Outstanding column! If it hasn’t been published in the MSM somewhere, you should submit it as a guest column for the record.
You have quite a story to tell, and you tell it in a really compelling way.
You have both my sympathy and my admiration.
Maybe sleeping with some of your male students will get their attention in the classroom from now on.
It *is* all the rage these days.
/joke
As for the iPod problem, they have an interesting solution here in the ‘burbs. The teacher will read off the contents from the iPod the first time, the second time, he synchs it to his play list. Being that he’s an absolute fan of the worst jazz music ever created (I don’t even know how they get away calling that ‘jazz’) it is a fate worse than death.
I hear you. Been there.
I have long suggested that the single most effective thing this country could do to improve education would be to eliminate this silly idea of compulsory education.
Any @sshole who doesn't want to be in a classroom -- or whose parents don't want them to be in a classroom -- gets the hell out of school and stops wasting everyone else's time and money.
I bow to your patience. I’d be a raving maniac if I had to put up with that.
I think they cloned my students from last year and sent them to you! I taught 6th and 8th grade at a low income middle school back then. I found that bribing them with candy was the only thing that had any effect. Isn’t that sad? Of course it was my last resort. I hated doing it, and it cost me a small fortune every week, but it was almost worth it. You have my sympathy - I know exactly what you’re going through!
There are a lot of conservatives who vent against teachers and teachers unions and over time they have become a big part of the problem in public education, but for the most part the problems are systemic. I am a babyboomer and when I went to school there were a lot of defecient teachers but the system was by and large a good one. If the system is sound, it can counteract some bad teachers. But today there are NO good teachers who can overcome a rotten system. A good teacher cannot teach against the system. The system has taken a lot of special education garbage and tried to adopt it to a broader population. I was a successful student in a successful system and that success can be reduced to this one premise. When I walked through that classroom door, I understood as well as the teacher understood that it was up to me as the individual to adjust to the teacher and the system if I was to be successful. In a weak willed people pleasing world, that idea has been turned upside down. This present rotten system has this delusion that the system can adjust to each and every individual, irregardless of what the student brings into the classroom as motivation. Somewhere in time, there was the business adage that the customer was always right. Now in the ever enlarging social welfare state, bureaucracies have adopted the the adage that the consumer of government services can do wrong. So it is, in the social welfare state, school is not to educate, but to indocrinate and prepare these present consumers of government, for future and further consumption of government as they grow older, nothing more, nothing less.
take a little responsibility for your incompetnace!
and change!
http://teachers.net/lessons/posts/3142.html
“classroom management by genghis”
I wrote this and it has helped hundreds of others and i am confident it will help you.
please write back
my email addres is at the end of the article.
It was painful to read because I know exactly what you’re talking about. I feel for ya.
And the part about “the nation’s future” I think is innaccurate. For alot of these kids, they are the service industry’s future. The justice system’s future. It’s sad but it’s a true, a lot of these kids don’t have much of a future, or atleast they think they don’t.
I hate that mentality about “all you have to do is teach a different way and they’ll listen!” That’s bunk. It’s the culture that’s warped, not the teaching methods. You’d have to change the kid’s personal attitude and outlook on life, but that comes from the influence of the parents, the community, and pop culture, and out of the realm of most any teacher.
The problem is that the current state of education did not condense upon the U.S. like a morning's dew.
It happened because a number of your colleagues decided- yes, actively decided,- that as long as their union could deliver more income to them; whatever else they did to the prospects of the children you are entrusted with, really was Someone Else's Problem.
Now, you weren't there during the worst of it, as the left began it's pogrom on education. And I hope you don't take my rant as a personal attack. It isn't.
Instead, I try to be as stunningly honest as you have just been, when you detailed the results of these several decades of leftist brilliance.
What they have done to the centuries-old idea that parents must deliver to schools, their children awake, alert, respectful and motivated to do their best... is criminal. But it was well thought out. The way to drain respect from children for all authority... is to saturate them with caustic propaganda about the sins of "authority".
The fact is that they did it well.
I don't recall parents spontaneously demanding that their children be handed every possible excuse for lack of effort. Parents didn't collectively insist on a far-left agenda of materials to propagandize with.
The unions... enabled by the authority of agency, acted in the name of all they represented, all of those noble teachers, and made a devil's deal. "Give us the control we need to craft our 'worker's paradise'... and we'll see you get a good rake-off of additional benefits." The teachers weighed the promise of cash in one hand... and the eventual cost of what they would be asked to allow to happen to the nation's children.
The deal was made. These people cannot act in the names of so many teachers, without those same teachers acquiescing to their agenda.
It's easy to burn a school down... and far, far more difficult to rebuild one. So, too, it is easy to trash the kind of environment where teachers act in loco parentis, with the authority willingly bestowed by parents to enforce respect, effort and behavior, on the part of children.
As long as the teachers agree that the most important part of their efforts need be directed at securing ever increasing levies and taxes out of the taxpayer parents... they will have no time or effort left available to explain hard realities to the parents of those children.And as long as parents accept things as they are...things will not improve. How could they?
We all feel badly for those teachers who could be actually opening up young minds, rather than slowly corroding them. But this is something that must come from the teachers.
You will collectively need to reach a realization of what is really important to you. And when you all finally come to an agreement to abandon the leftists who have so poisoned the well, your long rebuilding will only then begin.
But it will have no chance at all... until we all decide that tens of millions of children's futures trump the extremists' agenda.
My suggestion to you...run for your life. Move out of state to a small community in Idaho or Eastern WA.
Would you be allowed to play a Books for the Ears story? If you subscribe to the newsletter, you will receive about one a week. I have a hugh collection. Somewhere.
I used to get a book on tape, play it until the big climax, and then make the kids read the book to find out what happened. Worked every time.
Then there's the thing that if you're in a government school, once hired, you can't be fired and are guaranteed a raise whenever the union gets its back up.
Other than that, it's a tough job.
“It’s absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does...”
– John Taylor Gatto
Wow...this is what my daughters have to look forward to, isn’t it? They’re both teachers in OC...but our “climate” is changing here, too, rapidly.
I have no wonderful ideas for you...I like what al baby said about your having 8 kids who WANT to learn. Give THEM what they need and want!
You have my utmost respect for what you’re doing...
You have every reason to vent.
I once asked an experienced teacher what was the most important quality that a middle-school teacher could possess.
Without a moment's hesitation, she replied, "A bad memory."
When I asked why, she said, "If you remember tomorrow what the little monsters did to you today, you are likely to kill them."
I know I couldn’t do it (even with my own kids who are generally well-behaved!). Thanks go out to you.
And if you do end up finding another job - you’ll never really quit being a teacher. You’ll just lose your class and forget your principals. ;)