When you see a particular slogan or motto on a regular basis, it’s easy for it to become part of the background, to lose some of it’s meaning. This is certainly true of the UIL motto, “Making a World of Difference.” It’s on our letterhead, our business cards and our publications. It frequently appears next to the UIL logo on all manner of documents, and you may have used it yourself on some of your materials for your UIL district meet.
With such an omnipresence, it’s easy not to notice it at all.
I don’t know the history of how “Making a World of Difference” became the UIL motto, but I’m certain that it wasn’t just pulled out of the air. The League has been around for almost 100 years, and things have changed frequently — and often radically — over that span.
But one constant has certainly been that the leadership of the League is composed of thoughtful dedicated people who are committed to the success of young people in Texas, and to the belief that there is great educational value in the pursuit of excellence through competition.
It’s about the importance of strong extracurricular programs, and it’s really about the mission of public education in general.
When you place it in that context, a seemingly simple slogan takes on a much greater meaning, becoming much more than just part of the letterhead. But to get to that point, sometimes you need something concrete to really drive it home. It’s easy enough to assert the value of academic competition in the abstract, but it’s much better to base that assertion on real-world foundations. I had the pleasure recently of attending the yearly Texas Interscholastic League Foundation banquet here at UT-Austin.
A quick bit of history for those who might not be familiar with TILF.
Its creation was an initiative of former UIL Director Rodney J. Kidd during the 1950s. Since that time, the foundation has awarded more than $21 million in scholarships to more than 15,000 Texas students.
UIL pays for the foundation’s administrative overhead, and TILF board members donate their time and services, so that every dime the foundation receives can go directly to scholarships.
The only requirement to be eligible for a TILF scholarship? Advancing to the Academic State Meet sometime during your high school career. The yearly banquets (in addition to UT-Austin, there are banquets at Texas A&M and Texas Tech) bring scholarship donors and recipients together. The students have an opportunity to make a short speech in which they thank their donors and talk a little about what their UIL experience means to them.
At the UT-Austin event on Feb. 26, during her remarks Treva Dayton asked the students to share memories of their first and/or best UIL memories. I was struck by how many of them talked about starting out in elementary/junior high competition.
Whether it was second grade Storytelling or fourth grade Number Sense, they talked about how that first contest experience boosted their self-confidence and set them on a path to success. And these are students who are now attending one of the best universities in the country, many of them with 4.0 grade point averages.
I don’t think any of those students mentioned whether they placed at that first elementary school meet. The educational value of the experience was the important thing for them, which is exactly the philosophy we try to adhere to with the EJH program.
I wish every teacher and administrator had the opportunity to hear those students speak. With the ongoing frenzy over high-stakes testing, it’s easy to think that everything else is expendable. But hearing these students is a wonderful reminder of the value of UIL academics, and of extracurricular activities in general.
Somehow I doubt they would be quite so effusive if asked to recall their fondest memories of TAKS testing. There is certainly plenty of ground for debate over the value of standardized tests in measuring student performance, evaluating schools and guiding education policy. But there can be no debate that we do students a great disservice if we reduce the educational experience to little more than a series of test scores.
That’s why extracurricular programs continue to thrive in spite of all the competing pressures, because educators know that those programs are vital to student success.
One immediately relevant example: this year we will have the largest number of schools we’ve ever had involved in the elementary/junior high program, with more than 2,800 registered campuses.
There was something else too in what those scholarship recipients said. Many of them made a point of saying thank you to the coaches who they had worked with in their various academic activities.
Even though they knew those people would not be in the audience, they recognized the value of what those educators had done for them and wanted to share their gratitude. So that motto — “Making a World of Difference” — ultimately isn’t about what we do at the state office. Rather, it’s about what you do with your students each and every day, about the world of difference you make in their lives. When you think about it in those terms, a simple slogan suddenly seems incredibly profound.