My Infantry training company started with around 180 men. We barely graduated 120. I’m told that 20 to 30 percent “wash out” rate is not that uncommon.
And this author wants me to cry a river for what 10%? Please.
I did over twenty years in the Navy - including war service. Then I retired and became a teacher.
I almost quit half a dozen times in my first year in the classroom. Only stubborn refusal to be beaten by a bunch of kids stopped me.
Now I love teaching - but I’m also in a school environment where the majority of the kids want to learn and we’ve got the resources and methods in place to deal with things when they get difficult.
One of the things that I think trips up new teachers is that they are expected to be responsible for the bad behaviour of their students without being given the methods or support needed to achieve good results. Experienced teachers manage to get themselves into situations like mine - where teaching is relatively easy. New teachers get the toughest kids.
When you’re a 21 or 22 year old straight out of college (and the fact that you went to college and graduated is an indication of a certain degree of diligence and being willing to work in school), and you find yourself teaching 16, 17, or 18 year olds - people who are only a few years younger than yourself who don’t want to be there, and who know they can get away with doing almost anything to you short of physically attacking you (and often they can get away with that as well) and if you dare to even raise your voice, you could wind up being fired... it’s a ridiculous situation that’s become accepted in our schools.
If your DI was held to the same standard as the classroom professional of today. He would NOT have been allowed to raise his voice, he would always have to speak to,his charges with respect and consideration of their emotional needs. He would not be allowed to give ANY disciplinary action that was physical in nature, he would have to file over 15 pages of incident reports for EVERY incident that each charge was not performing optimally, that would include a detailed plan for how to encouragenthencharge to increase performance. He would have been required to contact the parents of the individual charge to discuss the need to improve performance. He would have been required to write endless reports describing how he was modifying the environment of the training group, to promote a better learning experience. He would have had at least two unannounced visits from the administration to review his interaction with his charges to determine why their level of performance was so low. He would have been given verbal, and written notice that having a 30% rate of below average results were possible means for his dismissal as not achieving the desired results in educating his charges. Your DI would be expected to meet all training goals, while having to provide all training materials from his own resources. Your DI would have to provide his charges with ammunition, manuals, targets, cleaning supplies, printed instructional,materials, instructional,display materials, toilet paper and tissues, and many other misc property, all from his own pocket. He would be told repeatedly that any of his charges that fail, only do so because he is not doing his job properly. The charges will be tested several times during training, and ANY ones that fail, even if they just sit and refuse to take the test, will be used to demonstrate why your DI is not qualified to perform his duties.
With these limitations, how many DI would be leaving each year.
Now tell me why you think your comparison is valid. My wife has been teaching in public schools for over 25 years. We spend over $2000 a year providing basic pencil and paper supplies for her students, this does not include many hundreds of dollars each month for other materials. Yet she is constantly plagued with underperforming students that can’t or won’t do assignments. And the administration holds her responsible for their failure. She was involved in three interview sessions with administrators and parents, recently. The student had reported that she looked at him with anger in her eyes. But he failed to recount that he had cussed at her and threatened her with physical harm. After a full week of investigation, she was warned that she was not properly in control of her classroom. The student was assigned to write a paper detailing what he had done that was wrong. His parent responded that he could not be forced to do that. How would your DI have handled that?