culture, a stream of people “who are already resisting—those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary.” To ask the hard questions and make the hard decisions involved in such resistance will be the work of a lifetime—Berry notes for the graduates that it will “involve you endlessly in out-of-school learning”—but it will be a lifetime of richness beyond the bounds of earning capacity and financial acuity. Ultimately, Berry calls for a set of choices, a constant reasserting of the basic choice that the right sort of college curriculum will have initiated; in his winsome terms, he affirms that “You will have to avoid thinking of yourselves as employable minds equipped with a few digits useful for pushing buttons. You will have to recover for yourselves the old understanding that you are whole beings inextricably and mysteriously compounded of minds and bodies.”

Whole beings—not fragmented, not dislocated, not splintering into a thousand pieces and directions based on social and economic necessity, not dying slowly under a facade of activity and prosperity. How might we be agents of this wholeness? How might we be teachers of the Berryian modes of resistance?5 We have determined at least three layers of mentoring wherein we can instill patterns of wholeness to help students learn what it means to be placed and at home.

At the first level, we seek to show dislocated and distressed students the nature of their condition (of our whole cultural condition!) in the context of an invitational learning community. OK, OK, easier said than done. Students coming from broken homes, troubled and troubling churches, hypersexualized high schools, and the mass chaos of a popular-culture-as-guide-to-life philosophy do not need to be convinced something has gone awry. Guiding students into worldview crises, shaking up their idolatries, revealing ourselves as co-strugglers yet hopeful models—these are grueling labors. But the learning community at a Christian liberal arts college could be one of the healthiest settings for such struggles, because these questions can be ruminated upon with faculty who most likely experience similar struggles and who seek not to demolish or demean students’ ill-formed notions so much as to redirect, to relocate them near life-giving waters.

We have found Berry’s essays, poems, and especially his fiction to be a key component in this tenuous work. For instance, in the finale to our Introduction to Philosophy course, we have used Berry’s volume of essays The Way of Ignorance to suggest that in modernity’s failed wake, in the midst of the postmodern grappling for hope, Berry’s vision of local communities as places of healing offers an alternative that is both disorienting and hopeful for the miasma they have (hopefully) encountered during the semester. We’ve also forged strong connections with students in teaching a course called Home Economics that is based around Berry’s book of the same name; the class is also inspired by his short stories from That Distant Land, which offer a sort of anecdotal vision for local community that is embodied in the people and place of Port William, Kentucky (Berry’s fictive doppelganger for his own hometown of Port Royal). The students in this class not only voiced the dislocation in which they found themselves, but they also hashed out possible remedies, or at least, in the terms of Berry’s Bellarmine University address, modes of resistance.

We got a glimpse that semester of what a Christian university could be if students learned to imagine the contours of a “fully-orbed community.”6 Matt also saw something like this during his time as a graduate student at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto when, in the middle of philosophical and theological wrestling, a daily three o’clock teatime allowed senior and junior members, administration, staff, and visitors to convene for genial conversation, for a reassertion of the human element that is present in all higher learning endeavors. That repeated sense of invitation and hospitality, in the midst of and, indeed, as a part of the fray, hits just the right note in the sort of harmony we seek for our students.

At the second level is the intentionality of the university in weaving into its own broader geographical proximity, which is crucial in transforming the university from a tool of dislocation to a workshop in relocation. Indeed, town-versus-gown tensions are fairly common—the massive state school that domineers and coerces the locals with its corporate presence, the small school that condescends to the local yokels and seeks to keep aloof—and a few years ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education had a back-page article suggesting that universities and colleges ought to seek healthier, more integrative relationships with their surrounding municipalities. The article’s reasons were those of mutualism: economic partnerships, a better disseminating of theoretical notions into practical situations. But we see a much sharper imperative for the faith-based school, because of the call to hospitality and being at home.

Our own school has dwelt on the fringe of its home city for sixty plus years, but much of its time has been spent in a fortress mentality, one of suspicion toward the vices of the city (and a commensurate public image of snootiness and perhaps fanaticism). Hence, students learned little about being located while at college—indeed, if anything, the work of dislocation was furthered. A more recent ethos of service to the underprivileged of the community has created a few more connections, but it has perhaps continued to emphasize the sort of self and other duality that bears rootless fruit.

We’ve begun to ask ourselves, and the administration of our school, what it might mean to be fully located here in Grand Rapids. How might the impulse toward sustainability, which is a hallmark of our city (we have a full-time Sustainability Director in the mayor’s office and the most green buildings per capita in the United States, including a brand new art museum), be complemented by programs, majors, facilities, and other embodiments of our university? How might the notion of students living in deliberate minicommunities in various areas of need throughout the city—a practice that has already been embraced by our goodly neighbor, Calvin College—create more of a sense of wholeness, both for our students in their experience and for the community in which they live? What sorts of interstices and confluences might be discovered if our school asked the city what we might do for the people and place in which we live, if we asked how we might best use our tremendous resources of thinkers and energetic students to serve (and not just incidentally or episodically, but in sustained, clear-eyed engagement)?

We imagine, ultimately, that both teachers and students (and, OK, I guess we can toss the administrators in there too!) will be refreshingly challenged to think about practicing what we preach. One creative possibility would be to allow students the opportunity to work off some tuition or housing costs through their commitments in the community—being at home in difficult settings to provide service, but more than service, something more like co-dwelling with those struggling and marginalized. The great cost increases that now perpetually plague higher education must be addressed by universities in ways that are morally meaningful, and this might be a way to do good to students while they are also able to practice the good themselves.

The third layer is one that is more or less forgotten in faculty and learning circles, one that is usually left to the development and fundraising folk: the alumni. As crass as the training for income production might be in many of our undergraduate and graduate settings, it’s probably the treatment of alumni that most clearly reinforces the apothegm: “Show me the money.” But what if that impulse were resisted, and the university community showed interest in the thinking and thriving of alumni minds? We have long aspired to create deep connections wherein our alumni, given a glimpse of the “fully-orbed community” while under our tutelage, then go out to locate and foster communities wherever they find themselves: knowing what questions to ask, knowing how to listen well, knowing how to stay put, and, crucially, knowing that their teachers want to hear back from them, want to communicate with them, want to play a role in all of the different home economies being formed.

Matt has tried to do this with his Philosophy alumni by means of wide-open communication lines and deliberate events, such as the yearly Philosophy Canoe Trip. This provides what homecomings of old might have provided: substantive human contact and conversation about the outworking of the vision gained in the college years—nothing like the elaborate depersonalized affairs that have evolved under the collective aegis of a thousand development offices.

If we could continuously ask our alumni to come back and tell current students how it is going, how the home-making is proceeding, what the pitfalls are, and what the wonderful bounty might be, perhaps the students wouldn’t feel so adrift, so betrayed upon graduation. Certainly a vigorous engagement of alumni with the student body—and conversely, getting students out to see the work that could await them when they join the resistance—would deepen the sense of why we educate in the first place.

“JOIN THE RESISTANCE!” It sounds a little melodramatic, a little Che Gueverean (if that can be an adjective), that is, until you walk into a classroom, or click into a cyberclassroom, or read an alumni fundraising letter, or sit in a Dilbertian cubicle, or work the tenth seventy-hour week in a row, or see another (and another and another) marriage break apart, another teenager plugged in behind a locked door, another eight-week-old infant tossed into a loving daycare. Suddenly, resistance is the only gesture that seems to point toward health, toward life.

We recall one of our favorite etymologies, that the word radical means not wild-eyed idealism or flipping the bird to authority, but instead rootedness (from the Latin radix, also the source of radish). We can be a part of that, we in higher education, in our own imperfect ways, as we teach what the Christian world and life vision means in all its obvious and subtle outworkings, as we give our push and then show the students where to push to try and overturn the idols of the age. And as we aspire to be a grounded and rooted school that embodies collectively the spirit of home-making we want each graduate to own. And as we try to keep the lines alive and buzzing between the campus and the multitudinous little communities of alumni, whose lives we want to hear and who we want to keep hearing from us. And so we return to Berry, our teacher of resistance, and hear him again as, at the end of the Bellarmine address, he asserts:

The logic of success insinuates that self-enlargement is your only responsibility, and that any job, any career will be satisfying if you succeed in it. But we can tell you, on the authority of much evidence, that a lot of people highly successful by that logic are painfully dissatisfied. We can tell you further that you cannot live in a career, and that satisfaction can come only from your life. To give satisfaction, your life will have to be lived in a family, a neighborhood, a community, an ecosystem, a watershed, a place, meeting your responsibilities to all those things to which you belong.

Let’s get that somewhere in our next set of learning objectives—put it on the syllabus and get to work!

Notes

1. Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle (Washington DC: Counterpoint, 2000), 62.

2. Wendell Berry, Home Economics (San Francisco: Northpoint, 1987), 51.

3. Ibid, 77.

4. All of our quotes from this address are based on the text that is found at www.bellarmine. edu/studentaffairs/Graduation/berry_address.asp. Unless otherwise noted, the remaining quotes in this essay are from this address.

5. Many of these observations are based on the ruminations in Chapter 10 of our forthcoming book Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader’s Guide (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2008).

6. Douglas Henry of Baylor University used these words when he spoke on our campus a few years ago.

About the Authors

Matt Bonzo

Matt Bonzo was born and raised in southeastern Ohio and graduated from Liberty University (BS), Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (MA), and the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto/Free University of Amsterdam (PhD). He has taught Philosophy at Cornerstone for ten years, and he is also the proprieter of Small Wonders Farm, a community-supported agriculture experiment that he runs with his wife Dorothe and his son Matthias on his land in Newaygo County. Unlike Wendell Berry, who still farms with draught horses, Bonzo has recently gone over to the dark side and purchased his first tractor.

Michael Stevens

Michael Stevens grew up in the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York and graduated from Baptist Bible College of Pennsylvania (BS), St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland (MA), and the University of Dallas (PhD). He has taught English classes at Cornerstone for eleven years and lives on the northeast side of Grand Rapids, where he is often seen walking to campus with his nose stuck in a book. Stevens is interested in T. S. Eliot, the Civil War, and baseball.

Jon Kitna - "Give Me Your Worst Students"

 

 

Former NFL QB Jon Kitna finds ‘gold mine’

at his troubled old high school

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nfl--former-nfl-qb-jon-kitna-finds-%E2%80%98gold-mine%E2%80%99-at-a-school-where-other-teachers-only-saw-problems-194739063.html

 

by Les Carpenter

December 19, 2012

 

 

Jon Kitna prepares for an algebra class at Lincoln High School.
(Yahoo! Sports)

TACOMA, Wash. – Before he left the Dallas Cowboys to come home again, Jon Kitna had one request of the two principals who run Lincoln High School:

 

Give me your worst students.

 

The other teachers told him to stop. This was last February and it was going to be hard enough to teach three algebra classes in the middle of a semester. He was two months gone from an NFL career that went for 16 years, after all. Yes, this was his old high school, the one where he was a star quarterback in the early 1990s, but didn’t the new football coach understand what he was getting into?

 

Didn’t he see the numbers? Didn’t he know that four of every five of the students were on free or reduced lunches? That finding a meal was more important than understanding negative integers? Inspiring the best students was going to be difficult enough. Save himself, they advised. Start slow. Make it easy.

 

Kitna shook his head. Easy wasn’t the point. At 6-foot-4 with a buzz cut and a body built for football, he fills the classroom doorways. He would not be intimidated. And how could they understand this was the only job he ever wanted – that his time in the NFL was a daily preparation for this moment? No, coming home was supposed to be as hard.

 

And so again he told the principals to have the other math teachers select the students they didn’t want – the ones who didn’t listen, who didn’t try, who didn’t care. He would take them all. The principals nodded. Lists were made, class rolls prepared. The new football coach was handed three dream teams of troublemakers. They wished him luck.

 

Only something happened in those three algebra classes, something no one could have imagined. The students who didn’t listen suddenly did. Those who never did work turned in assignments. And when the results of the math assessments came in, Kitna’s students were second best in the school. It wasn’t because their teacher was an NFL quarterback. Many of them didn’t have televisions at home. They had little idea who Jon Kitna was. No, this was something else. Something bigger. Something one of those two principals, Pat Erwin, considers in his office one recent day and finally calls: “The Kitna effect.”

 

---

 

He doesn’t have to be here, of course. Sixteen years as an NFL quarterback brought him more than $20 million. It gave him big homes and nice cars. It allowed his wife Jennifer and three children to never need again. When he walked away from the Cowboys after the 2011 season, he could have gone to the golf course or the broadcast booth or even one of those sprawling high schools with a giant stadium in a suburb of Dallas if he only wanted to coach.

 

“I don’t think that’s what my purpose was,” Kitna says. “This is my challenge. This is what I was meant to do.”

 

He is sitting at a teacher’s desk in the front of a classroom not long before his Algebra I class. Everything has changed in 20 years. Things seem worse now. There are so many more drugs. The poverty shocks him.

 

Yet people he knows from the old days say the school was more violent when he was a student. Gangs roamed the halls. He remembers the gangs but many of those kids were also his friends and they shielded him from what they were doing. Perhaps his memories are sanitized. Maybe because he was surrounded by wealth for so long the hardship here is all the more unsettling.

 

He sat with his team in a pregame study hall one fall day and told the players to close their books. Something was missing. What was it? He could sense they wanted to learn. He could see them working in school. They tried hard at football practice. And yet simple homework assignments went unfinished. Grades that had improved then mysteriously dropped. For every step forward there was a stumble.

 

“What is the disconnect?” he asked.

 

For several moments no one said anything. Then slowly the stories spilled out. Terrible stories. Heartbreaking stories. The players told of homes without parents. They said nobody in the house asked to see their homework. They talked of barely existing at all. They said the only place anyone seemed to care was at school. And they told him that even then he was the only one to whom they could relate.

 

“It was eye-opening,” Kitna says. “It was tearful to hear kids say: ‘My parents when I am doing my homework tell me to stop doing my homework and go sell drugs.’ Or to hear a kid say: ‘I don’t ever eat because I want my mom to eat and only one of us can eat.’ ”

 

For a moment Kitna is silent.

 

Then he stops and looks up wistfully.

 

“All that being said, I’m on a gold mine,” he continues. “This place is a freaking gold mine because these kids are super, uber-talented. Not just athletically. You’ve got kids who can sing and blow the pipes off of things. You see kids who can do acting and drama-type stuff and arts that are just amazing.

 

“People [in the NFL] said I got credited for being a great leader, they [said] ‘even as a backup people are drawn to you.’ And they’d say ‘why?’ Because I went here. It’s because I went here. I’m thoroughly convinced of that because if you go here you don’t just get to be one kind of person, you have to be able to adapt and intermix yourself into all different kinds of cultures and situations.”

 

A buzzer sounds. Time for class. The room begins to fill. The kids are laughing. A few say “hello.” One asks what they are going to work on that day. Kitna watches them and smiles.“I’m on a gold mine here,” he says again.

 

---

 

It takes a village to change a culture, and Kitna has filled his coaching staff with friends and associates he has known over the years. This includes former Oregon State player Casey Kjos, a cousin who he raised as a son, and Eric Boles, his teammate at Central Washington University who played briefly in the NFL. Jennifer and his brother’s wife take care of details like making meals for the team during training camp because they figure the players will otherwise not eat. Since the school had little money for things like uniforms and equipment they took over the booster club and website, and set up a 501(c)(3) and began soliciting donations.

 

Jon Kitna's football team has a weight room

equivalent to one used by NFL teams.

(Yahoo! Sports)

 

To show his seriousness, Kitna spent $150,000 to fill the weight room with equipment as nice as that in any NFL practice facility. He had the walls painted and named it after his old Lincoln teammate and longtime NFL safety Lawyer Milloy. Soon others followed. Carson Palmer, a teammate in Cincinnati, bought two industrial washers for uniforms. Current Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo provided the money for new jerseys. Calvin Johnson, his old receiver in Detroit paid for new equipment as did Cowboys linebacker DeMarcus Ware. Since the kids didn’t have their own spikes for practice, the Cowboys boxed up dozens of cleats. When Nike took over the NFL uniform contract in the spring, the Seahawks sold their now useless game pants to Lincoln at $1 a pair so the team could have practice uniforms.

 

Several times, Erwin, the co-principal, has walked into the school on Saturday mornings and found Kitna washing uniforms.

 

“I think what he is trying to do is see what can happen to kids in a high-poverty area when you put them in a world-class setting,” Erwin says.

 

But inspiring kids who come from nothing is not as easy as wearing Marshawn Lynch’s pants and Dez Bryant’s old cleats. For every moment of joy comes a day that makes no sense.

 

Not long after he arrived, Kitna took the football team to Seattle for a series of 7-on-7 drills at the University of Washington. When he sent notes to the parents, only three called to ask about the trip.

 

Then when the bus returned to Lincoln at 11:30 p.m., Kitna was stunned to discover not one parent or relative had come to meet them. He and the coaches split the players up and drove them home. It was 12:15 a.m. when Kitna dropped off the last of the players in his car. And as the door shut and the player waved good bye, Kitna wept.

 

“I could never fathom that my son would leave for school at 6:30 a.m. with no money for food and some coach I never met or know is going to take him to the University of Washington for 7-on-7 drills and I don’t even know what that means and then not have any transportation when he gets back,” he says. “That’s when it hit me how hard this was going to be.”

 

And yet he keeps pushing because this is all he knows to do, walking through the halls with a computer bag over his shoulder, nodding to kids, calling them: “Dude.”

 

“Jon does everything he has with his whole heart,” says Boles, who is one of his assistants. “I told him: ‘You are responsible to the kids but you are not responsible for them. You can’t control it, Jon.’

 

But his belief is: If they can make one decision a week or one decision a day that is better than the day before then you are making an impact.”

 

Or as the other co-principal, Greg Eisnaugle, says as he stands in the hall one day: “He just exudes positivism. He makes the kids feel they are worthy.

 

Then Eisnaugle pauses.

 

“Have you met Rayshaun Miller?” he asks.

 

---

 

On the dream team of troublemakers, Rayshaun Miller was a lottery pick. He rolled through his first year and a half at Lincoln tormenting teachers so much that many threw their hands up in frustration. The tales of his arrogance and disrespect filled the main office. Once Erwin found him in the hallway boasting of his 4.4 time in the 40-yard dash and how he would tear through opponents on the football field.

 

“How will we know, Rayshaun?” Erwin said. “You can’t stay eligible.”

 

But there is also something compelling about Miller. He is bright. While most teenagers find it difficult to connect with adults, he makes eye contact. His handshake is firm. He likes to talk. This is the student Kitna met when he arrived last February, not the one who drove the teachers mad. At the time Miller was failing pretty much everything. Kitna said he would pick him up at his house at 6:30 every morning and drive him to school where they would work on algebra before the students arrived. Later in the day, he was in Kitna’s class, which gave him more than two hours of math daily with the new coach.

 

His grades soared. The kid who was failing got A’s and B’s. The kid who mocked his teachers waved good morning. When other students fought, he broke them apart. Soon word came to the office of a new, different Rayshaun Miller. And everyone wondered just what had happened.

 

Miller stands in the weight room after school one day and says: “I got my act together.”

 

He was born in Sacramento, Calif., and was sent to live with his father in Tacoma when he was 6 to escape the violence of his old neighborhood. He hasn’t seen his mother or brother since. He says he carried the anger over this for a long time. It was Kitna, he says, who told him he couldn’t use his background as a reason for giving up.

 

“He taught me there is no excuse for not trying,” Miller says.

 

Then Miller starts to talk about his old self, the one who tried to fail. He tells a story of a time he mocked a student for getting an A in a class. He remembers calling the student “stupid.”

 

Now, in the weight room, Miller laughs.

 

“Can you believe that?” he says. “I called someone ‘stupid’ for getting an A.”

 

---

 

Football was a miracle for Kitna. Even he never imagined he’d be in the NFL. It took years to become the starting quarterback at Lincoln. Nobody was waiting with a scholarship when he graduated. His parents helped him pull the money together to go to Central Washington, an NAIA school halfway across the state, where he found himself at the bottom of a long list of quarterbacks. Eventually he became the starter. His senior year, Central won the NAIA national championship, which got him mild acclaim in Washington but did nothing to further his career.

 

Assuming he was done with football, Kitna finished his teaching degree and began pursuing the dream he and Jennifer talked so much about: teaching and coaching. Lincoln was actually looking for a head football coach. He applied but was turned down.

 

Then a few days later Dennis Erickson showed up on Central’s campus.

 

The Seahawks coach at the time was there to give a tryout to his nephew, Jamie Christian, who was one of Central’s receivers. The tryout was a family favor, yet what amazed Erickson was the quarterback whose throws looked like rockets zooming into Christian’s hands. The Seahawks offered Kitna a contract and a spot in their 1996 training camp. He made the practice squad and after the season was placed on the roster of the Barcelona Dragons of the World League. Barcelona won the league title on home turf. Kitna was MVP of the championship game and left the field to chants of “Keeetna! Keeetna! Keeetna!” He was anonymous no more.

 

He made Seattle’s roster in 1997 and became the team’s starting quarterback in 1998. In 2001 he went to Cincinnati, then to Detroit in 2006 where he threw for 4,000 yards two consecutive seasons, eventually landing in Dallas in 2009.

 

Then-Cowboys QB Jon Kitna throws a pass

against the in front 49ers in 2011. (AP)

Yet while this became his football narrative, it was never the story he wanted to tell. Rather the one he repeats, offering to anyone who will listen, is more complicated. It starts with a young college student from Tacoma who understood little about who he was. He went to parties. He drank until he was drunk. He stole. Boles, who speaks to companies about their image, once told a group from 7-Eleven: “You guys can invoice Jon Kitna because he stole so much from you.”

 

Boles was going through a religious awakening at this time. And he talked to Kitna a lot about what he learned. One night Jennifer, who was Kitna’s girlfriend at the time, came home to find him in bed with another woman. In the midst of the ensuing argument, Boles’ words suddenly made sense. And what came from that night was a different Kitna. The drinking stopped along with the stealing and the partying. His expressions of faith were overt, manifesting itself in T-shirts with slogans like “God Athletic Department” or caps with crosses. His bookshelf filled with spiritual texts.

 

His purpose became clear. He would teach. He would go back into the cities, to the worst of neighborhoods and he would make children better. He would tell them about choices and respect and responsibility. He was going to change lives.

 

---

 

With Lincoln being a public school, faith is not a part of the lesson plan. Kitna understands this and seems to respect it. After all, he is teaching in a district where students come from all over the world and from a variety of religions. And don’t the lessons he is trying to teach apply to everyone regardless of belief?

 

“Character is an every day, all the time thing,” Kitna says. “It’s who you really are. It’s not what you turn on and off when you’re around a coach or at home with your parents.”

 

He has a philosophy that he took from a team chaplain in Detroit. He calls it “the four pillars of manhood,” with each represented by a letter that forms the acronym: “R.E.A.L.” as in: A R.E.A.L. man…

 

Rejects passivity

Empathizes with others

Accepts responsibility

Leads courageously

 

And while R.E.A.L. is gender specific and targeted first toward the Lincoln football players, Kitna believes it to be a message that can be embraced by all the students. Who doesn’t need to be reminded to show empathy or courage or take responsibility for mistakes? Virtues are virtues, whether they are taught by a preacher or a math teacher or a football coach.

 

“Win with grace, lose with dignity,” Kitna says.

 

He sighs when he hears the complaints about NFL players celebrating touchdowns and sacks – mocking the failures of the opponent on that particular play. If people want to change this, he says, the time to do so isn’t when the players are in the NFL. It’s too late then. You have to reach them when they are teenagers.

 

And the lessons are harsh. One day this fall Kitna was told of a football player who watched another student draw a derogatory picture of a classmate. The football player had nothing to do with the drawing but he laughed. Kitna had a meeting with the player, the teacher and the student who was the target of the drawing.

 

“Well you didn’t do anything to help the situation,” Kitna told the player. “You didn’t reject passivity.”

 

Then he suspended the player for two series in the upcoming game.

 

Later that week, a group of football players surrounded a group of girl volleyball players from a different school who had come to Lincoln for a match. Two of the players danced suggestively in front of the girls. When Kitna found out about it the next day, he gathered the team together.

 

“Who was there?” he asked.

 

Two players raised their hands.

 

“Who else was there?” he demanded.

 

Eventually five more players stood before him with hands raised. “You who did it, you are out a half,” Kitna said. “And you who didn’t do anything about it, you are out for two series.”

 

Months later, now, Kitna shakes his head. Lincoln lost its starting quarterback, a starting defensive lineman, starting center, a starting receiver and a starting linebacker for parts of that next game. The other team returned a punt for a touchdown, perhaps in part because special teams practice was canceled for the meeting about the volleyball incident. The replacement quarterback had a pass intercepted for a touchdown and Lincoln lost. It was a critical defeat in a 5-5 season.

 

“They got to feel the impact of losing a football game because of the decisions we make,” he says. “But the greater things was [that] the freshmen got to see it. ‘Coach doesn’t play, he really means this.’ ”

 

---

 

In the classroom a projection device turns on, the lights go dim and Kitna stands before his Algebra 1 class with a problem to solve. Behind him, on a screen, is a drawing of a yellow cab with the following question:

 

“A taxicab company charges a flat fee of $1.85 plus an additional .40 cents per quarter mile. A: Write a formula to find the total cost for cab fare. B: Use this formula to find the cost for one person to travel eight miles.”

 

The students unpack their bags, pull pencils from holders and take school-owned calculators from felt caddies that hang on the wall but already something is wrong. Kitna can sense it. Then it hits him: Almost none of them have been inside a taxicab. They are staring at him because they don’t understand the question.

 

Before the first X or fraction or set of parentheses can be scribbled on paper, Kitna must explain taxicabs. He shrugs. Teaching is making him a very patient man. Carefully, he explains the concept of a taxi meter.

 

He had to give up two of the algebra classes this fall because the demands of building the football program became too much. He replaced them with weight training which gives him more time with the football players. He thinks it’s important that they see him as much as possible.

 

But there is also a part of him that loves this class. And there are so many stories, like the one of the girl who barely spoke for the first few weeks who is now one of the best students. He can see the recognition. He can feel learning. This makes him happy. For, yes, he is sitting on a gold mine.