Fast Track Education

Glen Werdon holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial technology and a Ph.D. in industrial psychology, but the two activities he holds dearest are driving fast cars and driving home his points on education.

His primary point about education, as it is practiced in the school system today, is that it is restrictive, shortsighted and misfiring on a lot of cylinders.

The bottom line, he believes, is that there are a lot of kids in school who could make a contribution to the work force if their interests and the needs of industry were being met.

“I got a letter from Honda the other day saying that they would be looking for 5,000 trained mechanics in the United States next year, and expected to be able to find no more than 500,” Werdon said.

What Honda Motor Corp. is looking for is the kind of well-trained, intelligent mechanic who is highly respected in such other parts of the industrialized world as Germany and Japan, he said. Car companies in this country need people who have received classroom training that allows them to deal with the tremendous technical changes that have transformed the automotive industry in the past few years.

“No one is paying attention to the fact that thousands of kids who leave high school in this country every year could be good candidates for positions in which they could make $50,000 to $60,000 a year instead of making hamburgers or going on welfare,” he added.

Werdon--auto shop teacher at Sepulveda’s Monroe High School, where a large portion of the student body, he says, quits school between the 10th and 12th grades--has run his own automotive business. He also is a race-car driver and has studied industrial societies throughout the world as part of his doctoral studies.

“In this country, we only pay attention to the kids who want to go, or have been pushed into going, to college,” he said. “People who are intelligent and mechanically minded are routinely discouraged from continuing high school. There is no budget to teach gifted students the crafts that would guarantee their financial future and independence.”

At Monroe, Werdon is not letting that happen, at least not for the automotively minded.

His 150 or so students are not just being taught the fundamentals of mechanics, they are working on cars that Werdon races on weekends at such places as Saugus Speedway.

In order to stay in this popular high school program, Werdon’s students must meet the same academic requirements school athletes meet. They must maintain a C average and can have no bad citizenship marks on their report cards.

A lot of the resources for this program come out of Werdon’s pocket or his garage. “I provide the cars to work on and many of the tools,” he said. “There is no money in the auto shop budget. None. Not even enough to pay for Xeroxing class lessons.”

In fact, because the school could not provide insurance for the lucky kids who get to work as pit crew at the race track, Werdon has gotten them designated a Boy Scout troop so they can be covered by that group’s insurance.

Critical Mass

Perhaps you have not heard of wallyball.

It is played on a racquetball court with a net divider and a little blue ball that seems to travel at warp speed.

While racquetball has only two or four participants, wallyball, like volleyball, can have four people, six people or the entire population of downtown Burbank on the court if you wish.

The aim of the exercise is for your side to score 15 points faster than their side, and the fun part is that there are no out-of-bounds and no rules, according to Tom Hemmingsen of Racquet Centre in Studio City, which hosts these extravaganzas.

Well, it is not exactly true that there are no rules.

A serve may not hit the back wall and may only bounce off one of the side walls.

Of course, you don’t have to pay any attention to these rules, according to Hemmingsen. He says many people like to make the rules up as they go along and then disregard them if they get in the way of winning.

The most disconcerting part of wallyball is that a player may ricochet the ball off all of the walls or the ceiling, so it’s like being caught in a cross-fire during duck hunting season.

Supreme Court Sports Center in Van Nuys also is among the places offering wallyball.

Botanical Disaster

There is a big emphasis on nature in the fifth-grade curriculum in Las Virgenes Unified School District, so administrators thought it would be nice to allow the students to select the name of a school scheduled to open in Calabasas in the fall of 1992.

“We told the kids that they could select any name they wanted from all the flora and fauna indigenous to the area,” said Donald Kobabe, district director of special pupil services.

The students were given a list of appropriate trees and the like.

The overwhelming choice was Laurel Bay--the only problem being that there is a tree named bay laurel but none named laurel bay, which is what appeared on the ballot and which the students liked so much.

There was no way the district was going to allow a school to be called something that sounded like a Hawaiian tourist destination, so Kobabe said he was going to wait for the flap to die down and then try the process again.

Social Notes

No one from the San Fernando Valley is going to the Los Angeles Library Assn. Ball this week.

In fact, no one from the entire Los Angeles area is expected to attend.

But that’s all right with the folks who dreamed up this gala event, which is why they call it the Annual Stay Home and Read a Book Ball.

You don’t have to rent a tux and don’t need a sitter. You can forget about doing hair and nails and worrying about who will be at your table.

The only thing you need to do to prepare for this event is pick up a flyer at the Van Nuys or Woodland Hills public libraries (many others have them too). The flyer tells how to make a contribution to the library and then, instead of all the hassle of getting gotten up to attend some gaudy fund-raising shindig, curl up at home with a good book.

The local libraries could use the funds, according to Marlene Wulff, who has been at the Van Nuys branch for 27 years.

“When I first started in the library system, we had lots of money for books and a fairly uniform clientele,” said the research librarian.

“Now we serve a multilingual, multi-interest population, and we have no money at all.”

Overheard

“I love the word autodidact , because almost no one thinks it means self-educated. When an editor asks me if I know anything about surfing, I say I certainly do, that I’m an autodidact, and then I run for the library to read everything I can on the subject.”

--A woman talking to a fellow writer at a California Writer’s Club meeting in Canoga Park