OT: Teachers' Jobs

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

Original Yahoo! HPFG Header:
No: HPFGUIDX C7281
From: catlady_de_los_angeles
Subject: Re: OT: Teachers' Jobs
Reply To: [Yahoo! #7210] Re: OT: Teachers' Jobs
Date: 8/19/00 2:28 pm  (ET)

> I think teachers are RESPECTED...

I DON'T think teachers are respected! Public school teachers,
anyway. Maybe I hang out with too many Libertarians who say that public
school teachers must be useless parasites living on the taxpayers' money
because of being government employees, and too many engineers who say that
teacher are not underpaid: "Sure, they're not paid as much as engineers,
but they AREN'T engineers". But I read all this stuff about politicians
calling for competency tests for teachers and increased ease of firing
teachers and punishments for teachers whose students don't do well on
standardised tests and blaming every bad thing in the world on teachers'
unions, and it seems to me that they are trying to appeal to that group
of voters (which they must believe is a LARGE group, or they wouldn't
spend so much time pandering to it) who believe that all problems with
public schools (and unsupervised children after school) are caused by
teachers deliberately trying to harm the students by not teaching them.

While surely some of the disdain against teachers comes from the fact
that they do a laborious, stressful, and badly paid job, thus "proving"
that they couldn't meet the qualifications for a better job, perhaps
some comes from voters' memories of their own miserable school days.

ALICIA-SUE SPINNET wrote eloquently about the boredom of bright (and even
average) students forced (by the anti-tracking ideologues) into untracked
classes taught at the level and speed of the remedial students, altho'
she left out the teachers who turn into Snape when confronted with a
bright student (I always suspected that the reason that Mr E--, one of
my high school math teachers, hated all of us students, is that it was
left over from hating all the classmates who did better than him in his
high school and college).

Alicia-Sue also mentioned the general attitude that making learning be
fun for the students is a SIN.