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Bad Education

One principle of medieval warfare I’ve taken to heart is, “Know thy enemy.” Since I am a seething cauldron of hate, I’ve gotten to know quite a few people. Since the advent of Google (I’m no search-engine Johnny Come Lately, but in the pre-Google days, Internet-stalking was little more than a recipe for failure; say what you will about their indexing algorithms, they have hit the chewy nougat center of information-gathering for future serial killers) and the increased popularity of blogs and social networking sites, I’ve gotten to know more about certain enemies than I ever thought possible. I once found Owen’s DeviantArt page and, as such, was able to digest his alarming short stories. I’ve found more about The Manager than I ever thought possible. More importantly, I’ve dug deep into the world of the stupid blogger and have come out on the other side hating her more than ever.

One of her blog’s recurring statements: she teaches high school English to inner-city kids. She’s very proud of this, especially the “inner-city” part, because she thinks it gives her some kind of street cred or insight into this hoary netherworld. But here’s the recurring theme of these posts: she teaches very, very, very badly. She’s one of those people who will post excerpts of student work just to mock them, and not in a good-natured or loving way. (P.S.: she teaches them! isn’t the fact that they do so poorly at least a small reflection of her competence?) She’ll regale her captive audience with distressing stories about kids with serious psychological damage, structured as hilarious anecdotes about misplaced rage! But the absolute worst is when she basically comes out and says, “I have no interest in teaching these kids. I want to be a screenwriter, but teaching English in the inner-city was the only way I could get to L.A., so I guess I’ll have to put up with this miserable job.”

I know the following statement is, unfortunately, untrue, but this has always been my philosophy about teaching (whether it’s in public education or not): it’s a calling. You have to really want to teach these kids, you have to treat it as more than a job, because for a semester or year (or more), they’re the only guidance you have. You can justify it any way you want, but if you suck at your job or are thoroughly disinterested in it because you’re trying to pursue another career, that’s on you, not your students. You are officially a shitty teacher, and they have officially gotten a shitty education from you. Congratulations!

Over the years, I’ve had plenty of teachers who had failed to live their dreams. I had a few who genuinely wanted to be teachers. I had a few, especially the younger ones, who had that “checked-out” attitude of someone still trying to pursue an alternate career while “falling back” on teaching. Then there were the older ones who fell into teaching gigs by accident and wanted a place where they could drink on the job and collect a meager paycheck while doing as little as possible.

The only ones who had any impact were the older ones who once had dreams but had failed to achieve them; instead of growing old and bitter (like most of my college professors), these teachers poured all the energy they wished they could devote to their failed careers…into the classroom. They excited themselves about teaching a bunch of punk kids by looking through the prism of whatever they had failed to achieve — and through that, they somehow excited most of their students into learning.

So here we have the stupid blogger, in one of her many posts illustrating why she should not be allowed anywhere near a school, writing the following:

For the past two years I’ve had the same planning period - third. Third is the best planning period because it straddles our two lunch periods, so while everybody else gets 35 minutes to eat, I get two hours.

Has anyone else noticed where she went wrong? Here’s a hint: planning periods are for planning, not for extra-long lunches. This is the same person who has been known, on occasion, to gripe about — gasp! — her job encroaching on her free time, but when they are paying her to do that work, she elects to fuck off. Maybe this post, which explains her planning period has been moved to first, is some sort of punishment for, I dunno, taking two-hour lunches instead of using the planning period to do the work she’s paid to do.

She follows this up by saying the following:

• She would just sleep in, except her school wisely docks her pay if she doesn’t punch in by a certain, pre-school-starting time.
• Although she did start out using this planning period to do lesson-planning, handout-creating, and researching, that got boring! And she was oh so very tired!
• So she started watching movies via Netflix’s instant video thingamadoo.
• Oh, but she’s limited herself to documentaries, so that’s sort of like doing research.

She spends the rest of the post taking the “documentaries for research purposes” to its logical extreme, pretending that she has been using these documentaries all along to possibly show students while introducing concepts involving persuasive and expository writing. Believable! Especially the part about Super High Me, which is clearly something that could be shown in a public high school with no repercussions.

I’m a pretty spiteful guy. Maybe if I knew the stupid blogger in person and hated her, I’d try to semi-nonymously get her shitcanned. I’m actually tempted to do it anyway; her blog provides more than enough evidence to, at the very least, get her into assloads of trouble with her immediate superiors. But really, it’s not something to retaliate against. It’s something to mourn: a school teacher who devotes more time and energy to being a Hollywood nobody than to educating her students. It’s not bad to have dreams, but low-quality public-school teachers like this once again get me fist-shakingly mad at the state of education in this country. No child left behind…unless your teacher’s budding screenwriting career gets in the way!

Posted by Stan on August 1, 2008 9:00 AM  | Permalink | Random Musings | Digg It