The husband of a teacher called up Rush today to take issue with some statements Rush made about teachers last week. I won't share his comments here, but the husband's words got me thinking about my own teachers.
Basically - what the husband said was, if kids are failing to learn, don't blame the teachers, blame the kids and the parents. And you know, he's right. For every one parent who spends time working with their kids on their homework, there's 99 parents who can't do that because they never finished high school themselves, and don't even know what their kids are learning. And of course since they never finished high school and don't ever anticipate being able to work at a job that will make them a living wage, they can't explain to their kids that that's what education will help them do - get them off welfare and into mainstream America.
It's not just the poor, of course. Plenty of wealthy parents will call up a principal and say, "Hey, my son is getting a D in his class and he needs a B. Make sure he gets a B, or I won't be donating any money to this-or-that school fund."
But for the last few decades, education has not been prized in the US. If you're a kid who is great at sports, you're lauded and looked up to. If you win a knowledge bowl or a chess tournament, you're spurned as a show-off or a nerd. Poor kids who want to get an education and get out of the ghetto are actually victimized by their own neighbors, who will beat them up for trying to be "better" than they are. "You think you're better than us? Well, you're not better than us, because I can stomp you into a coma and I will, too."
It's been 25 years since I was in high school, in a little, mid-western town, with an all-white enrollment, if I remember correctly. And like all schools, the teasing and tormenting and bullying that went on were rife. Perhaps not as violent as you find in inner city schools, but the verbal abuse and destruction was there, all right.
There was one teacher, an English teacher, and for some reason two girls in my class had conceived a real dislike for him. And they spent a whole year persecuting this guy - making jokes out loud in class to disrupt it, sneering at him, putting super glue on his chair to ruin his slacks, all kinds of vile, petty things. He'd send them to the principle and they never once got suspended, let alone spanked. Eventually, I think he just quit.
So when it comes to how much teachers should make, I admit I'm in a quandary. If we could afford it, I'd say every teacher who had to deal with kids deserved to make a hundred thousand a year. Unfortunately, we can't afford it.
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In the interests of Order and Method: My Schedule of Regular Posts
*Monday through Friday morning - schedules of President, VP and Secretary of State and her diplomats
*Monday through Friday afternoon - List of topics Limbaugh discussed on his program that day
*Monday through Friday througout the day - My posts on anything that I feel like talking about. At least one or two a day, sometimes more.
*Saturday through Sunday morning - An addition to my booklist of political books - covering Democrats, Republicans and other interested parties.
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