Local school district goes on strike...anti-teacher idiots with no clue coming out of the woodwork.

Here, for example:

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/downingtown-pa/TBHDLT6SPD9CFNBTU

There will be loads of uninformed letters in the local Republican rag in short order, I'm sure.

If any of you fellow educators wish to participate in the (most likely fruitless, but you never know) Topix smackdown, don't let me stop you. :evilgrin:

Living in their mansions and driving their BMWs. Don't they care about the children?

:eyes:


dg

...the problem I have, generally speaking. Teachers always earned their money years ago and that's even more true today.

I don't even have a problem with their belonging to unions. My wife is a Civil Servant in the tech field and they make a very good buck with benefits to match. Everyone in her department has a Masters degree or better. They're tough jobs to get.

What I do have a problem with is that public education tends to sometimes be a dumping ground for those among us who aren't all that bright and who might have bilged out of other programs in college. I think everyone here has had an experience with a primary or secondary school teacher who overstepped their bounds and went crazy with the little bit of authority they had. In the corporate world, we call it short man's syndrome.

I will also tell you there's a tendency toward public school teachers and administrators becoming mind numbed bureaucrats...and that we're seeing more of it instead of less. Putting a little kid in jail because he brought a knife from the family silverware drawer for lunch is flat out retarded - but that's the kind of thing the media likes to sensationalize and that's what gets printed.

The honest truth is that many people's impression of those who work in public education isn't very good...and that many of those opinions have some basis in fact. My sister has a degree in Elementary Ed and I personally would not ride in a car she was driving. She doesn't think quickly, she doesn't read well, she doesn't write well, etc. She manages little kids fairly well...because there's not much difference between her and the kids. I could say the same for a few people I know who became high school teachers. They may have gone to college and gotten good grades (easy when you major in Ed) but I wouldn't trust any of them next to me at the yoke of an aircraft going 200 MPH.

We can disagree but I've been posting in these forums for well into twenty years going all the way back to Usenet and Fidonet, and I've basically seen it all. I wouldn't stick my neck out if I didn't know I was absolutely correct.

this should be interesting

I love how people want to apply rules of business to education UNTIL it comes to teacher pay. Education should be a business! But you shouldn't have to pay as much as any other business pays it's employees with similar education!

...with paying them better, if we'd end up with a better product.

They accept only the finest materials, and when they find a supplier who can't produce the best parts, they dump them and get a different, better supplier.

If you use the "better product" analogy, you have to deal with the fact that some of the "raw materials" the schools have to work with is ..... well.... let's just say "imperfect".

I taught HS seniors in an affluent suburbs. We had very little "imperfect raw materials". Mom and Dad had lots of bucks, had stimulated the kids' minds since birth. They valued education and teachers. They read books. They were involved... maybe too much.

Do you know how other schools might have a different "raw material base"?

I thought you did.

...but you're not gonna sit here and tell me I have to accept mediocrity. I'm not gonna take it and I don't have to. It's my tax money supporting these idiots and I'm tired of it. So are many others.

That's ultimately where this leads. Yes, the education lobby is very good at protecting its own but there are increasingly more of us than there are of you. Eventually, you'll be overwhelmed. That's how NCLB got passed. That's how welfare reform got passed and signed by a Democrat, over Daniel Moynihan's objections. Bill Clinton sensed an opportunity and took advantage of it. Hillary would do the same thing.

...but let's be blunt, you can't take crap and turn it into gold, no matter how hard you try. Teachers can do their very best, but some students are simply not blessed with great aptitude or attitude. Teachers are humans, not miracle workers, and they can only do so much with what they're given.

I taught with teachers who'd won awards for excellence in their fields and in education, too.

I was told by a couple of administrators when I was looking for a job out of college that my high grades were a liability (thinking I wouldn't be able to teach the kids at their level), but most seemed to be happy with my qualifications but just couldn't hire me at the time. Now I'm a stay-at-home mom and couldn't get a teaching job without massive classwork and a couple of state-specific tests.

Not all of us are idiots. Not all of us went into education because we couldn't do anything else. I personally know many who were high-achieving students in college and wonderful teachers in the classroom.

people like that... they're probably playing out some episode from their pathetic childhoods

they were in fifth grade once. Everyone with a big mouth should have to substitute teach in a middle school classroom for three days. :)

Part of it is the kid may not have a relationship with the sub. I know exactly how I can talk with my German teacher, but with a sub I'm lost.

And I love it. Well... 80+% of it.

for eighth grade one year after retirement. what a fiasco! LOL!

I like your thinking!

:shrug:

Hey Charlie, Phil. Try stepping into a modern day classroom for a week and being a professional teacher meeting all the criteria. And while you are at it, don't forget the 20 - 40 hours of unpaid overtime that you will be spending planning, grading, conferencing, doing mandatory continuing education, running clubs, etc.

Bet you won't last 2 days.

...and that's precisely the excuse seasoned teachers tend to give for 98 IQ, below average intellect types continuing to be allowed in the classroom.

They say "well, they'll show up to do the job" when presumably no one else will.

That's nice, I suppose.

But what they're actually doing is making one hell of an argument for privatization.

That didn't make much sense.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Nice.

...that I care if it's nice. It's accurate. I've been there. I've seen it.

And no matter what people say about the unions keeping the idiots in, I can tell you with absolute certainty that if a teacher is not qualified to be in the classroom, he or she is removed.

I've been there. I've seen it.

:shrug:

And I imagine that my IQ is higher than yours by a couple of standard deviations. In fact I would imagine that most of my colleagues in education have a higher IQ than yours, and a larger sense of dedication and caring than you do.

And as far as an average IQ goes(which is what 98-100 is), what of it? It means that they're average, at least in verbal and math. But hey, according to many accepted theorists, Gardner prominent among them, there are actually multiple intelligences, with verbal and math being but two of them. People are good in some, not so much in others.

And it's obvious that you really haven't "been there", otherwise you would realize that teachers are generally the ones who are required to take the most college hours and have the largest college workload. They also generally have to keep a higher GPA than other disciplines, not to mention the advanced degrees and continuing education that they're required to get after college.

You have no fucking clue, and your ignorance is all too apparent.

I recall a semester when I had 10 classes, and it was only 13 credits. Most of those required quite a bit of practice outside of the classroom.

If it is indeed, YOUR airplane.

Serial number D-9775
Built 1975
Certificate issue date 08/14/1989
Continental IO 520
Registered Owner
P. J. Man****
Farm*******, NJ

Careful, there.

...anymore. We owned it years ago, and it was a great airplane.

Though, like any occupation, there are people who shouldn't be teaching, this is not the case where I work.

I would encourage your local school district to increase the standards and practices requirements of your teachers. That will weed out many of the lazy and unsuited. At the same time you need to offer better pay to attract more talented teachers.

By the way, some of the worst teachers are in private schools, for the exact same reasons I mentioned above. Low pay, no benefits, low standards, poor practices.

Privitization is code word for education on the cheap. Kind of like war on the cheap. That didn't work out so well either did it?

to reveal yet another Libertarian.

Public school teaching used to be the one of the few careers open to intellectually talented women, and they were fired if they got married, or at the latest, if they got pregnant. School districts could get away with paying them very little, because where else were they going to go?

The salaries and working conditions haven't caught up with the new reality that school teaching has to compete with all the other professions to attract candidates.

In many other countries, public school teaching is one of the best paying and most prestigious jobs that a four-year graduate can get, and only the best students are allowed to enter it.

All those students in other countries who are beating American kids in math and science are products of their nations' public schools.

I was offered a job in one school to teach something I wasn't qualified for, to teach my subject at a grade level I wasn't trained for, for half-medical and $12,300 a year.

Another private school offered me $15K and crappy benefits to start an AP English program (when only teachers with master's degrees in English are supposed to teach AP) straight out of college and re-do their entire English curriculum (that was crap--worst book room I've ever seen).

I finally got into the Catholic schools and did better, but some of the teachers I worked with were, um, odd, to put it nicely. Some were amazingly wonderful, an honor to know and work with. Some were, well, scary. One Spanish teacher who had never taught before (businesswoman who'd been downsized) made the girls pay her to go to the bathroom. This at a girls school and all of the attendant issues there. They'd come to my class and beg for a bathroom break. Ridiculous. Another teacher was an ego-driven maniac who infuriated her students and couldn't teach her way out of a paper bag (I subbed for her, so I knew her plans and notes) but wasn't easy to replace and so was allowed to get away with it.

Kids are kids. Teachers are teachers. Great teachers work alongside horrible teachers, and it varies by year and by day who's great and who's terrible. I've seen terrible teachers get through to kids no one has could, and I've seen wonderful teachers get abused by the principal to the point of breaking. The privates are really not that much better unless you also then keep certain kids out to keep test scores up.

I taught for two years right out of college at a non-union Catholic girls school, and then the year after that, I taught at a union Catholic co-ed school. I only made it three years, and I can tell ya, it's really bad with no union. I'd never teach anywhere without a union again. Let's just say getting screamed at by a nun who, as principal, can fire at will is no picnic.

...hit you with a ruler?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Still. Quite unnerving.

...I have that image of Kathleen Freeman in the Blues Brothers.

A local district here is striking over only getting a 4.5% pay raise. I only get a 3% pay raise!!!!
They have 14 sick days, I have 4.

I'm trying to get a union job next year.. but it's hard to get into those schools for my subject unless a teacher retires or dies.

on edit: I should have read the article. Downingtown is the district I was talking about.

...you know things have to be pretty bad. Teachers are willing to put up with one hell of a lot of crap, mainly because it's practically a job requirement these days. In addition, teachers are more susceptible than most to the emotional blackmail ploy, "If you really cared about the kids..." Fill in the blank with whatever questionable demand you can think of.

If things are bad enough that the union was able to convince the majority of teachers to go on strike, it has to be pretty damned bad. And if they win their cause, it only helps the students.

My mom had a couple of work slow-downs (only do the contract work and nothing extra) but never a strike in her 33 years of teaching high school art. It's bad when they strike.

anything they can with their greed.

Right-wingers are weird.