LET'S TALK ABOUT TEACHERS

LET'S TALK ABOUT TEACHERS

Now that school is all back in full force after this Labor day weekend, let's tackle the serious subject of teaching and how utterly fucked education is.

I know a lot of teachers, and every single one of them is constantly burnt out husk of a person who hates the bullshit that comes with their job. The whole goal of going in to that industry is to be a mentor, to educate, to better the future generation and it comes with a huge passion to be apart that i s totally just destroyed when they enter the classroom and see all the other bullshit that they have to deal with.

Many of which have already decided they were getting out of that 'dream career' because it just comes with a lot of headaches that society has just dumped on them. To add insult to injury, the pay is just not there for the amount of time that you have to actually be working. Not only the long day of teaching and in many cases being a glorified babysitter to these problem children who have a varied degree of learning impediments, but you have to take you work home with you on the daily in terms of grading and planning lessons that will eat up all your actual social time.

Then you have how condescending everyone is towards the profession. Just because they went to school once and teaching must really be easy. And hey, you get such a long holiday in summer and all the holidays that kids have off. Man, you must really have it easy in your career. I have no sympathy for you!

I had hoped that the public perception of public educators had slowly started to change and the acknowledgement that they are treated like absolute disposable shit would disappear, but then again, we live in a country where the solution to gun violence in the school was to make the English history teacher an unstoppable protector by giving them a gun. Then I'm reminded that society just sees teachers as some disposable shield for their children once again.

One other factor that you have to realize is that they are both powerless in the classroom and vs the parents - who only see their kids for a few hours every day and occasionally on weekends anyway. The whole Teacher-student relationship has been mutated into a sort of Teacher - Educational standards bureaucracy where the teacher has become just a tool to get learning standards up without regard of the actual situation that they are in with the students. Test scores and lesson milestones are all that matter regardless of anything else.

Situations happen where a teacher recognizes that a student is slightly behind the average for their age group, which probably has been acknowledged but no past teacher wanted to deal with the hassle of informing the parent, and then contact with the parents in regards to let them know and use their spare time to prepare a development plan and help the kid be brought up to speed amount to the student barely getting caught up - that is if the parent is even receptive to help the situation and isn't going to just argue that you're unfairly picking on their star child.

In which case the parents lose their shit, complain to the school that the teacher is at fault for their child being behind, and demands the teacher go out of their way to bring the one child up to speed at the cost of the classroom progressing further. Then when the parent confronted about how this may effect the other pupils in learning, their only concern is that their child is important. All this in an overcrowded classroom just show that the whole school system is pretty fucking whack.

This sort of stuff is how we get teachers who are in full on "Don't give a fuck anymore" mode because it's so easy to get screwed if you try too hard. Otherwise you end up breaking down in tears every day because you are terrified of parents and hate your job with a passion, when you entered it with a completely different sort of passion approach to it. 

Now I'm not opposed to PTA's, but parents should have very little say in how their children are educated. Leave that hard work to the professionals. Parents know nothing of educational principals, they don't keep up with teaching standards and new testing patterns. But I guess maybe parents wouldn't be acting so crazy about their child if they didn't feel like the world was burning to the ground and they weren't dealing with a the slowly dawning realization that merit will not be enough to save their children.

It used to be that doing well in school would guarantee a pathway to a comfortable life. Now suddenly people with university degrees can't get jobs, and even people with multiple degrees and jobs can't afford a comfortable life, let alone security like home ownership. Instead you're dealing with one financial emergency after another.

But this sort of fear mentality does lead to parents wanting to micromanage what their children learn and how they do it. While it's not completely bad for parents to have a say in how their child's education is approached, being too on top of the teacher can cause a sort of chicken/egg situation - in which like I said, many teacher get burned out because of parents trying to push an agenda or using them as nothing more than a daycare mission impossible situation to push up their children's future.

Then we have the private school situation. Were parents take their kids out of public schools and either take their kids to private schools or building a community just outside of a large city, incorporating and creating a school system for rich people. Add in that many private  or other for-profit schools are leeching tax money from public schools, leaving poor schools poorer. If there's anything in this country as dire as the healthcare industry, it's the education sector and that's getting fucked totally.

Maybe the answer is that teachers should stop working so hard and buying supplies with their own money they will never be reimbursed for. They need to take on a more Capitalistic outlook for their own enlightened self interest and just say FUCK YOU, Society. I get it, they are trying to help. That's what they did all the education to be a teacher, but they're not getting anything of note out of it right now in our current educational system other than a lack of respect and a case of being way overworked.

At the very least we need to start realizing that they need far more respect and trust and funding to start being appreciated as much as they should be. Getting them proper compensation for all the time they spend working would be the starting point.