Posted on 04/13/2008 11:24:45 AM PDT by wagglebee
Did you catch the video this week of a student kicking the stuffing out of an art teacher in Baltimore, Maryland while the rest of the class cheered the pounding on? Y’know, if that teacher was moi, and some F-bomb dropping Darwinian throwback came over my desk to accost me, I’d grab my handy dandy scissors and plant ‘em in the feral teen’s skullcap, Jason Voorhees style.
From there I would proceed to snag the American flag from the corner of the room (if there was one) in order to stave off the rest of the flesh eating zombies ‘til Jason Statham came in with dual SKSes, spitting 154 grain FMJs, to assist with my safe exit.
As a teacher, I’d have painted on the front of my desk: DON’T TREAD ON ME—and I’d have the moxie to back it up.
Bumming a line from a movie with the late great Charlton Heston, it looks like the public schools (especially in the inner cities) are being run by “damned dirty apes.” The violent and obnoxious students are becoming emboldened in their bellicose behavior within the ridiculously overcrowded Public Stool System, and I believe we haven’t seen the half of this catastrophic snake. Teachers, you’d better have a serious plan in place—other than pushing a panic button—should you be next.
I’m not a prophet or a betting man, but (as stated) I’m a guessing it’s going to get worse. I’m talkin’ way bad (pardon my English; I went to Publik Skule). Mark my words. And I don’t care how much Obama talks about hope, or how many inspirational songs American Idol contestants cover, the dysfunctional die has been officially cast for increased chaos in the inner city classroom. Thank you, liberals.
We’ve got a stack of untamed teens who can’t do arithmetic doing the math and figuring out that they can bank street credit for their constant disruptions and violent attacks upon students and teachers with the penalty for their crimes being (maybe) a milquetoast slap on their tattooed wrist. Maybe. And the perks for their misbehaving? Well, they radically trump the mild and tame thump the delinquent gets on their never-utilized head.
Can you say, “Hello, pandemonium?” I knew you could.
Who the heck would want to be a teacher within such an out-of-control environment? I know if I were an undergrad with dreams of teaching “the next generation” within the Public Fool System, I think I’d switch majors after YouTubing the video of that teacher getting tenderized this week while the class was hooting and hollering.
Yep, I’d be looking for something less threatening like being a mole inside of an al-Qaeda death squad, or perhaps working as ranting Rosie’s personal assistant, or perhaps a vocation in neutering un-anesthetized, unusually angry wolverines.
It’s been four years since we pulled our teenage daughters out of the public school system and started to home school them, and I could kick myself for having waited so long. I owe you, girls. The educational, emotional, spiritual and physical progress they have made has been amazing. I’ve been ecstatically stunned at how they’ve aggressively embraced the new lease on their educational life.
Since we began this program, my oldest has graduated and is now in a great university and on her way to Boardwalk and Park Place. My other daughter is currently cruising through her online honors level classes as a girl uninterrupted.
Yep, it’s amazing that with their virtual schooling they actually get to study the basics, pursue their educational and athletic interests, and do it from wherever in the world they can get online (unlike public schools).
No longer do they have to wait for the 186% overcrowded class to decide to cease fighting and stop cussing and humping long enough that the teacher can teach the students how to write their name so that, later on in life, they can sign for their stuff once they leave whatever prison they’re in.
The day I quit teaching in this kind of setting, I figured I could get more money and have less stress street-walking! I talked to a teacher recently who said, “We are not allowed to touch the students. I had a defiant young man (high school) who stood in the doorway of my classroom. I touched his jacket to encourage him to come in. His mother called and SCREAMED at me/ at the office, that I dared to touch him.”
I suspected she was a lib. Why else would she be risking her life?
I wonder sometimes if today's homeschoolers are tomorrow's elites.
This is my sister’s last year teaching in Tucson - she’s tired of the whole routine. I asked her what it took in TUSD to hold a failing kid back a grade.
She replied, “If he can eat and get bigger, he’ll move up a grade!”
They say, “you get what you pay for”, and public schools are “free” so I guess they’re right.
“virtual schooling.” That pretty well sums it up.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." The idea was to keep the state out of the churches, not to keep the churches out of the state. By banning prayer, they violated the 1st Amendment of "prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
I spend close to $6000/yr to send my daughter to private school and because of this I do have a little pull with the school authorities, ($6000 worth). I also have the option to send my daughter elsewhere. I've been pretty happy with my daughters school however. When all the parents at a school are making sacrifices from their finances and their time to send their kids to school they end up taking their children's education pretty seriously.
Exactly right. Thanks for pointing this out.
I suspect it wouldn’t pass with a lot of conservatives either, because parents and parents and many of them think the other kids need it but theirs don’t.
susie
And I ALWAYS tell their parents when I see well behaved kids in public. It usually surprises them, but they appreciate it, and it’s good for the kids to see that it’s noticed. And if some poorly behaved youngin’ happens to overhear, perhaps they will pause to reflect (altho I doubt it).
susie
And of course not all public schools are like what we read about in the papers. If they were, this story would not be news, it would be the norm.
susie
Good observation. In a media-image dominated world, one has to be reminded of the basics.
I saw an instance of this the other day at a local restaurant. The father, a boy (about 8), and his sister(about 6) were out for dinner. After the boy started teasing his sister, the father told to to move to another seat at the table.
At first, the boy refused to move. After the third time being told, he got up and in a disgusted tone said "OK, I'll f**kin' move." The father did absolutely nothing about it. Had I said that to my father, I'd probably still be looking for my teeth off in the corner of the restaurant.
Wow, Guitar Class? I should’ve gone to school with you.
Maybe I’d be able to do a decent lead now...
“I saw an instance of this the other day at a local restaurant. The father, a boy (about 8), and his sister(about 6) were out for dinner. After the boy started teasing his sister, the father told to to move to another seat at the table.
At first, the boy refused to move. After the third time being told, he got up and in a disgusted tone said “OK, I’ll f**kin’ move.” The father did absolutely nothing about it. Had I said that to my father, I’d probably still be looking for my teeth off in the corner of the restaurant.”
I don’t even want to recall what I know would have happened to me when I got back to the car or home if I had behaved similarly. The problems is that many kids know they can get away with it. They also know they have “rights” nowadays, too.
Reintroduce corporol punishment in schools.
***
I am afraid that is much too simplistic. In your grandmother’s day, the parents would have backed up the paddle-wielding teacher. Today, 99% of the time, the parents of the delinquents approve of such horrid behavior in their offspring and would probably take a swing at the teacher themselves.
The problem starts in the home, and many parents — at all income levels — do not take the time to properly socialize their children.
Believe me, that 6 paragraph rant is why one of the most passionate topics I do talk about are my years in the Public School system(as I have no life). They should be wrecked by wrecking balls, replaced with business centers and decentralized enough to where a new movement happens that revives the Greco-Roman period of education. I am sick of overcrowded classrooms filled with students who constantly talk to one another during classtime, harrass the teacher, and stay in school.
It is like voting, pure Democracy is all in the word “no” and so people don’t always have to be educated in the same tinderbox as everybody else. This is the same school, the one I went to, that was no.1 in the county and no.2 in pot smoking. It was also 15 minutes away from Annapolis in a “small town” yet probably because I was in level II schooling I had to deal with the cult fetishers.
Not that I wasn’t a rebel myself(I wrote a song by the age of 15 called Jailhouse Blues which was one of my first songs. It was about how school was no different than a jailhouse or a Communist State) in guitar class. I love music and would love to form a band but I was too experimental. Just remember, this may be the tip of the iceberg as I was in Middle School when Columbine happened.
The teachers were also usually uniformly nice which made me feel a lot of pity for them, and I started to lose faith in my generation by the students I saw. A few people have actually told me to be a history teacher but it would be a lot more useful to be the kind of reformer you see in the movies. My old principal tried to do that, including videos on morality, but nonetheless we all shrugged and laughed it off. Yet, however he was being very serious.
Perhaps, being older, I would feel a lot to like about the movies and I also would’ve liked the abstinence things we had. What really struck my mind, and I was too numb and naive to notice, was how much the teachers cared more for their pay than for their students as they held technical teacher’s strikes in High School. It almost seems like when you have a Union, especially a big one, it always feeds off of resentment, conformity and not how to teach the students better but freebies.
How many children in the U.S. attend public school? How many instances of this behavior occur throughout the U.S. in public schools? How many people are assaulted on city streets in the U.S. compared to the number of teachers who are assaulted in public schools? Should we abandon our city streets too while we are at it?
How many of these teacher assaults occurred during each previous decade going back the last 30 or 40 years or more? Are things really getting worse, or has the advent of 24 hour news cycles and readily available video recording devices made for such incidents to become much more widely reported over the course of the past 10 to 15 years. People making “knee jerk” “emotional” comments about such incidents adds little to the debate.
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