I was never that caught up in the whole education debate in this country, not that I don't care but in the conservative worldview if I understand it correctly and I think I do there are an awful lot of bad teachers in the public schools and so if we just got rid of teacher tenure everything would be hunky-dory. In fact this is one issue they really get their dander up about, endless columns to the point where I just cruise them and turn the page but dunno man, maybe the problem is with the Kids. In our discussion of utterly boring and meaningless jobs Saty had this to say: "Quite a lot of jobs could be made more interesting by the motivation and willingness of the person doing it to make it more interesting." Just substitute the word class for jobs and student instead of person and the same point applies to education. What's a teacher to do with a class full of asshole kids, fidgety brats who won't sit still and aren't willing to learn? I started out very early in the public school system but then my folks switched me over to private but out of all those years I don't really recall too many truly bad teachers. Maybe a few were too boring and dry for my tastes and could have been better but to hear conservatives tell the tale......Mayor Bloomberg's multimillion dollar Black and Latino Initiative in NYC has as a key component teaching the young'ens all about Sex, rubber instructions, things like that but if I may borrow from the soapster here it is not even the primary obligation of the State to educate your kid. It certainly isn't to teach them something Mom and Dad should be teaching them anyway and I say teach 'em a trade, how to make money, how to get a job. How is learning about Mike and Fred adopting a kid gonna pay the bills down the road? Now Mayor Bloomberg somehow got the law changed in the City so he could run for a third term and we get this stuff for his finale and pedestrian plazas where cars used to be and bike lanes nobody really uses and he even wants to have food grade inspections for New York's trademark fast food vendors because in his words if he's buying a hot dog he wants to know whether the guy washed his hands first. Maybe you want one of those giant salted pretzels and Moussa just took a dump. I just shut my mind off to it:)
Now there ARE bad teachers. I had one in my AP English class who told me I was worthless and had no business being in her class. Back then I was very punk, very rebellious, very political and nonconformist with a vengeance (this in a Catholic highschool). (Of course I'm not any of that anymore.. lol).
ReplyDeleteAnyway the whole year she pretty much ignored me which is not too easy to do when there's only 11 people in the class and she tried to nail me on anything she could get, like dress code or whatever, and I didn't get very good grades on anything I wrote.
When the time came around for us to take that AP exam she did tell me I wasted her time the entire year and that I would be wasting mine taking the test and only embarrass myself... I took it anyway and basically if you've ever had any exp with it, the grading is ALL subjective, you pretty much write an essay and they go from there. Grading is done on a 1(fail) to a 5(perfect) and it means a lot because you get college credits based on your grade.
I wrote my essay on Crime and Punishment which I had only read the first 24 pages of (hated it, never have read the rest) and as it turned out I was the only person not only in the school but in all of Westchester to get a 5 on the exam.
I took the printout that they mailed me and brought it into her classroom when no one else was there but her and me, slapped it down on the desk, looked her in the eye and said F***k You. She didn't say a word and I took my paper and left.
Now that's pretty much a success story of getting around a teacher who actively tries to put a student down and discourage them, but how many people can put up with that kind of treatment and even beyond that, what teacher would do this to a kid? But it happens. Around here they had an expose where teachers were encouraging kids to drop out because their grades weren't so good or whatever. I mean, encourage a kid to drop out?! So there are indeed bad teachers out there. There's bad kids, but I think there are good kids that get the shit end of the stick too.
I totally think that there are kids today under the influence of substandard parenting that isn't making the teacher's jobs any easier, but also political correctness and the dumbing down of kids is hurting our country.
ReplyDeleteActually I did have a history teacher once in Catholic high school who asked me a question and I gave a simple and brief answer and she practically said that my answer sucked in front of the whole class. What I'm talking about is conservatives talk like there's an epidemic of bad teachers out there in the public schools and not having a real knowledge of the field other than what I read in the papers I don't want to draw conclusions here. You couldn't finish Crime and Punishment, I couldn't get past the first few pages of Roots in school.
ReplyDeleteI don't think anyone says there is an epidemic of bad teachers, but a system where bad teachers cannot be removed is ridiculous, and needs to be changed.
ReplyDeleteIn NYC it's a really hot issue at the moment.
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