I read recently about the high school ‘dropout mills.’ Instead of diploma mills, there are about 2,000 high schools that have most of the country’s dropouts. What JUMPED off the page was the fact that over half of the USA’s black high school students are stuck in these crap schools.
Makes me want to return to teaching. I would probably get fired for using regular pronouns, but it would be fun while it lasted. One of the particular joys of teaching struggling kids is showing them that they can learn. The look in the eyes of a child that just learned how to do something, when previously neither home nor school had supported them, is a joy I received more than a few times.
Here is a fun side note. At the start of every school year, I would encounter foul or unkind language in the classroom. I would state ‘If you can’t say something nice, just shut the front door.’ As I stated.. shut the f... the students’ eyes would get very wide, expecting foul language. We would discuss that language is a choice. Ahhh.. sugar.....oh, fudge. After a while, the students would state ‘teacher, some day you are going to slip’ (say a foul word). I would again remind them language is a choice. Eventually, some students would see me in the hallways at other times of the day and shout “hey Mr ****, shut the front door!”
The movie Stand and Deliver, about educator Jaime Escalante who taught ghetto kids to excel in mathematics really changed my thinking. It's criminal not to find ways to help these kids accept responsibility for their own futures, since many of their parents did not.
Now, the left just calls math "racist."