Posted on 11/27/2006 7:04:44 AM PST by meandog
Why mock him? He obviously got a quality education from professional teachers, suiting him for an exciting and intellectual career in sanitation management.
Yeah, well Walter Williams is a nincompoop! We put our butts on the line every day to teach your snotty-nose little monsters to be good citizens, pay taxes, and to lead some sort of productive lives. I have suffered a broken finger and many bloody noses breaking up the fights of the offspring you and your ilk produce. I have counseled many a pregnant teen about staying in school, confiscated many little bags of a certain South American agricultural product, and actually removed weapons (including a 7-inch knife) from a student...and, guess what, I've done it with no help from you ungrateful parents, thank you very much!
In fact, most of the time all we get from you parents is threats and mountains of criticism (just like what you see on this thread).
I've also helped many students into college which I am proud very of doing...American teaching is the hardest, most underpaid, profession in the world. If you don't believe me, try it--I'm willing to bet a meager teacher's paycheck against your week's windfall profit salary that you'll find it's not for whimps (especially the homeschooled parental ones!).
In most countries teachers are revered along the same lines as "priest," or "soldier," or "doctor," but, here, they are ridiculed and compared to "janitors" because a school custodian thought enough about education quality to write the article. Well, I could care less about your kids homeschool them all the way through college if you want only, when they cannot read, don't blame us!
thank you!
...and post #502 goes double for you ##@*%$ guys!
I really don't get it. Half your posts are extolling all the great things about public schools, the other half make it sound like a war zone. I sure as hell won't ever send a kid of mine into a mess like you described in 502.
Hey meandog, I'm with you on this!
The fact that a lot of teachers are dolts doesn't mean every teacher is a dolt.
I'm a high school sub teacher about 6-10 times per year teaching science and math. I have a couple of teacher friends who are smart and conservative also. I'm glad to hear that another FReeper is a teacher. If we had more conservatives teaching in schools, many of the problems there would wither.
The fact remains that most professional teachers are not bright, which explains why most of them are die-hard goofy libs.
Use your power to set them straight. With puppy dog innocence I will drop a thought bomb on the teachers during lunch whenever I can, such as simply asking "What do you think the terrorists would do if we left Iraq, would they come here instead?" Then whatever lib-crap they spew, I come back with "Are you SUUUURE?, and would you bet your life on that?"
In other countries teachers actually teach and turn out students who beat the pants off our students in international competitions. The American education establishment turns out kids who are barely literate and then has the temerity to demand respect ... for what ?
Your attitude on this entire thread exemplifies what many of us have experienced from the public education establishment in this country - no accountability, protect the institution even as it fails, and blame parents first and lack of funding second.
BTW, most homeschooled parents aren't in the "windfall profit salary" category - we just care about what our kids are being taught. We don't want our children in the learning atmosphere that you keep raging about. We want the best for our kids.....and most public schools/teachers fall very short of what's best.
Though not war zones, I'm not trying to pass them all off as academic Edens either...the point is, they could be a lot better but only WITH THE HELP OF CARING PARENTS. Get involved with you local school to make it better!
I did try it. My company had a program where they paid an engineer to work at an elementary school in a school in the bad part of town.
I ended up hating it. It was funny because the teachers think of engineering as not a people friendly job, and that is what I hated the most about teaching. In engineering, I was part of a team of other engineers. I like working with a team.
In teaching you are one person in there. If you like being in charge, you'll like teaching.
A couple of other observations. Engineers definitely work harder than teachers. Most of my fellow engineers worked many late nights and on weekends. We also did not have much time off (3 weeks sick/vacation days off for the entire year, and only a few holidays off). Engineering is academically also very hard. Each project is different. You are constantly having to teach yourself new things. It is constantly evolving, and it is very difficult to stay on top of things. Also, the products that my company (a defense company produced) could not fail. If they failed, people's lives were at stake.
Another observation was that the good teachers really made the difference in the classroom. Some of the teachers were just great, and some of the teachers were just lousy. I had one teacher that would eat in front of her kids and yell at them all of the time. When I was in the classroom, she sat around and did nothing. The other teachers helped out with discipline or explaining things to kids that didn't get what I was doing. (I helped in the computer lab.) Kids wanted to do well with the good teachers, and they loved them.
I also think that the first few years of teaching are the hardest because you have to come up with lessons plans. However, these days with the internet that is much easier.
Bad parents and bad kids definitely make teaching harder. No two ways about it.
When my kids have been in the public school, I actually liked my kids teachers. I did not like the policies of the administrators from principals up to the superintendent. I also did not like the bad kids and bad parents. The problems with the administration and the bad kids are the main reason two of my kids are no longer in public school.
I don't think anyone here does think all teachers are dolts. We've all come across those teachers who we wish would be teaching all our kids' classes. Meandog has a hair up his butt and sees a declining enrollment as homeschooling and charter schools increase in numbers as a threat to his way of life (which of course it is).
However, he spews all kinds of garbage such as homeschoolers turn out illiterates and social misfits, and then declines to back up any of his statements with references. I've variously asked him on this thread to provide sources, his level of educational competence and so on and have had absolutely zero response. If you assign a kid a term paper and they don't list sources, do you give them a good grade ?
The custodian is probably the best educated and literate person at that institution. They wouldn't dare let the teachers write the article. It would expose their incompetence.
I'm not going to invest large chunks of my life in trying to prop up a failed paradigm. Even if I wanted to do so, it wouldn't be wise.
Having seen public health care (as practiced in Canada and the UK) and public housing (as practiced here in the US), I really don't care to participate in public education, thanks. It's just a bad idea.
I don't think it will ever go away entirely; but it's possible that at some point in the future it'll be the educational choice of last resort, for those who are out of options. The sooner we get there as a nation, the better off we'll be.
Mind you, this isn't the fault of the professionals in the system; this is the fault of the system itself. It just doesn't work very well.
You're cherry picking your own ideal group for comparison. The "parental involvement" indicates the parents are having to compensate for what the schools can't accomplish alone. Try comparing public school students without parental involvement to home schooled students so you don't have a mixed paradigm.
She is really enjoying her classes, the material and the teachers, too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.