That is technically true, but the Venn diagram has a rather large overlapping area between them.
1 Like
For a lot of them it’s race. My mother was a teacher, and I ended up hearing teacher talk. My mom wasn’t one of them (those teachers), in fact it was almost always a fresh faced 24 year old blonde TBH. But the line goes like this “our schools would be good if we could kick out the blacks they make us get worse ratings because it’s not evenly measured.” If it wasn’t that it was “if we could deport the [insert immigrant minority to hate of the month].” I would bet that plenty of them vote or have voted against their own interest, the interest of education, and the interest of the American population because for a lot of white women teaching is a) something you do before you get married to a white man and become a SAHW/SAHM or b) it’s one of the places where you can be racist, hurt people, and most of the time get away with it… power is fun! Personally I hope along with this a ton of shitty teachers get flushed out permanently, maybe the hard times for them is helping that bit along.
3 Likes
If you let them get beyond that, it will be “if we could kick out the white working class…” See British Grammar schools for an example.
There will always be someone other than themselves to blame.
5 Likes
Totally, totally nailed it!
My mom was an evil, racist teacher. But the hilarious part is that she wasn’t exactly white. She was a Latina from West Texas whose family was scratching in the dirt when Sam Houston’s people showed up. So guess what her least-favorite ethnic group was?..yep, her own.
She encouraged, financed, and labored for my brother when he started to deal drugs because “That’s how you get rich!” Well, he inherited her laziness along with her greed, and managed to be yet another drug dealer who can’t afford to move out of his mom’s house or keep a car running. Don’t blame her on Ayn Rand though, she’d never read a book that wasn’t a crime novel.
While doing research on ‘Why is my family a bunch of incompetent criminals?’, I ran across a soft-science article that claimed nursing and teaching attracted an abnormal number of psychopaths (or was it sociopaths?) because it was the easiest (laziest) way to get into a career with no supervision and lots of power over people (kids, the ill) who can’t fight back.
1 Like
I hate people who make generalizations. They’re all idiots.
7 Likes
I have seen this play out in high performance things like music, dance, whatnot. But an elementary school teacher? What exactly is it they failed at doing? Doing fractions at a professional level? Absurd.
Yeah, I have a hard time seeing Republicans losing any sleep over this.
I keep having to ‘Gen X-plain’ to some of the Baby Boomers I keep running into with grand political conspiracy theories about school closings that the Millennials are now the SECOND generation in a row that is NOT rampantly breeding. Back in the days when Baby Boomers were forcing school districts to build those hideous ‘Machines for Teaching’ brick-and-glass schools, families that had 6 kids weren’t weird - that was normal. Now, parents are ‘weird’ if they have more than 2 kids. And there aren’t nearly as many people at all in Gen X and the Millennials to even BECOME parents, and married couples who have NO kids aren’t unusual.
So, without hordes of kids to teach, why are we building new schools at all and not firing teachers en masse?
There’s 35 kids per classroom in my local schools. Every year the schools all get waivers to permit it. But 11 kids per teacher, 2 teachers per class is optimal for society.
And they’ve fired all the librarians, music teachers, and other non-STEM teaching staff.
This I have seen with my own eyes, for 20 years now it has been going on.
8 Likes
Texas shithole democracy fistbump. My mom did 30 plus years because she’s codependent, masochistic, a touch narcissistic in that inverted martyr way (pretty benign by my family’s standards), and capable of epic levels of denial. God I hated her teacher “friends” whom she also hated but of course indulged so so much, I swear it put more of a rift between the two of us than her staying with my dad. My mom’s motto was “I know it’s wrong and it’s not true but if you want to get along you have to pretend to agree…” I guess I’m considered a millennial which is weird because people still act like it’s a youth generation and I’m not feeling too youthful these days, but I tend to offer to birth one child for every 2 million dollars someone pays me directly. No takers so far. That being said I desperately want a better educated populace. It’s a sad situation because you have big problems inside and out. There is a lack of funding for education, and there is rampant corruption within educational facilities. Throw money at it and you pay the assholes and woefully impaired thinkers emerge as a result. Take the money away and we get hoards of woefully impaired thinkers and we still have assholes. Some kind of enlightenment is going to have to happen but I’ll be damned if I know how. So far as I can tell things have only gotten worse since she “retired”, and when she was teaching there were usually 30 plus kids in any given class and pretty much no concern over anything but how the school looked once test results came in.
2 Likes
Oh, I TOTALLY agree my tax dollars are being spent on what you and I think are the ‘wrong’ things…
BUT, the giant waves of kids entering the school districts every fall just aren’t there, Your school district must be an aberration - a good neighborhood that isn’t aging out of the ‘Child Production Business’. My brother’s neighborhood popped up overnight, attracted parents that were all EXACTLY the same age, their kids all finished school within a few years of each other - and none of the parents are selling their houses to families with school-aged kids. So the school went from brand-new and filled to the brim to being on the list of potentially closed, because the neighborhood doesn’t have any kids to send there.
My own neighborhood (Da Hood) has a lot more turnover than my brother’s fancy neighborhood - but still, 1-2 kids is normal. Not like the homeowners who are aging out and leaving. They all had at LEAST 4-6 kids, even if they had to trade out their spouses. The classrooms are about 17 kids per room.
I wish I could like that more than once.
well, yeah… that’s biology.
3 Likes
In Delaware, there’s a combination of many factors.
We had tremendous “white flight” into private schools after 1970s court-ordered bussing sent the inner city poor into the (formerly) excellent suburban schools; the affluent were not willing to have their children sent to systematically underprovisioned ghetto schools. This resulted in many huge schools being shut down and sold off at bargain basement prices to politically connected megacorporations.
Now we have “charter” and “magnet” schools that involve entrance examinations and engage in discriminatory shenanigans like not having cafeterias (so that they don’t have to support the School Lunch program - this keeps the truly poor out) or not having any transportation system (this keeps families without cars out). Some of these new schools are actually in the old school buildings, repurchased at great expense.
In the end result the remaining public feeder schools are populated principally by the urban poor, despite being physically situated in lily white affluent suburbs, and many of the students and their parents are unable to participate in school events like PTA or football or whatever because of transport costs and availability.
Add “teaching to the test” and “No Child Left Exploited” and “School Choice” and devoting more resources to the better performing schools where they don’t need them as much, and of course “Zero Tolerance” and stir thoroughly… That’s Delaware’s school system. A descending spiral of screwing over the poor, who are predominantly people of color, for the benefit of those who need it the least, the affluent citizens of every race, creed and color.
3 Likes
I’m snickering at the thought of trying bussing back in my very, very un-diverse childhood rural school district: Load up impoverished white farm kids, drive around in circles all the Hell over the county, wind up dropping them off at the ONLY school within 40 miles…
I still suspect you live somewhere that’s attracting the few breeders that are left to make school students. Each year, the population wedge gets thinner, and no one wants to make mouths to feed in a down economy. But if you live in a really good school district, people will buy a house there just to get their kids into the school they wan.
The major factor is that we’ve been smashing the educational infrastructure at roughly the same rate that the number of students has been dropping, and an accompanying minor factor is that fewer and fewer people are able to afford private schools. There have been birthrate fluctuations, though.
Our school districts are world famous for our zero-tolerance policies. Literally world famous, I could meet people from Japan and tell them I’m from Delaware, and I’d be totally unsurprised when they said “oh, that place that sends first-graders that never hurt anyone to reform school?” Our test scores are stable or dropping, too. Everything we are doing is demonstrably wrong and not working… and the 21st century response to that is to double down, of course.
3 Likes
Um… I’m sorry, but no. Some of us chose education, not because we’re right wing or left wing, or “bad at math” (which, by the way, doesn’t make you a garbage human, just not good a a particular skill, thanks very fucking much), but because we love young people, care about their well being, and want to help them do well. I teach at the college level, and I assure you, that plenty of people are here, not because we fail at life, but because we genuinely give a shit.
11 Likes
Uhhh…okay. I completed all the coursework for a Master’s in Teaching Secondary Science, but had to quit before I finished my thesis because I ran out of money. I didn’t have to take ONE SINGLE math or science class - it was all just educational dogma from back in the good old days, regurgitated to their formulas.
I have a Bachelor’s in Not Teaching, and used that to get a Post-Baccalaureate substitute’s license in my local district. Teachers are bad at math. I had to explain the tax differences between deducting student loan costs (Hope) and getting credit for student loan costs (Lifetime Learning). It was painful and pointless, and they would try to cover their ignorance by derailing the conversation by how they should be getting gold medals for being such martyrs. Mostly just a lot of “I hate you young people trying to take my job-for-life”.
If you read my post, I was puzzled why the Republican teachers would keep supporting a party that was hurting them financially, and they couldn’t give me an answer because they couldn’t figure out the math. Again, just a bunch of yelling.
I’m bad at math and I teach. I guess I’m a garbage human who isn’t worth your time.
7 Likes
Blame that on the accreditation process, not the colleges themselves. I’ve had a couple teachers who had double majors (education and their subject matter) in math and english. They did very well but not above average from other teachers at least for me. One thing that marks a great teacher, in my experience as a student, is their ability to be able to get the attention of the class while keeping with their lesson plan however it may be deviated due to differences in students and the class as a whole. One may be a great mathematician but fail at teaching since teaching and learning math aren’t exactly the same. So I think you should give teachers a break when it comes to the current situation in the US. It’s basically a nightmare situation even when compared to developing countries.
2 Likes
My high school calculus teacher was so good at math that he ran a side business doing calculus for private businesses. He loved teaching, so he kept teaching as his day job.
Also, I’d like to point out that every single professor/TA/instructor in my major at university was damned good at math. Why? Because they teach future engineers how to do advanced mathematics.
6 Likes
