From time to time I click on teachers posts, something I shouldn't do. This time the source was hidden.
The spinelessness that's common to such threads causes me to alternate between blind fury at what teachers are teaching our children, and absolute dispair at how we allowed such amoral wimps to get such a stranglehold on our children.
Homeschooled kids are our only hope. Most of the rest are being taught to nothing of value. Your posts are just another in an endless stream of confirmations.
Spinelessness?
I have fought for my country. Twenty two years in uniform serving to protect our democratic way of life, including service in combat. And once I left the Navy, I decided to become a teacher because I was so deeply, deeply worried about what was wrong with our schools and wanted to help fix them.
I am not amoral. I am a very moral person, in fact, an officer and a gentleman required by sworn oath to at all times, in all ways uphold a very high standard of morality and behaviour. And I do this in the classroom, and I insist on it from my students.
You do not know me. You have no idea what I stand for.
I utterly CONDEMN what this woman did at the age of nineteen and I do not think for one moment that she should be anywhere near children. I would have no problem with her being in prison as I think her crimes in 1973 would have justified life imprisonment.
But I am also a rational, thinking human being who isn't stupid enough to think that a person is always going to be the same person at the age of fifty two as they were at the age of nineteen. People can change, and this woman does seem to have changed.
I think homeschooling is a wonderful thing as it happens for parents who are able to do it. But not all parents can or will, and their kids need an education as well. I'm a teacher to help provide that. I teach in one of Australia's top private schools and work to help create moral, upstanding, dedicated, hardworking citizens for our society.
I think that is worth doing.
And I don't ever give up on a kid, whatever he does. They're not yet grown. They can always be helped. They can always change.
I haven't lost one yet.