[Bon of Babble]

You’ve written a superb post, and I appreciate that you stand up for us beleaguered teachers against a hostile public.

I am sick and tired of people thinking they’re experts on education and that the fault of failing students lies strictly with the teachers. Critics who have never set foot in a classroom yet remember their own classrooms as full of kids eager to learn from brilliant teachers and think it’s the same now as it was then. Well, times have certainly changed and I’d invite any of them into a typical high school classroom to show us how to do it.

So few have any idea what it’s like to work in a school where black kids not only freely roam the halls all day but, when in class, are hostile to the education process and do everything they can to interrupt, disrupt, run around the room, yell and defy the teacher.

I know because I’ve been in those classrooms and when I tried to get help, am told by administrators that I cannot send students out for defiance, that children should be in class and if I send them out, I am denying these students the “right” to an education.

I felt as if I had fallen through the looking glass.

The local media are no better. Low test scores are prominently displayed with full blame assigned to “uneducated,” “boring,” or “racist” teachers. The paper is always happy to interview the kids who are happy to claim, “I didn’t learn nothing from that teacher!”

We teachers are never asked, of course, and the kids’ attendance or discipline records never scrutinized, it’s always the teachers’ fault.

[EinNYC]

Thanks for telling it like it is. Maybe some of the knee-jerk "It's the UNION'S fault!" or "It's the teacher's fault!" folks who routinely post their ignorance-based remarks will now pause before hitting the SEND button. The classroom's not like you remember it, people. Students are not respectful, industrious, or reflective like they were in the good ol' days. They refuse to own up to failure as their fault in any way. If they were out partying all night or getting high or playing video games instead of studying for the test they know they have tomorrow, it's the TEACHER'S fault. If they waited until the 15 minutes before a project was due and then failed to hand anything in or handed in something absolutely reflecting its slapdash origin, it's the TEACHER'S fault. If no one who wants to learn something can hear because a student feels like amusing themselves by deliberating disrupting a lesson, nothing happens to the disruptive student. The entire class is held hostage because after all, one cannot deprive that disruptive student of their opportunity to "learn", can they?

No WONDER they claim they "learned nothing from that teacher"! They were the spanner in the spokes of the lesson, day after day and yet have the nerve to blame someone else for their failure, thanks to the expert tutelage of Al Sharpton and his fellow masters of projection. It's always someone else's fault that they did not learn as they should.

Remind you of someone who claims it's always someone else's fault, anyone but him?